Latinas Ruiz Sánchez Korrol
A
in the United States
Historical
Encyclopedia
Latinas in the United States
Latinas in the United States q A Historical Encyclopedia VOLUME 1 Introduction Abarca through Guzmán
Edited by
Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders Fax orders Orders by e-mail
800-842-6796 812-855-7931
[email protected] © 2006 by Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Latinas in the United States : a historical encyclopedia / edited by Vicki L. Ruíz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34680-0 (set : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-253-34681-9 (vol. 1 : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-253-34683-5 (vol. 2 : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-253-34684-3 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Hispanic American women—Biography—Encyclopedias. I. Ruíz, Vicki. II. Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. E184.S75L35 2006 920.72089'68073—dc22 2005034986 1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07 06
In honor of the women in whose footprints we follow, and for the women who build community today and tomorrow. En homenaje a las mujeres cuyos pasos seguimos, y para todas aquéllas que construyen la comunidad de hoy y del mañana.
Contents
q Volume 1 Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview of Latinas in the United States Latinas in the Southwest Latinas in the Northeast
xv
Arguello, María de la Concepción (Sister María Dominica)
56
xix
Arías, Anna María
57
Arizona Orphan Abduction
58 59
1
Armiño, Franca de
1
Arocho, Juanita
60
7
Arroyo, Carmen E.
61
14
Arroyo, Martina
62
Latinas in the Southeast
18
Artists
63
Latinas in the Pacific Northwest
24
Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA)
67
Abarca, Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz
29
ASPIRA
68
Acosta, Lucy
30
ASPIRA v. New York City Board of Education
69
Acosta Vice, Celia M.
31
Avila, María Elena
69
Aging
33
Avila, Modesta
70
Agostini del Río, Amelia
35
Aztlán
71
Alatorre, Soledad “Chole”
35
Babín, María Teresa
74
Albelo, Carmen
36
Baca, Judith Francesca
74
Alfau Galván de Solalinde, Jesusa
37
Baca Barragán, Polly
75
Allende, Isabel
38
Baez, Joan Chandos
76
Alonzo, Ventura
38
Barceló, María Gertrudis (“La Tules”)
78
Altars
40
Barnard, Juana Josefina Cavasos
79
Alvarez, Aida
41
Barraza, Santa Contreras
80
Alvarez, Cecilia Concepción
42
Barrera, Plácida Peña
81
Alvarez, Delia
43
Belpré, Pura
83
Alvarez, Julia
44
Bencomo, Julieta Saucedo
84
Alvarez, Linda
44
Bernal, Martha
85
Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District
45
Bernasconi, Socorro Hernández
86
Americanization Programs
46
Betances Jaeger, Clotilde
87
Antonetty, Evelina López
48
Betanzos, Amalia V.
88
Antonio Maceo Brigade
49
Bilingual Education
88
Anzaldúa, Gloria
51
Black Legend
90
Apodaca, Felicitas
52
Blake, María DeCastro
91
Aprenda y Superese
54
Borrero Pierra, Juana
93
Aragón, Jesusita
54
Boyar, Monica
94
Arballo, María Feliciana
55
Bozak, Carmen Contreras
95
Latinas in the Midwest
vii q
Contents Bracero Program
96
Chávez Ravine, Los Angeles
148
Braga, Sonia
99
Chávez-Thompson, Linda
149
99 100
Chicana Caucus/National Women’s Political Caucus
150
Caballero, Diana
103
Chicana Rights Project
151
Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola
104
Chicano Movement
151
Cabrera, Angelina “Angie”
105
Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC)
155
Cabrera, Lydia
106
Cigar Workers
156
Calderón, Rose Marie
107
Cinema Images, Contemporary
159
California Missions
108
Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica
161
California Sanitary Canning Company Strike
110
Cisneros, Sandra
161
Callejo, Adelfa Botello
111
Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana
162
Callis de Fages, Eulalia Francesca y Josepha
112
Collazo, Rosa Cortéz
163
Calvillo, Ana María del Carmen
113
Colón, Miriam
164
Canales, Laura
114
Canales, Nohelia de los Angeles
115
Colón, Rufa Concepción Fernández (“Concha”)
166
Canino, María Josefa
116
Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN)
167
Communist Party
168 169 170
Briones, María Juana Burciaga, Mirna Ramos
Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU)
117
Cántico de la Mujer Latina
118
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS)
Capetillo, Luisa
119
Community Service Organization (CSO)
Carbonell, Anna
119
Congreso del Pueblo
172
Cardona, Alice
120
Córdova, Lina
173
Carr, Vikki
121
Corridos
175
Carrillo de Fitch, Josefa
122
Cossio y Cisneros, Evangelina
176
Casal, Lourdes
123
Cotera, Martha
177
Casals, Rosemary
124
Crawford, Mercedes Margarita Martínez
178
Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia
125
Cruz, Celia
179
Casita Maria, New York
126
Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party
181
Castillo, Ana
128
Cuban Independence Women’s Clubs
182
Castillo, Guadalupe
129
Cuban Women’s Club
183
Castro, Rosie
130
Cuban-Spanish-American War
184
Castro, Victoria M. “Vickie”
131
Cuero, Delfina
185
Ceja, Amelia Moran
132
Davis, Grace Montañez
187
Central American Immigrant Women
134
De Acosta, Aida
188
Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA)
137
De Acosta, Mercedes
189
Centro Hispano Católico
139
De Aragón, Uva
190
Centro Mater
139
De Arteaga, Genoveva
191
Cepeda-Leonardo, Margarita
140
De Avila, Dolores C.
192
Cervantes, Lorna Dee
140
De Burgos, Julia
193
Chabram, Angie González
142
De la Cruz, Jessie López
194
Chacón, Soledad Chávez
143
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés
196
“Charo” (María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza)
De la Garza, Beatríz
197
144
De León, Patricia de la Garza
198
Chávez, Denise
144
Del Castillo, Adelaida Rebecca
199
Chávez, Helen
146
Del Prado, Pura
200
Chávez, Linda
147
Del Río, Dolores
201
viii q
Contents Del Valle, Carmen
202
Fornés, María Irene
270
Delgado, Jane L.
203
Friendly House, Phoenix
271
Demography
204
Fuerza Unida
272
Deportations during the Great Depression
209
Gallegos, Carmen Cornejo
274
DiMartino, Rita
211
Ganados del Valle
274
Dimas, Beatrice Escadero
212
Gangs
276
Domestic Violence
214
García, Cristina
278
Domestic Workers
216
García, Eva Carrillo de
280
Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR)
García, Providencia “Provi”
280
217
García Cortese, Aimee
282
Dueto Carmen y Laura
218
García-Aguilera, Carolina
283
Durazo, María Elena
219
Garcíaz, María
284
Echaveste, María
221
Garment Industry
285
Education
222
Giant
286
El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española
226
Gómez Carbonell, María
288
El Monte Berry Strike
226
Gómez-Potter, Socorro
289
Gonzáles, Elvira Rodríguez de
290
El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA)
227
González, Laura
290
El Paso Laundry Strike
228
González, Matiana
292
El Rescate
229
González Mireles, Jovita
292
Entrepreneurs
229
Govea, Jessica
294
Environment and the Border
232
Grau, María Leopoldina “Pola”
295
Escajeda, Josefina
236
Escalona, Beatríz (“La Chata Noloesca”)
236
Great Depression and Mexican American Women
297
Escobar, Carmen Bernal
237
Guerra, Fermina
300
Espaillat, Rhina P.
238
Guerrero, Rosa
300
Espinosa-Mora, Deborah
239
Guerrero, Victoria Partida
302
Esquivel, Gregoria
240
Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda
303
Esquivel, Yolanda Almaraz
241
Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán
305
Estefan, Gloria
242
Guzmán, Madre María Dominga
306
Esteves, Sandra María
243
Family
245
Volume 2
Farah Strike
249
Hamlin, Rosalie Méndez
308
Farmworkers
250
Hayworth, Rita
309
Feminism
253
Head Start
310
Fernández, Beatrice “Gigi”
255
Health: Current Issues and Trends
311
Fernández, Mary Joe
255
Henríquez Ureña, Camila
315
Fernández, Rosita
256
Hernández, Antonia
317
Ferré Aguayo, Sor Isolina
257
Hernández, Ester
318
Fierro, Josefina
259
Hernández, María Latigo
319
Figueroa, Belén
260
Hernández, Olivia
320
Figueroa Mercado, Loida
261
Hernández, Victoria
322
Flores, Diana
263
Herrada, Elena
323
Flores, Francisca
264
Herrera, Carolina
324
Florez, Encarnación Villarreal Escobedo
265
Herrera, María Cristina
325
Folk Healing Traditions
266
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
326
Fontañez, Jovita
270
Hinojosa, Tish
327
ix q
Contents Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program (HMDP)
López, María I.
402
328
López, Nancy Marie
403
Houchen Settlement, El Paso
329
López, Rosie
403
Huerta, Cecilia Olivarez
331
López, Yolanda
404
Huerta, Dolores
332
López Córdova, Gloria
406
Hull-House, Chicago
333
Lorenzana, Apolinaria
407
Idar Juárez, Jovita
336
Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Strike
408
Immigration of Latinas to the United States
337
Lozano, Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo
410
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)
341
Lozano, Emma
411
Intermarriage, Contemporary
342
Lozano, Mónica Cecilia
412
Intermarriage, Historical
344
Lucas, María Elena
413
International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)
Machuca, Ester
415
348
Madrid, Patricia A.
415
Jaramillo, Cleofas Martínez
351
Madrigal v. Quilligan
416
Jiménez, María de los Angeles
352
Maldonado, Amelia Margarita
419
Journalism and Print Media
353
Maquiladoras
420
Jurado, Katy
358
Mariachi
421
Kimbell, Sylvia Rodríguez
359
Mariachi Estrella de Topeka
422
Kissinger, Beatrice Amado
360
Marianismo and Machismo
423
La Llorona
362
Marshall, Guadalupe
424
“La Lupe” (Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond)
363
Martí de Cid, Dolores
425
La Malinche (Malinalli Tenepal)
364
Martínez, Agueda Salazar
426
La Mujer Obrera
366
Martínez, Anita N.
426
La Raza Unida Party
367
Martínez, Demetria
428
Labor Unions
368
Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland “Betita”
429
Lares, Michelle Yvette “Shelly”
372
Martínez, Frances Aldama
430
Las Hermanas
373
Martínez, Vilma S.
431
Latina U.S. Treasurers
374
Martínez Santaella, Inocencia
433
Latinas in the U.S. Congress
375
McBride, Teresa N.
433
Mederos y Cabañas de González, Elena Inés
434
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
378
Media Stereotypes
436
Lebrón, Dolores “Lolita”
380
Medicine
438
Ledesma, Josephine
381
Medina, Esther
440
Lee Tapia, Consuelo
382
Meléndez, Concha
441
Legal Issues
383
Meléndez, Sara
442
León, Ruth Esther Soto (“La Hermana León”)
Méndez, Consuelo Herrera
443
384
Méndez, Olga A.
444
León, Tania
385
Méndez v. Westminster
445
Lesbians
386
Mendieta, Ana
447
“Letter from Chapultepec”
388
Mendoza, Lydia
448
Liberation Theology
389
Mendoza, María Estella Altamirano
448
Líderes Campesinas
390
Mendoza v. Tucson School District No. 1
450
Literature
392
Mercado, Victoria “Vicky”
451
Lobo, Rebecca Rose
396
Mesa-Bains, Amalia
452
Lomas Garza, Carmen
397
Mestizaje
453
Lone Star
397
López, Lillian
401
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
457
x q
Contents Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA)
458
Mexican Mothers’ Club, University of Chicago Settlement House
459
Mexican Revolution
460
Mexican Revolution, Border Women in
464
Mexican Schools
466
Migration and Labor
468
Naturalization
517
Navarro, M. Susana
519
Nerio, Trinidad
520
New Economics for Women (NEW)
521
New York City Mission Society (NYCMS)
522
Nieto, Sonia
523
Nieto Gómez, Anna
524
Norte, Marisela
525
Novello, Antonia Coello
526
Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia
528
Núñez, Ana Rosa
529
Nuns, Colonial
530
Nuns, Contemporary
531
Military Service
473
Miller, Esther
475
Mining Communities
476
Miranda, Carmen
478
Mistral, Gabriela (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga)
479
Mohr, Nicholasa
480
Mojica-Hammer, Ruth
481
Molina, Gloria
482
Montemayor, Alice Dickerson
483
Montes-Donnelly, Elba Iris
484
Montez, María (María Africa Gracia Vidal)
485
Mora, Magdalena
487
Mora, Patricia “Pat”
488
Moraga, Cherríe
488
Moraga, Gloria Flores
489
Morales, Iris
491
Morales-Horowitz, Nilda M.
492
Moreno, Luisa
492
Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, María Concepción “Concha”
546
Moreno, Rita (Rosa Dolores Alverio)
494
O’Shea, María Elena
547
Morillo, Irma
496
Otero-Smart, Ingrid
548
Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA)
497
Otero-Warren, Adelina
549
Movie Stars
497
Mugarrieta, Elvira Virginia (Babe Bean; Jack Bee Garland)
502
Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, Brooklyn
503
Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA)
505
Mujeres por la Raza
506
Mujerista Theology
507
Munguía, Carolina Malpica de
508
Muñoz, María del Carmen
509
National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS)
510
National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW)
Obejas, Achy
533
Ochoa, Ellen
534
O’Donnell, Sylvia Colorado
535
Olivares, Olga Ballesteros
535
Olivarez, Graciela
537
Olivera, Mercedes
538
Ontiveros, Manuela
540
Operation Pedro Pan
541
Orozco, Aurora Estrada
543
Ortega, Carlota Ayala
544
Ortiz Cofer, Judith
545
Pachucas
552
Palacio-Grottola, Sonia
555
Pantoja, Antonia
557
Parsons, Lucia González
558
Patiño Río, Dolores
559
Pauwels Pfeiffer, Linda Lorena
561
Payán, Ilka Tanya
562
Pedroso, Paulina
563
Peña de Bordas, (Ana) Virginia de
563
Peñaranda, Ana Marcial
564
Pentecostal Church
565
511
Perales, Nina
569
National Chicana Conference
512
Pérez, Eulalia
570
National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW)
Pérez, Graciela
571
513
Pérez v. Sharp
573
National Council of La Raza (NCLR)
514
Phelps Dodge Strike
573
National Hispanic Feminist Conference
515
Phillips, Carmen Romero
574
National Puerto Rican Forum
516
Pilsen Neighbors Community Council
575
xi q
Contents Pinedo, Encarnación
576
Romero Cash, Marie
643
Politics, Electoral
577
Rosado Rousseau, Leoncia (“Mamá Léo”)
644
Politics, Party
579
Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana
645
Popular Religiosity
581
Roybal-Allard, Lucille
646
Prida, Dolores
582
Ruiz, Bernarda
647
Propositions 187 and 209
583
Ruiz, Irene Hernández
649
Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo
650
Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA)
584
Sada, María G. “Chata”
652
Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York
585
Salsa
652
Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners
587
Salt of the Earth
656
Puerto Ricans in Hawaii
591
San Antonio, Ana Gloria
657
San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike
658
San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike
659
Volume 3 Quesada, Alicia Otilia
596
San Juan, Olga
662
Quesada, Dora Ocampo
597
Sánchez, Loretta
662
Quinceañera
598
Sánchez, María Clemencia
663
Quintanilla Pérez, Selena
600
Sánchez, María E.
664
Quintero, Luisa
601
Sánchez Cruz, Rebecca
666
Race and Color Consciousness
603
Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz
667
Ramírez, Emilia Schunior
607
Santería
669
Santiago, Petra
670
Ramírez, Sara Estela
608
Ramírez, Tina
609
Ramírez de Arellano, Diana
609
Rangel, Irma
611
Rape
611
Schechter, Esperanza Acosta Mendoza “Hope”
674
Reid, Marita
613
Scientists
675
Reid, Victoria Comicrabit
614
Sena, Elvira
679
Religion
615
Sepúlveda, Emma
680
Reyes, Guadalupe
622
Sexuality
681
Rico, Angelina Moreno
623
Silva, Chelo
682
Rincón de Gautier, Felisa
624
Silva de Cintrón, Josefina “Pepiña”
682
Rivera, Aurelia “Yeya”
625
Rivera, Chita
626
“Sister Carmelita” (Carmela Zapata Bonilla Marrero)
683
Rivera, Graciela
627
Slavery
684
Rivera, Roxana
629
Sloss-Vento, Adela
686
Rivera Martínez, Domitila
630
Smeltertown, El Paso
687
Robles Díaz, Inés
631
Smith, Plácida Elvira García
689
Rodríguez, Hermelinda Morales
632
Soldaderas
690
Rodríguez, “Isabel” Hernández
633
Solis, Hilda L.
691
Rodríguez, Josefa “Chepita”
634
Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza
692
Rodríguez, Patricia
634
Soto Feliciano, Carmen Lillian “Lily”
694
Rodríguez, Sofía
636
Souchet, Clementina
695
Rodríguez Cabral, María Cristina
637
Rodríguez de Tió, Lola
637
Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP)
696
Rodríguez McLean, Verneda
639
Spanish Borderlands
Rodríguez Remeneski, Shirley
640
Colonial Law
700
Rodríguez-Trias, Helen
641
Comadrazgo
703
Saralegui, Cristina
672
Saucedo, María del Jesús
673
xii q
697
Contents Early Settlement Life in the Borderlands
704
United Farm Workers of America (UFW)
772
Encomienda
708
Women in California
709
Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW)
773
Women in New Mexico
710
U.S.-Mexican War
776
Women in St. Augustine
714
Urquides, María Luisa Legarra
779
Women in Texas
716
Urrea, Teresa
780
719
Valdez, Patssi
782
720
Vallejo, Epifania de Guadalupe
783
Spiritism in New York City
721
Vallejo de Leese, María Paula Rosalía
784
Sterilization
723
Vanguardia Puertorriqueña
785
Street Vending
725
Varela, Beatriz
786
Student Movements
727
Varela, María
787
Substitute Auxiliary Teachers (SATs)
728
Vásquez, Anna
788
Swilling, Trinidad Escalante
730
Vásquez, Enriqueta Longeaux y
789
Tabaqueros’ Unions
732
Velázquez, Loreta Janeta
790
Talamante, Olga
733
Velázquez, Nydia M.
791
Tarango, Yolanda
734
Vélez, Lupe
793
Telenovelas
735
Vélez de Vando, Emelí
793
Television
736
Vélez-Mitchell, Anita
795
Tempe Normal School
740
Ten Years’ War
742
Vicioso Sánchez, Sherezada “Chiqui”
797
Tenayuca, Emma
743
Vidal, Irma
798
Tex-Son Strike
745
Theater
746
Women’s Wills Spiritism
Padua Hills Theater
748
Playwrights
748
Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT)
751
Teatro Campesino
752
Villalongín Dramatic Company
753
Toraño-Pantín, María Elena
754
Vidaurri, Rita
799
Villarreal, Andrea and Teresa
800
Viramontes, Helena María
800
Virgen de Guadalupe
801
Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre
803
Voting Rights Act
804
Watsonville Strike
805
Welch, Raquel
806
West Side Story
807
Wilcox, Mary Rose Garrido
808
Torres, Alva
756
Torres, Ida Inés
757
Torres, Lourdes
758
Wolf, Esther Valladolid
809
Torres, Patsy (Patricia Donita)
759
World War II
810
Tovar, Lupita
760
Ybarra, Eva
815
Toypurina
761
Young Lords
815
Trambley, Estela Portillo
762
Zamora, Bernice B. Ortiz
818
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
762
Zárate, Rosa Marta
819
Treaty of Paris
766
Zúñiga, Alejandra Rojas
820
Treviño-Sauceda, Mily
766
Tufiño, Nitza
767
List of Biographical Entries
823
Ulibarrí Sánchez, Louise
769
List of Organizations
829
Selected Readings in Latina History
831
Notes on Contributors
835
Index
851
United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA)
770
xiii q
Preface
q Latina history is a mosaic across time, region, gender, and borders. At the heart of this encyclopedia is a commitment to reclaim the lives of Latinas within their own historical moments and to recover their stories— frequently hidden, forgotten, or ignored. Since the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, Spanish-speaking women have left their imprints on U.S. soil. They appeared on the historical landscape before the establishment of English and French settlements. Many Latinas have Native American roots, while some trace their heritage to the rich contributions of the peoples of West Africa, brought to these shores as enslaved women. Still others descended from Spain and diverse European countries and, in time, combined their particular experiences with different communities of people in the Americas in the process of mestizaje, the blending of Spanish, African, and indigenous peoples. This pivotal point is important for understanding the cultural and biological syncretism that, in turn, gave form to Latinos in the United States in both the past and the present. As poet Aurora Levins Morales has aptly surmised: “I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.”1 Nomenclature for Latinas in and of itself reveals much about the diversity of Spanish-speaking peoples in the United States, past and present. There has never existed a single signifier of self-identification from Tejanos and Californios of the nineteenth century to Latinos and Hispanics today. In this encyclopedia Latina is an umbrella term that refers to all women of Latin American birth or heritage, including women from North, Central, and South America and the Spanishspeaking Caribbean. Mexicana and Mexicano refer to those born in Mexico, and Mexican American indicates U.S. birth. Chicana and Chicano reflect a political consciousness that emerged out of the Chicano student movement, often a generational marker for those who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. Nuyorican refers to Puerto Ricans born on the mainland, not just in New York, while Puertorriqueña and Puertorriqueño include islanders and Nuyoricans alike. Boricua signifies endearment, empowerment, and unity for all
Puerto Ricans. For some, regional identification becomes synonymous with nationality—Tejanos in Texas and Hispanos in New Mexico and Colorado. Others situate themselves in terms of racial location, preferring perhaps an Iberian connection (Hispanic) or emphasizing indigenous (mestizo/a) or African (Afro-Latino/a) roots. Cultural/national identification remains strong— Salvadorans, Dominicans, Brazilians, and Cubans, to name just a few. Divergent cultural locations mark the heterogeneity within Latino communities, a heterogeneity that occurs even within families. As Salt Lake City housing activist María Garcíaz reflected, “My mother is Spanish; one brother is Mexican; my sister Mexican-American; I am Chicana. Three brothers are Hispanic and the youngest is Latino.”2 Within these pages the historical and literary narratives marking the U.S. Latina experience come to life. From mestizo settlements, pioneer life, and diasporic communities, Latinas in the United States documents women’s contributions as settlers, healers, ranchers, and landowners, as community organizers and educators, and as writers, artists, and performers. Their experiences during and after Euro-American colonizing and conquests of the Southwest are also explored, in addition to the early-nineteenth-century migration of Puerto Ricans and Cubans. For the twentieth century, issues of immigration, literature, cultural traditions, labor, gender roles, community organizations, and politics are addressed, as well as individual biographical profiles of women who have left their marks on history, such as Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo, conservative New Mexican politician Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, and Guatemalan labor and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno. This encyclopedia focuses on how Latinas have shaped their own lives, cultures, and communities through mutual assistance and collective action and how our understanding of pivotal events, such as the U.S.-Mexican War, the Great Depression, and World War II, becomes transformed when they are viewed through women’s eyes. Written to engage general and scholarly readers, this encyclopedia, the first to focus specifically on Latina history, consists of almost 600 entries (700,000
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Preface words) and nearly 300 photographs. The introduction features five comprehensive regional and historical overviews of Latina history in the Southwest, the Northeast, the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Pacific Northwest. Several themes interlace the diverse components within this compendium of new knowledge. First, the encyclopedia is essentially a working-class history of Latinas whose experiences and actions during three centuries helped build this nation. Second, it also represents an intellectual history of women who witnessed, defied, negotiated, and chronicled the forces that shaped Spanish American colonization and the present contours of this nation. Education, religion, activism, and labor and community have loomed large in the lives of Latinas, past and present. Representing cutting-edge scholarship, Latinas in the United States documents the divergences and convergences in the U.S. experiences of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American women in a manner not possible before this publication. The coeditors are indebted to the cadre of talented authors who wrote entries for the encyclopedia, many of whom are among the most distinguished scholars in the fields of history, cultural studies, social science, and Latino studies. Their insights, hard work, and corazón shaped this collective, landmark enterprise. This project began in the spring of 1998. The coeditors, widely recognized as leaders in the field of Latina history, embarked on this project as an intellectual conversation that moved the discussion from a onegroup, one-coast perspective (whether Chicanas in California or Boricuas in New York) to an exploration of panethnic comparative perspectives that examined common legacies, divergent paths, and intersections of community activism and cultural production. The coeditors solicited nominations from five associate editors, specialists in various aspects of Latina studies, and an advisory board of well-known scholars. The majority of the profiles were generated through these recommendations, and the editors and board members played crucial roles in identifying subjects, photographs, and potential authors. In 2000 publicity about the project spread across the nation based on a Knight-Ridder column, a New York Times feature article, a lead story in the Miami Herald, and subsequent exposure on television and other media sources, including the newspapers Hoy and El Diario/La Prensa, which, in turn, brought additional biographical profiles to our attention. The coeditors might never have known about Amelia Maldonado, a pioneer bilingual elementary teacher in Tucson, Arizona, who began her forty-year career in 1919, except for the correspondence of her nephew, Francis Brady. Perhaps, too, Verneda Rodríguez McLean, a pilot dur-
ing World War II, would have gone unnoticed if museum director Bruce Ashcroft had not approached Vicki Ruiz after her lecture at the University of Texas, Austin. The entry on Madre María Dominga Guzmán, founder of a religious order and in the process of canonization, came to us in similar fashion. Even within the final week of putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, additional nominations kept arriving. To honor those who shared their stories and to provide examples of representative women, the coeditors have endeavored to include as many of these nominees as possible. During the past three decades Latina educators from university professors to precollegiate teachers have contributed to the fluorescence of Latina history and Latina studies as recognized academic disciplines. They are acknowledged in these volumes through their scholarship. The advice of the associate editors and advisory board members provided critical guidance in selecting not only individuals, but also events and organizations with an emphasis on historical significance. The criteria for inclusion in Latinas in the United States favored older public women who had made a difference in their respective communities or on the national stage. A handful of young women representative of political activism and the arts are included, in addition to a few women like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Felisa Rincón de Gautier whose influence transcended national boundaries. Although many presentday women are profiled, the coeditors sought to avoid a “who’s who” approach. For this reason film legends like Carmen Miranda or Rita Moreno merited individual biographies, while their current counterparts may be included only in larger thematic entries. Contemporary representatives of women in the public eye were selected from a variety of fields—business, labor, literature, religion, social work, education, law, politics, entertainment, and the arts, to name a few. Encouraging comparative insights as well as discrete cultural narratives, the coeditors, as authors of numerous entries and editors of many more, have emphasized, whenever possible, a sense of real people—their dreams, routines, personalities, values, and contributions. From settlers to curanderas and from flappers to feminists, Latinas have indeed made history. Contrary to popular media images that portray Latinos as recent immigrants, their legacies actually stretch back hundreds of years to the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. Indeed, this Spanish outpost was not just the realm of conquistadores and missionaries but also of women colonists and their families. St. Augustine was one of three military units in the primary line of defense established by the Spanish Crown throughout the Caribbean. Living under constant danger of British invasion, colonists in this neglected fron-
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Preface tier settlement faced enormous obstacles. As mulattos, negroes, indios, mestizos, and criollos, they resisted and reinforced the injustices of life within a rigid class, color, and labor system that privileged Spaniards. Critical to the settlement’s survival, St. Augustine women participated in every aspect of colonial life. Their lives were conditioned by race, class, and marital status. Indian and black women were concentrated at the bottom rungs of the social scale, often enslaved or indentured laborers in the house and the fields. However, free blacks, recent immigrants, and nonelites could also own property. By 1763 St. Augustine included some Catalan immigrants, Christianized Indians, and free blacks who added to the colony’s already diverse and shifting demographic profile. Juana Ana María Paniagua, for example, was a mujer mercenaria (prostitute) who owned slaves and property. Most women were not, in fact, landowners, but more than a quarter of all landowners in the colony were single women, probably widows.3 The story of St. Augustine, one that reveals the dynamic syncretism and fissures marking colonial society, provides an example of the histories tucked within this text. The five-part introduction, divided by region, provides the historical context for the encyclopedia as a whole and for the individual entries. In the words of Chicana artist Irma Barbosa, “Stories are the spirit threads passed on from generation to generation.”4 Latina history has often been a private one, narratives told at the kitchen table. We hope that this encyclopedia inspires a new generation of historical research, including recording family memoirs and writing scholarly monographs. Many histories remain to be discovered and interpreted, especially of women with Central American, South American, Cuban, and Dominican roots. The preponderance of Mexican and Puerto Rican profiles reflects the current state of the field. As coeditors, we have also privileged the lives of women grassroots community organizers whose contributions have not had a wider hearing outside their respective towns or neighborhoods. Often underestimated in community politics and at city hall, these women demonstrate determination, resourcefulness, and tenacity. A Salvadoran immigrant and restaurant
owner, Mirna Burciaga, successfully challenged discriminatory policies of a local southern California school district and in a recent interview related why she refused to be ignored. “I have an accent . . . when I talk . . . But that doesn’t mean I have an accent . . . when I think.”5 Burciaga is a naturalized U.S. citizen whose community engagement may be a bellwether for Latina politics in the twenty-first century. According to recent census figures, Latinos represent almost 50 percent of the foreign born in the United States (15 million out of 31 million total). In 2002 the Latino population could be categorized as follows: 67 percent Mexican, 14 percent Central and South American, 8 percent Puerto Rican, 4 percent Cuban, and 6 percent other groups (e.g., Dominicans). Moreover, 40 percent of all U.S. Latinos are foreign born.6 This layering of generations and of diverse cultural groups, ranging from Hispanos in New Mexico whose roots extend back four centuries to recently arrived Dominican immigrants in New York City, speaks to an array of Latino/Latina experiences, past, present, and future. Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia documents, chronicles, and traces the ways in which Latinas make meaning in their own lives and in the lives of others. ¡Pa’lante!
Notes 1. Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales, Getting Home Alive (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1986), 50. 2. Vicki L. Ruiz, “Garcíaz, María,” in this volume. 3. Susan L. Pickman and Dorcas R. Gilmore, “Women in St. Augustine,” in “Spanish Borderlands” in this volume. 4. Chicana artist Irma Lerma Barbosa, quoted in María Ochoa, Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 68. 5. Jessica Garrison, 2001. “Orange County District to Overhaul English Instruction,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, B1. 6. Social Science Data Analysis Network, “Nativity and Citizenship, 1990–2000.” www.censusscope.org (accessed June 22, 2005); U.S. Bureau of the Census, June 2003. The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2002 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office) 1.
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Acknowledgments
q This project began in 1998, and through it all our managing editor, Carlos A. Cruz, has been the creative and organizational touchstone that sustained our efforts during the past eight years. In addition to managing all of our files, budgets, and contracts, he was responsible for the digital photography and reproductions and designed all of our e-mail and print postcards and publicity. As our biggest fan and toughest taskmaster, Cruz was a tireless office manager, photo researcher, resident artist, and enduring friend. Latinas in the United States would simply not exist without his efforts. Substantial financial support was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation. We thank Helen Aguera, our program officer at NEH, and Janice Petrovich at the Ford Foundation. Cathy McKee, formerly of Motorola, provided a small seed grant at the beginning of the project. We have deeply appreciated the institutional funding we received, particularly during the last few months when our budget was bare. For Vicki L. Ruiz, the Arizona State University Office of the Provost allocated significant support monies, and she thanks Provost Milton Glick and Vice President for Research Jonathan Fink. At the University of California, Irvine, research funding provided by the Office of the Executive ViceChancellor, the School of Social Sciences, and the School of Humanities proved invaluable, and we acknowledge Michael R. Gottfredson, Executive ViceChancellor, Barbara Dosher, Dean of Social Sciences, and Karen Lawrence, Dean of Humanities. The Center for Latinos in a Global Society, directed by Leo Chávez, offered summer travel money and graduate research assistance during the project’s last year. For Virginia Sánchez Korrol, María E. Pérez y González and the faculty and staff of the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College provided unwavering support, space, supplies, funds, and student assistants Jeannette Reyes and Bethsaida George. President Christoph M. Kimmich and Provost Roberta S. Matthews of Brooklyn College, as well as the former president, Vernon Lattin, provided funding for the project, and Nicholas Irons, Peggy Bergamasco, and the staff of Information and Technology Services
gave us equipment and technical support. Christina Sferruzzo in the Office of Research and Program Development both was supportive and provided oversight of the project funds. We both acknowledge day-to-day assistance of the staff members. Vicki Ruiz thanks Vera Galaviz of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Arizona State and Stella Ginez of the Program in Chicano/Latino Studies and Judy Morgan of the History Department at UC Irvine. Virginia Sánchez Korrol owes a debt of gratitude to Mildred Nieves Rivera and Raquel Fernández, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College. We relied on the wise counsel of the associate editors—Lillian Castillo-Speed, Bárbara Cruz, María Cristina García, Cynthia Orozco, and Nélida Pérez— whose hard work, prescient insights, and corazón contributed to the shaping of these volumes. We also thank our distinguished advisory board—Edna AcostaBelén, Frances Aparicio, Albert Camarillo, María Raquel Casas, Daisy Cocco de Felippis, Deena González, Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Ramón Gutiérrez, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Nancy Hewitt, Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Félix Matos Rodríguez, Lara Medina, Cecilia Menjívar, María Montoya, Milga Morales Nadal, Lorena Oropeza, Cynthia Orozco, María Pérez y González, Yolanda Prieto, Naomi Quiñonez, Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Elizabeth Salas, and Carmen Teresa Whalen. We also thank Margaret Stroebel and Susan Ware, who took time from their own reference works to assist us in the early stages of this project. We particularly appreciate those advisory editors who took the time to craft one or more entries for the encyclopedia. Most of all, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the more than 230 authors who made the encyclopedia possible. We are humbled by the overwhelming response we received from our contributors. The late Norma Williams deserves special mention, and we deeply regret that she did not live to see her contribution on the Latino family in print. Vicki L. Ruiz acknowledges with great gratitude the essays penned by her current and former graduate students: Carole Au-
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Acknowledgments tori, Margie Brown-Coronel, Enrique Buelna, Yolanda Calderón-Wallace, Eve Carr, Phillip Castruita, Marisela Chávez, Julie Cohen, Marcelle Maese Cohen, Virginia Espino, Lilia Fernández, Matt García, Antonia GarcíaOrozco, Margaret Jacobs, Irene Mata, Laura Muñoz, Marian Perales, Naomi Quiñonez, Annette Reed, Jean Reynolds, Alicia Rodríquez-Estrada, Maythee Rojas, Steven Rosales, Ana Rosas, Arlene Sánchez Walsh, Soledad Vidal, and Mary Ann Villarreal. Our Brooklyn College writers include Dorian Chandler, Georgina García, Luis Gordillo, Rachel Greene, Jorivette Quintana, and Jeannette Reyes. Mil gracias. We are indebted to Christine Marin, head of the Chicano Research Collection at Arizona State University, for her assistance with photographs over the years and to Alicia, Dora, and Eugene Quesada for allowing us to reproduce the photo of their mother and best friend in “Comadres,” the book cover image for Latinas in the United States. Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez also deserves special mention for allowing us to reproduce several narrative profiles and photographs from the University of Texas at Austin’s U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project. We extend our deep appreciation to María Estorino and Esperanza de Varona of the Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami, for their assistance with photos and research, and to Nélida Pérez and Pedro Juan Hernández of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Library and Archives, Hunter College, for their constant support and access to innumerable resources. We also appreciate the dedication and generosity of the staff at the following repositories: Arizona Historical Society Library, Tucson; Autry National Center (especially Carolyn Brucken); Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; California State Archives; Center for American History, the University of Texas, Austin; Center for Southwestern Research, University of New Mexico; City of Greeley (CO) Archives; Colección Puertorriqueña, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras; Colorado Historical Society; Corona (CA) Public Library Heritage Room; Fototeca del INAH, Pachuco, Hildalgo, Mexico (especially Susana Ramírez Vizcaya); Galerie Lelong, New York City; The Library of Congress; Los Angeles Public Library; Museum of New Mexico; New York Public Library; Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica (CA); Rio Grande Historical Collection, New Mexico State University; Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University; Special Collections, Stanford University; Special Collections, Texas A&M,
Corpus Christi; Tampa Bay History; Texas Labor Archives, University of Texas, Arlington; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Libraries; University of South Florida Library; University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio (especially Patrick Lemelle); Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum; Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University; and Western History Department, Denver Public Library. Throughout the life of the project we were fortunate to receive enthusiastic media coverage that resulted in bringing potential subjects to our attention. For these efforts we extend our thanks to dozens of journalists, among them Lou Gonzales of the Colorado Springs Gazette, Barbara Crossette of the New York Times, Ana Veciana of the Miami Herald, and Albor Ruiz and Juan González of the New York Daily News. El Diario/La Prensa, Hoy, Latina Magazine, Latina Style, and Hispanic Outlook wrote about the project, and Univision Network and Lifetime TV brought it to the attention of the viewing public. Julie Frank of Latino Expo in New York was among the first to provide a venue for disseminating information about the Latina encyclopedia. We thank her and also Anita Vélez-Mitchell, Tania León, Angie Cabrera, and the late Antonia Pantoja, who unhesitatingly shared their life stories at the Latina encyclopedia’s Latino Expo roundtable discussion. We are also grateful to journalists Betsy Wade and Kay Mills and to Rita Henley Jensen and the staff of Women’s e-news for their encouragement, support, and recognition of our project. Kudos goes to Robert Sloan of Indiana University Press for his faith, enthusiasm, and professionalism and to his entire staff for all of their efforts. It has been a long road and we thank you for standing by the project. We also acknowledge Lewis Parker of Westchester Book Services for his encouragement, efficiency, and patience. Our copy editor, Charles Eberline, deserves special mention for his superlative editorial skills, thoughtful queries, and meticulous attention to detail. In some ways it seems bittersweet to end our eightyear collaboration. We started the project as friends and have concluded it as sisters. We have shared our lives in good times and in bad—through the death of a parent, the travails of major surgery, and the survival of cancer. We thank our families, especially our spouses Victor Becerra and Chuck Korrol, for their patience, good humor, and unflagging encouragement. Again, thanks to Carlos Cruz, who today remains the one person who knows where everything is.
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Latinas in the United States
Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview of Latinas in the United States
q LATINAS IN THE SOUTHWEST Since 1540 and the arrival of the Coronado expedition, Spanish-speaking women have migrated north decades, even centuries, before their Euro-American counterparts ventured west. They participated in the founding of Santa Fe in 1610, San Antonio in 1718, and Los Angeles in 1781, all part of the Spanish borderlands. The Spanish colonial government, in its efforts to secure its territorial claims, offered a number of inducements to those willing to undertake such an arduous and frequently perilous journey. Subsidies given to a band of settlers headed for Texas included not only food and livestock but also petticoats and silk stockings. Few women ventured to Mexico’s far northern frontier alone as widows or orphans; most arrived as the wives or daughters of soldiers, farmers, and artisans. The colonists themselves were typically mestizos (Spanish/Indian) or mulattoes (Spanish/African). Indeed, more than half the founding families of Los Angeles were of African descent. Those settlers who garnered economic and social power, as well as their children, would often position themselves as “Spanish,” putting into practice the truism “money buys color” common throughout colonial Latin America. These successful individuals not only found economic opportunity on the frontier but also reimagined their racial identities. Women such as María Feliciana Arballo and Victoria Reid illuminate this privileging of a fictive Spanish past. In the early years the concern was less about status than survival as settlements, especially in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, teetered on the brink of extinction through starvation or combative relationships with native peoples. However, the missions, pueblos (towns), and presidios (forts) took hold, and over the course of three centuries, Spanish/Mexican women raised families on the frontier and worked alongside their fathers and husbands herding cattle and tending crops. Women also participated in the day-to-day operation of area missions. Whether heralded as centers of
godliness and civilization or condemned as concentration camps, the missions, particularly in California, played instrumental roles in the economic development of an area and in the acculturation and decimation of indigenous peoples. In an environment of social indoctrination, acculturation, and servitude, missions relied on Indian labor to feed the growing colony and produce essential goods for trade. While the Francis-
“Comadres” Teresa Grijalva de Orozco and Francisca Ocampo Quesada, 1912. Courtesy of the Ocampo Family Collection, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview cans were certainly zealous and energetic, they did not act alone. To support their endeavors, mission friars recruited women such as Apolinaria Lorenzana and Eulalia Pérez into their service as housekeepers, midwives, cooks, healers, teachers, seamstresses, and business managers. The close proximity between Indian and Spanish/Mexican women engendered little pretense of a shared sisterhood. Indentured servitude was prevalent on the colonial frontier and persisted well into the nineteenth century. Indians and, to a lesser extent, people of African heritage were pressed into bondage. For instance, in 1735 Anttonía Lusgardia Ernandes, a mulatta, sued her former master for custody of their son. The man admitted paternity, but claimed that his former servant had relinquished the child to his wife since his wife had christened the child. The court, however, granted Ernandes custody. In other cases this pattern continued with tragic results. As noted by historian Miroslava Chávez-García, the murder of the Indian servant known only as Ysabel at the hands of her mistress Guadalupe Trujillo in 1843 offers but one example of the violence inflicted by one group of women on another. Race and class hierarchies significantly shaped everyday life on Mexico’s far northern frontier. Spanish/Mexican settlement has been shrouded by myth. Walt Disney’s Zorro, for example, epitomized the
notion of romantic California controlled by fun-loving, swashbuckling rancheros. Because only 3 percent of California’s Spanish/Mexican population could be considered rancheros in 1850, most women did not preside over large estates, but helped manage small family farms. In addition to traditional female tasks, Mexican women were accomplished vaqueras or cowgirls. Spanish-speaking women, like their EuroAmerican counterparts, encountered a duality in frontier expectations. Although they were placed on a pedestal as delicate ladies, women were responsible for an array of strenuous chores. One can imagine a young woman being serenaded in the evening and then awaking at dawn to slop the hogs. Married women on the Spanish borderlands had certain legal advantages not afforded their EuroAmerican peers. Under English common law, women, when they married, became feme covert (or dead in the eyes of the legal system) and thus could not own property separate from their husbands. Conversely, Spanish/Mexican women retained control of their land after marriage and held one-half interest in the community property they shared with their spouses. Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, which María Rita Valdez operated well into the 1880s, is now better known as Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive takes its name from Rancho Rodeo. Other women, such as Juana Briones, Victoria
“Cowgirls/vaqueras,” circa early 1900s. Courtesy of Ocampo Family Collection, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview Reid, Gretrudis Barceló, and María Calvillo, proved successful entrepreneurs and property holders, even defending their interests in court when necessary. Life for Mexican settlers changed dramatically in 1848 (1836 for Tejanos given the Alamo and the Texas revolt) with the conclusion of U.S.–Mexican War, the discovery of gold in California, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexicans on the U.S. side of the border became second-class citizens, divested of their property, political power, and cultural entitlements. Their world turned upside down. This period of conquest and migration was marked by pejorative stereotypes and widespread violence. In Euro-American journals, novels, and travelogues Spanish-speaking women were frequently portrayed as flashy, morally loose vixens. At times these images had dire results. On July 5, 1851, a Mexican woman swung from the gallows, the only woman lynched during the California gold rush. Josefa Loraiza (also known as Juanita of Downieville) was tried, convicted, and hung the same day she had killed a popular Euro-American miner and prizefighter, a man who the day before had assaulted her. Nine days later a San Francisco newspaper editorialized, “Now we venture to say that had this woman been an American instead of a Mexican . . . had she been of the Anglo-Saxon race, instead of being hung for the deed, she would have been lauded for it.” For elite families, holding on to their ranchos assumed primary importance, and according to some historians, they believed that they had a greater chance of retaining their land if they acquired a EuroAmerican son-in-law. Intermarriage, however, was no insurance policy. In 1849 María Amparo Ruiz married Captain Henry S. Burton, and five years later the couple purchased Rancho Jamul, a sprawling property that covered much of present-day San Diego. When Henry Burton died in 1869, the ownership of the ranch came into question. After several years of litigation, the court awarded his widow only 8,925 acres. Squatters challenged even this amount, and she continued to lose acreage in the years ahead. Chronicling her experiences, Ruiz de Burton, considered the first Mexican American novelist, penned The Squatter and the Don (1885), a fictionalized account of the decline of the Californio ranching class. Segregated from the Euro-American population, Mexican Americans in the barrios of the Southwest were relegated to lower-tier jobs, such as farm labor, domestic work, and food processing. Nineteenthcentury Spanish-language newspapers reveal ample information on the social mores and expectations within these tightly knit communities. Newspaper editors upheld the double standard, and at times women
wrote letters to protest. When one Tucson editor used biblical authority to bolster traditional views, one woman wrote that given that “the Bible itself was written by men and since ‘all men were liars,’ it could not be trusted.” The Catholic Church couched its opposition to public schools in New Mexico and Arizona solely on moral terms, and one New Mexico priest in 1877 argued that women’s suffrage imperiled both the family and the future of humanity. Some women did transgress the bounds of convention. Gertrudis Barceló ran a successful gambling hall and saloon in Santa Fe, a business that became a popular landmark. Loreta Janeta Velázquez, an elite woman from Cuba, fought for the Confederacy disguised as a man, Lt. Harry Buford. Perceived as a heretic by the Catholic Church but as a saint by her followers, Teresa Urrea was a powerful curandera who for a time conducted public faith healings. Despite conventions that relegated women to hearth and home, women worked for wages, most commonly because of economic necessity. Whether in cities or on farms, family members pooled their earnings to put food on the table. Some women worked at home taking in laundry, boarders, and sewing. Others worked in agricultural fields, in restaurants and hotels, and in canneries and laundries. Some sold food on the streets, while others operated small cafés or served their neighbors as curanderas and midwives. In 1900 over 100,000 people of Mexican birth or heritage lived in the Southwest, but by 1930 this figure increased ten-fold as over one million Mexicans, pushed out by revolution and lured by prospective jobs came to the United States. They settled into existing barrios and forged new communities in the Southwest and the Midwest. Like their foremothers, women usually journeyed north as wives and daughters. Many, however, crossed the border alone or as single mothers. As in the past, women’s wage earning proved essential to family survival. Urban daughters (less frequently mothers) worked in canneries and garment plants, as well as in the service industry. Entire families labored in the fields and received their wages in a single check made out to the head of the household. Peeling chiles by hand all day long at a cannery or picking berries for a penny per basket did not make for warm memories. Supporting her family at thirteen, Erminia Ruiz remembered the long hours at the doughnut shop and being hidden in the flour bins because of her age when health inspectors arrived. Exploitation in pay and in working conditions prompted attempts at unionization. Through mutualaid societies and progressive trade unions, Mexican women proved tenacious activists. In 1933 alone thirty-seven major agricultural strikes occurred in Cali-
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview
Mother and infant, 1949. Courtesy of Lee (Russell) Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Neg. no. 13918-EF12.
fornia, twenty-four led by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. The Los Angeles garment workers’ strike (1933), the San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike (1938), and the California Sanitary Canning Company strike (1939) provide examples of urban activism in the Southwest. Southern California cannery activists, such as Carmen Bernal Escobar, negotiated significant wage increases and benefits as members of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA). Like the daughters of European immigrants, young Mexican women experienced the lure of U.S. popular culture. Considerable conflict emerged between daugh-
An employee of La Malinche Tortilla Factory, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1949. Courtesy of Lee (Russell) Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin, Neg. no. II DF-6.
ters and parents because teenagers wanted to dress and perhaps behave like their Euro-American peers at work or like the heroines they encountered in movies and magazines. Evading traditional chaperonage became a major pastime for youth. Stories of ditching the dueña (chaperone) resonate in the memories of Latinas who came of age between the two world wars. While youth experienced the lure of Hollywood, a considerable number faced the specter of deportation. From 1931 to 1934 more than one-third of the Mexican people in the United States (more than 500,000) were either deported (summarily taken off the streets and transported across the border) or repatriated (leaving on their own, frequently under the threat of deportation), even though most were native U.S. citizens. Discrimination and segregation in housing, employment, schools, and public recreation further served to remind youth of their second-tier citizenship. A resident of the San Joaquin Valley of California put it this way: “I remember . . . signs all over that read ‘no Mexicans allowed.’ ” Operating small neighborhood businesses, the Mexican American middle class at times made common cause with their working-class customers, but in other instances they desired social distance. Members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) did both simultaneously. Envisioning themselves as patriotic “white” Americans pursuing their rights (the other white group), LULACers restricted membership to English-speaking U.S. citizens. Taking a page from the early NAACP, LULAC stressed the leadership of an “educated elite” who would lift their less fortunate neighbors by their bootstraps. From LULAC’s inception women participated in numerous grassroots service projects and quickly assumed leadership positions in
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview dorsed the rights of immigrants to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation. Although el Congreso was short lived, it demonstrated the potential for building regional and national coalitions. After World War II Mexican women were involved in a gamut of political organizations, such as LULAC and the Community Service Organization (CSO). While militant labor unions faltered during the cold war era, the classic film Salt of the Earth recorded the real-life story of the Mexican mining families who staged a successful strike in New Mexico. With an emphasis on local issues and voter registration, CSO brought together two dynamic organizers who would change trade union history, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, cofounders of the United Farm Workers (UFW) during the early 1960s. Huerta, the principal negotiator and lobbyist, relied on extended kin and women friends to care for her eleven children during her absences. The idea of a “union family” undergirded UFW organizing campaigns that significantly improved the living conditions and wages of migrant farmworkers. As part of global student movements of the 1960s,
An elegant flapper, Luisa Espinel, a popular entertainer and great-aunt of singer Linda Ronstadt. Courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
both local chapters and national posts. LULAC stalwarts such as feminist Alicia Dickerson Montemayor and folklorist Jovita González engaged in voluntarist politics and educational reform that sought to meet community needs. An important civil rights organization, LULAC used the courts to protest discrimination and played a vital role in Méndez v. Westminster, a landmark school desegregation case. Taking a more working-class community action approach, El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress) was the first national Latino civil rights assembly, held in 1939. Luisa Moreno, an immigrant from Guatemala, and Josefina Fierro, a native of Mexicali, were the driving forces behind el Congreso, Moreno in organizing the first conference and Fierro in terms of the day-to-day activities of the southern California chapters. Welcoming all Latinos regardless of cultural background or citizenship and drawing delegates mostly from labor unions, mutual-aid societies, and other grassroots groups, el Congreso called for an end to segregation in public facilities, housing, education, and employment and en-
Symbolizing a bicultural heritage, María Soto Audelo at a Fourth of July celebration, 1917. Courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview Mexican American youth joined together to address continuing problems of discrimination, particularly in education and politics. Embracing the mantle of cultural nationalism, they transformed the pejorative term “Chicano” into a symbol of pride. “Chicano/a” represents a commitment to social justice and social change. A graduate student at UCLA, Magdalena Mora, not only wrote about trade union struggles, but participated in them as well. An activist since high school, she died of a brain tumor at the age of twenty-nine. The informal credo of the Chicano student movement was to return to one’s community after one’s college education. Mora never left. Many Chicanas chafed at the sexism they experienced in the movement, but they avoided mainstream Euro-American feminist groups, which they perceived as condescending and indifferent. In forming their own agenda, Chicanas looked to the histories of their mothers and grandmothers and to role models of the past, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sara Estela Ramírez, Emma Tenayuca, and Luisa Moreno. Women, including Martha Cotera, Adelaida Del Castillo, and Ana Nieto Gómez, began to articulate a Chicana feminist vision that was predicated on the politics of the community, not the politics of the individual. No armchair activists, they provided leadership on a number of fronts, including welfare rights, immigrant services and advocacy, sterilization suits, community organizations, La Raza Unida Party, antiwar protests, and campus activism. Chicana lesbians, however, found themselves isolated in movement activities. As Cherríe Moraga revealed, “My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression.” Surprisingly, it was not until 1992 that the lesbian caucus of the National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies was established. In their published works and community activities, Latina lesbian writers like Gloria Anzaldula and Moraga have strived to build interracial, transnational networks among women of color. In the Southwest, where the majority of Mexican Americans live, a layering of generations has taken place from seventh-generation New Mexicans to recent immigrants. This layering has provided a vibrant cultural dynamic represented by artists Amalia MesaBains, Judith Baca, and Carmen Lomas Garza and poets Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, and Demetria Martínez (to name a few). Substantial numbers of Latinos who are not of Mexican ancestry or birth have contributed to a new layering of communities and cultural orientations. Since the 1980s more than 500,000 Salvadorans have immigrated to the United States and represent more than 40 percent of Central American arrivals, followed by Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, with
Erminia Ruiz at age nineteen. Courtesy of Vicki L. Ruiz.
smaller numbers from Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and Belize. Approximately 50 percent of Central Americans settle in California. Food can serve as a cultural barometer. In Los Angeles, for example, pupusas can be found as readily as tacos, and one of the premiere Cuban bakeries, Porto’s, can be found in the southern California community of Glendale. Indeed, more than 60,000 Cubans reside in the Golden State. While tensions certainly exist among working class immigrant Latinos, service workers have come together as union stalwarts, as exemplified by Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Union in Los Angeles, led by former Chicana student activist María Elena Durazo. Individuals have also made a difference, for example, Mirna Burciaga, a Costa Mesa mother and small-business owner who took on the local school district and won. Born in El Salvador, Burciaga noted how officials underestimated her intelligence and tenacity. A number of Latinas have capitalized on educational and entrepreneurial opportunities. Linda Alvarado of Colorado not only owns a major construction company but also is part owner of a major-league baseball franchise, the Colorado Rockies. A former farmworker, Amelia Ceja is the first woman president of a world-class winery, Ceja Vineyards in Napa, Cali-
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview fornia. A rocket scientist once employed by NASA, France Córdova is the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. As businesswomen, philanthropists, physicians, attorneys, and educators (to name a few), Latina professionals demonstrate the importance of education and educational access for individual dreams and community well-being. Indeed, the quest for educational equity has been an integral part of the history of civil rights among Latinos in the United States. Latinos can be found throughout the Southwest. Five southwestern states have the largest proportion of people of Latin American birth and heritage relative to the overall population. New Mexico is first, with Latinos constituting 42 percent of the state’s population, followed by California (32 percent), Texas (32 percent), Arizona (25 percent), and Nevada (20 percent). In 2000 Latinos could be found in every state of the union from Alabama to Wyoming. The Latino population has also become more diverse, with Dominicans in Dallas and Puerto Ricans in Phoenix. Latinas in the Southwest have a history rooted in a Mexican American past, but their future will reflect in some measure a political and cultural coalescence on latinidad. SOURCES: Chávez-García, Miroslava. 2002. “Guadalupe Trujillo: Race, Culture, and Justice in Mexican Los Angeles.” In The Human Tradition in California, eds. Clark Davis and David Igler. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources; “Latinos in the United States,” Winter, 1996. OAH Magazine of History; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; and Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, eds. 2005. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press; Social Science Data
Analysis Network. “Nativity and Citizenship, 1990– 2000.” www.censusscope.org (accessed May 23, 2005); U.S. Bureau of the Census, June 2003. The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2002. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office. Vicki L. Ruiz
LATINAS IN THE NORTHEAST In all probability the first families from the Hispanic Caribbean settled in New York, Boston, Hartford, and Philadelphia during the early nineteenth century. Records indicate that a small but energetic trade between the islands and key urban centers in the Northeast attracted merchant families involved in commerce. By the 1830s trade expanded sufficiently to warrant the establishment of a Cuban–Puerto Rican Benevolent Merchants’ Association. In the federal census of 1845 some 508 individuals from Mexico and South America were found in New York City. A sizable Cuban community, including members of the Quesada, Arango, and Mantilla families, lived on 110th Street facing Central Park. Among the handful of Puerto Rican families in Connecticut was that of merchant José de Rivera, a wealthy sugar and wine trader who lived in Bridgeport from 1844 to 1855. De Rivera and his wife, son, and three daughters occupied an elegant residence on Stratford Avenue. From the mid- to the late nineteenth century, immigration from the Hispanic Caribbean, Mexico, and South America increased. Political exiles and those who left on their own to escape tyranny and exploitation in the countries of origin were among the first to sow the seeds of identifiable Spanish-speaking com-
Carmen Cornejo Gallegos standing in the back row, third from the left. “Los Tomboys,” Orange County softball champions of 1947. Courtesy of Lori Gallegos-Hupka.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview munities in the Northeast. Others who came were artisans, labor leaders, professionals, or working-class individuals who were disillusioned with homeland conditions and sought a better way of life. Trade increased bringing a steady stream of merchants and well-to-do visitors to the North. Women were particularly attracted to the freedom enjoyed in large cities like New York in comparison with stricter gender expectations back home. “What a pleasure it is to see women here driving their own carriages, often alone, sometimes with a girl friend or young daughter,” exclaimed the Cuban Aurelia Castillo de González on one such trip. Among the earliest immigrants were students like the three daughters of Dr. Juan Fermín Figueroa and Angela Socarrás Varona, who graduated from pharmacy school in New York and returned to Havana to open the city’s first female-owned pharmacy. María Dolores de Figueroa became Cuba’s first licensed woman pharmacist. Rita Danau lived and studied in New York for years before returning to Cuba to open a school for fencing, cycling, and riding. Julia Martínez studied at Notre Dame in Baltimore and earned a doctorate from the University of Havana. Pilar Barbosa de Rosario was the first woman to teach at the University of Puerto Rico after receiving a master’s degree and a doctorate from Clark University. Her contemporary, Amelia Agostini de del Río, also earned academic credentials from U.S. institutions. By the early 1900s American schools organized special programs for Spanish-speaking teachers such as the New York State Normal School at New Paltz, which invited thirty Cuban teachers every year. Similarly, Harvard University hosted some 1,300 Cuban teachers for instruction in the summer of 1900. Finally, among the handful of Dominican intellectuals who studied in the United States during this early period was the notable Camila Henríquez Ureña. The youngest daughter of an illustrious intellectual family, Henríquez Ureña received a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 1919. In concert with the rebellions for Antillean independence from 1868 to 1898, expatriate communities in the Northeast swelled with staunch supporters of liberation, political activists, skilled and unskilled workers, and professionals. The life of Puerto Rican patriot Lola Rodríguez de Tió offers a wonderful example of women’s roles in these struggles, as does that of the Cuban Emilia Casanova de Villaverde. Noted for writing the Puerto Rican revolutionary anthem, Rodríguez de Tió lived much of her life in exile because of her political convictions. Her writings, poetry, readings, and fiery discourses on political reforms electrified audiences in New York at the height of the conflicts. Casanova de Villaverde wrote extensively in support of independence and sold her jewelry and home furnishings to finance the war efforts. Her guidance was in-
strumental in founding Las Hijas de Cuba, located on New York’s Washington Square. Like Rodríguez de Tió and Casanova de Villaverde, numerous women in exile formed political clubs and organizations that raised funds, held bazaars, hosted dances and theatrical events, featured speakers and recitals, commemorated cultural and historical events, and proselytized about Antillean liberation. Contingents of workers also made up early communities, many of whom were connected to either political or labor movements. Cigar workers were particularly identified with socialism and prioritized the plight of the working class. The practice of la lectura, reading aloud to cigar workers in Spanish-owned factories, honed class consciousness, raised awareness about workers’ struggles, and promoted solidarity. Luisa Capetillo was perhaps the only female ever to read in the New York cigar factories. Known for her feminist writings, Capetillo, who belonged to the leadership of the Puerto Rican union Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Labor), wholeheartedly supported women’s equality, free love, and human emancipation. During her residence in New York Capetillo ran a vegetarian restaurant and a boardinghouse on Twenty-second Street and Eighth Avenue where she raged against tyranny and gender injustice
Elisa Santiago Baeza, New York, circa 1927. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
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Butcher’s shop at 111th Street and Park Avenue, New York. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
and espoused strongly held views on revolution, classless societies, and anarchy. Indeed, boardinghouses, bodegas, dressmaking shops, and cigar factories were among the earliest entrepreneurial ventures in which Latinas were involved. One Cuban woman, Gertrudes Heredia de Serra, even ran the Midwife Clinic of Havana in New York City. American citizenship, imposed on the people of Puerto Rico by an act of Congress in 1917, altered the migrant flow from the islands. Although Spaniards, Dominicans, and other Latin Americans continued to come to New York for study or business, Puerto Ricans, as citizens, came to predominate among the Spanishspeaking population throughout the Northeast, particularly because it was easier for citizens to enter the country than for noncitizens. The migrant flow followed two streams. Either they came voluntarily in search of better economic prospects not available to them in Puerto Rico, or they were actively recruited by American companies to work in the fields or factories. Whatever the reason, the dynamics of migration were intricately tied to the economic cycles of U.S. markets, ease of transportation, and job availability. In 1920 the 130 women recruited to work by the American Manufacturing Company joined dozens of Puerto Ricans already living in Brooklyn, site of the earliest enclave in the city. The company provided shelter and their basic needs, deducting a percentage of their salary for the initial steamship transportation and companysponsored events. By the early 1920s women immigrated to the United States for a myriad of reasons; they followed husbands or parents in the migration, or they came alone. Dominican writer Virginia de Peña de Bordas came to live
and study in the United States by herself. Antonia Denis, an activist and community organizer in Brooklyn, arrived in New York in 1919 on board the Caracas. By the 1920s she was deeply involved in borough politics, was active in the Betances Democratic Club, and was the founder of the Hijas de Borinquen. Denis was known to provide room and board for needy compatriots in her Columbia Street house. In his memoir Joaquín Colón lauded Denis for accommodating nearly forty migrants during a crisis in 1920. Victoria Hernández was an entrepreneur who ran a record store and gave piano lessons in the back of the store. The sister of noted composer Rafael Hernández, Victoria became one of the most prominent women in the Latin music business. Elisa Santiago Baeza explained her reasons for coming to New York in 1930. “We were eleven, six females and five males,” remarked Santiago Baeza, who stayed for thirty years and raised a family. “We were poor and as the oldest female, I was like a second mother. The burden of caring for the younger children was always on me.” Women were homemakers and worked in restaurants, the garment industry, and factories or as domestics and housekeepers. They contributed to both the formal and informal economic sectors and altered their lifestyles and gender roles in the process. Women took in boarders, helped expand fledgling communities through ritual kinship, provided child care for working mothers, sold their home cooking, did piecework in the home, and tended to growing families. In times of need women organized rent parties, helped reestablish evicted families, shared apartments with other families, and opened their homes to newly arrived migrants. In this spirit women helped extend communal
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Rally for community rights, Chelsea, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Aura Sánchez Garfunkel.
bonds at a point when nuclear families predominated over extended-family compositions, and they made lifelong friendships and support networks in an otherwise hostile environment. By the 1930s Latinas like the noted Guatemalan labor leader Luisa Moreno were vigorously engaged in union organizing, were active in community groups and in the public schools that educated their children, and projected their views in a wide array of journalistic enterprises that flourished during the period. Revista de Artes y Letras, published in New York from 1933 until 1945, printed the work of major literary figures like Julia de Burgos and Gabriela Mistral. It published articles on family and child welfare, religion, society, the arts, and education. Founded and edited by Josefina Silva de Cintrón, this journal specifically targeted a sophisticated female readership
but was not above confronting city officials on critical educational issues affecting the Puerto Rican community. But for the most part, Latinas in the Northeast concentrated among the working class, and the 1930s and 1940s found them employed in factories, in garmentrelated occupations that relied heavily on the work of Puerto Rican women, as translators in civil service, as postal employees, in military service, and in other industries essential to the World War II war efforts. Nineteen-year-old Gloria Huertas, a native of Caguas, arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, with four children and no skills but soon found a job that allowed her to support her family. Community activist Antonia Pantoja arrived in New York in 1944 and worked in a series of factory jobs, all of which paid double what her salary had been as a rural teacher in Puerto Rico. Before she became the first woman mayor in the Western Hemisphere (she served as mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, from 1946 to 1968), Felisa Rincón de Gautier worked in New York factories, as did the city’s first bilingual teacher, Ana Peñaranda, recruited to teach English to the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking children in the South Bronx’s Public School 25. Most Latinas did not have the luxury to choose between working outside the home and being full-time homemakers. In the words of Connecticut community builder Genoveva Rodríguez, “What made me get up in the morning; it wasn’t because I wanted to. It was because I was poor. And I wanted a better life . . . for my kids. And they wouldn’t have a better life unless they went to school.” After World War II Puerto Rican barrios multiplied throughout the Northeast, in great measure because of the industrialization policies of the government of Puerto Rico. Migrant populations increased dramatically, and during the 1950s and 1960s an additional 20,000 seasonal contract farm laborers added to the migrant numbers. Seasonal workers, recruited to plant and harvest agricultural production, often remained in the regions of their contractual obligations, sent for their families, and gave rise to sizable communities in
Participants in a social club organization, Hotel Granada, Brooklyn, 1962. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Cubans in New York supporting the resistance against Batista’s government, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
places like Dover, New Jersey, Hartford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lorain, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. Until the 1970s, 80 percent of the migrant flow continued to come into New York City; 860,552 Puerto Ricans resided in New York, but 1.5 million appeared in the national census of 1990, with sizable populations in Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, Hartford, and Jersey City. Moreover, the 1960s witnessed immigration legislation that eliminated preferences in the quota system based on national origins. Legal reforms encouraged Western Hemisphere emigration and family reunification and opened the door to an unprecedented immigration from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Economic uncertainty and political unrest were the most powerful factors in this immigration. The result was the emergence of a highly diverse, multilayered, ethnoracial Latino community that combined recent arrivals with longtime residents, citizens with aliens, and Spanish speakers with second-, third-, or fourth-generation English-dominant hyphenated Americans. For Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and other Latina women, community issues, such as bilingual education, access to higher education, health, environment, employment, and adequate living conditions, reigned supreme. Communities mobilized, formed organizations for advancement, created the conditions for an emergent leadership, and combated racism and discrimination. Organizations like ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Family Institute, the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), and the Puerto Rican Forum in New York spawned counterparts throughout the Northeast with different names but the same intentions. Indeed, many of the groups that originated throughout the civil rights period had national and international connections and continue to the present.
Women were front and center in many of these ventures. In New York, Pantoja worked alongside a dedicated group of social workers and educators that included high-profile figures like Josephine Nieves, Alice Cardona, Yolanda Sánchez, and María Canino to create ASPIRA, PRACA, and the Puerto Rican Forum. These organizations defined, structured, advocated, and provided for the urgent sociopolitical and economic survival of growing communities, often neglected by mainstream power brokers. Some belonged to the pioneer generation, like Patricia Rodríguez, a labor activist in Brooklyn, or Mamá Léo (Leoncia Rosado Rousseau), a Christian pastor who established a successful drug-abuse program in the South Bronx, but others were more recent arrivals. In Hartford María Clemencia Sánchez laid the foundations for the first Puerto Rican Day Parade, a celebratory feat that reinforced cultural nationalism but was also steeped in local politics. Described as a “one-woman socialservice operation,” Sánchez ran a candy store for a living where she held voter registration drives. She became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the Hartford School Board in 1973 and the first Latina to serve in the state legislature. In Boston’s South End Jovita Fontañez helped establish Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), an organization that blocked the city from destroying a Puerto Rican community under urban renewal. Rallying to the cry “We shall not be moved from parcel 19,” IBA led the way in creating a model development project, Villa Victoria. In New Jersey María DeCastro Blake, a passionate and determined woman, fought to open the doors of Rutgers University to Latino(a) students. In spite of continuous struggles to provide basic necessities, achieve, and hold on to gains against mainstream backlash, Latina activist efforts were intended
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Latinos in New York asking for support of the Dominican Revolution against Trujillo’s government. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
to yield long-range benefits, not self-aggrandizement. Edna Negrón succeeded María Clemencia Sánchez as the state representative for her district following Sánchez’s untimely death. Negrón, Connecticut director of the Governor’s Office of Puerto Rico, settled in Hartford in the 1960s and served as the city’s coordinator for bilingual-bicultural education programs. Pantoja placed the directorship of ASPIRA, her most cherished organization, in the hands of Yolanda Sánchez and proceeded to blaze new trails in Puerto Rican and Latino community and educational advancement. María E. Sánchez, a leader in developing bilingual education in New York City, went on to direct the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College, as did María Canino in the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Livingston College of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Certainly women’s political and union activism and intellectual and academic endeavors eroded the notion that Latinas were passive and uninterested in bettering their situations or in education. On the contrary, their contributions signaled another vibrant strand in the American mosaic. Claiming strong ties to cultural citizenship, Latina struggles in the Northeast ranged from securing bilingual education programs to admission into universities; from developing academic departments, programs, and research institutes on Puerto Rican, Latino, Dominican, or Hispanic American stud-
ies to incorporating Latino history and culture into the public school curriculum; and from marginalization on the job market to sitting at the negotiating table. By the 1980s and 1990s Latinas appeared to reap some of the fruits of this labor by assuming the reins of leadership in the public and private sectors. Latina activists in bilingual education in the 1960s and 1970s like Carmen Pérez-Hogan, María Ramírez, and Hilda Hidalgo occupied decision-making positions at the state and national levels in the 1990s. Hidalgo served as assistant commissioner of education for the state of New Jersey, but before that she struggled with a cadre of committed individuals like Carmen Asencio in Trenton and Gloria del Toro in Newark to provide educational and social services for Puerto Ricans and Latinos. Bronx-bred Sonia Sotomayor, an assistant district attorney in New York, became U.S. district court judge for the Southern District of New York in 1992. The first Puerto Rican woman to serve in a U.S. federal court, Sotomayor earned her law degree from Yale University, where she edited the Yale Law Journal. Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, an associate judge of the New York State Court of Appeals in 1994, served as a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society in New York City from 1967 to 1969. In medicine two Latinas from the Northeast stand out for their monumental service. Antonia Novello, the commissioner of health for the state of New York (and the first Latina
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Community mobilization, Centro Latino de Chelsea, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Aura Sánchez Garfunkel.
surgeon general) advocated for quality health care and led the first national Latino initiative to identify and strategically address disease prevention. Helen Rodríguez-Trias directed the Department of Pediatrics at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, highlighting community-based involvement in health issues, AIDS among women, and sterilization. Isaura Santiago and Dolores Fernández each became president of Hostos College in the City University of New York system. Elsa Gómez
was president of Kean College in New Jersey, and Marta Casals Istomin, cofounder of the internationally recognized Pablo Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, heads Manhattan’s School of Music. Each of the women cited represents countless others who have enormously contributed to the legacy of Latinas in the Northeast. In the twenty-first century a dramatic increase in the numbers of Mexican and Central American immigrants
Antonia Denis supporting Celia Acosta Vice’s candidacy for the New York State Assembly. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview in northeastern states has emerged that signifies how each incoming group finds its own way to connect to a historical legacy. Catering to the growing numbers of day laborers in Long Island, a group scorned for altering traditional work patterns in suburbs like Farmingville, Latinas have formed a door-to-door business. As cocineras (cooks), they provide homemade meals to men living away from wives and mothers. According to the New York Times, “These women make dinner, over-hear secrets, console those who cannot find work and quickly get used to grown men calling them madre.” Hired to provide staples, cook, and clean house for legal or illegal communities of migrant workers, the women accommodate several homes a week. They cook the appropriate regional dishes required by each home, sometimes bring their children with them while they work, and serve as intermediaries with the surrounding societies when needed. Resilient and adapting to changing times, Latinas meet their own financial obligations, often earning more than they would at fast-food restaurants. Moreover, they serve as integral links in the preservation of community and heritage, carrying forth a legacy forged in the distant past. The effects of migration, daily life in diaspora, identity, biculturalism, bilingualism, race, class, and gender become subjects for analysis in a variety of venues. During the 1980s and 1990s Latina writers like Nicholasa Mohr (Nilda), Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents), Esmeralda Santiago (When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman), and Judith Ortiz Cofer (Silent Dancing) explored these issues in semiautobiographical novels. In searching for their own answers, they gave voice to millions who experience the duality of “living on the hyphen.” Aurora Levins Morales expanded the paradigm by introducing intergenerational and cross-cultural perspectives that spoke to yet another reality—the coalescence of something new on U.S. soil, neither Latin American nor U.S. American but a synthesis of both. Simply stated, Levins Morales declares in her poem Child of the Americas, “I am new. History made me. My first language was Spanglish. I was born at the crossroads and I am whole.” In this spirit Latina history in the Northeast shares common ground. SOURCES: Acosta-Belén, Edna, Margarita Benítez, José E. Cruz, Yvonne González-Rodríguez, Clara E. Rodríguez, Carlos E. Santiago, Azara Santiago-Rivera, and Barbara Sjostrom. 2000. “Adíos Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History and Contributions. Albany, NY: Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, SUNY; Glasser, Ruth. 1997. “Aquí me quedo”: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut. Middletown: Connecticut Humanities Council; Pérez, Louis A. 1999. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture.
New York: Harper Collins; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. 2nd ed. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York. Berkeley: University of California Press; Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. 2005. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
LATINAS IN THE MIDWEST Latina migrants began arriving in the Midwest in significant numbers during the early twentieth century as part of larger Latino migrant flows. The Mexican community was the largest Latina/o population in the region throughout the twentieth century, followed by Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Central and South Americans. Latina/o communities have historically emerged in both urban and rural areas, and the group represents a diverse range of countries of origin, as well as class backgrounds. Many of the earliest residents, however, were working-class migrants in search of economic security. The pre–World War II era saw largely Mexican immigrants, with smaller numbers of Central and South American and Caribbean immigrants. The first Latina/o immigrants to Chicago, for example, were workers contracted by the railroads in 1916. In that year 206 Mexicans were working on the railroads; by 1926, 5,255 Mexican men worked on the rail lines. Some wives, children, and other female relatives and single women also traveled to the Midwest. Women, however, made up a relatively small proportion of these communities. For example, of 17,000 Mexicans living in Chicago in 1927, only 1,650 were women and 3,350 were children. In the Indiana Harbor colony during this time, women numbered 500 and children 1,000 in a total population of 4,500 Mexican immigrants. Similarly, in Gary, Indiana, the population of 2,500 Mexicans included only 200 women and 350 children. In urban areas like Chicago, Latina/o immigrants, predominantly males, were drawn by work in railroads, steel mills, and meatpacking houses. The railroads also drew workers to cities like Milwaukee and Kansas City, while cities like Gary and Indiana Harbor employed workers in steel mills. Detroit drew workers to the auto and other related industries. Overall, midwestern cities provided the opportunity for higher industrial wages compared with agricultural labor in the Southwest. Many Latina immigrants worked outside the home, as well, in order to contribute to household economies. By the 1930s, according to Zaragosa Vargas, women constituted more than one-third of the Mexican immigrant workforce. Though women rarely found employment in heavy industrial work, some Mexicanas found
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview jobs processing meats and sausages in the packinghouses or worked in candy, mattress, and paper factories. Smaller numbers found jobs as salesclerks or in office work. Although some men objected to women’s employment outside the home because it disrupted the traditional gendered division of labor, for many families it was an economic necessity. Women also did work that blurred public/private boundaries, including taking in boarders, running restaurants that catered to single migrant men, or taking in piecework. Few Latinas during this period worked in domestic service. In addition to paid labor, Latina immigrants also did the important work of sustaining social networks and kinship ties, performing productive labor in the home, and caring for other workers. Women, for example, often led collection efforts for fellow immigrants who were ill or had passed away. They organized cultural celebrations such as national independence days and other pageants. Latinas and their families faced difficult conditions in midwestern cities because Mexican migrants often lived in the most overcrowded and poorest housing available. Railroad companies often relegated Mexican workers to boxcar camps. Here women had the especially difficult work of making suitable homes for their
families in the direst of conditions, usually without heating, plumbing, modern cooking facilities, or adequate shelter from the elements. Mexican women struggled to maintain households and feed and care for their families in the most inhospitable conditions. Moreover, social service agencies and settlement houses neglected Mexican communities in comparison with European immigrants. Some agencies, however, did provide assistance to Latina/o immigrants, targeting Mexican women, for example, in their Americanization efforts. Mexican women also migrated to rural areas throughout the region, where they and their families worked as agricultural laborers. Agricultural recruiters often sought entire families for fieldwork because this would ensure more hands in the fields. The first Mexican workers in Minnesota arrived in 1907, while the first workers in Ohio and Wisconsin (Milwaukee) arrived in 1917. By 1927 the Mexican population in the Midwest numbered 63,700. In summer months, when families headed north as migrant farmworkers, their numbers rose to as many as 80,000. Women, alongside male relatives and children, worked in the beet fields of Minnesota and Michigan, in the onion fields of Ohio, and on other crops throughout the region. Latina/o
Elena Rico and partner at one of the Chicago Fiesta Guild events. Courtesy of Elena Rico.
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The Gómez family immigrated to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1917 from Jalisco, Mexico. The eighteen children pooled their resources from their jobs in the meatpacking houses and beer factories to support the family. Courtesy of Lara Medina.
immigrants also found themselves in rural or smalltown communities in places like Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa. Not all Latinas during this time period, however, came from working-class backgrounds. A small number of professional Latin American migrants also made their homes in urban areas in the region. Argentinian, Colombian, Costa Rican, Cuban, Honduran, Mexican, and Panamanian consuls had offices in cities like Chicago, while Latin American doctors, lawyers, and other professionals relocated their families to midwestern cities where their services were in demand among the growing migrant population. The wives of these professional men often filled the roles of socialites, cultural ambassadors, and community leaders. They sometimes hosted or made appearances at social functions such as national independence celebrations where they represented their countries of origin to international government officials and the broader American society. Latin American students who studied in the Midwest also contributed to the migrant population. Latina young women from wealthy families who graduated from high school or college in the region were sometimes noted in local Spanish-language newspapers. In Chicago Spanish-language newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s recognized the presence of Latina immigrant readers and printed columns that catered specifically to women. Advice columns addressed topics like beauty and homemaking. They advised readers on disciplining children and the cultural and moral education of Latin American children growing up in the United States. Women also found recipes and housekeeping tips in the pages of Spanish newspapers. In addition, numerous advertisements announced prod-
ucts like beauty creams and cosmetics designed to appeal to Latina migrant women. In the growing consumer culture of the United States, Latinas too were potential consumers. Latinas also used the newspapers for their own entrepreneurial interests—to advertise their boardinghouses or restaurants to fellow migrants. Such advertisements sometimes included a photograph of the proprietress of the business as a way to personalize the establishment and evoke a sense of “home” for potential migrant male customers. After the Great Depression the Latina/o population in the Midwest declined dramatically. Deportation and repatriation campaigns depleted the Mexican migrant communities in urban and rural areas alike. By 1936, for example, only 1,200 Mexicans remained in Detroit, a city that had had 15,000 immigrants only seven years earlier and was the second-largest urban settlement of Mexicans in the Midwest. Mexican communities dwindled throughout the region and did not reemerge until after World War II. The postwar era, however, also saw a rise in the migration of Puerto Rican women, men, and children. The years after World War II witnessed a renewed flow of Latina/o migrants. In particular, Puerto Ricans became an attractive source of labor for some American companies. Women and men were recruited for agricultural labor, picking crops as Mexican immigrants had done in earlier decades. Industrial employers, however, also began seeking out Puerto Rican labor. Puerto Rican women and men found work in factories in eastern and midwestern cities, but Puerto Rican women found employment in domestic work as well. In 1946 more than 300 Puerto Rican women migrated to Chicago as part of an experimental domestic-
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Two generations in 1939: a Mexican mother, Hermelinda Gómez Ornelas, with her Mexican American daughter, Ofelia “Rosemary” Ornelas. Courtesy of Lara Medina.
labor recruitment program. Because the women were hired as live-in domestics, they lived dispersed throughout the city in employers’ homes rather than in concentrated ethnic communities. The recruitment program also included several dozen Puerto Rican men hired to work at the Chicago Hardware Foundry Company, which housed the men in a boxcar community on the company’s premises. Within three months many workers began complaining about work conditions; some women worked as many as fifteen hours a day, others had poor living arrangements, and others complained of unfair wages. The women, who met one another at social gatherings sponsored by the local YWCA, gained the support of Puerto Rican students at the University of Chicago, including the famous Puerto Rican anthropologist Elena Padilla and Munita Muñoz Lee, the daughter of the then president of the Puerto Rican Senate (and soon to be governor of the island territory), Luis Muñoz Marín. Other sympathetic observers became involved as well, including a Puerto Rican social worker vacationing in Chicago at the time, Carmen Isales. After interviewing thirty women and researching local prevailing wages, Isales made the case that the women were discriminated against by a racially based wage differential: while employers paid white women as much as $35 or $40 per week for domestic work, Puerto Rican women earned only $15 per week. Eventually many of the recruited domestic workers quit their jobs and left the city. The episode, however, marked an important moment of Latina women in the Midwest advocating for one another and demanding equitable treatment as workers.
Small numbers of Latinas/os also continued migrating to the Midwest as university students. Puerto Rican and other Latina/o students attended universities throughout the region. Puerto Rican scholar Elena Padilla, for example, completed her master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1947. Though little was known about Latina/o immigrant populations in the Midwest during this time, Padilla’s thesis compared Puerto Rican migration in Chicago and New York City. Her work made a significant contribution to the scholarship on Latinas/os in the Midwest. Other Puerto Rican women also began migrating to the city after World War II. Those who did not live with their employers made their homes among Mexican immigrants (based on language affinities) or among African Americans (based on racial affinities). Many Puerto Rican women who migrated to the Midwest during this time had previous work experience in Puerto Rico, largely in the needle trades or in agricultural work. According to Gina Pérez, Puerto Rican women and men migrated as part of household units seeking a strategy for economic survival. Puerto Rican women’s work both within and outside the home together represented women’s survival strategies as members of families and extended communities. Puerto Rican and Mexican women continued to arrive in the Midwest during the 1950s, particularly in urban areas, as part of larger migrant movements. As in the 1920s, women found employment in agricultural work, in meatpacking and other factories, and, increasingly, in domestic labor. Mexican and Puerto Rican communities grew dramatically during this decade. These new (im)migrants, however, continued to be marginalized by the city and were relegated to the poorest neighborhoods, the worst housing, and the lowest-skilled jobs. Moreover, because of the rapid deindustrialization of American cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, the Puerto Rican community experienced growing unemployment and underemployment and increasingly turned to public assistance for economic survival. Thus, while many Puerto Rican migrants initially came to the Midwest because of the promise of economic opportunities, the loss of industrial jobs made the times much more difficult for many. According to Gina Pérez, in Chicago by the 1960s, Puerto Ricans became stigmatized as culturally dysfunctional, an underclass, and largely dependent on welfare. Such characterizations of the Puerto Rican community rested largely on specifically gendered ideologies: like the denigrating views of African American women, these views described poor Puerto Rican women in very negative terms. Puerto Rican and other Latina women made efforts to better
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview their socioeconomic conditions, however, by organizing around issues of welfare rights, education, and employment discrimination. By 1965, when the Immigration and Naturalization Act reformed American immigration quotas, Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants to cities like Chicago and Detroit were increasingly accompanied by Cuban and Central and South American immigrants. Again, while Latin American men often immigrated alone as an economic strategy to provide for their families back home, women also immigrated as part of household units. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, however, women also began immigrating alone, as men had done earlier, also seeking to provide economically for their families back home. Cuban immigrants began arriving in larger numbers after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The earliest waves of immigrants included mostly professionals and elites. By the 1980s the Cuban immigrant population included more working-class and less educated immigrants as well. Central and South Americans also included middle- and upper-class professionals, but particularly for Central Americans, migrants included large numbers of political refugees who were fleeing civil wars and political unrest in war-torn homelands. Mexican immigrants continued arriving, many of whom were fleeing Mexico’s economic devastation during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Latina women from many of these sending countries played crucial roles in maintaining transnational ties and social networks between home and the U.S. mainland. By the 1970s Latinas in the Midwest, especially the second and third generations, became increasingly politicized and more vocal about demanding services and rights for their communities. Women became the backbone of community organizing and grassroots activism and led various struggles for equitable housing, education, employment, and welfare rights. Maria Cerda, a Puerto Rican woman, became the first Hispanic to serve on the Chicago Board of Education in 1969. She advocated assiduously for bilingual education and a school curriculum that valued Latina/o children’s cultural backgrounds. Six years later Cerda became the first executive director of the Latino Institute, a research and advocacy agency that provided technical assistance and support for local Latina/o community-based organizations. In 1973 Mexican and Puerto Rican women in Chicago founded Mujeres Latinas en Acción, a social service and advocacy agency that serves Spanish-speaking women. Mexican mothers in Chicago during the 1970s also led the struggle against inequitable, segregated, and inferior education for their children in overcrowded Mexican neighborhood schools. As small numbers of women began
gaining access to higher education and professions, Latinas also became more visible as artists, educators and businesswomen and in other professional roles during the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of the twentieth century Latinas began flexing some political power as well, running for city, county, and state political seats and gaining political appointments in municipal government. Still, Latinas in the Midwest struggle with gender and racial discrimination in education, housing, and employment. Recent immigrants, in particular, experience high rates of poverty, low wages, inequitable education, and inadequate housing. But U.S.-born Latinas also experience high rates of unemployment, poverty, and lack of educational resources. Latinas in the region have faced particular challenges over the decades. Being in a geographic region that is often overlooked by the East Coast–West Coast emphasis on Latinas/os, Latinas have had to work hard to make their communities visible on the national level. They have also encountered significant diversity within the Latina/o community in the region. Today Latina immigrants continue to arrive from countries throughout Latin America—Colombia, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. They also find, however, long-standing communities of women who trace their roots in the region back to the early twentieth century. SOURCES: Fernández, Lilia. 2005. “Latina/o Migration and Community Formation in Postwar Chicago: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Gender, and Politics, 1945– 1975.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego; García, Juan R. 1996. Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900– 1932. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Padilla, Elena. 1947. “Puerto Rican Immigrants in New York and Chicago: A Study in Comparative Assimilation.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago; Pérez, Gina M. 2004. The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families. Berkeley: University of California Press; Vargas, Zaragosa. 1993. Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lilia Fernández
LATINAS IN THE SOUTHEAST When one thinks of traditional areas of settlement for Latinos, one thinks primarily of the Southwest and the Northeast of the United States. However, the first Spanish settlement in what is now the United States was in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. It was not until decades later that settlements were founded in New Mexico, Texas, and other areas of the Southwest. Since the six-
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview teenth century Florida has been an important destination for many people who trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking nations. The Latino group most associated with the southeastern states is the Cubans. More than 1.3 million Cubans live in the United States today, and more than 60 percent of them live in southern Florida alone. Cuban migration to the United States can be divided into two distinct periods: the nineteenth-century migration prompted in part by the various wars of independence against Spain, and the post-1959 migration provoked by the Cuban Revolution. Cubans have migrated to the United States at other times, responding to a variety of political and economic crises in their country, but the largest migrations occurred during these two periods. Thousands of Cubans migrated as a result of the Cuban wars of independence (1868–1878 and 1895– 1898). Those who migrated to the United States settled in different cities around the country. Some settled in the Northeast, in places such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The majority, however, settled in the southeastern United States, in cities like Key West, Tampa, Jacksonville, and New Orleans. Various Cuban cigar manufacturers relocated to Florida during this period, and Key West and Tampa emerged as the major cigar-manufacturing centers in the United States because of the Cuban factories that relocated to that area. These factories attracted thousands of Cuban workers who, faced with unemployment in Cuba in the midst of war, chose to leave for the United States and took their wives and children with them. As a result of the relocation, many women were forced to work outside the home to supplement their family’s income. They worked as seamstresses, laundresses, servants, cooks, midwives, peddlers, grocers, and boardinghouse keepers. By the 1870s Cuban women in Florida had a higher labor participation rate than women on the island. More women worked in the cigar industry than in any other trade, especially in Key West, where they constituted 9 percent of the industry’s workforce. While men performed the highly skilled tasks of cutting, filling, rolling, classing, and selecting, women worked at semiskilled tasks, especially as despalilladoras, or tobacco strippers. Over time, however, more and more women gained access to the skilled occupations traditionally held by men. By 1890 women constituted up to one-quarter of all hand rollers in some factories in Tampa, working alongside the men. There was at least one case of a woman lectora, a reader in the cigar factory, occupying the most prestigious position on the factory floor. Whether they settled in Florida or New York, most Cubans perceived themselves as exiles and planned to
return to their homeland once it became an economically stable, independent nation. While they struggled to survive in the United States, they assisted in the liberation efforts. Throughout the Ten Years’ War (1868– 1878) Cubans raised money for the rebel forces. Women established organizations to assist the independence movement, among them the Hijas del Pueblo in New Orleans and the Junta Patriótica de Damas de Nueva York, which raised money to buy supplies for the rebel forces, and they rallied public support for the Cuban cause. Women also played a key role in José Martí’s Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC). Of the 200 clubs that constituted part of the PRC, 25 percent were women’s clubs. By 1898 Key West had the most clubes femeninos, with eighteen chapters, and Tampa had fifteen clubs. Total membership in the clubes femeninos in the United States and abroad reached nearly 1,500 by the end of 1898. Some of the clubes were named for female heroes of the revolution such as Mariana Grajales and Mercedes Varona. Often the names the women chose for their clubs reflected the role they perceived for themselves in the liberation effort, such as Protectoras de la Pátria (Protectors of the Nation), Obreras de la Independencia (Forgers of Independence), and Protectoras del Ejército (Protectors of the Army). The clubes femeninos organized dances, picnics, raffles, auctions, banquets, rallies, and parades through which they promoted the idea of independence and raised money to supply and feed the rebel army. Apart from their active fund-raising and propaganda work, the women assisted the revolution in more subtle ways. As their men left to fight in Cuba, the responsibility of supporting their families fell on women’s shoulders. Women successfully raised families, worked outside the home, and contributed to the political cause. They often neglected their own personal comfort in order to contribute more money to the PRC. Throughout the war, as more and more Cubans sought refuge in their communities, the women also took in the homeless, collected clothes, and set up soup kitchens. They took in widows, orphans, wounded soldiers, and other victims of the war. They kept medical supplies and even weapons and ammunition, and they opened their homes to the rebel leaders who made periodic visits to the exile communities to rally support. After the Treaty of Paris that ended the CubanSpanish-American war of 1895–1898, a radical relocation to Cuba did not take place. Over the years Cubans had established ties to the United States in spite of their nationalism. Although they may have been torn by their desires to return home, they realized that they could fare better economically if they remained in the
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview United States. Many of those who repatriated following the war returned to Florida within a few years because of the political and economic instability on the island. They were joined by hundreds of new immigrants who chose to seek economic opportunities in the United States while Cuba rebuilt itself. After independence the Cuban exile communities now channeled their energies into improving their domestic environment and especially their working conditions. The Cubans had a long tradition of militant trade unionism, but instead of joining U.S. labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor or the International Cigarmakers Union, they created their own labor unions such as the Union de Trabajadores and la Resistencia that addressed not only immediate concerns such as wages and benefits, but long-term issues such as class struggle. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Cuban cigar workers in Florida, especially in Tampa, went on strike on several occasions. Female cigar makers struck alongside the men for higher wages, better benefits, and union recognition. The women of the community assisted the protesters in countless ways. They set up soup kitchens, or cocinas económicas, to feed the striking cigar workers and their families, and they collected clothes, food, and medicine for them. When the strikers were evicted from their houses because of their inability to pay rent, women took families into their homes. Less is known about Cuban women’s lives after the 1920s because this period has received comparatively limited scholarly attention. Migration to the United States continued in the decades after Cuban independence because of high unemployment and a work climate hostile to organized labor. Records show that from 1921 to 1930, 16,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States. However, immigration decreased because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as it did for most other immigrant groups. From 1931 to 1940 only 9,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States. A return migration to Cuba also characterized this period. Cigar workers were particularly likely to return. By the early 1930s the cigar industry in the United States had fallen on hard times, and many cigar makers either returned to Cuba or looked for factory jobs up north. Black and mixed-race Cubans were the most likely to move north during the first decades of the twentieth century because of segregation and heightened racial tension and discrimination in the South. The political violence in Cuba during the 1940s and 1950s also compelled Cubans to emigrate, many as political exiles. From 1941 to 1950 some 26,000 Cubans immigrated to the United States. During the following decade 79,000 individuals immigrated. Cuban expatriates maintained contact with the homeland in multiple ways. They sent remittances to their relatives and kept
Cuban traditions and the memory of their homeland alive through various cultural activities associated with religious or patriotic celebrations. Cubans published Spanish-language newspapers with news of the homeland, wrote books, and composed music that evoked their ties to both Cuba and the United States. Until 1959 Cubans on the island and on the mainland were able to travel back and forth, exchanging stimulating ideas and maintaining a sense of nationhood. They imported Cuban products and exported some of their own. Many emigrated to the United States with the hope of returning to their homeland one day; others never looked back. Like their nineteenth-century forebears, they played an active role in the politics of their homeland by raising money or campaigning for political candidates running for office back home. But the longer the Cubans stayed in the United States, the stronger the ties they developed to the country that gave them refuge. By far the largest Cuban migration to the United States occurred as a result of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Ironically, the revolutionary movement that produced the greatest reform also distanced the greatest number of people by its radicalism. More than onetenth of Cuba’s present-day population chose or was forced to emigrate after 1959; nearly 1 million settled in the United States and in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Due to the visible and active U.S. presence on the island before the revolution, as well as a long historical connection between the two, it was logical that Cubans turned to the American nation in this time of need. The postrevolutionary migration occurred in four distinct waves: 1959–1962, 1965–1973, 1980, and 1994 to the present. It also followed a socioeconomic progression. The first to leave were the upper and middle classes, followed closely by the working classes. The U.S. government granted the Cubans of the first two waves refugee status and welcomed them with a comprehensive assistance program, the Cuban Refugee Program (CRP). By 1973 CPR had dispensed more than $957 million in relief through job training, education programs, loans, medical care, surplus food distribution, and emergency relief checks, as well as a resettlement program. Subsequent arrivals did not receive the same levels of government assistance, but they did encounter a fairly open-door policy. Most Cubans who found the means to leave the island were accepted into the United States, even if they entered the country illegally. Cuban women often found their first jobs more readily than men because they were willing to work for lower wages. These jobs, for the most part, were unskilled or semiskilled labor that did not require fluency in English or contact with the general public. Women
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview found jobs as factory operatives, seamstresses, domestics and nannies, janitors, cooks, dishwashers, waitresses, sales personnel, and agricultural workers and in other low-level service occupations. The garment industry and textile manufacturing were important employers. By the mid-1980s more than 25,000 Cuban women worked in the garment industry and had become the backbone of that industry. Because thousands of Cuban women were seeking employment, the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami created vocational training programs specifically for them. In 1964 a program titled “Training for Independence,” or Aprenda y Supérese, was established by the center to help single women and heads of households become self-supporting. In two-month sessions women received intensive English instruction and training in a number of marketable skills: hand sewing, sewingmachine work, clerical office work, nursing assistance, housekeeping, and even silk-screen art work. Afterward the government assisted the women in finding employment, often resettling them to other parts of the country. Aprenda y Supérese trained more than 3,000 Cuban women and was so successful that it became a model for the amended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program during the Johnson administration in 1968. Women also encountered opportunities in the teaching profession, where they contributed to the accommodation of thousands of refugee children into the Dade County school system. In 1961 Dade County, Florida, established a Cuban Teacher Training Program to prepare former and aspiring teachers for positions in southern Florida’s rapidly growing school system. The Cuban “teacher assistants,” the majority of whom were women, spent up to eight hours per day in a classroom, assisting in curriculum planning, teaching, and
supervision and acting as interpreters for the refugee children. At night they took English-language and education courses to prepare for their certification exams. Once certified, the teachers headed their own classrooms in Dade County schools or were relocated to school systems around the country. As each year decreased their chances of returning to Cuba, women began to work toward improving the quality of their lives in the United States. Many returned to school either to revalidate their professional credentials or to train for a more marketable career, accommodating language courses and college curricula into their busy schedules. To assist each other in these efforts, women helped found and maintain professional organizations that served as clearinghouses of information on job and educational opportunities. These professional associations had a largely male membership. However, in some associations, such as the Colegio Nacional de Bibliotecarios en el Exilio for librarians and the Colegio Nacional de Farmaceuticos en el Exilio for pharmacists, women constituted at least half the membership. For those women who did not have professional training, informal networks emerged to inform each other of job and educational opportunities. Exile taught women to be resourceful and to work together within their families, neighborhoods, and communities. As their spheres of responsibility expanded, they found new and innovative ways of balancing work at home and in the workplace. Out of their common need they created networks of female relatives, friends, and neighbors to exchange services: they took care of each other’s children and took turns doing the grocery shopping; they served as interpreters for one another; and in some cases they shared the expenses of major appliances that they traded from
Members of the Colegio Nacional de Bibliotecarias en el Exilio. Sitting from left to right: Evidia Blanco, Dolores Rovira, Ana Rosa Núñez, and Rosa Abella; standing from left to right: Elena Peraza, Carmen Martínez, María de los Angeles Menéndez, Sara Sánchez, and Lesbia Varona. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview house to house. These networks of family and friends were crucial to women who worked outside the home. Although women expanded their roles to include wage earning, their spouses did not expand their roles to include housework. Elderly women, in particular, played a crucial role in this network. In three-generation households the elderly supplied an additional income from either outside employment or public assistance, which, in turn, helped assist their families financially. More important, they played a pivotal role in child rearing and home maintenance, allowing their daughters, granddaughters, and neighbors to go out and find work. Some entrepreneurial women created lucrative businesses that catered to the needs of women who entered the workplace. They established housekeeping and delivery services, laundries and dry cleaners, home ateliers and dress shops, beauty parlors, daycare centers, driving schools, and even subscription home-delivery food services. Cubans discovered that any business that made life easier for women who worked outside the home had a good chance of succeeding. The shift in roles and responsibilities has had a tremendous impact on Cubans’ economic “success” as a group. As early as 1980 Cuban American median family income was almost equal to that of the total U.S. population. This was an important accomplishment for a community of predominantly first-generation immigrants. Women’s high participation in the labor force helped raise the median family income. Without their contributions, these statistics would have been much different. While women’s new roles brought them independence and power, it also strained marriages because many men felt threatened by these nontraditional relationships. By 1980 census figures showed that Cuban women had the highest divorce rates in the United States: 9.3 percent of Cuban women aged fifteen years and above identified themselves as divorced in the 1980 census, as compared with 7.3 of the total U.S. population. While women’s participation in the labor force had a notable impact on the economic success of both their families and the larger community, their participation in the political activities of the community was less obvious. During the 1960s exile politics was concerned more with Cuba than with the United States, and hundreds of political organizations emerged in Miami, Union City, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago to lead the counterrevolution. Since politics was generally regarded as too hostile or violent an arena for women, for the most part, they were excluded from these organizations. The vast majority of women were also too preoccupied with domestic and economic responsibilities to be full-time advocates of la causa
cubana. Tradition cast them in a supportive role. They could always be counted on to do the thankless and tedious work of sewing or painting banners, preparing food for protesters at demonstrations, writing letters and making phone calls, and marching in demonstrations. The handful of political organizations that emerged exclusively for women, among them the Union de Mujeres, the Cruzada Femenina Cubana, and the Movimiento Femenino Anticomunista de Cuba, functioned as auxiliaries, providing moral and financial support to different men’s organizations by participating in their rallies and fund-raisers, organizing public relations campaigns and membership drives, and even sponsoring memorial services for the men who died for la causa. These organizations, however, offered no real political alternatives. The one political issue that drew a significant participation from women was human rights. Numerous coalitions emerged dedicated to calling world attention to the plight of political prisoners in Cuba. Perhaps the most notable of these groups was the nonprofit organization Of Human Rights, founded in 1961 by Elena Mederos González to monitor human rights abuses in Cuba. Other groups that have emerged include the Committee to Denounce Cruelties to Cuban Political Prisoners, the Centro de Derechos Humanos del Movimiento Demócrata Cristiano, and El Movimiento Mujeres pro Derechos Humanos. Women played a crucial role in this political campaign, since it was their fathers, husbands, sons, and sisters who were imprisoned in Cuba. They wrote letters and sent petitions to Amnesty International, Americas Watch, the International Red Cross, and the PEN clubs, and they met with presidents, congressmen, and foreign dignitaries. They organized fund-raising banquets to raise money for their publicity campaign, arranged special memorial services to pray for the prisoners, and helped erect monuments honoring the prisoners in parks and public areas to keep them in the community’s consciousness. It took years, however, to see the fruits of their work. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the Castro government finally began to release thousands of political prisoners. Younger women who came of age in the United States and studied at U.S. colleges and universities tended to have greater opportunities for political expression than their mothers. Influenced by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, they joined various student political groups and staged protests and demonstrations on college campuses. Some of these younger women, influenced by the radicalized milieu of the 1960s, came to adopt a more tolerant view of the revolution and began to work for the normalization of relations between both countries. Many
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Refugee camp in Miami during the massive Cuban immigration known as the Mariel Boatlift, 1980. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
young women also played key editorial roles in political journals of the 1970s such as Areíto, Nueva Generación, Joven Cuba, Krisis, and ¡Cuba Va! that analyzed la problemática cubana and the plight of Cubans in the United States. Since the 1980s a number of women have begun to distinguish themselves in local politics, serving in city and county governments. Ironically, because women were excluded from exile politics, they carved a niche for themselves in ethnic politics, that is, domestic policy making. Working with other racial and ethnic groups, they addressed issues of importance to the community as a whole, such as crime, racism, education, taxes, utilities, and urban development. As representatives of the Cuban community at the local level, they also addressed issues of specific importance to their fellow émigrés. In 1989 one Miami politician, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, was elected to occupy the House seat long held by the late congressman Democrat Claude Pepper. Cuban women were perhaps most influential in cultural matters, specifically, preserving cubanidad, or those customs, values, and traditions that they associated with being Cuban. Preserving cubanidad became a cultural mission in the exile community: an attempt to preserve those values they regarded as important for the distant day when repatriation became possible. Over time, however, as the exiles resigned themselves to a lengthy, if not permanent, stay in the United States, preserving cubanidad became important to establish the cultural boundaries that would allow Cubans to survive as a distinct community. Women reinforced cubanidad at both the family and community levels. As parents, they were traditionally responsible
for instilling cultural values in their children and grandchildren and making sure that they learned to speak Spanish, as well as appreciate their cultural heritage. With this goal in mind, they established afterschool programs in churches, schools, and community centers that taught children the basics of Cuban history, geography, and culture for a few hours each day. On the community level, women created cultural organizations that sponsored various activities for the general public: lectures and seminars, literary contests, scholarship programs, variety shows, and festivals and parades. Through these activities they encouraged study and pride in la tradición nacional. In their mission to preserve cubanidad, women also published newspapers and magazines and wrote essays, articles, and editorials for the Cuban exile press. A small few even had their own radio and television shows. Through these media they educated the public on a variety of cultural and historical topics. They entertained the public with stories and interviews and offered practical advice about life in exile. Initially, women did not hold as visible a representation in journalism, radio, and television as they did in cultural organizations, since men dominated the communications media. Of a sample of 665 periodicals at the Cuban Exile Archives of the University of Miami, published by Cuban exiles during the period 1959–1988, roughly 10 percent were published, edited, or directed by women. The percentage of female contributors varied, however, depending on the type of publication. Political newspapers employed few or no women, while the so-called women’s magazines usually had a predominantly female staff. During the 1990s, however, the number of women in journalism and the communications media increased. At the Miami Herald and other city newspapers in the southeastern United States, Cuban women and other Latinas served as writers and editors. One Cuban woman, Liz Balmaseda, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work at the Miami Herald. Women served as reporters and anchors at local television stations, as well as national networks such as the Spanish-language Univisión and Telemundo. Among the women who have distinguished themselves in this medium are Cristina Saralegui, María Elvira Salazar, and Teresa Rodríguez. Cuban women from Miami also made names for themselves in the English-language mainstream and cable networks, for example, Daisy Fuentes and Maty Montfort. As their spheres of influence expanded, women also demanded more of their organizations. The Cuban Women’s Club (CWC), for example, founded in 1969 as a social club for middle-class women, diversified its activities to retain the participation of its wage-earning members. Modeled after the elite Liceo Cubano in Havana, the Cuban Women’s Club sponsored luncheons,
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview conferences, art exhibitions, and literary contests. Members were also involved in local charities and fund-raising activities, just as women of their social class were expected to be back in Cuba. By the mid1970s, however, members demanded that the club do more than just organize social and charitable events. They wanted their club to address issues pertinent to their careers and their new roles in U.S. society. By the late 1970s, conferences addressed such issues as bilingual education, voting and political representation, salaries, and the workplace. The CWC ceased to be an exclusively Cuban social club and counted more than 300 members of various nationalities and professional and educational backgrounds by 1980. Several business and professional organizations also emerged in southern Florida during the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting women’s permanent shift into the workplace. Groups such as the Comité de Mujeres Latinas, the Latin Business and Professional Women’s Club (LBPWC), and the Coalition of Hispanic American Women (CHAW) were created by younger women, graduates of U.S. colleges and universities, who regarded themselves as Cuban Americans. Whether at the local or national level, CHAW and the LBPWC addressed the problems all women in the U.S. workforce faced: unequal pay, inadequate child care, discrimination, and sexual harassment. Their workshops taught women strategies to achieve equal access to education, social services, and the judicial system. However, they also discussed issues relevant to the larger Latino community such as bilingual education, immigration reform, affirmative action, and domestic violence. Both organizations sponsored a scholarship program to help needy students attend college. The exile experience, thus forced women to expand their participation in labor, the economy, politics, and the overall life of the community. To deal with the problems and challenges of life in a new country, they created social, familial, and professional networks. Women reconciled the past with the present and promoted an appreciation of the Cuban cultural heritage while contributing to their families’ adaptation into the mainstream. They helped create a strong and stable ethnic community with ties to two countries and two cultures. The Cuban population of southern Florida is the best known of the Latino/a populations of the southeastern United States, but it is not the only group to have settled in this state and region. Even in Miami and Dade County, long considered a Cuban stronghold, that group no longer constitutes the numerical majority. A recent influx from Central and South America, particularly from Nicaragua and Colombia, means that Cuban-accented Spanish is not the only form of the language heard on the streets of southern Florida.
Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and others have also migrated to southern Florida and have established transnational economic and political connections that contribute to the city’s reputation as the “gateway to the Americas.” While Miami/Dade County was the most popular destination of Latinos, migration to other parts of the state also increased. By 1999 the Latino population in Florida stood at 2,334,403. Elsewhere around the southeastern United States, Latinos have settled in towns and cities not traditionally associated with their populations. Some of them are recent immigrants, legal or illegal; others are contracted laborers who arrive with temporary visas; and still others are internal migrants who migrate from other areas of the country in search of better economic opportunities. The Latino/a population of Georgia is one of the fastest growing in the nation, doubling in size in just one decade. According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1999 there were 239,566 Latinos in Georgia, compared with 108,933 in 1990. Statistics for the Latino populations in 1999 in other southeastern states and their percentage increase since 1990 include the following: Alabama, 45,349 (84.1 percent); Louisiana, 119,496 (28.4 percent); Mississippi, 23,975 (49.9 percent); North Carolina, 175,707 (128.9 percent); and South Carolina, 54,299 (78 percent). Apart from a few studies of agricultural and oil workers in the region, non-Cuban Latinos of the Southeast remain one of the most understudied populations. SOURCES: Estrade, Paul. 1987. “Los clubes femeninos en el Partido Revolucionario Cubano (1892–1898).” Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos 10:175–201; García, María Cristina. 1994. “Cuban Women in the United States.” In Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology, ed. Felix Padilla, 203–217. Houston: Arte Público Press; Pérez, Lisandro. 1986. “Immigrant Economic Adjustment and Family Organization: The Cuban Success Story.” International Migration Review 20 (Spring): 4–21; Pérez, Louis A. 1978. “Cubans in Tampa: From Exiles to Immigrants, 1892– 1901.” Florida Historical Quarterly 57 (October): 129– 140; Prieto, Yolanda. 1984. “Reinterpreting an Immigration Success Story: Cuban Women, Work, and Change in a New Jersey Community.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University. María Cristina García
LATINAS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST A historical overview of Latinas in the Pacific northwestern states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho reveals that according to the 2000 census, the Latino
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview population of this region constituted about 7.8 percent of the total population. More than 75 percent of the Latino population in these states is of Mexican origin. The historiography of Latinas in this area remains almost nonexistent. Scholarly writing about Latinas appears here and there in brief mentions by scholars focusing on twentieth-century farmworkers, immigration, labor, and the family. Themes of importance for Latinas include the immigrant experience, farmworker women’s issues, education, cultural preservation, political involvement, and the isolation of living in the Pacific Northwest. Spanish exploration of the Pacific coast regions of Washington and Oregon began in the 1790s with the appearance of sailing ships and a few settlements. Latinas came into the Pacific Northwest as members of families and groups such as the wives and daughters of miners, vaqueros, mule packers, soldiers, and settlers. The most striking aspect of the Latina experience from the 1790s until the beginning of the twentieth century was the fact that women, along with their families, did not tend to become permanent residents in the Pacific Northwest. Most returned to the U.S. Southwest or headed into Canada and Alaska. When the Spanish sent out forty-three ships of exploration in the late 1700s, indigenous women were often among the first to make contact with them. The rosters of the Spanish expeditions are scarce, but it seems that the crews were all men, with no women family members aboard. According to several scholars, the relationship between the Spanish sailors/settlers and indigenous women was not respectful or cordial. Native women faced abuse, rape, and enslavement by the Spaniards. In 1792 the Spanish established a twoyear garrison of soldiers on Vancouver Island and another outpost at Neah Bay on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The Spanish settlements consisted of about eighty mixed-race Spanish colonials, Peruvian Indians, and no female inhabitants. Some Spanish soldiers deserted and took up residence with local peoples such as the Mowachaht, one of the Nuu-chah-nulth (formerly Nootka) tribes of the area. Children born to these unions were reared in the mother’s indigenous culture. By 1795 the last garrison contingent of twenty soldiers left Nootka. The turmoil of the Mexican-American War (1846– 1848) and its aftermath drew Mexican families to the Pacific Northwest from their homes in California or New Mexico. The most famous woman visitor to Oregon was María Josefa Tafoya, the wife of pioneer Oregonian Ewing Young. Young died in Oregon in 1843, far from his home in Taos, New Mexico. Tafoya and her son traveled to Oregon in 1855 to successfully claim Young’s estate of $4,994.64. In her petition Tafoya detailed her dire poverty and her dependence upon the
day labor of her son, as well as charity and assistance from her relatives. Rosario Romero from Sonora, Mexico, settled in Yakima, Washington, during the 1860s. Although she is credited with starting the region’s sheep-herding industry, she, like many others, did not remain in Washington as a permanent resident. Laurita Galina was another settler from Sonora. Born in 1830, she married and migrated with her husband to Oregon in 1862. By the 1870s Laurita had three children and lived in Josephine County, Oregon. Carmelita Colón, also born in Mexico, settled in Walla Walla, Washington, with her husband in the 1860s. Together they ran a mule-pack train from Walla Walla to Idaho. When their business failed, they stayed in the area to run a Mexican restaurant. Their descendants lived in Walla Walla until the 1950s. The twentieth century witnessed a significant increase in the number of Latina migrants and immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, people who stayed on as permanent residents. Since the 1920s Yakima County, Washington, has ranked among the ten most productive agricultural counties in the United States and thus has required large numbers of workers (predominantly Mexican) from the April asparagus harvest to apple picking in October. The level of hardship and segregation earned Yakima County the unflattering nickname “Little Mississippi of the Northwest.” Mexican American migrants came from New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming, while immigrants arrived from Mexico. In recent times they have been joined by immigrants from Central and South America. Juanita Ramírez migrated to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1916, and by the 1920s immigrant families lived in Nyssa, Oregon. Between 1915 and 1917 some of the early Latino migrants to Portland, Oregon, hailed from New Mexico. Born in Texas, Francisca García became part of the migrant labor stream that traveled from Texas to Ohio to pick sugar beets and tomatoes, then on to Wyoming for sugar beets, then on to Washington for asparagus, before moving further south to Oregon for hops and berries and then a final stop to pick cotton in California. Finally García and her family settled in Woodburn in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Catalina Trujillo remembered her family’s journey from Mexico to Oregon via the railroads. Her father worked for the railroad, and the family’s home was a railroad car, part of a boxcar barrio that had been set aside as housing for the workers. Migration from the United States and immigration from Mexico and South America to the Pacific Northwest began to increase dramatically during the 1940s. Families that moved during this period represent the nucleus of the Latino communities that currently thrive in the Northwest. Born in La Junta, Colorado, in 1924,
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview Victoria Archuleta Sierra moved permanently to Pocatello, Idaho, in 1942. Sierra attended Idaho State University, became an electrician’s helper and a railroad worker, and in 1945 joined the Women’s Air Corps (WAC). She trained as a hospital aide and a medic in her eighteen months of military service. In a letter to her daughter, Antonia, Irene Castañeda detailed the family’s move to Washington from Texas during the 1940s. Castañeda criticized the labor contractor for lying to the family that conditions in Toppenish were good and fair. The family experienced horrendous hardship, arriving in “bitterly cold weather” after traveling on a flatbed truck. The Castañedas discovered that their housing was “some old shacks, all full of knotholes in Brownstown—about twenty miles outside of Toppenish.” Irene Castañeda recalled working in the hops fields in which women were paid 75 cents per hour while men received 85 cents per hour. Braceros (Mexican guest workers from 1942 to 1964) were also recruited to work in the Pacific Northwest. While the braceros in the Pacific Northwest were all men, women nonetheless wrote letters, trying to remain in contact with their departed husbands and sons. By the 1950s the character of the settled Latino communities became evident in the celebration of cultural and religious events. El Día de las madres became an important annual event in Mexican communities. In Toppenish, Washington, on September 15–16, 1952, Margarita Rodríguez was crowned “Queen Liberty” in celebration of Mexican Independence Day. In summer migrant worker families abounded and at times held tardeadas (afternoon) and evening dances. Women such as Beatriz Escalante, the daughter of a migrant worker family in Sunnyside, Elaine Romero, the daughter of a family that operated a tiny Mexican restaurant in West Seattle, and María Dena, whose family had left field labor behind for other jobs, retained selected elements of Mexican border culture that fused the values of family, community, and smalltown traditions with hard work. As part of this cultural preservation, Herminia Méndez began Spanish radio programming in the Yakima Valley in 1951. According to historian Erasmo Gamboa, in the hop fields when mechanization took place, “a division of labor by gender occurred with women and sometimes children going on the belt lines removing leaves and doing other ‘light jobs’ that required more dexterity, while males specialized in areas of the kiln where the hops were ‘cooked’ or dried. Naturally, a differentiated wage system for women and men also developed.” Eva Castellañoz, a curandera (healer) in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1938 migrated with her husband Teodoro to the Snake River Valley in eastern Oregon.
In addition to rearing nine children, she has worked as a migrant laborer, teacher, county activist, and traditionalist artist. For her creation of coronas (traditional wax and paper crowns used for weddings and quinceañeras), she received a National Heritage Award in 1988. The arrival of Latinas from many different countries in South America occurred during the 1960s. The first groups that came from South America were called “the new Hispanics” and migrated to the Northwest for better jobs or a peaceful sociopolitical climate. Aida Pelaez Edenholm arrived in Washington during the 1960s, joining about a dozen Bolivian-born immigrants. She worked as a Pan American Airlines hostess and married a Seattle resident. Later during the 1960s a trickle of refugees from repressive regimes made their way into the Pacific Northwest. They remain most concentrated in the state of Washington. These “new Hispanic” Latinos in Washington grew from 1,371 in 1960 to 6,073 by 1980. Berta González fled Chile with her husband and two daughters during the Chilean military coup that ousted the popularly elected president Salvador Allende. The family settled in Seattle in 1977. With the number of farm labor jobs decreasing year by year because of the decline in prices for the crops, unreliable water supplies, and farm land prices, increasing numbers of Latinos are migrating from small towns of the Pacific Northwest to urban areas. Most have not settled in defined barrios but remain scattered throughout city neighborhoods. One remedy for this scattered population has involved establishing settlement houses or community centers. In Seattle el Centro de la Raza established the Frances Martínez Community Service Center in 1983 as a tribute to the tireless activism of Martínez and her valiant struggle against leukemia. A former farmworker, she worked until the end of her life helping Latinos find jobs, housing, and counseling. Through el Centro de la Raza she organized emergency food programs and classes and secured legal advice for recent arrivals in Seattle. Activism often became a family affair. Two women, Ninfa Tanguma and her daughter Yolanda Alaníz, provided leadership for Latinas in their transition from rural to urban areas. In 1970 Tanguma took her turn at picket duty in a hop-ranch strike in Yakima. Latinas were at the forefront of the strike and seemed “more willing to sacrifice than many men when it comes to supporting the union.” Her daughter Yolanda joined the picket line at the age of six. Her sister recalled that Yolanda would study after working in the fields in order to educate herself out of farm labor. She attended the University of Washington in the early 1970s and recalled having to fight the “machismo” of El
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). She wrote a pamphlet titled “In Defense of Adultery” because the male leaders of MEChA slanderously accused their Chicana comrades of being sexually promiscuous. Her struggles with sexist and nationalist men and her experience helping organize a campus union of low paid service workers led her to become a socialist feminist. In 1993 she ran unsuccessfully for the Seattle City Council as a socialist. She was by far the most important leader for the group Radical Women until the late 1990s, when she left the Pacific Northwest to become an activist in California. The 1980s witnessed the first Latinas to win public office. Two Latinas currently serve in the Washington state legislature. In 1988 State Senator Margarita López Prentice, a Democrat representing the Eleventh District, was the first Latina elected to public office. Before going into politics, she worked as a registered nurse for thirty years. Health care and worker protection have long been of major concern for López Prentice. In 1989 she sponsored a bill that would require doctors to report pesticide poisoning cases to the state Department of Social and Health Services. Phyllis Gutiérrez-Kenney represents the Forty-sixth Legislative District in Seattle. Born into a farmworker family, she was one of eight children. Her father organized the first beet workers’ union in the state of Montana. In Washington the family picked potatoes by hand. At the age of five, her job was to shake the vines free of potatoes so the older children could pick them up and put them in heavy sacks that they dragged behind them. Allergic to pesticides, she could not work in the hop fields. Gutiérrez-Kenny remembered picking asparagus for “seventy-five cents an hour and no bathrooms in the field.” A mother of ten children, she stayed in the fields until the ninth month of her first pregnancy. Her own family would “pick grapes, prunes and other fruit in the Tri-Cities on weekends for extra money.” Her first stint at organizing began when she cofounded the Migrant Daycare Centers of Washington. She also cofounded the Educational Institute for Rural Families in Pasco. Two tragedies motivated her to focus on farmworker issues, one involving the death of a friend when she fell off a plank and into an irrigation ditch, the other death of a brother who died of pneumonia caused by the poor housing. Gutiérrez-Kenney recalled that “the snow would come in through the cracks and the windows would break and we’d have to cover them with blankets.” Today she is the owner of her own retail business (Felipa’s) and devotes much of her time to working for many professional and volunteer efforts toward quality education and social and economic equity for women and people of color. She
has been a consistent spokesperson for the rights of farmworkers, especially in relation to education and housing. In 1998 she ran unsuccessfully for the position of secretary of state in Washington. Latinas who have served as commissioners in Oregon’s Hispanic Commission include María de Jesús García, Consuelo Lightner, Liliana Olverding, Nancy Padilla, Wendy Veliz, and Annabelle Jaramillo. The first Latina to be appointed to King County Superior Court in Seattle was Carmen Otero, and the second Latina appointed to the bench was Judge Debora Juárez. Although some professional and entrepreneurial gains are evident, women in the Pacific Northwest share many of the same concerns that Latinas face in other parts of the United States. Education statistics in 2000 indicate about 51 percent of Latinos had completed at least a high-school diploma, compared with 83 percent of European Americans in the Pacific Northwest. In employment, about 36 percent of Latinas in Washington and Oregon were employed in the whitecollar occupations of service and administrative support, while less than 8 percent of Latinas labored as farmworkers. Latinas continue to form groups that seek to better their situation in the Pacific Northwest. Hortensia Villanueva formed a mothers’ club in December of 1994. The wife of a union leader in eastern Washington, Villanueva used space at the Farm Workers’ Clinic to organize the mothers of children who came down with contagious viral infections. Other groups include the long-standing Mujeres Unidas de Idaho in Boise, formed in 1989 to sponsor an annual conference and work as a network support system for Idaho’s Latinas. Latinas have been leaders in groups such as the United Farm Workers of America, the Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA), Mujeres de Oregon, and the Oregon, Washington, and Idaho Commissions on Hispanic Affairs. Currently Rosalinda Guillen serves as Washington’s regional director of the United Farm Workers, and Mona Mendoza is the cofounder of Hands off Washington, a gay/lesbian rights organization. Entrepreneur Celia D. Mariscal and her family group own Juanita’s Fine Foods in Hood River, Oregon, which grosses about $4 million per year. Her mother had wanted to own her own business and passed on this desire to her thirteen children, who decided to start a business when they were adults. In starting their tortilla factory in 1969, Mariscal recalled, “At night we made our tortillas—about 30 boxes. Since I was the only one who didn’t work during the day I would take the tortillas out to the stores to try and sell them.” She further emphasized that Mexican women can be successful and reflected that “in our company my brothers
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Introduction: A Historical and Regional Overview tween embracing traditional cultural values and wanting to further their education. In urban areas campus women’s organizations, including Latina sororities, seek to address the lack of substantial women’s networks and role models. Insitutions like Centro de la Raza also promote a sense of community. In 1989 a group of Latinas in Seattle formed the Hispanic Women’s Network (HWN) to promote the personal, professional, and educational growth of its members. Artist Cecilia Concepción Alvarez arrived in Washington State in 1975 and has developed a national reputation for her paintings. Her art reflects her experiences as a Chicana/Cubana, and through it she expresses her own vision of beauty and strength. In her opinion, people, art, and society have an obligation to advance humanity and find solutions to problems that threaten human coexistence and survival. Latinas living in the Pacific Northwest reflect in a variety of ways Alvarez’s thoughts about combining selected cultural traditions with environmental concerns for today and the future.
Las Cuatas Diego, 1980. Painting in oil on canvas by and courtesy of Cecilia Concepción Alvarez.
respect my decisions because I am the oldest. They don’t treat me with any less value because I’m a woman.” Latinas in the Pacific Northwest continue to be divided by cultural group, although the majority are of Mexican birth or heritage and have some connection to the rural areas and farm labor. Young rural Latinas, often reared in modest circumstances, feel torn be-
SOURCES: Gamboa, Erasmo, ed. 1992. Voces hispanas: Hispanic Voices of Idaho. Boise: Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs; Gamboa, Erasmo, and Carolyn M. Buan. 1995. Nostros: The Hispanic People of Oregon: Essays and Recollections. Portland: Oregon Council for the Humanities; Valle, Isabel. 1994. Fields of Toil: A Migrant Family’s Journey. Pullman: Washington State University Press; Villarreal, Luz E., and Sandra B. Fancher García. 1995. “A Cultural Profile and Status of Chicanas in the Northwest.” In The Chicano Experience in the Northwest, ed. Carlos S. Maldonado and Gilberto García. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
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Elizabeth Salas
A q ABARCA, APOLONIA “POLLY” MUÑOZ (1920– ) In June 1941 twenty-year-old Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz left her home in Mission, Texas, for Corpus Christi to pursue an education in nursing. Since the age of fifteen she had known that she wanted a career as a public servant. Abarca found her calling when she helped a nurse take handicapped children to a hospital in Galveston for treatment. Volunteering her time to help those in need became a way of life for her. While she was still a student, Abarca spent time volunteering at the Department of Immigration and working at the local dry-goods store on Saturdays—a task her father disapproved of. To Antonio Muñoz, the father of ten children, education was the primary goal. When Apolonia Muñoz Abarca arrived at Fred Roberts Nursing School in Corpus Christi, she realized that she was the only Hispanic in the class. Although she had grown up in segregated schools in Mission, now she faced a whole new dilemma. Her roommate was frightened of her. In her hometown in Virginia, the young lady had been told that “Mexicans would kill you,” Abarca recalled. Fortunately the fear was quickly
dispersed, and the two became close friends. “We [Hispanics] always had to work a little bit harder to prove ourselves,” she said. During her first year at nursing school Abarca’s older brother Antonio Muñoz was sent to Europe as a gunner in the air force. The next year her fiancé joined the army and was sent to Germany. Money was becoming scarce in the Muñoz family, and Abarca began to think that joining the Cadet Corps as a nurse was her only option. She wrote to her brother and her fiancé, whom she later married after the war, telling them of her plans, but both of them begged her to stay at home. Her brother sent money to pay for the remainder of nursing school, and she graduated in 1944 as a registered nurse. Abarca worked at Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi, where she set up new operating and emergency rooms and soon became the supervisor of the outpatient clinic. In 1946 she joined the U.S. Public Health Service hospital in Corpus Christi and also began volunteering as a Red Cross nurse in the settlement house. There she taught home nursing in Spanish and English, again as a volunteer. For fifteen years she worked as a nurse at the City-County Health Department.
Apolonia Abarca (back, second from left) was a member of the 1944 nursing class at Fred Roberts Hospital, Corpus Christi, Texas. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Acosta, Lucy In 1964 Abarca helped win the first federal grant in the United States for family planning—a milestone for health care. She said that she supported providing birth control after working as a public health nurse for so many years. Poor young women were constantly asking her how not to get pregnant too soon. Families lived in poverty. Children were neglected and undernourished. “At that time the word birth control was a no-no,” commented Abarca. “I was daring, I guess.” In 1965 Abarca was hired as the executive director of the area Planned Parenthood center and remained there until the services were turned over to the local health department. Abarca later worked as the director of nursing at the state-operated Corpus Christi school for mentally retarded children. She retired in 1974. Her husband, Antonio Abarca, died in 1984. Now in her eighties, Abarca still lives in Corpus Christi. See also World War II SOURCE: Stevens, Darcie. 2001. “War Granted Nurse Opportunity of Her Dreams.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 3, no. 1 (Fall). Darcie Stevens
ACOSTA, LUCY (1926–
in 1958. Although a Ladies Council in El Paso already existed (formed in 1934), Acosta and a few others felt that its dwindling membership signaled the need for a new council that might better represent the interests of a younger Mexican American generation. Beginning with “thirty some-odd” women, Ladies Council No. 335 grew to average between 50 and 100 members. Coinciding with the council’s birth was the campaign of El Paso’s first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles. Thus one of the council’s first political actions involved raising funds to pay the poll taxes of Mexican Americans to ensure their right to vote in the mayoral election. Although LULAC’s official policy prohibited the organization from endorsing specific candidates, it nonetheless offered essential support to the Telles campaign through its registration drives. Acosta recalls spending Saturdays fundraising in front of the local Sears, J. C. Penney’s, numerous other stores, local churches, and the county courthouse. She remembers that a large part of their work required going door-todoor to register voters from south El Paso. Speaking of her involvement in LULAC’s 1957 registration drive, Acosta recalls: I was still not very much in the political scene. I was there because Raymond Telles inspired all these people. . . . Let me tell you that people that had never, ever, ever voted—Mexican people I’m talking about—or ever, ever, taken . . . well, they couldn’t vote because they never had a poll tax, would go out and buy a poll tax. Raymond Telles was a mexicano, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we would have the first Mexican-American mayor, the city of El Paso.
)
Born in 1926 in Miami, Arizona, Lucy Acosta was six years old when her family moved to El Paso, Texas. In the midst of the Great Depression Miami’s copper mines, which had employed many of her family members, shut down, and many families, including Acosta’s, were forced to seek employment elsewhere. Acosta’s father was killed in one of these old copper mines when she was only three years old. Although her mother remarried a few years after they arrived in El Paso, Acosta remembers that it was pension payments her family received following her father’s death that enabled them to survive the depression years. These payments meant that she could attend school full-time, unlike many of her friends and neighbors who had to work instead. Also, unlike many of her male peers, Acosta was free of the requirements of military service that withdrew most Mexican American boys in her high school. With a great love for her studies, Acosta excelled in school, graduating from Bowie High School in the top ten of her class. After high school she attended International Business College in El Paso, from which she graduated in 1945, and went on to hold several clerical and accounting jobs into the 1970s. Acosta married Alejandro Acosta in 1948 and gave birth to two children, Alex and Danny. Acosta joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in 1957 and helped organize LULAC’s Ladies Council No. 335, which was officially chartered
The registration drives were an enormous success. LULAC’s efforts and Telles’s election drew on the growing resolve of Mexican Americans across the nation. In particular, veterans returning home from World War II sought to challenge the discrimination they faced in the draft and the continuing discrimination they faced when they applied for jobs upon their return home. Raymond Telles’s election was a turning point for Acosta as well. Involvement in the campaign marked her entry into political activism and touched off what was to become a long and illustrious career with LULAC. She held numerous positions with her local chapter, as well as in the national administration of LULAC. In addition, she was appointed to various committees in Telles’s administration. After his term she continued to hold appointments under Mayor Judson Williams and subsequent mayors. In 1972 she became the first woman in the history of El Paso to be appointed civil service commissioner. The LULAC Ladies Council No. 335 continued to play an important role in registration drives. In 1960 it worked to organize Mexican American voters who
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Acosta Vice, Celia M. backed John F. Kennedy for president. Raymond Telles left El Paso during his second term as mayor to work in the Kennedy administration. In 1970 he launched an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Acosta remained a close friend and supporter of Telles during the election in which Mexican Americans and Democrats were deeply divided. Of the election, she remembers that “a lot of people were just very hurt that he left, he took off and left us, you know. Like if we were his little chickens and he took off and he left us.” In addition to her continued involvement with LULAC, Acosta’s public service included membership in the PTA, St. Joseph’s Catholic Parish, and United Way and seats on the board of directors for multiple city and county agencies. Throughout her career she received numerous honors for her commitment to political activism and to the city of El Paso in particular. In 1963 and again in 1973 she was selected Outstanding LULAC National Woman of the Year and Outstanding LULAC Woman for the State of Texas and for the City of El Paso District No. 4. See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCES: Acosta, Lucy. 1957–1979. Collection. LULAC Archives, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Texas at Austin; ———. 1982. Interview by Mario T. García, October 28; García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Julie Cohen
ACOSTA VICE, CELIA M. (1919–1993) Hailed as a mixture of Mother Teresa, Felisa Rincón de Gautier (the first female mayor of San Juan), and Eleanor Roosevelt, Celia Acosta was a pioneer of the Puerto Rican community in New York City. She was born on June 20, 1919, in Guayanilla, a small municipality on Puerto Rico’s southern coast. A committed public servant, Acosta founded the fifty-member Council of Brooklyn Organizations and was a member of the New York City School Decentralization Committee and of the advisory board of the Brooklyn branch of the Urban League. She became the first Puerto Rican female real-estate broker in Brooklyn and the first female grand marshal of the now National Puerto Rican Day Parade. Acosta was an established businesswoman who used her contacts and influences to advance the cause of social and economic equality, as well as the artistic heritage of the Puerto Rican people, both in New York City and on the island. Her earliest years were spent in Puerto Rico. Acosta’s father, Ramón, was a man of varied talents, having mastered the shoemakers’ art while tending to
a number of real-estate holdings and selling hardware and trinkets. Her mother, Flora, and her father decided to migrate to New York City in 1926, following the patterns of other migrants who came to U.S. shores not solely for economic reasons, but to seek educational advancement and to reunite with family members who had preceded them. The family settled in the Navy Yard area of Brooklyn among many Italian immigrants who themselves were recent arrivals and struggling to learn the English language. A precocious, slightly built, thin child, Acosta excelled in her acquisition of English and often served as a tutor to new arrivals from Puerto Rico. She has recounted how, given her appearance and the widespread fear of tuberculosis, school authorities would place her in special classes for children thought to be carrying this disease. When she was twelve, Acosta’s family returned to Puerto Rico, nostalgic for the warmth and energizing climate of the island. During that one year Acosta found herself struggling to catch up in Spanish with island-raised classmates. This factor, coupled with her mother’s desire to once more reunite the family, motivated their return to New York. As a young Puerto Rican teenager, Acosta confronted many prejudices. However, she also met individuals who influenced the course her life would take. At thirteen she was encouraged by her mother’s employer, a Mr. Kaufman, not to leave school for factory work. Although she did not accept this form of employment initially, Acosta’s desire to provide for herself and her household led her to work in factories and offices throughout her young adult life. Acosta had wanted to graduate from Girls’ Commercial High School but was discouraged by a school administrator who suggested that a girl reared near the dockyards came from the “other side of the tracks.” Acosta persisted and eventually was enrolled. This type of searing experience motivated her to ensure that others would not have to face the same discrimination. After completing her secondary education in night school, she set out to acquire the many skills she would need to advance her community. In the late 1930s she worked in a variety of jobs, including import-export, making artificial flowers, and the graveyard shift in a defense plant. A loan from her uncle allowed her to buy into a neighborhood business in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that soon became an information and resource network for those most in need of social services. Acosta’s many interests led her to study literature, sociology, and business at Brooklyn College and Pace University on a non-credit basis. From 1942 to 1948 she developed additional skills as an accountant and translator while also serving the community as an interpreter and an informal curator of Puerto Rican artis-
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Acosta Vice, Celia M. tic and cultural history. Her civic involvement covered many fronts, including active leadership in the local Democratic regular and independent political clubs. In 1954 she helped found the Fernando Sierra Vardeci Independent Democratic Club in Brooklyn. She successfully set out to unite the many disparate Puerto Rican/Hispanic organizations in Brooklyn by forming a powerful federation known as the Council of Brooklyn Organizations that was able to influence New York City’s political hierarchy. In the absence of any government funding, Acosta asserted that she was obliged to pay “la renta y la luz del Concilio” (the rent and light bills of the council). She also stated that from these offices in Williamsburg, Boricua College, the first Puerto Rican institution of higher education in the United States, emerged. While she was immersed in the issues and problems affecting the Puerto Rican community, including voting rights and the struggle for bilingual services for a predominantly Spanish-speaking migrant community, she allied herself with the African American struggle for civil rights and made it her own. This commitment was realized through her work with the Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Lafayette Boys’ Club. Her leadership in the community was recognized in 1960 when she was named the first female grand marshal of New York City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade. She described this position as significant because, in her own words, “el desfile no era solamente para fiestar, era ademas una fuerza política” (the parade was not just festive but a political force as well). Subsequently she was named to the Commission on Human Rights
Celia M. Acosta Vice, Democratic candidate for the New York State Assembly. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
and served actively on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint local school board. In this capacity she was able to utilize her mediation and conflict-resolution skills to bring together white ethnics and communities of color. Amid all the political involvement Acosta Vice found time, in 1961 to organize the first Three Kings Day Parade in Brooklyn, distributing free toys during the Christmas season to families who could not afford them. She was approached to run as coleader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party representing the Puerto Rican community, a position she did not relish, given its largely ceremonial status. In addition, in 1964 Acosta Vice was asked to head a major governmentsponsored social service agency, the Eleanor Roosevelt Job Orientation in Neighborhoods Center (JOIN), to help troubled youth. Her proven leadership and ability to mobilize the community led her to become the director of information and community relations for the Community Corporation of Williamsburg in 1968. A lifelong supporter of the Puerto Rican arts, she maintained an extensive book collection, considered the foundation for New York’s Museo del Barrio. In the 1970s she founded the first library and bookstore on Puerto Rico in New York City, the Puerto Rican Heritage Bookstore, and made frequent trips to the island to purchase art and handicrafts. By 1979 Acosta returned to her homeland. Continuing her unstinting support of Puerto Rican arts and culture, she established the Kiosko Cultural in Plaza de las Americas, Puerto Rico’s most prominent commercial center. Celia Acosta Vice died following a bout with cancer on January 30, 1993. Her service was attended not only by her three daughters, but also by the former director of the renowned Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, Dr. Ricardo Alegria. She leaves a long legacy of unflinching engagement as a female pioneer in the economic, political, social, and cultural affairs of the Puerto Rican community in New York City and in Puerto Rico. In the tradition of the “servant leader,” Acosta Vice selflessly sought to empower disenfranchised constituencies and provided a vision for the pursuit of social equity and justice. SOURCES: Acosta Vice, Celia. 1973. Interview, Long Island Historical Society Oral History Project (PROH #002), Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, August 7; Board of Education of the City of New York. 1965. Call Them Heroes. Morristown, NY: Silver Burdett Co.; Ferrer, Mila. 1993. “P.R. Cultural Leader in NY Interred in Old San Juan.” San Juan Star, February 2; Puerto Ricans in NY: Voice of the Migration. New York, NY: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños; 1988. Celia Acosta Vice Interview, June 6; San Juan Star. 1993. “Celia Acosta Rodriquez,” February 2. Centro Archíves, Centro de Estudíos Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Milga Morales
Aging
AGING The research on aging gives limited attention to racial/ethnic groups. It was not until the 1960s that studies of older African Americans emerged, and attention to Latinas/Latinos in general began to appear during the 1970s. Most of the literature focused on Chicanas/Chicanos, the largest proportion of Latinas/Latinos in the United States. Nevertheless, within this population social scientists paid little attention to the elderly, partly because of misconceptions and stereotypes about their place within the family and the broader society. Social science literature tended to paint a rather romanticized picture of the extended Latino or Hispanic family, which was believed to support the aged and protect them from a “hostile” world. As a result, the problems of older individuals, unlike their counterparts in other racial/ethnic groups, were minimized by the “supportive qualities” of the Latino family. While such ideas continue to the present, this position has attracted critical attention in recent years. Until the 1980s the available research on Latinos generally ignored critical gender analyses or differences. With respect to gender, differences among Latinos are similar to those of other elderly groups. For example, women generally live longer and outnumber men. Older Latino men marry or remarry more often than men in other racial/ethnic minority groups. Sanchez-Ayendez (1986), who studied “the interplay between values and behavior in family and community of a group of older, low income Puerto Rican women in Boston,” describes how women create and utilize familial and community networks in a supportive, productive nature. Bastida (1984) explored age- and gender-linked norms among Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban women and found that core cultural elements of the collective identity system exist among all three populations. In other words, women’s lives are shaped by sex-appropriate behavior and the pursuit of realism regarding age and aging. A comprehensive work on older Latinas, edited by Marta Sotomayor (1995), helps understand current research and its implications for policy development. Particular attention and advice are available for program administrators, psychologists and counselors, doctors, nurses, and service providers. Espin’s (1992) work on contemporary sexuality and the Hispanic woman suggests that “the honor of Latin families is strongly tied to the sexual purity of women. And the concept of honor and dignity is one of the essential distinctive marks of Hispanic culture.” Hispanic or Latina sexuality, as culturally defined, is linked to assumed lifelong roles in both the family and community. In many instances women’s roles may render them both powerful and powerless. For example, middle-
aged and elderly Hispanic women retain important roles in their families, even after their sons and daughters are married. Grandmothers remain present and highly vocal in family affairs and have more status and power than their white American counterparts, who may suffer depression due to “empty-nest syndrome.” Espin is one of the few writers who critically examine the relationship between sexuality, gender, and woman’s roles in old age. In general, research and writings on older Mexican women remain scarce. Aging among Mexican women appears as a uniform process because research has failed to address the lives of older Chicanas in a critical manner. In studies on aged Chicanas the plight of older women is masked by notions of familism. As defined in the literature, that concept embraces familial cultural values of unity and expected mutual aid, respect for the aged, and a positive gender hierarchy considered specific to Chicano families but found among other Latinos as well. Studies guided by the concept of familism describe characteristics of strength and vitality among older Chicanas, who nonetheless defer to their husbands and male relatives. Generally, older women are viewed from a traditional perspective in which gender differences are neither challenged nor questioned. More specifically, the role of the Chicana grandmother is portrayed as that of the nurturing elderly child-care provider, facilitator of religious and cultural values (cultural teacher), and the main individual in the extended family. Alignments between women, both within the family and outside it, often constitute the core of family networks. Scholars claim that older women perform a variety of tasks for their families. Nonetheless, familism as an empirical phenomenon, a manifestation of expected mutual aid and support, is changing, although certain elements of it, particularly family unity, still remain. The multigenerational household and extended family do not operate as the literature would have people believe, in part because older women are establishing modified networks with other older Chicanas, not necessarily within their own family. While they still value family unity, it may stem not from familism or culture but rather from gender and age dynamics. The value placed on motherhood by most Latinas continues with the transition to grandmotherhood. Current research suggests that older Chicanas find grandmotherhood “confining” and “limiting” and seek ways to avoid meeting the expectations associated with the status. Many women expressed joy and pride on becoming grandmothers, but they were less willing to take on child care. Gender, also a major component of Chicano familism, continues to manifest itself throughout the life
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Aging cycle. Familism serves to explain and understand women as wives, mothers, and grandmothers. Older women in general struggle with past traditions in the midst of contemporary realities that create contradictions and challenges in advanced age. Although they are socialized with conventional ideas about old age (harmony, status, respect, and solace), the reality of their present lives is poverty, family structural changes, differential life expectancies, and longevity. Older women confront traditions that reinforce a gender hierarchy. Chicano and Latino cultural norms expect older women, whether they are biological or surrogate grandmothers, to conform to the role of caregivers, and they are generally discouraged from seeking male companionship. They are steered instead toward the role of abuelas (grandmothers) and an old age spent as caregivers. Older Chicanas are dealing with conflicting cultural traditions and structural constraints through community organizations, senior-citizen centers, the Catholic Church, and their own families. Within these contexts women actively define or construct varied meanings of aged womanhood. Among Chicanas attempts to define and resolve issues of womanhood lead to challenging cultural expectations at the risk of being disrespected. Capitalizing on respect is critical because it facilitates the process of self-definition. The family presents a means of support, love, and respect, but stresses conformity and ultimately control. In moving toward alternative definitions of womanhood among older Chicanas, the concept of abuela or grandmother merits attention. The term abuela connotes a romanticized image of a matriarch that only serves to disempower women within their families and in the community. It is interesting to note that when older Chicanas are discussed in the literature, they are almost always referred to as grandmothers. Thus the terms grandmother and older woman are synonymous. The element of powerlessness lies in the potential exploitation of older Chicanas as convenient caregivers or baby-sitters. While grandmothering is a difficult task, of greater concern are limited views of older women simply as caregivers. The process of establishing oneself as a cultural teacher differs for widowed and married women and involves retaining and capitalizing on the respect granted to older women who conform to the caregiver role. The widowed grandmother respects the memory of her past marriage, remains widowed, and conforms to the nurturer role. Since convention discourages older women from seeking male friendship, this proscription ultimately controls their sexuality. While older Chicanas do have a sense of sexuality, cultural expectations, ageism, and patriarchy define and subsequently influence the expression of sexuality. A widowed grandmother who
challenges this expectation risks being judged a “bad” woman, or una mujer sin vergüenza. The dichotomy of the “good” versus “bad” woman serves to ensure that widowed grandmothers will commit themselves to cultural expectations of caregiving. If they do not concede, they risk losing the respect needed to establish themselves as cultural teachers. The social construction of womanhood for older Chicanas involves reconceptualizing the traditional expectation of caregiving and the role of cultural teacher. Along with other Latinas, Chicana grandmothers are altering such traditional roles and will provide child care out of necessity but not for convenience’s sake. This, in turn, grants them independence and leverage in defining their relationship to the family. Under these conditions child-care services are viewed as important to the family, and grandmothers attempt to construct the caregiver role as familial support rather than a form of control. Nonetheless, their womanhood, with respect to grandmothering, continues to be defined within a traditional context. The process of socially constructing elderly womanhood also involves utilizing the symbolic respect for the aged. Younger generations are expected to acknowledge the presence of their elders, not render them invisible. They are taught to respect the aged for their wisdom, knowledge, and survival into old age. Older women’s quest for self-definition often depends on their relationship to their children, and requiring respect for the aged places Chicanas in an advantageous situation. It enables them to maintain contact with their children, grandchildren, and, for some, greatgrandchildren. Such contact, whether through visits, social gatherings, or caregiving services, allows older women to establish themselves as cultural teachers and subsequently to redefine their womanhood while maintaining positive familial relationships. As cultural teachers, women socialize grandchildren and/or great-grandchildren with certain cultural values and traditions, particularly their behavior toward older people and the maintenance of the Spanish language. The preservation of traditional music, food, and, for some, religion is equally as important. Older women are thus placed in a position where they can leave a legacy of cultural rather than monetary value. SOURCES: Bastida, E. 1984. “Age and Gender Linked Norms among Older Hispanic Women.” In The Hispanic Older Woman, ed. Roberto Anson. Washingtion, DC: National Hispanic Council on Aging; Espin, O. M. 1992. “Cultural and Historical Influences on Sexuality in Hispanic/Latin Women: Implications for Psychotherapy.” In Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, ed. M. L. Andersen and P. H. Collins. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth; Facio, E. 1996. Understanding Older Chicanas: Sociological and Policy Perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
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Alatorre, Soledad “Chole” Publications; Sánchez-Ayendez, M. 1986. “Puerto Rican Elderly Women: Shared Meanings and Informal Support Networks.” In All American Women: Lines That Divide, Ties That Bind, ed. J. B. Cole. New York: Free Press; Sotomayor, M., ed. 1995. In Triple Jeopardy: Aged Hispanic Women: Insights and Experiences. Washington, DC: National Hispanic Council on Aging.
Elisa Linda Facio
AGOSTINI DEL RÍO, AMELIA (1896–1996) Born in Yauco, Puerto Rico, in 1896, scholar Amelia Agostini del Río grew up a diligent student and avid reader. After completing high school she received a scholarship to study at the University of Puerto Rico’s Normal School, from which she graduated in 1917. She was part of a select group of women students being trained mostly as teachers, but her exposure to academic life at Puerto Rico’s main center of learning resulted in many friendships with prominent male and female writers and intellectuals of this period. After graduating from the university she worked as a highschool teacher. In 1918 she left the island to further her education at Vassar College. She also studied at the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas and received a doctoral degree from the University of Madrid. Afterward she continued teaching in Santurce’s high school for several years, but was also involved in writing, directing, and performing in some theatrical productions. In 1926 she married the well-known Spanish literary critic Angel del Río, who had been her professor at the University of Puerto Rico. They moved to New York, where her husband taught at New York University and later at the Hispanic Institute of Columbia University. Angel del Río and other intellectuals from Spain were living in exile in New York and Puerto Rico during the years before and after the Spanish civil war and the fascist Francisco Franco dictatorship. These Spanish exiles played a key role in the founding not only of Columbia’s Hispanic Institute, but also of a prestigious Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. Agostini’s broad intellectual formation and close contact with Spanish and Latin American literary circles is reflected in many of her writings. She lived for forty years in New York, where she was involved in teaching and other scholarly pursuits, including creative writing. She was a professor of Spanish language and literature and chair of the Spanish Department at Barnard College for many years. Along with her husband, she taught at Middlebury College’s Spanish immersion summer program. The couple also coedited the widely used textbook Antología general de la liter-
atura española (General Anthology of Spanish Literature) (1960). From her experiences in the New York Latino community, she wrote a book of narrative portrayals, Puertorriqueños en Nueva York (1970). After four decades of living in New York, Agostini returned to Puerto Rico in the late 1960s, a few years after the death of her husband. On the island she continued her teaching and writing activities and became a frequent cultural columnist for the Puerto Rican newspaper El Imparcial. Her articles from this period are collected in the book Rosa de los vientos (Rose of the Winds) (1980). Most of these articles relate personal anecdotes involving distinguished figures of Puerto Rico’s literary world and that of other Spanishspeaking countries. These writings represent a mixture of cultural commentary, autobiographical account, and literary criticism, but most of all, they are a clear testimony of how numerous intellectual friendships shaped and enriched Agostini’s life. An earlier book, Viñetas de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Vignettes) (1965), is an intimate recollection of the author’s years growing up in the small town of Yauco, Puerto Rico, and provides some human-interest stories about a few of the town’s most picturesque characters. Her connections to the homeland are also reflected in her poetry collection Canto a San Juan de Puerto Rico y otros poemas (Song to San Juan de Puerto Rico and Other Poems) (1974). She also authored several books of children’s stories and songs. For her many literary and cultural contributions, Agostini was honored in 1973 by the Puerto Rico Chapter of the American Women’s Union. She was also elected president of the Sociedad de Autores Puertorriqueños (Society of Puerto Rican Authors). See also Education SOURCES: Agostini del Río, Amelia. 1980. Rosa de los vientos. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña; Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1974. Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña. Vol. 2, tomo 1. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Edna Acosta-Belén
ALATORRE, SOLEDAD “CHOLE” (1927– ) Soledad “Chole” Alatorre was born in 1927 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. She came from an upper-middle-class background in Mexico. Her father was an officer in the Railroad Workers Union. At the age of twenty-seven Alatorre immigrated to the United States with her husband and sister. She settled in the San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles and began a career working as a bathing-suit model for a clothing-manufacturing company in downtown Los Angeles. Through her work
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Albelo, Carmen Alatorre began to establish relationships with the workers in the garment industry. In the manufacturing plant Alatorre became known for her personal contact with workers and eventually took on the role of an intermediary between the union rank and file and garment-industry manufacturers. This launched a career of labor organizing in the greater Los Angeles region. Alatorre became affiliated with unions such as the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, the Maritime Union, and the United Farm Workers. A strong labor activist, Alatorre became a prominent leader in the Chicano civil rights movement. In 1968, along with Bert Corona, whom she met through labor organizing, Alatorre founded el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo Hermandad General de Trabajadores, also known as CASA. CASA became a leading organization advocating for immigrant worker rights and provided a host of services for immigrant workers, including legal assistance, social policy advocacy, and education. Alatorre was a vital force in the operation of CASA. She was responsible for administrative duties and maintained a behind-the-scenes approach to her activism. Close friends say that this was one of Alatorre’s strengths. She firmly believed in the collective spirit of activism and organizing and refrained from any sort of self-promotion. To this day, Alatorre remains politically active. She maintains a prominent role but a behind-the-scenes profile in the Chicano/Latino communities of southern California. She has protested the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan and vigilante action in San Diego and has worked toward ensuring representation of the Latino community in local political campaigns and elections in Los Angeles. Like many individuals in the movements for labor and civil rights, Alatorre championed community efforts and continuously identified herself as a member of the movement, rather than as an individual leader. See also Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) SOURCES: García, Mario T. 1994. Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona. Berkeley: University of California Press; Gutiérrez, David G. 1995. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
ALBELO, CARMEN (1925–
)
When Carmen Albelo sailed from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to the United States in 1939, she envisioned a land of opportunity and freedom, not war, discrimination, and loneliness. “When I came here I thought I was
going to have a better life, but it wasn’t like that,” Albelo recalled. Born on October 1, 1925, in Sábana Grande, Puerto Rico, Albelo was introduced to an independent lifestyle at an early age. When she was only eight years old, young Albelo’s mother divorced her husband and left Albelo and her siblings with relatives so she could try to make a better life for them in America. “It wasn’t very easy when she left us,” Albelo said, but her mother had no choice. Albelo stayed in Puerto Rico with her brother, two sisters, and grandparents. One by one, the children moved to the United States to rejoin their mother. Carmen Albelo was first. “My mother sent me clothes for that day—shoes, clothes and ten dollars,” Albelo said. She sailed to the United States by herself, wearing clothes ten times too big for her. “My aunt sent a letter to my mother saying I was [a size] 16; that was the size she wore. I was about 80 pounds,” Albelo said. At fourteen years of age, draped in layers of clothing, sunburned from the boat ride, and ill from motion sickness, she arrived in the United States almost unrecognizable to her mother, but with hope for the beginnings of a prosperous future. Two years later she was engaged to Higinio Albelo, a boy from the apartment building where she lived. “I had a dream with him,” Albelo recalls. “I saw him dressed like a soldier, and he had a bag on his back. That’s the way I saw him the first time.” Although her mother disapproved of her getting married at such a young age, problems at home with her new stepfather pushed Albelo toward the altar. “He didn’t want us,” Albelo said of her stepfather. “So I told my mother, ‘I’m going to get married.’ . . . I didn’t want my mother, because of me, having problems.” On November 19, 1941, Carmen and Higinio Albelo exchanged vows, promising to cherish and love each other, in good times and in bad. One of their cherished moments was the birth of Higinio Jr., whom they called Gene, on January 14, 1943, in Metropolitan Hospital in New York. Albelo spent three days in labor, without medication and without her mother or husband at her side. Higinio Albelo had been called to serve his country and was visiting his parents in Puerto Rico before going to fight with the navy in World War II. He did not see his son until a year later. The birth of her baby boy, however, made the time away from her husband easier for Albelo. “That was a joy because he was something that belonged to me, not to my family, not to anybody, me and my husband. And for years, I didn’t have any joy, until I had my son,” Albelo said. With Higinio Albelo away at war, Carmen Albelo had a difficult time working, taking care of her son, and dealing with missing her husband all at once. While working as a seamstress sewing uniforms for members of the military, Albelo found that the nanny she
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Alfau Galván de Solalinde, Jesusa but I had good days, too. So I can’t complain that much.” See also World War II SOURCES: Albelo, Carmen. 2002. Interview by Helen Aguirre Ferre, Miami Vet Center, September 14; Mendoza, Sylvia. 2003. “New Baby Helped Woman Endure Lonely War Years.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring). Sylvia Mendoza
ALFAU GALVÁN DE SOLALINDE, JESUSA (1890–1943)
Carmen I. Albelo and her son, Gene Albelo, in California, 1948. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
had hired to care for her son was leaving him alone for hours at a time. Albelo had to quit her job and stay home. She recalls writing to her husband in tears, asking what they were going to do, and feeling helpless because the checks she received from the navy were not enough. “I was alone in New York, and my mother was two hours away,” Albelo said. “The problem was, I was very, very lonely.” Higinio Albelo began staying in while the other navy men had free time, ironing uniforms to make extra money to send home to his wife and baby boy. The extra money helped ease some of the family’s financial woes, but they were still apart. “I remember one Christmas I was so alone. I was crying, I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so awful to be alone on Christmas.’ And I said, ‘Well, I have my baby boy. That’s good enough for me,’ ” Albelo said. That same Christmas Albelo was surprised by someone at the door. Thinking someone might be trying to break in, she was shocked to see her husband walk in. “That was so nice, because my baby was happy, I was happy, and he was happy,” Albelo said. When Higinio Albelo finally returned for good after serving for three years in the war, the couple’s daughter, Carmen Albelo, was born, and the family was complete. The children inherited their mother’s sense of independence and hard work; Higinio became the first in his family to graduate from college, from Columbia University, and Carmen got her associate’s degree and fulfilled a lifelong dream to teach elementary school. Albelo said she had achieved all she set out for when she sailed to the United States in 1939. “I had bad days,
Novelist, painter, and educator Jesusa Alfau Galván was the daughter of Antonio Abad Alfau Baralt and Eugenia Galván Velázquez. She spent much of her life in the shadows of her illustrious grandfather, the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván, author of Enriquillo, one of the better-known and best-regarded indianista (idealizedIndian-themed) novels in the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America. Alfau’s husband was the distinguished hispanista (Hispanic studies professor) Antonio G. Solalinde. She spent many years living in her native Spain and in the Dominican Republic, land of her ancestors. She received her formal education in Spain and later worked with her husband in research on philology and education. Jesusa Alfau Galván authored at the age of eighteen the novel Los débiles, published four years later in 1912 in Spain. Alfau Galván de Solalinde lived in the United States on and off beginning in 1916. In the United States she was a regular contributor to the weekly Las Novedades, edited between 1916 and 1918 by her father. Her essays published in Las Novedades are meant to interpret for many in the Latino communities, within and outside the United States, customs and values of North American culture, much as José Martí and Pachín Marín, among many, had done before her. Among the titles of articles published in Las Novedades are “Sábado” (Saturday), “Thanksgiving,” and “Visiones del Norte” (Visions of the North). For several decades most Dominican literary histories have indicated that Los débiles had been translated into English in the United States. There is a 1930 edition of Los débiles that was published by Prentice-Hall, with a prologue and notes by Professor J. Horace Nunemaker of the Department of Foreign Languages at the State College of Washington. This edition was prepared for use as a textbook in intermediate to advanced Spanish-language courses. The brief prologue is the only section written in English. There is also a vocabulary in the back and a series of exercises. A copy of this second edition of Los débiles was found by
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Allende, Isabel Daisy Cocco De Filippis on the shelves of the Queens College library, one of the colleges of the City University of New York. Cocco De Filippis edited the novel and published it in a slim volume titled Como los crisantemos lila, obra escogida de Jesusa Alfau Galván de Solalinde, with eight of the articles written by Galván de Solalinde for Las Novedades. Jesusa Alfau Galván de Solalinde began writing her thesis “Nomenclatura de los tejidos españoles del siglo XIII” in English for the master of arts degree at the University of Wisconsin, but she died in Mexico in 1943 before completing the project. Her thesis was translated into Spanish by her nephew Antonio Gobernado de García and published in 1969 by the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. Her life and work are early precursors of what became the diasporic Dominican/Hispanic family in the twentieth century. SOURCES: Alfau Galván, Jesusa. 1912. Los débiles. Madrid: Imprenta Artística José Blas; ———. 1930. Los débiles. Prologue and annotations by J. Horace Nunemaker. New York: Prentice-Hall; ———. 2000. Como los crisantemos lila, obra escogida. Selection and prologue by Daisy Cocco De Filippis. Colección Tertuliando, no. 5. New York: Ediciones Alcance. Daisy Cocco De Filippis
ALLENDE, ISABEL (1942–
)
Noted writer Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, where her father Tomás Allende served as a diplomat. She is a second cousin of socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens (1908–1973). After her father abandoned the family, her mother, Francisca Llona, was left with three children. She moved back to her parents’ house in Santiago de Chile in 1945 and later married Ramón Huidobro, also a diplomat. He was appointed to Bolivia and Beirut, where Allende attended private schools. In 1958 the writer returned to Chile and met her first husband, Miguel Frías. They married in 1962 and had two children, Paula and Nicolás. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, but three years later, on September 11, there was a coup d’état led by Pinochet Ugarte and supported by both Chilean aristocrats and the U.S. government. Salvador Allende was assassinated, and Isabel Allende was forced to leave the country in 1975. From 1967 to 1974 Isabel Allende worked as a bilingual secretary at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Chile. She also wrote for Paula magazine and was in charge of the humorous column “Los impertinentes.” From 1973 to 1974 she contributed to the children’s magazine Mampato and published two stories for children: “The Grandmother
Panchita” and “Lauchas y lauchones.” In addition, between 1970 and 1975 she worked for television channels 13 and 7 in Santiago. In 1975 Allende and her family were exiled to Venezuela, where they lived for thirteen years. In Caracas she contributed to the newspaper El Nacional and from 1979 to 1982 worked as an administrator for Marroco College, a secondary school in the Venezuelan capital. In 1978 Allende and her husband separated for two months. They eventually divorced in 1987. In 1981, when her grandfather was about to die, Allende began to write him a letter that later became the manuscript for The House of the Spirits. The novel, published a year later, brought her international attention. She published nine more books in the next twenty years: Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Paula, Aphrodite, Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia, and City of Beasts. In 1988 she married Willie Gordon; since then, they have both lived in San Rafael, California. Today the Chilean novelist is dedicated to writing, lecturing, and giving conferences. After fifteen years of exile Allende returned to Chile to receive the Gabriela Mistral Award. A year later her daughter, Paula, suffered a porphyria attack and went into a coma. She died in 1992, and in her memory Allende began to write Paula. Gregory D. Lagos-Montoya has stated, “Although Allende’s literary awards as well as her honorary degrees are numerous, some literary critics have alleged that her works are imitations of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967).” Even though one can see a similarity in elements of the so-called magic realism, it is undeniable that Allende is a prolific author who has developed her own style and who has managed to succeed as a best-selling novelist. See also Literature SOURCES: Correas Zapata, Celia. 1998. Isabel Allende, vida y espíritus. España: Plaza y Janés; Isabel Allende online. http://www.isabelallende.com/ (accessed October 4, 2004); Tompkins, Cynthia Margarita, and David William Foster, eds. 2001. Notable Twentieth-Century Latin American Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Maria E. Villamil
ALONZO, VENTURA (1904–2000) Ventura Alonzo was born in Matamoros, Mexico, on December 30, 1904. She was the fifth of eight children born to José Martínez and Maria de Pilár Cuevas Escamilla. When she was five, she and her family fled the Mexican Revolution to live in Brownsville, Texas. Shortly thereafter they continued their migration to
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Alonzo, Ventura
Ventura Alonzo was known as the Queen of the Accordion. Mural by Teodoro Estrada, 1996. Photograph by David Carrera Jr. Courtesy of Mary Ann Villarreal.
Kingsville, Texas. Her love for music began when her older brother ordered a piano from New York City. She recalls that she was only twelve years old when a piano teacher came from Mexico and gave several children, including her sister, piano lessons. Alonzo, however, just wanted to play and did not want lessons. She recounted, “Entonces vino el profesor y me examinó en el piano. . . . El dijo ‘Esta muchachita no es de nota, es de aquí de la cabeza.’ ” (Then the professor came and gave me an examination on the piano. . . . He said [to my parents], “This little girl does not go by note, but it’s here in her head.”) Her father passed away in Kingsville, and the onset of the depression forced Alonzo, her mother, and her siblings to move to Houston to find employment. Alonzo gave birth to eight children, three sons with her first husband and five children with her second husband, Francisco Alonzo. In the mid-1930s she and Francisco started their orchestra, Alonzo y sus Rancheros, which was composed of family members, including Alonzo as the singer and accordion player. Before starting on the circuit, the group performed for free at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church’s annual bazaar in Houston. She was a hit wherever they performed, traveling from Fort Worth to Kingsville. One story goes that “during one set, Alonzo’s arm got tired from holding the accordion and she put it down, stepping up to the microphone to sing publicly for the first time. She was a hit.” The orchestra performed live on the radio to increase its popularity and also to introduce music it had recorded. She eventually earned the title “Queen of the Accordion” or “la
Reina del Acordéon.” Her talents did not end with her playing or singing abilities. She wrote several songs that the group recorded, including “Magnolia Park.” They performed throughout Houston’s Magnolia Park until they opened La Terraza in 1956, a ballroom located at 1515 McCarty Drive. At the ballroom Alonzo had multiple duties, from performing to collecting the cover charge at the door. She knew the importance of keeping her audience happy, playing the songs they requested, and keeping the regulars returning week after week. Ventura and Francisco Alonzo retired from the nightclub business and from performing as an orchestra in 1969. In retirement she dedicated her time to playing the piano for senior citizens of the Denver Harbor community every Friday at the Centro Alegre. A mural dedicated to Alonzo was painted by local art teacher Teodoro Estrada in 1996 and is located on the side of a Houston Firestone store at 6901 Harrisburg Blvd. SOURCES: Alonzo, Ventura. 1999. Oral history interview by Mary Ann Villarreal, May; Peña, Manuel. 1999. The Mexican American Orquesta: Music, Culture, and Dialectic of Conflict. Austin: University of Texas Press; Rust, Carol. 1996. “Ventura Alonzo Honored in Magnolia Mural/Queen of the Accordian.” Houston Chronicle, August 14, 1; Vargas, Deborah Rose Ramos. 2003. “Las tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz; Villarreal, Mary Ann. 2003. “Cantantes y Cantineras: Mexican American Communities and the Mapping of Public Space.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University.
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Mary Ann Villarreal
Altars
ALTARS The tradition of altar making or “the arrangement of objects with symbolic meaning” has its roots for Latinas among the ancient indigenous cultures of Mexico and Latin America. In Mexico the Toltecs maintained small shrines or altars to deities in the privacy of domestic space. The Mexica carried on the tradition in their dwellings with small alcoves designed for an effigy of a deity and a container for burnt offerings. Among the Maya, Toltec, and Mexica, large stones with flat surfaces suitable for the burning of oblations served as public altars. During the colonial period elite Spanish and criollo families constructed home chapels with elaborate altars dedicated to Catholic icons. Indigenous peoples continued the practice of domestic altar making. Despite efforts by church officials to curtail the importance of home altars for native peoples, these sites of spiritual vitality persisted, but with Christian symbols included. For mestizo populations, the complexity of nepantla (a Nahua term meaning “in the middle”) began to be visualized in religious iconography. In time, mestizo home altars revealed the emerging syncretic nature of Mexican Catholicism with its distinct symbol system incorporating indigenous and Christian elements in one object, for example, the crucified body of Jesus surrounded by the moon and sun, or a crucifix made of cornhusks. These images connect the Christian deity to the sacred cosmic forces and the sacred food of Mesoamerican indigenous religions. The curtailment of church authority during the Reform era and the Juárez presidency in the mid-1800s, along with the decline in the number of priests and churches, increased the importance of domestic shrines where families could continue their prayers and rituals. The rezadora or female prayer leader took on a central role in the maintenance and transmission of the faith among family members. In rural communities the virtual absence of clergy made the spiritual healing abilities of curanderas or specialized healers extremely significant. The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a reinstatement of church vitality in Mexico with a new cadre of priests trained in ideas of social action. Church buildings and church attendance increased, yet the home altar remained a central site for the practice of personal and familial devotions. With the annexation of one-half of Mexico by the United States in 1848, Mexican Catholics became members of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church. Overt discrimination, European-born clergy, and unequal monetary and staff allocations to new Mexican American dioceses often created a distance between Mexican Americans and the institutional church. Once again, the home altar maintained its importance in the
preservation of the faith among Mexican families. During the mid-twentieth century, as part of efforts to universalize Catholic worship, Mexican American Catholics often succumbed to the pressure to drop domestic altar making. Numerous families, however, continued the tradition that celebrates spirituality beyond the boundaries of institutionalized religion and often signifies a Latina feminist spirituality. For Latina Protestants, the construction of home altars with symbols other than a cross and the Bible are rare, because Protestant Christianity traditionally prohibits the display of icons or the practice of praying through material objects. Rather, el altar familiar, the family altar, takes the form of time and space set aside for Bible study and prayer. Latinas practicing Santería or Lucumí construct altars regularly as part of their ritual practice of making oblations to deities and the ancestors. Depending on the oricha or sacred spirit being honored, a santera’s altar will contain food and drink offerings, richly colored fabrics designating the oricha, elaborately decorated ceramic pots holding the ashé or
Catholic women took great pride and comfort in their home altars. Courtesy of Lee (Russell) Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Neg. no. CN06311.
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Alvarez, Aida spiritual power of the oricha, ritual instruments to call forth ancestors and spirits, and images of the oricha, at times a statue of a Christian saint that conceals the identity of the oricha. Chicana artists such as Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ofelia Esparza, and Enedina Casarez Vásquez have influenced significantly the reclamation of altar making as a central expression of spirituality by contemporary Chicanas and Latinas. For Latinas who have left organized religion and for those who remain, altars provide the space for women to create and express what for them has ultimate meaning. For women, the act of altar making reinforces their claim to name the sacred. Through the arrangement of symbols, photographs, candles, and icons, all imbued with meaning, altars connect the spiritual world with the physical world, the living with the dead, goddesses/gods or the spirit world with humans, and the altar maker with the viewer. Altars become sites of historical memory, of creativity and imagination. They communicate family histories and personal and political identities through the images and symbols displayed. Altars can take a variety of forms, from more abstract to traditional expressions and from personal and private creations to public and communal works of art. They represent fluid expressions of ever-changing personal and social locations. Chicanas and Latinas inherit a rich legacy of women creating sacred spaces for spiritual and psychic nourishment. See also Religion SOURCES: Cortez, Constance, ed. 1999. Imágenes e historias/Images and Histories: Chicana Altar-Inspired Art. Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery; McMann, Jean. 1998. Altars and Icons: Sacred Spaces in Everyday Life. San Francisco: Chronicle Books; Romero Cash, María. 1998. Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press; Salvo, Dana. 1997. Home Altars of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Turner, Kay. 1999. Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. New York: Thames and Hudson. Lara Medina
ALVAREZ, AIDA (1949–
)
Aida Alvarez, the first Hispanic woman and first Puerto Rican to head the federal Small Business Administration, was born in Aguadilla, the oldest of the six daughters and sons of Héctor and Aurelia Alvarez. The family moved to New York when Alvarez was not yet a year old, and when she was of school age she helped at her mother’s businesses—a luncheonette first, later a restaurant—between classes. That experience, she later said, gave her an understanding of the needs of small-business owners.
The first person in her immediate family to obtain a college education, Alvarez graduated from Harvard College with a degree in English literature in 1971 and then spent two years as a high-school Spanish teacher before starting a successful career as a newspaper and television journalist and anchor. With a series of articles for the New York Post, “Latins in New York,” she won a Front Page Award for Journalistic Excellence, and her television reporting from El Salvador during that country’s civil war won an Emmy nomination in 1982. Although she considered the possibility of continuing as a war correspondent, after her experience in Central America Alvarez decided that she wanted a role that allowed her to work for social change. “In the media, you have to be objective. But as I matured, I had some strong beliefs, and I really wanted to be an advocate,” she told an interviewer. Leaving what was considered an enviable position in the prime television news market of New York City, in 1984 Alvarez became vice president for public affairs and special projects for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, a post she occupied until the following year. After that brief initial experience in government Alvarez worked in the investment banking industry for more than a decade, specializing in public finance at Bear Stearns and Company and at the First Boston Corporation. During that period she met her husband, Dr. Raymond Baxter. They have two daughters. In private industry Alvarez served on several governmental panels, among them New York City’s Charter Revision Commission, which was in charge of rewriting the city’s charter. She developed a reputation for directness, an illustration of which was seen in her statements to the press after the commission’s final vote in 1989. As one of the few dissenters from the commission’s recommendations, Alvarez declared that the process had been a missed opportunity and called the final draft “a patchwork of political accommodations rather than a progressive vision.” Alvarez was also engaged in national Democratic politics, participating in Al Gore’s presidential campaign and working in the development of a Hispanic agenda for the 1988 election. She was co-chair of the women’s committee for Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, and after Clinton’s victory she served on his economic transition team. Alvarez returned to government in 1993 when Clinton nominated her as director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, a new government entity created to regulate the nation’s two largest housing finance agencies. In December 1996 President Clinton nominated Aida Alvarez to head the Small Business Administration (SBA). She was sworn in on March 7, 1997, and remained in the post throughout the full second term of
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Alvarez, Cecilia Concepción the Clinton presidency. Those were years of high tension between the Republican-led Congress and the Democratic executive branch, and the SBA’s managerial practices under Alvarez’s direction were reviewed by Congress on several occasions. Although Alvarez’s background in finance was an asset, her lack of professional small-business experience was pointed out by critics when she was nominated, and when she took office, there were questions about the future of the agency, which had been frequently targeted for budgetary reductions. It was therefore considered a credit to Alvarez that during the four years of her tenure, the amount of loans and guarantees given by the SBA increased significantly. The agency also developed programs to address the needs of special constituencies, from rural businesses to independent filmmakers, and began initiatives to increase small businesses’ participation in international trade. Under Alvarez’s direction the SBA reached an agreement with the big three U.S. automakers to increase their contracts with minority-owned small businesses. Alvarez also developed partnerships with ethnic business organizations and offered new bilingual services. Her vigorous advocacy for women- and minority-owned small businesses, which led to a dramatic increase in loans to both sectors, was one of her most strongly noticed accomplishments as an administrator. SOURCES: Birnbaum, Jeffrey H. 2001. “Aida’s Exit Interview: She Made the SBA Bigger and Better Than Ever, but Does the Outgoing Boss Have Any Regrets?” FSB (Fortune Small Business), March 1; Nixon, Brian. 1994. “Inventing Government: A Profile of Aida Alvarez.” Savings and Community Banker, April. Maria Vega
ALVAREZ, CECILIA CONCEPCIÓN (1950– ) Dynamic self-taught artist Cecilia Alvarez is a Cuban Mexican American born to Jorge Guillermo Alvarez and Cecilia Alejandra Diego de Alvarez in National City, California. She was raised on the San Diego–Tijuana border and eventually attended San Diego State University, where she pursued a degree in sociology. At the age of twenty-three, however, Alvarez quit school in order to help support her family. Eventually Alvarez moved to Canada, where the spatial distance from her community provided her the environment to begin to think freely. According to Alvarez, this experience allowed her to see racism in a different light and to grow as an individual.
Alvarez’s work as an artist is centered on family in a symbolic sense that discusses issues in both her life and the world. Her use of female images transcends the literal meaning of gender to portray the aspects of life that are considered inferior or less important in an industrial consumer society. Female perspectives on the symbolic things people give up to survive, such as culture and earth, are those aspects that are unfortunately given female attributes. Examining the female form in Alvarez’s work demonstrates that she is essentially redefining femininity. In the piece La Malinche Tenia Sus Rasones Alvarez portrays La Malinche, Hernán, Cortés’s indigenous concubine, as a remorseful heroine. Another factor in the imagery used reflects aspects of Alvarez’s upbringing in the San Diego area, where the proximity to Mexico and the influxes of migration constantly create political unrest and cultural shifts. Alvarez explains that growing up in the San Diego–Tijuana area, she quickly learned that people tend to disregard family and culture, and that when these are sacrificed, they become commodified. In this way her work is a visual discourse on reality and the changes of humanity within a collective society. As an artist, Alvarez attempts to redefine beauty, power, and importance from the context of cultural values: “Without dreams of beauty, of power—there is no reason to live.” La Tierra Santa, Las Cuatas Diego, and El Eterno Danzón del Sueño de la Unidad exemplify Alzarez’s use of culture, often depicted as family figures or indigenous figures, and the Earth, represented by flowers or animals. The use of family figures and the Earth is an important aspect in her art because they embody her ideas on the preservation of culture and community. Beyond the aesthetic qualities of her art, Alvarez’s artistic strength lies in her ability to incorporate the observer into a dialogue of current social issues within the context of culture. Si Te Puede Pasar a Ti, EL SIDA is perhaps the best example of this capacity. This installation piece utilizes the image of the skeleton to demonstrate the inevitable, yet her use of the woman with the condom illustrates the power that people hold to avoid destruction through sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS. Through the process of immersing the observer into a discussion on power and social issues, Alvarez invites introspection about personal biases, hate, and prejudice. Alvarez aims to help youth understand the complex world that they live in so that they may grow to be healthy individuals. She feels that her upbringing in the San Diego area and her subsequent residence in Washington State have allowed her to become a freethinker. Alvarez also believes that to achieve dynamic changes in the community, people must educate themselves.
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La Tierra Santa, 1986. Painting in oil on canvas by and courtesy of Cecilia Concepción Alvarez.
Among her achievements, she lists being blessed with the opportunity to articulate through her art what is important to her community locally, nationally, and internationally. Her work has been featured in many books and several international art shows. See also Artists SOURCES: Alvarez, Cecilia Concepción. 2002. Oral history interview by Marylou Gómez, May 24; Beardsley, John, and Jane Livingston. 1987. Hispanic Art in the United States. New York: Abbeville Press; Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds. 1991. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles; Quirate, Jacinto. Mexican American Artists. Austin: University of Texas Press. Marylou Gómez
ALVAREZ, DELIA (1941–
)
An outspoken critic of U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia, Delia Alvarez is also the sister of
Everett Alvarez Jr., who was held as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict for eight and one-half years. Delia Alvarez’s antiwar activism reflected both her increasing involvement in the Chicano movement during the late 1960s and her steadfast conviction that ending the war was the fastest way to bring her brother home. When they were growing up in the California town of Salinas, the two Alvarez siblings, of whom Delia was the younger by three years, were extremely close. When Delia Alvarez found out that her brother, a U.S. Navy pilot, had been shot down in August 1964 during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, she immediately wished that she, as a woman, could join the military to help rescue him. At the time, like many Americans, she accepted the necessity of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism. Her brother’s capture, however, prompted her to read everything she could about Vietnam’s colonial past and American intervention. She concluded that the conflict was essentially a civil war in which the U.S. military had no legitimate role to play. For a member of a military family in the mid-1960s, however, the notion of expressing such doubts publicly was inconceivable. Her reluctance faded as the years passed and her brother remained a prisoner. Furthering her opposition to the war was Delia Alvarez’s participation in the Chicano movement. When she was working in San Jose to promote Mexican American college recruitment and retention, she noticed that Chicanos were particularly vulnerable to the draft because they were not receiving college deferments. Similarly, when she pressed for better health care and improved local housing, she resented the federal government’s cuts in funding for domestic social programs while it was spending billions on the war overseas. As she explained years later, “I would have come out against [the war] if [my brother] hadn’t been a POW,” but “there’s no doubt in my mind that I became so involved because I had an emotional involvement to end the war.” Determined to do everything in her power to hasten her brother’s release, Delia Alvarez became a featured speaker at national antiwar rallies. She also traveled repeatedly to Washington, D.C., to demand that the Nixon administration stop the war. In 1970 she cofounded a group of antiwar POW families. As a member of that group, Delia Alvarez also met with IndoChinese women twice in the early 1970s, in Vancouver and Paris. All along, she realized that she was risking her brother’s disapproval. In fact, while he was still a captive in North Vietnam, Everett Alvarez Jr. was dismayed to learn of his sister’s antiwar activism. Like many POWs, he viewed such protest as tantamount to
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Alvarez, Julia siding with the enemy. But after Everett Alvarez’s release in 1973, familial bonds ultimately proved more powerful than the siblings’ political differences. Delia Alvarez retired as the director of public health for Santa Clara County in 1993 and now lives in San Francisco. SOURCE: Oropeza, Lorena. 2005. Raza Sí!, Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lorena Oropeza
ALVAREZ, JULIA (1950–
)
The first Dominican American novelist to bring Dominican culture to the attention of an English-speaking readership, Julia Alvarez was born in 1950 in New York City but was raised in the Dominican Republic in an extended upper-class Dominican family that exerted a powerful influence on Alvarez and her sisters, who grew up on her mother’s family property surrounded by aunts, cousins, and maids. Despite these early experiences on the Caribbean island, the enormous impact of U.S. culture on those of her class has led Alvarez to assert, “Mine was an American childhood.” Politics intruded on her idyllic youth, however, and compelled her and her family to experience life in the United States firsthand. Because of his opposition to the regime of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Alvarez’s father, a medical doctor, was forced to flee the country to the United States with his wife and daughters in 1960. The homesickness and alienation Alvarez experienced as an immigrant and her struggle to find a place for herself in a new environment are the foundation of much of her writing, particularly her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), a work described as a Dominican female bildungsroman that garnered the author critical praise as an evocative storyteller. Alvarez has also published several award-winning collections of poetry, including Homecoming (1984) and The Other Side: El otro lado (1996). A graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont and Syracuse University (M.F.A., 1975), Alvarez became an English professor at Middlebury in 1988. The author and her husband divide their time between their home in Vermont and their farm in the mountains of the Dominican Republic. While García Girls parallels autobiographical elements of Alvarez’s own experiences, her second work of fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), delves more specifically into the history of her homeland as it follows the story of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered for their political resistance to the brutal Trujillo regime. In 1997 Alvarez returned to charac-
ters in García Girls in her novel Yo!, which continues themes found in her first novel related to the complexity of the bilingual-bicultural experience of Latina women in U.S. culture. “Sometimes I hear Spanish in English (and of course, vice versa). That’s why I describe myself as a Dominican American writer. That’s not just a term. I’m mapping a country that’s not on a map. . . . It’s a world formed of contradictions, clashes, cominglings—the gringa and the Dominican, and it is precisely that tension and richness that interests me.” Julia Alvarez is a writer whose work is in demand in the popular media. Her thoughtful yet lively essays can be found in a range of publications, from Latina magazine to the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times. Her work Something to Declare (1998) is a collection of essays that trace the diverse lessons she has learned on the way to becoming a writer. In keeping with her interest in illuminating the lives of remarkable Dominican women, Alvarez has published In the Name of Salomé (2000). The story concerns the famous nineteenth-century national poet of the Dominican Republic, Salome Ureña, who, among other accomplishments, established the country’s first free school for females, and her daughter, Camila Henríquez Ureña, who retired from her position as a professor at Vassar College in 1960 to join the Cuban Revolution. While Julia Alvarez’s class origins may distinguish her experiences from those of the typical Dominican immigrant to the United States, she nevertheless was the first writer to provide a voice in English for that community and, in particular, for the concerns of Dominican women. See also Literature SOURCES: Castelluci Cox, Karen. 2001. “A Particular Blessing: Storytelling as Healing in the Novels of Julia Alvarez.” In Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. New York: Palgrave–St. Martin’s Press; Notable Hispanic American Women Book II. 1998. Detroit: Gale Research; Rosario-Sievert, Heather. 2000. “The Dominican-American Bildungsroman: Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” In U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers, eds. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Margarite Fernández Olmos
ALVAREZ, LINDA (19??–
)
Almost three decades in journalism and frequent involvement in charitable causes have made reporter Linda Alvarez one of the most recognized Latino television presences in Los Angeles. Born Hermelinda Alvarez, she was one of the four children of Ray Alvarez,
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Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District a gas-station owner of Mexican origin, and Margarita Larios, a Californian of Mexican and Chilean descent who worked as an administrative assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles. When the couple separated, the children—three sisters and a brother—fell upon difficult times. As Alvarez once told an interviewer, “We depended on each other growing up. I wouldn’t have been able to graduate from college if I hadn’t had scholarships and people who cared about me.” Linda Alvarez’s education and early career were oriented toward the learning and teaching of languages. She attended Catholic schools and Venice High School, and in 1963 she graduated from UCLA with an English degree. After an additional year earning her teaching credentials, Alvarez taught English and Spanish for two years at Venice High School. In her spare time she also taught Spanish to Peace Corps volunteers, an experience that eventually inspired her to relocate to Venezuela, where she taught at the Universidad de Carabobo and started an English-language school. After she returned to the United States, she taught at schools in New York and Connecticut and at the United Nations Secretariat. For one summer she also worked at the Universidad Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Upon returning from Mexico, she became director of an adult basic education program for the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in Chicago. Noticing her excellent pronunciation of both Spanish and English, an acquaintance encouraged her to record bilingual public announcements for television station WTTW. That marked the beginning of a career in the media for Alvarez. In 1973 she was hired by station WMAQ, initially as a weather forecaster. After a short time she was offered a regular news reporting job and, after a year, became cohost of Chicago Camera, a ninety-minute program that was transmitted live from various locations in the city. In 1977 Alvarez moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. For a brief period she was one of the hosts of KNBC’s Saturday Show before relocating again to Phoenix, Arizona. There, at station KPNX, Alvarez was anchor of three daily newscasts and was the reporter and producer of the station’s documentary unit. It was in Phoenix that she met her husband, cameraman Bill Timmer. In August 1985 Alvarez returned to Los Angeles’ KNBC as weekend anchor. A year later, at the same station, Alvarez became the first Latina to anchor a major weekday newscast in the Los Angeles area. After eight years at KNBC, in 1993 Alvarez joined station KCBS, where she has worked as anchor and news reporter.
Among the events Alvarez has covered during her career are the 1985 earthquake in the Mexican capital, the California earthquakes of 1987 and 1989, Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit to Los Angeles, and the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. At various journalism conferences Alvarez has spoken about the need for strong ethical standards in the profession and for better representation of women and minorities in the media. “There is a race to get advertisers and audiences,” she said at a meeting of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “Crime and sex stories get audiences. The media overlook the community issues that affect Latinos.” Alvarez has also spoken frequently in favor of youth service and educational programs. Active in many notfor-profit organizations, she has been a frequent participant in fund-raising events and has been a board member of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, Big Sisters of Los Angeles, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, among other charities. Alvarez has won eight Emmy awards and honors from many media organizations. See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Alexander, Katina. 1988. “Linda Alvarez Wears Her Heritage Proudly—Even without Makeup.” Orange County Register, December 2; Guensburg, Carol. 1999. “Taming the Beast.” American Journalism Review, July. María Vega
ALVAREZ V. LEMON GROVE SCHOOL DISTRICT (1931) Although limited in scope and local in nature, the California court case Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District was one of the earliest challenges to school segregation in the United States. A small farming community east of San Diego, Lemon Grove seemed an unlikely place for litigation because European American and Mexican American children attended the same elementary school in 1930. Such integrated education seemed exceptional for the time period, because segregated “Mexican” schools were the norm in southern California. This situation, however, soon changed. On January 5, 1931, when the children returned to school after the holidays, the school superintendent, Jerome Greene, met the Mexican youngsters at the door and instructed them to walk over to their “new school” constructed across the tracks in the barrio. The “new” two-room facility resembled a barn hastily built and hastily furnished with secondhand equipment, supplies, and books. The students returned to their homes, and their parents took action. Forming el Comité de Vecinos de Lemon Grove (the Lemon Grove
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Americanization Programs Neighbors Committee), they voted to boycott the segregated school and to seek legal redress. Except for one household, every family kept the children home. With the assistance of the Mexican consul, Enrique Ferreira, the Comité hired an attorney on behalf of the eighty-five children affected and filed suit. Using the Americanization banner, board members justified their actions on the grounds that a separate facility was necessary to meet the needs of non-Englishspeaking children. They argued that the Mexican students were behind in their studies and that the new school would offer them remedial instruction. To counter this argument, students “took the stand to prove their knowledge of English.” Twelve-year-old Roberto Alvarez testified as the lead plaintiff in the case. An honor student, Alvarez contradicted the school board’s claims of alleged learning difficulties among local Mexican youth. In Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District (1931) Judge Claude Chambers ordered the “immediate reinstatement” of the Mexican children to their old grammar school. Chambers, however, in this landmark case made a fairly narrow ruling; he argued that Mexicans were “white” and therefore not subject to segregation. Alvarez graduated from high school, joined the navy during World War II, and later became a multimillionaire as the owner of an international producedistribution firm. His son Roberto Alvarez Jr., an anthropologist who teaches in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, wrote about his family’s involvement in the case and worked closely with filmmaker Paul Espinosa to bring the story to life in the PBS docudrama The Lemon Grove Incident. Making history runs in the family, because Luis Alvarez, the son of Roberto Alvarez Jr., is a historian at the University of Houston. During a reign of deportations and repatriations during the Great Depression, Mexican immigrants had mustered the courage to protest segregation in education and they had won. These immigrant parents, moreover, had sought the assistance of the Mexican consul in their effort to provide equal opportunities for their children born in the United States. Equally important, according to anthropologist Roberto Alvarez Jr., the case may represent “the first successful court action in favor of school desegregation in the United States.” Certainly it was an early victory. See also Education; Mexican Schools SOURCES: Alvarez, Roberto, Jr. 1987. Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press; Balderrama, Francisco. 1982. In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate, and the Mexican Community, 1929–1936. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Espinosa, Paul (producer). 1984. The
Lemon Grove Incident. Videocassette documentary; Ruiz, Vicki L. 2004. “Tapestries of Resistance: Episodes of School Segregation and Desegregation in the U.S. West.” In Peter Lau, ed. From Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Exploration of Brown. v. Board of Education and American Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vicki L. Ruiz
AMERICANIZATION PROGRAMS Between 1910 and 1930 more than 1 million Mexicanos migrated northward to the United States. Escaping widespread poverty and the violence and chaos of the Mexican Revolution, they represented the first modern wave of Mexican immigration. In response, from Los Angeles, California, to Gary, Indiana, stateand religious-sponsored Americanization programs swung into action. Imbued with the ideology of “the melting pot,” teachers, social workers, and religious missionaries envisioned themselves as the standardbearers of salvation and civilization as they targeted their messages and activities toward women and children. Like their counterparts several decades earlier who had lived in east coast and midwestern settlement houses working among recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, these reformers emphasized classes in hygiene, civics, cooking, language, and vocational education (e.g., sewing and carpentry). Whether seated at a desk in a public school or on a sofa at a Protestant or Catholic neighborhood house, Mexican women received similar messages of assimilation. Examples of Americanization efforts spanned the Southwest and Midwest from secular settlements in Watts, Pasadena, and Riverside to Hull-House in Chicago and Catholic neighborhood centers, such as Friendly House in Phoenix. Protestants also operated an array of settlements, health clinics, and schools. During this time, for example, the Methodist Church sponsored one hospital, four boarding schools, and sixteen settlements and community centers, all serving a predominantly Mexican clientele. In addition to these social services, the advocates of Americanization held out unrealistic notions of the American dream and romantic constructions of life in the United States. Just as Madison Avenue advertisers exhorted consumers to buy particular products to find romance, happiness, and financial security, many Americanization workers made similar promises of behaviors that would provide the key for immigrant success if they were embraced. In the words of one missionary at the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement in El Paso, Texas, “Sanitary conditions have been improving—more children go to school—more parents are be-
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Americanization Programs
Celia M. Acosta Vice and Ivan Vice with their daughters at a Brooklyn celebration, 1960. Courtesy of Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
coming citizens, more are leaving Catholicism—more are entering business and public life—and more and more they taking on the customs and standards of the Anglo people.” This statement ignores economic segmentation and racial-ethnic segregation. Focusing on El Paso, historian Mario García (1980) demonstrated that the curricula in Mexican schools, which emphasized vocational education, served to funnel Mexican youth into the factories and building trades. In the abstract, education raised expectations, but in practice, it trained them for low-status, low-paying jobs. Settlement workers seemed to ignore that racial-ethnic identity involved not only a matter of personal choice and heritage but
also an ascribed status imposed by external sources. Indeed, Houchen Settlement operated an employment bureau for neighborhood women that placed them as domestic workers in “Christian” homes. At the Eighth Street School in Tempe, Arizona, the segregated “Mexican” elementary school, girls were taught not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also cooking, bed making, sewing, and other domestic chores. This emphasis on domesticity (lessons that one could argue young girls learned at home) prepared the children for future work in the service sector as maids and housekeepers. There are a few exceptions worth noting in terms of promoting individual mobility. The Hull-House Kilns,
Patriotic parade in Spanish Harlem. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Antonetty, Evelina López
Dance recital. Courtesy of Houchen Community Center, El Paso, Texas.
for example, represented a cottage industry that emphasized self-help, artistic innovation, and sales, and as a result, several immigrant artisans became wellknown artists in their own right. A Methodist all-girls boarding school, the Frances De Pauw School in Los Angeles, educated approximately 1,800 young Mexican women from 1900 to 1946. According to one source, “Among [the school’s] graduates are secretaries, bookkeepers, clerks, office receptionists, nurses, teachers, waitresses, workers in cosmetic laboratories, church workers, and Christian homemakers.” While preparing its charges for the workaday world, the school never lost sight of women’s domestic duties. “Every De Pauw girl is graded as carefully in housework as she is in her studies.” Americanization workers were not always praised for their activities. Reverend Robert McLean, who worked among Mexicans in Los Angeles, referred to his congregation as “chili con carne” bound to give Uncle Sam a bad case of “heartburn.” While one can certainly cringe at the ethnocentrism that permeated settlement work, one should also acknowledge its contributions in terms of providing medical and childcare services. For example, the hospital and clinic associated with El Paso’s Houchen Settlement were important community institutions for more than half a century. Americanization programs in the Southwest, most of which were sporadic and poorly financed, had little impact. For example, Mexican women in El Paso derived substantive services in the form of health care and education from Houchen Settlement; however, they refused to embrace the romantic idealizations of American life or to attempt to make themselves over into white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Latinas have sought to claim a place for themselves and their families in the United States without abandoning their cultural affinities. The idea that Latino cultures inherently “lack” certain ingredients for success was a widely held premise among advocates of Americanization, people who did
not recognize the very real economic impediments for mobility. This culturally deficient model continues to haunt Latinos today from the novels of Oscar Lewis to the attitudes of some contemporary social workers and educators. For example, one university outreach program is based on the assumption that Latino parents need to be instructed by undergraduate volunteers on the proper ways to read and play with their preschool children. The legacies of Progressive-era Americanization projects remain in the twenty-first century. See also Education SOURCES: Ganz, Cheryl R., and Margaret Strobel, eds. 2004. Shaping Clay, Shaping Lives: Mexicans, Reformers, and Pottery at Chicago’s Hull House, 1920–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; García, Mario T. 1980. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Sánchez, George J. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press; Yohn, Susan. 1995. A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
ANTONETTY, EVELINA LÓPEZ (1922–1984) Educator and community activist Evelina López Antonetty is a woman of legendary status known to some as the “mother of the Puerto Rican Community” and to others as the “hell lady of the Bronx.” Nobody was neutral about Antonetty. On a gray September day in 1933, Evelina López arrived alone in New York City aboard the boat El Ponce. She was ten years old and disembarked lamenting the loss of her long hair that had been cut before her voyage. The earliest impression of the drabness of her new surroundings remained in her memories forever. She had come to stay with her mother’s sister, Vicenta, who lived in El Barrio, or
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Antonio Maceo Brigade Spanish Harlem. Back in Ponce her mother Eva saved for boat fare to New York, but it was not until 1935 that she and her two younger daughters, Lillian and Elba, joined Evelina, thus beginning their new life as a migrant family in New York. Eva López worked long hours in the laundry room of the Hotel New Yorker to provide for her daughters and keep them in school. As a young girl in East Harlem, Evelina López became the spokesperson for her neighbors, often helping them resolve problems with landlords and city agencies. Her sisters described López as courageous and quick to notice injustices. At the age of sixteen she and her sister Lillian joined the Young Communist League. She attended public schools and graduated from Wadleigh High School in Central Harlem. The depression and lack of money prevented her from going on to college. From 1946 to 1956 Antonetty worked as a job developer and organizer for District 65, a militant union that organized small shops. She not only was instrumental in bringing more than 4,000 Spanish-speaking workers into the union, but also organized the Spanish Affairs Committee within the union. Mentored by community activists like Jesús Colón and Bernardo Vega, Antonetty developed into a formidable activist and community leader. In 1965, frustrated by the lack of response on the part of the public school system to the needs of Puerto Ricans and other minorities, Antonetty joined forces with other parents to create United Bronx Parents (UBP), a grassroots organization dedicated to community development in the South Bronx area with special emphasis on educational reform. Under Antonetty’s dynamic leadership UBP flourished, broadening its mission, adding new projects and constituencies that
extended well beyond its Bronx headquarters, and providing technical assistance in parent training to diverse groups in New York and other cities. In 1970 UBP began to expand its program activities to other arenas, establishing a bilingual-bicultural day-care center, an adult education program, a youth leadership program, and a citywide summer lunch program. Antonetty was the executive director of UBP until her death in 1984. Antonetty was greatly admired for her organizing skills and her understanding of political issues. She mobilized parents throughout the city for quality education, organized sit-ins against library closings, and was instrumental in the struggle for school decentralization and community control of schools. She was a forceful, persuasive, pioneering leader who was widely respected for her ability to bring people together. She is fondly remembered by many younger activists as an influential mentor and as a model for Puerto Rican leadership in New York. Antonetty never earned a college degree, although she attended classes at Brooklyn, Hunter, City, and Manhattan Colleges. In 1970 she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Manhattan College and ever after was respectfully called Dr. Evelina Antonetty. She taught a course, the Puerto Rican Child in New York City Schools, in the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College. Her affiliations and awards are numerous. In 1990, six years after her death, a tribute celebrating her legacy was held in City College. The program focused on her efforts at coalition building and the social transformation of communities of color. In 2001 a play was produced titled Evelina’s Heart/El corazón de Evelina that tells the story of her life accomplishments and reaffirms her important place in Puerto Rican community history. In memory of her achievements, the library and archives of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College carry her name. See also Education SOURCES: Antonetty, Evelina López. 1997, 2001. Oral history interviews by Lillian López. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1984. Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience. Eds. Louis Reyes Rivera and Julio Rodríguez. New York: IPRUS Institute; Mohr, Nicholasa. 1993. All for the Better. Austin, TX: Steck-Vaughn; Rodríguez, Sandra, and Gloria Zelaya. 2001. Evelina’s Heart. Multimedia play; United Bronx Parents, Inc. 1966–1989. Records. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Nélida Pérez
ANTONIO MACEO BRIGADE (1977– ) Evelina López Antonetty at a rally. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
After the revolution that took place in Cuba in 1959, both the United States and Cuba barred Cuban exiles
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Antonio Maceo Brigade from returning to visit their homeland. All that changed in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter lifted the ban on travel to Cuba, and the Cuban government invited a group of young Cuban professionals for a return visit. The group’s members called themselves the Antonio Maceo Brigade (Brigada Antonio Maceo, BAM) after a black Cuban military strategist of the nineteenth century known for his fierce military fighting against Spain in defense of his homeland. The trip home marked a major turning point in the relationship of the Cuban government to its diaspora of exiles and immigrants. It also marked the first time that Cubans residing in the United States openly dared to break ranks with the more vocal and organized anti-Castro leadership in the Cuban exile community. The Antonio Maceo Brigade was made up of fiftyfive women and men—young professionals and students from the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Mexico. They were united around a common theme: support for the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, and the cessation of hostile acts of aggression against Cuba by the U.S. government or members of the Cuban exile community. The brigade only accepted as members those individuals who had left Cuba as youngsters through parental decision, and who had not participated in acts of organized violence against the Cuban government. The latter conditions not only responded to restrictions set by the Cuban government itself as security measures, but also reflected the youthful idealism of the members of the BAM themselves. For the most part, the first BAM members, or brigadistas, had been activists against the Vietnam War, participants in progressive movements in the Puerto Rican and Chicano communities in the United States, or members of Jóven Cuba, a magazine for Cuban Americans. But the driving force behind the first Antonio Maceo Brigade was really the members of Aréito, a magazine founded in 1974 by young Cuban intellectuals who had consistently advocated a rapprochement with Cuba. Cuba’s Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos extended the historic 1977 travel invitation to the members of Aréito magazine. Two women, in particular, were the principal movers and shakers behind Aréito and the organization of the first brigade: Lourdes Casal, Ph.D., and Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Ph.D. Casal, a black woman of considerable literary talent, is considered one of the most accomplished Cuban exile intellectuals of the period. She died only a few years after that historic trip. Pérez-Stable is a respected political science professor who now openly favors a U.S.-style democracy in Cuba. The Antonio Maceo Brigade was organized in January 1978 upon the return of the brigadistas to the
United States. Since then, hundreds of young Cubans who had spent most of their lives outside their homeland have returned to Cuba under its auspices in search of family and roots. For them, that return has been as emotionally charged as it was for the first brigadistas. The echo of the experience is summarized in what one of the first BAM members told the New York Times upon his return home: “The country is the people and the family we still have there. While we were there with our families, we were true Cubans, revolution or not, and there was an instant rapport.” In Cuba the first Antonio Maceo Brigade not only visited family and friends, but also met with topranking government officials, including Cuban president Fidel Castro. That first visit by Cuban exiles to their abandoned homeland opened the way for the Cuban government to relax its antagonism toward the exile community and led Castro to call for a dialogue between Cuba and Cubans living abroad. It resulted in agreements to release political prisoners and find ways of reuniting separated families and in new regulations to allow Cubans abroad to visit relatives in Cuba. In December 1978 three members of the first Antonio Maceo Brigade opened Marazul Tours, the first U.S.based travel agency to arrange routine trips to Cuba, and another BAM member opened a similar agency in Puerto Rico. But the attempt to establish a bridge to the homeland angered the anti-Castro leadership in the Cuban exile community. There were numerous sharp media attacks and even violence. In April 1979 Carlos Muñiz Varela was assassinated in Puerto Rico, and in November of the same year the Cuban terrorist organization Omega 7 took credit for the assassination of dialoguero Eulalio Negrín in West New York, New Jersey. The Antonio Maceo Brigade continues to exist today, falling far to the left of the political spectrum of most groups in the Cuban American community. Although many former brigadistas publicly hold a more moderate and often critical political stance toward their country of origin, on one issue agreement is certain: After that first visit to Cuba by the Antonio Maceo Brigade in 1977, the lives of Cubans living on the island and their counterparts abroad were never the same again. Because of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, the divide between Cuba and its exile community was forever broken. SOURCES: Aréito. 1978. Special edition entirely dedicated to the Antonio Maceo Brigade. 4 (Spring); Grupo Aréito. 1978. Contra viento y marea. Havana, Cuba: Casa de las Americas; Pérez-Stable, Marifeli. 1978. “Young Cuban Exiles Visit Homeland.” Guardian (New York), March 8, 24; Smothers, Ronald. 1978. “Cuban Exiles Visiting Home Find Identity.” New York Times, February 14, 37.
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Dagmaris Cabezas
Anzaldúa, Gloria
ANZALDÚA, GLORIA (1942–2004) Descended from seven generations of ranchers in a small southern Texas ranching settlement known as Jesús María, Gloria Anzaldúa was born in 1942. The oldest child in a family of four, as an infant she developed a rare illness that caused her to have a menstrual period at the age of three months. According to Anzaldúa, “I started bleeding in my diaper and went into puberty when I was six.” The resultant physical imbalances caused her to stop growing physically at the age of twelve. Acutely aware of her difference at an early age, Anzaldúa believes that “I was born a queer.” This perception had both physical and political ramifications for the rest of her life. Anzaldúa recalls that at about the age of eight “my coming to voice had to do with feeling oppressed because of race. I noticed very early on the difference between how the white kids were treated and how I was treated.” Anzaldúa attended segregated schools until high school. She received her elementary education in a one-room schoolhouse where one teacher taught all the grades in Spanish. Anzaldúa’s thirst for knowledge and her budding intellectual efforts served as a double-edged sword. Although her schoolmates recognized her as “a brain,” her teachers treated her intelligence as a novelty. Anzaldúa was aware early on of the racism that cast her as an exception to the rule for Mexicanas. Her intelligence also drew criticism from family members who considered her love for reading and writing to be unusual. Constantly ridiculed for her efforts, she nonetheless continued her studies. Anzaldúa recollects an image of herself as an “eighty pound kid who carried around the complete works of Aristotle.” She always felt herself to be a philosopher trying to make sense of life. By the time she was twelve, Anzaldúa’s family moved to Hargill, Texas, and two years later her father died. In order to survive, she and her family labored as migrant workers. During this period Anzaldúa came to understand the social disparities and injustices of migrant life. The shock of her father’s death worsened Anzaldúa’s physical condition. The severity of her menstrual pain caused her to disassociate herself from her body and enter a fantasy world. “I would go into my imagination; I would go into the world of the book.” Reading and writing allowed Anzaldúa to both confront and escape her realities. Anzaldúa found that she wrote most about what bothered her—“injustice against women.” During this time she developed a consciousness about a family double standard that flagrantly privileged males. “I knew that in my culture the males were favored and I could see it in my own family.” Although Anzaldúa esteemed her single mother’s
strength and hard work to keep the family together, she rebelled against her mother’s attempt to impose strict and limiting rules of tradition on her daughters. Anzaldúa believes that Chicanas are influenced by many sectors that socialize girls into silence. The larger social message “calls for us to keep our mouths shut.” Disrupting silence and asserting voice are issues that breathe through many of Anzaldúa’s writings. Anzaldúa continued to work in the southern Texas fields throughout high school and college while pursuing a B.A. degree from Pan American University. After graduating in 1969, she enrolled in an M.A. program in English education at the University of Texas, Austin, where she received her degree in 1972. Upon completion of her degree Anzaldúa was selected to teach migrant children in a Texas state education program. She then moved to Indiana and worked as the director of the Migrant Bilingual Program. In 1974 she began writing poetry. One of her first essays, “Growing Up Chicana,” was written during this period. In 1974 Anzaldúa entered a doctoral program at the University of Texas, Austin. However, she soon became disgusted with the narrow limitations of a department that did not recognize Chicana literature as a field. She left in 1977. This experience strengthened her resolve to devote herself to creative expression, and soon she was on the road to San Francisco, where she embraced a life of writing and in the process became one of the foremost Chicana writers in the nation. Anzaldúa’s work has inscribed an indelible mark on the American literary and political landscape. A Chicana lesbian, feminist, writer, theorist, and activist, Anzaldúa coedited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with colleague Cherríe Moraga. It became a groundbreaking book on feminism among women of color. Published in 1981, Bridge remains a cornerstone in explicating the unique social, cultural, and political foundations of Chicana feminism. Speaking of her intense motivations for writing the book, Anzaldúa states, “For me the being different, the class thing, the being a little Chicanita, the gender thing, the race thing, the family, my father’s death, just seeing what death and pain are like were motivations for me to write.” San Francisco also ignited Anzaldúa’s social consciousness, and she became active in a number of causes, including the United Farm Workers union. She also continued to work with migrant children. However, her involvement in the Feminist Writers Guild and the Women’s Writers’ Union brought her face-to-face with the racism and sexism in white, mainstream feminist organizations that further motivated her to edit This Bridge Called My Back. Despite the positive popular recognition Anzaldúa
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Apodaca, Felicitas gained for her work, she continued to struggle with her family’s negative reactions to controversial themes such as lesbianism, sexuality, and family relationships. Her family perceived such public disclosures of her personal life as a kind of cultural betrayal. “I was betraying the culture by exposing all these things.” Anzaldúa remains philosophical about this contradiction and encourages Chicana writers to overcome such pressures and to challenge assumed roles. Another important work published by Anzaldúa is Borderlands /La frontera: The New Mestiza. Borderlands constructs an important framework for negotiating a complex legacy of colonization and offers a new paradigm for transcendence in a form Anzaldúa refers to as “Mestiza Consciousness.” It continues to be a primer for Chicana/o feminists, scholars, writers, and activists. Anzaldúa wrote Borderlands while living in Santa Cruz. She moved there in 1985 to complete a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Although she was an invited distinguished visiting professor in Women’s studies, the program did not accept her because “they felt I was too established. . . . I didn’t know enough theory and was too far behind and wouldn’t be able to catch up. The final blow was the fact that I was a creative writer and they already had too many creative writers.” Although she did not enter the program, Anzaldúa continued her goals and in 1990 published a sequel to Bridge titled Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras. Through her writing Anzaldúa hoped to give younger Chicanas a sense of continuity to the Chicana feminist and queer experience by telling them her stories. For her, “this is how I continue the Chicano struggle. I can use my writing as a feminist, as a queer and as a Chicana to question, to identify, and to open up minds.” Anzaldúa’s most recent contribution to the field of feminist studies is This Bridge Called Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, coedited with Ana Louise Keating and released in 2002. According to Vanessa Bush, “this feminist anthology acknowledges the enormous contribution to feminist literature of the first Bridge and explores continuing challenges for feminist thought.” On May 15, 2004, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa lost her struggle with diabetes and passed away at her Santa Cruz home. See also Feminism; Literature SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spillsters/Aunt Lute; ———, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Criticial Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute; ———. 1994. Interview by Naomi H. Quiñonez, Santa Cruz, CA; Dictionary of Literary Biography. 1992. Vol. 122, Chicano Writers, Second Series. Detroit: Gale
Research; Monaega, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Naomi H. Quiñonez
APODACA, FELICITAS (1912–1997) Community activist Felicitas Córdova Apodaca was born on March 6, 1912, in a small town outside of Guanajuato, Mexico. Her mother, Irene Santos Córdova, customarily left El Paso, Texas, for Mexico to deliver her babies surrounded by female relatives. Although her husband, Ignacio Córdova, did not approve, Irene traveled in the midst of the Mexican Revolution to deliver Felicitas, and it was six months before the infant was brought to El Paso. Apodaca’s father worked at the smelter outside of El Paso, and the family lived in company homes. Nevertheless, the industrious Ignacio began to buy property on Raynor and Central in El Paso, Texas, where the family eventually moved. Some of Apodaca’s earliest remembrances are of this moving day. She believed that her family was rather grand using a horse-drawn wagon to carry their belongings and the small children, while her mother rode in a fringed black surrey. Apodaca recalled, as well, the large mounds of grease left over from the smelting of the ore. It was perhaps an incident with the Migra (the INS Border Patrol) that influenced the girl to become fluent in English. One day while the women in the home were in the kitchen making Mexican sausage, La Migra invaded the house and took all the occupants away. Upon hearing the noise, the five-year-old Apodaca hid in the corral. Afterward she entered the kitchen and saw the pots boiling and her grandmother rocking in her chair. When Ignacio came home, he became angry, took the immigration papers to the detention center, and got the family released. Ignacio encouraged his daughter, a perceptive child, to get a college education, promising that he would be there to play mariachis when she graduated. Apodaca never saw that day because her father died when she was in the eighth grade. Reading was her passion, and she often negotiated household chores in exchange for reading time. More acculturated than her siblings, Apodaca spoke both Spanish and English. She was proud of her Mexican heritage, relished the display of both the Mexican and American flags, and soon became the family’s interpreter. During the depression she attended El Paso High School, but dropped out one semester short of graduation. To help her widowed mother, Apodaca went to work. In 1937 she married Juan Apodaca. For thirteen years she was a traditional wife and mother. She man-
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Felicitas Apodaca, circa 1940. Publicity photograph for El Paso Planned Parenthood. Courtesy of Linda Apodaca.
aged household finances and joined Planned Parenthood, becoming a poster mom with her son Juan. A resourceful woman, Apodaca earned extra money selling hosiery and clothes. She worked as a maid at the Campo Grande Motel on Alameda and, in time, was hired as a seasonal sales employee at the Popular, a leading area department store. Apodaca experienced many changes in her life, moving from Texas to California as a middle-aged woman. Her work as an activist became her third career. She retired from Bonds Stores in 1973 and embarked on a new chapter in work and activism. Apodaca joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), a long-standing grass roots civil rights confederation in California, as a community development specialist. At the age of sixty-two, she began her work with the CSO chapter based in El Monte, a predominantly Mexican community near Los Angeles. From her first day at the El Monte office, Apodaca fell into the rhythm of community work, organizing, activism, and peer counseling. To organize the El Monte chapter, Apodaca needed people, and so she recruited longtime customers from Bond into the CSO. She also recruited parents of students involved in the Young Adult Leadership Program sponsored by the CSO. Apodaca taught new members how to run meetings and elections themselves. With chapter members, Apodaca organized fund-raisers, youth activities, the annual Navidad en el Barrio (Christmas in the Neigh-
borhood) pageant, and a food pantry for low-income residents. At the biweekly food pantry food was brought in from the main distribution center in Los Angeles and put into baskets. Apodaca coordinated these activities with the help of chapter members and also did the paperwork to verify the distribution of food. To her recollection, no one was ever turned away from the pantry. Apodaca acquainted new members with the CSO’s food co-op, buyers’ club, death-benefit society, and credit union and also helped distribute groceries to members. Mexican immigrant families were introduced to banking by way of the CSO credit union. People who lived on minimum wages were able to save for cars and then purchase them through the credit union. Many of the people Apodaca worked with were undocumented immigrants for whom she provided consumer and paralegal information and family counseling. With advice from the CSO legal team, she helped families with financial planning, property investments, IRAs, mutual funds, and writing wills. She counseled women in abusive relationships by providing referrals to women’s centers in the San Gabriel Valley. In addition, Apodaca helped families avoid foreclosures and maneuver through the maze of the immigration system. This work gave her additional experience in advocacy, helping clients with unscrupulous lawyers who had been paid by the undocumented immigrants, but who had not provided the contracted legal services. Through these programs Apodaca often empowered her clients so they could advocate for themselves. When Apodaca finally retired at the age of seventynine, she had not missed a day of work since 1950. Nor did she completely retire even then. Apodaca took classes at California State University, Los Angeles, and worked on a master’s degree in sociology. Until the final days of her life, Apodaca was active in her community and with her family. She died on December 26, 1997. Felicitas Córdova Apodaca was a feminist long before the National Association for Chicano Studies dedicated its 1984 conference to the issue of Chicana feminism. She empowered her children, nieces, and nephews to build a better life for themselves and their families. She empowered the disadvantaged and underrepresented to become part of the American fabric. Though she never became a U.S. citizen, she believed in the United States and its political processes. Above all, she had a deep commitment to education. See also Community Service Organization (CSO) SOURCES: Apodaca, M. Linda. 1999. “There Is Nothing as Gentle as Strength and Nothing as Strong as Gentleness: The
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Aprenda y Superese Life and Times of Felicitas Córdova Apodaca, 1912–1997.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 20:1 (Spring): 45–58; Rooke, Luisa. 1992. “Lessons—Old and New: 80 Year Old Still Learning, Shares Anti-drug Message.” San Gabriel Tribune, July 21, D1.
Linda Apodaca
APRENDA Y SUPERESE (1965–1973) During the second wave of post-Castro Cuban immigration to the United States (1965–1973), the federal government experimented with various programs to help Cuban refugees adapt to the U.S. labor market. Aprenda y Superese, also known as “Training for Independence,” was one such program. Unlike the majority of job-training programs, which targeted male workers, Aprenda y Superese targeted Cuban women, particularly those who had signed up to receive assistance from the Cuban Refugee Program. Because of the Castro government’s restrictions, which prevented men of military age from emigrating, as well as political prisoners or those holding skills vital to the revolution, this second wave of Cuban immigration had a disproportionate number of women and elderly. Many Cuban women suddenly found themselves alone in the United States, or the sole support of their parents and children. Since threequarters of Cuban women did not work outside the home prior to the Castro revolution, few had skills, job experience, or English fluency that they could successfully use in the U.S. labor market. The women who took part in Aprenda y Superese received intensive training in any of a number of skills, including hand and machine sewing, clerical work, nursing assistance, silk-screen art work, and domestic service. Day care was provided, as well as a monthly stipend to cover transportation costs to the training site. Upon completion of the course, the women agreed to resettle outside of Miami if jobs in the city were unavailable. Aprenda y Superese was regarded as one of the most successful programs under the umbrella of the federally funded Cuban Refugee Program. It served as a model for the amended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in 1968. Together with the other CRP programs, Aprenda y Superese was phased out by 1973. SOURCES: García, María Cristina. 1996. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959– 1994. Berkeley: University of California Press; U.S. Cuban Refugee Program. 1968. Training for Independence: A New Approach to the Problems of Dependency. Washington, DC: Social and Rehabilitation Service. María Cristina García
ARAGÓN, JESUSITA (19??–) After learning the skill of midwifery from watching her grandmother, Hispanic New Mexican partera (midwife) Jesusita Aragón delivered more than 12,000 infants in her life. Aragón’s clients were women who worked in ranching and subsistence farming and lived under extremely difficult conditions in the northern New Mexican frontier. Working and living on shared land marked by extended-family networks, patriarchal rulings, patrones, and folk Catholicism, Aragón delivered her first baby when she was fourteen. Unable to finish school, Aragón took over her grandmother’s practice as a local partera and willingly devoted her life to the service of the community whose members sought her out to bless, heal, advise, and cure them day and night. Through Aragón’s life one can learn about folk medicinal practices and the various ways in which parteras’ skills and knowledge met the critical health and emotional needs of the Spanish-speaking community in New Mexico during the early and mid-twentieth century. Stressing the importance of maintaining a balance between the natural and the supernatural, Aragón believed that her ability to cure others was a direct blessing from God that required her to be available to heal, treat, and pray over patients and their families at any time. Her methodology as a partera, which was supported by the larger curandera (healing) community, held diseases to be the result of natural imbalances, bewitchments, or punishments for sins. However, these could be effectively treated with knowledgeable use of herbal teas, cleansings, massages, and prayers to local saints. Historian Fran Leeper Buss referred to Aragón as the last of the traditional Hispanic midwives in New Mexico, who learned the skills of midwifery and healing by riding along on horseback with her grandmother and helping her deliver the villages’ babies. Aside from assisting her grandmother, Aragón also became an expert field worker, laboring in the fields with her father, who raised her like a boy and taught her how to protect herself from snakes, to work with wood, and to shoot weapons. Early in her childhood Aragón assumed the place of the oldest son in her family. Forced to leave school after completing the eighth grade, she helped her father herd sheep and goats in the seasonal rhythms of farm life. Growing up in the village of Trujillo, working in the fields, herding, planting, driving wool to the market, and assisting with deliveries, Aragón recalled a happy childhood with big fiestas, dancing, local fairs, sewing special gowns, and sharing good food. Aragón’s mother died at the age of thirty-four when Aragón was only ten. Raised by her grandparents and
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Arballo, María Feliciana her father, she helped the family survive until she was sent away following two pregnancies outside of marriage. Ashamed and ostracized, she attempted to run away, but had nowhere to go, so she returned to the family home, where she was closely watched. When Aragón was able to afford it, she moved out of the family home with her three little children. She built her own home and decided to farm and work as a midwife. In order to support her family, Aragón cleaned houses, washed, and ironed in Trujillo until she moved with her three children to Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1952 so they could attend high school. Recalling her experiences as a midwife, Aragón remembered riding long distances on horseback, wagons, or cars to help deliver babies. She confessed that sometimes her job had dangerous aspects, especially when she was following a strange man to his home, trusting that his wife was about to give birth. Aragón would always pray on her way to deliveries and remembered to bring along a clean white apron and to keep her nails trimmed. Aragón kept a meticulously clean delivery room in the back of her home. She made sure that her hands were soft and smooth and she tried to comfort stressed pregnant women by making them laugh and trying to distract them. Aragón remembered that many mothers pinched, scratched, and yelled at her, often blaming her for their condition. Still, Aragón understood their anxieties and remained calm, especially when mothers tried to deliver breech babies. She was a skillful and experienced midwife, but when Anglo medical practices were introduced through nursing campaigns to educate and license parteras, she opted to refer difficult deliveries to the local hospitals to ensure a mother’s safest delivery environment. Aragón helped deliver babies and later in her career obtained a practicing license and joined a midwife club. She baptized babies, helped with adoptions, cared for children and mothers when they were sick, and suffered the painful and difficult experiences of losing mothers and babies in difficult deliveries. In these times of profound sadness, grandmothers were left with the grief of losing a child and the challenge of raising grandbabies at a late age. Because she understood her job as a partera as a blessing from God, she only charged fifty dollars for deliveries, and in difficult financial situations she delivered babies for free. Aragón also treated young women who were victims of rape, cured kids with empacho (food poisoning), and healed ulcers and illnesses through expert use of alcohol, azafrán, snake weed, romerillo, teas, and chamomile. To supplement her income, Aragón took in boarders who were outpatients from a local mental hospital. With the rise of birth control and the spread of institutional medicine, fewer mothers needed her help.
Still, she remained in the area to take care of people, her family, and her ranch. See also Medicine SOURCES: Buss, Fran Leeper. 1980. La Partera: Story of a Midwife. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Comunicación e Información de la mujer. Ruiz, Miriam. 2002. “Las parteras: un trabajo historicamente despreciado.” June 22. www.cimacnotlocas.com (accessed October 4, 2004); elmundo.es (online newspaper based in Spain). 2002. “Vuelven las parteras.” www.el-mundo.es (accessed October 4, 2004). Soledad Vidal
ARBALLO, MARÍA FELICIANA (1762–?) Known as the “Merry Widow” of California history, María Feliciana Arballo journeyed to California as part of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza’s 1775–1776 colonizing expedition. Of Spanish birth and thus at the pinnacle of colonial society, this resident of Sinaloa was a rebellious teen who defied her parents by marrying a common mestizo soldier named Juan Gutiérrez. The couple had two daughters and had hoped to travel with Anza in search of a new life. Regrettably, her husband died before the expedition, but rather than remain behind, as Father Font suggested, Arballo convinced Captain de Anza that she and her daughters could complete the journey. With one daughter riding in front and the other in back, the three traveled by horseback all the way to California. According to Antonia I. Castañeda, Arballo paid for her assertiveness and determination. Father Font rebuked her on several occasions throughout the journey; the most notable incident occurred on December 17, 1775, when the colonists staged a fandango (dance) celebrating the successful crossing of the treacherous Colorado River. Font grew increasingly angry and incensed with the colonists for their inappropriate celebration and suggested prayer rather than music and dance. Noting that she had had a bit too much to drink, he wrote about “a very bold widow [who] sang some verses that were not at all nice, applauded and cheered by the crowd.” Although reprimanded and physically beaten for her actions, Arballo and her two daughters survived the journey and became permanent settlers in California. While atypical in her willful independence, Arballo was representative of Spanish-speaking women’s experiences in Spanish borderlands frontier society and particularly of the women who journeyed north to California. Statistically, Arballo deviated just slightly from the other women because twenty-nine of the thirtyfour women on the Anza expedition were wives of soldiers. Their average age was twenty-eight; they had married in their mid-teens. At the time of the expedition they had been married an average of twelve years
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Arguello, María de la Concepción and had given birth to an average of four children. Most of the women were in the middle of their childbearing years, and eight of the thirty-four women were or became pregnant during the journey, but five had miscarriages, and one woman, Manuela Ygnacia Pineuleas, died in childbirth. No extended families joined the expedition, and as a result, wives were highly self-reliant, and older children were pressed into needed labor for household tasks. While she statistically shared many common points with the other women, Arballo’s actions reveal a strong, assertive, and headstrong woman who faced frontier hardships and changes of fortune with resolve and determination. As a widow, she was, ironically, in both the strongest and weakest social position a woman could occupy in Spanish/Mexican society. The fact that she constantly ignored Father Font’s attempt to restrict and admonish her actions indicates a woman who made her own decisions. The hardships of the journey failed to lessen Arballo’s bold nature. On January 4, 1776, the expedition reached the San Gabriel Mission and rested before finishing the last leg of its journey to Monterey, California, but when it began the journey north, the expedition was missing Arballo and her daughters. She caused “a minor sensation” by remaining at the San Gabriel Mission and quickly marrying Juan Francisco López, a soldier, on April 7, 1776. She survived her second husband and on March 10, 1800, three months after López’s death, married her third husband, Mariano Tenorio, at the fairly advanced age for the time of fortyeight. Arballo’s life reveals that opportunities and good fortune were available to women on the far northern frontier, and some women made the best of them depending on their means and abilities, that is, if they were bold enough. She also leaves a lasting political legacy, because she became the grandmother of two California governors, Andrés and Pío Pico. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Bouvier, Virginia Marie. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Castañeda, Antonia I. 1990. “Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Taggert, Frederick J. 1913. The Anza Expedition of 1775–1776, Diary of Pedro Font. Berkeley: University of California Press. María Raquel Casas
ARGUELLO, MARÍA DE LA CONCEPCIÓN (SISTER MARÍA DOMINICA) (1791–1857) The life of María de la Concepción Arguello spans a period of sixty-seven years during which her native Cali-
fornia evolved from Spanish colonial rule to Mexican rule to U.S. conquest in 1848. She was born in 1791 at the presidio in San Francisco, where her father, Don José Arguello, served as commandante. Commandante Arguello and his wife, María Ignacia Moraga, like many other military families during this period, represented and protected the Spanish Crown’s interest in Alta California. They responded to the Spanish Crown’s Reglamento Laws of the 1770s that promoted colonization in Alta California by establishing presidios and missions in the empire’s far northern territories in an effort to discourage Russian, British, or French expansion. Arguello’s life, as a member of a military family, reveals the varied roles of Spanish-speaking women in Alta California. In addition to the traditional roles of wife and mother, women in this frontier society assumed other responsibilities that were essential to mission and presidio self-sufficiency. Arguello is best remembered as the “Juliet of California” as a result of her ill-fated romance with Count Nickolai Rezanov. In 1806 Count Rezanov, chamberlain to Czar Alexander I, sailed into San Francisco Bay, desperately seeking supplies for his starving Russian colony in Sitka, Alaska. Despite the Spanish Crown’s ban on trade with Russia, Commandante Arguello allowed the Russians entrance in order to repair their vessel, as well as to obtain needed supplies. During the count’s stay at the presidio, he was immediately taken with the commandante’s beautiful daughter. The fifteen-year-old Concepción Arguello reciprocated his feelings, and anxious to secure a trading relationship with this Spanish outpost, the forty-two-year-old Rezanov asked for her hand in marriage. Although the count’s proposal met with great disapproval from her parents and local priests, Rezanov’s journal states, “her resoluteness finally overcame them all.” It took a very strong and daring young woman to stand up to all the authority figures in her life. Because the pope, the king of Spain, and Alexander I all would have to grant permission for the marriage, the two planned a ceremony to take place within two years upon Rezanov’s return from Russia with the necessary dispensations. Because of a fatal accident in Siberia, he never returned to California. Concepción Arguello heard rumors of Rezanov’s death two years after his departure. The story of the young Spanish beauty falling in love with a Russian count has inspired literary figures such as Bret Harte, Gertrude Atherton, and Alberta Denis to pen highly romantic interpretations of the affair. While Denis implores, “Let us keep our romance,” Hubert Bancroft pragmatically states that although he does not want to spoil a good story, the “celebrated courtship had a very solid superstructure of ambition and diplomacy.” The strong-willed Arguello, however,
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Artist rendition of María de la Concepción Arguello. Photograph by Jan Café. Courtesy of the Interfaith Center at the Presidio in San Francisco.
was not a pathetic and fragile young woman, nor out of sorrow did she don the nun’s habit “in spirit” after her fiancé failed to return. To focus on only one incident in her life negates her years of social service to the poor in both California and Mexico. In reality, she did not have the luxury of dwelling on her misfortune, because her father’s reassignment to a post in Loreto caused great financial hardship. A robust and confident Arguello accompanied them to Loreto, becoming her parents’ caretakers until their deaths in Guadalajara fourteen years later. As one of the few literate women in the area, she shared her knowledge with others. She certainly did not conform to Brigida Briones’s observation that women of Alta California “were born and educated here; here they lived and died; in complete ignorance of the world outside.” On the contrary, Arguello traveled up and down the coast of the Californias ministering to the poor as a secular nun. Upon her return to California in the 1830s, she offered her assistance to the missions and the newly created diocese. From 1846 to 1850 she represented the Catholic presence in the region until a new bishop could be appointed. Although she was in her sixties, Arguello eagerly petitioned for admittance to the first convent in California in 1851. A year later she became Sister María Dominica, California’s first native-born nun. She assisted in the establishment of the order’s new headquarters and school in Benicia, where she remained until her death in 1857. Forty years of lifelong service to her family, community, and church and her role as an educator in early California certainly eclipse the romantic image as the “Juliet of California.” See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Arguello, María Dominica, Sr. Correspondence. Dominican Convent Archives, San Rafael, CA; Bancroft, Hubert
Howe. 1886. History of California. Vol. 11. San Francisco: History Company; Castañeda, Antonia. 1988. “Comparative Frontiers: The Migration of Women to Alta California and New Zealand.” In Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ——— . 1990. “Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Yolanda Calderón-Wallace
ARÍAS, ANNA MARÍA (1960–2001) Anna María Arías was the founder of Latina Style magazine, the premiere national magazine for professional Hispanic women. Born and raised in San Bernardino, California, Arías came from a politically active family. Her father, Jesse, was the first Latino city council member in San Bernardino, and her mother was elected to the same seat in 1995. From early childhood Arías was outgoing and dynamic. In high school she was a cheerleader and student body officer. After a trip to Hawaii as a teenager, Arías was deeply drawn to the state and decided to enroll at Hawaii Pacific University. After obtaining her B.A. degree in communications, she won a fellowship in 1988 from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) that brought her to a position at CNN’s Washington, D.C., office. Opinionated and energetic, Arías was well suited for the city’s competitive, political atmosphere. Soon after she arrived, she met numerous influential members of the Latino community. Always drawn to stories of accomplished women, Arías developed a passion for Latina advocacy. She believed very strongly in promoting the position of Latinas through economic empowerment and through greater representation of professional Latinas in the national media.
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Anna María Arías. Courtesy of Latina Style magazine.
From the moment she arrived in Washington, Arías enjoyed a varied and accomplished communications career. She worked as a radio news anchor, newswriter, and media and campaign organizer for presidential and local candidates at the Democratic National Committee. She was also a member of CNN’s Crossfire program. Arías earned a respected reputation for her work in the Hispanic media and served for five years as managing editor of Hispanic magazine. Her editorial direction and keen insight into the issues affecting the Hispanic community were instrumental in making the publication one of the most respected media vehicles in the Hispanic market. However, she was struck by the exclusion of Latinas from the general market media and even from the Hispanic media. Her experience inspired Arías to produce a publication that would address that inequality by promoting a positive and accurate image of Latinas. With only her family’s support and a small inheritance from her father, Arías took on the arduous task of publishing a start-up magazine. Working intensely from her small apartment with just one computer, she began designing the magazine that would become her life’s mission. In October 1994 Arías launched Latina Style magazine. In her seven years at the helm of the publication, Arías was able to establish a relationship with Latina readers that remains unsurpassed. To this day the magazine is the only national publication that is 100 percent Latina owned. Latina Style is the first national
magazine that covers issues pertinent to the contemporary, professional, Hispanic working woman from a Latina point of view. Today, with a national circulation of 150,000 and a readership of more than 600,000, Latina Style reaches the Latina professional, business owner, and college student with all the information she needs to succeed in her endeavors. Through special programs like the Latina Style Business Series and the Latina Style Special Report of the top fifty companies for Latinas, the magazine maintains an active relationship between its readers, political leaders, and the corporate world. During her years at Latina Style Arías bravely fought a seven-year battle with aplastic anemia. However, she refused to let her illness affect her joy in life or her desire for success. Her determination paid off both in the growth of her magazine and in public recognition of her work. She received many accolades, including the Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s 1999 Entrepreneur of the Year. She counted among her many admirers members of Congress, community leaders, corporate executives, and former Second Lady of the United States Tipper Gore. After her death Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez remarked about Anna María Arías: “She was an amazing woman, a loyal colleague, and a first-rate editor. . . . Latina Style, a smart, witty, colorful magazine, is a real reflection of Anna María and what she represented. She was a real inspiration for Hispanic women everywhere.” In many ways Arías lives on through her magazine, her outreach programs, and the scholarships named in her honor. These include the GM–Anna María Arías Communications Scholarship, the CHCI Anna María Arías Trailblazer Scholarship, the MANA (a National Latina Organization)/State Farm Insurance Companies Scholarship, and the Anna María Arías Memorial Business Fund Awards. In the words of Congressman Silvestre Reyes, “The same hope, excitement and joy shared by Anna María will shine bright as others follow in her footsteps to ensure that the Hispanic community and Latinas specifically, are properly represented in all spheres of society.” SOURCE: Anna María Arías Memorial Foundation. www.annamariaarias.com (accessed September 10, 2004). Julia Young
ARIZONA ORPHAN ABDUCTION (1904–1906) The dramatic story of the Arizona orphan abduction in 1904 began in New York City. There, in the late nineteenth century, child welfare advocates developed a system of “rescuing” the city’s so-called orphans by shipping them west on orphan trains. Most of the chil-
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Armiño, Franca de dren shipped out were not orphans but children of poor single mothers who could not manage to support their offspring and had no welfare programs to help them. The so-called rescuers were motivated not only by sympathy for the children but also by their desire to combat disorder and violations of what they considered proper family values among the poor, to rid the city of undesirables, and to avoid spending tax money on aid to the poor. Most of these orphans were Catholics, while the leading child savers were Protestants who placed the waifs in Protestant homes. To the Catholics, this policy seemed a form of genocide. In response, the Irish Sisters of Charity opened the New York Foundling Hospital, which proceeded to run its own orphan trains, placing children in Catholic homes in the West. In 1904 a priest from two small towns, Clifton and Morenci, Arizona, rounded up parishioners to volunteer to take forty orphans aged two to six. A group of Irish Catholic children was shipped out on September 25, accompanied by three sisters, three nurses, and one male logistics agent. When they arrived, the priest gave the children over one by one to their assigned foster mothers. But the New York Catholics did not understand who the Arizona Catholics were. The Clifton and Morenci Catholics were, of course, all Mexicans. The twin towns Clifton and Morenci had arisen around copper mines and smelters, and their combined population of 4,500 to 5,000 was at least 65 percent Mexican. The nuns thought that they were placing poor Catholic children with poor Catholic parents, but the Clifton and Morenci Anglos saw “white” children being given to Mexicans. They organized an “indignation” meeting and threatened the Foundling Hospital’s staff with tarring and feathering and even lynching. The Anglo women began to convince each other that placing the white children with Mexicans was a form of child abuse from which the children needed “rescue,” and they mobilized Anglo men to form a posse. This group of twenty-five went to the Mexican homes and kidnapped the children at gunpoint. The men delivered the children to the Anglo women, who kept some for themselves and distributed others among the Anglos, and all refused to give them back to the Foundling Hospital. The nuns, meanwhile, had capitulated to the Anglos’ racist complaints. They agreed to take all the children back to New York and re-place them with suitable “white” Catholics, but now the Anglos would not give up the children. Their defense consisted of vile allegations about the housekeeping standards and morals of the Mexicans, a defense that simultaneously reflected and constructed an ideology of Mexican inferiority. The Foundling Hospital brought suit, and the case made its
way through three layers of courts, ending at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1906. All the courts ruled in favor of the vigilantes and allowed them to keep the children. The legal logic included several abstruse points, but the central finding rested on the best-interests-of-thechild doctrine and was accompanied by an explicit statement about the unfitness of Mexicans as parents to “white” children. The vigilante families kept the children forever. The case illustrated some of the peculiarities of racial formations in the United States. The U.S. government had officially categorized Mexicans as “white.” This logic stemmed partly from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had conferred U.S. citizenship on residents of the territory taken from Mexico. Since the law at that time allowed only whites and blacks to become naturalized citizens, the fact that Mexicans were citizens seemed to make them white. To Arizona Anglos by the turn of the century, Mexicans were not “white” and were rapidly being segregated. In contrast, the Irish orphans were by no means entirely white in New York—they were said to be “of the Irish race.” The most resonant aspect of this case was the Anglos’ sincere conviction that Mexicans could only be inferior parents, not qualified to raise “white” children, and that the whites had a responsibility to “protect” the children. This perspective has led throughout the world to abduction of the children of subordinated peoples by dominant peoples—a practice used against Aborigines in Australia, American Indians in the United States, Irish in the United Kingdom, Sephardic Jews in Israel, antidictatorship activists in Argentina, and, in a wellknown individual case, the Cuban boy Elián González in Miami. SOURCES: Gordon, Linda. 1999. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Heyman, Josiah McC. 1991. Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886–1986. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel. 1994. “Seasons, Seeds, and Souls: Mexican Women Gardening in the American Mesilla, 1900–1940.” In Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990, ed. Heather Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, 140–156. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Ruiz, Vicki. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Linda Gordon
ARMIÑO, FRANCA DE (C. 1900–19??) The available details about Franca de Armiño’s life are still very sketchy. She worked as a tobacco stripper (despalilladora) in Puerto Rico and was one of the most active feminists in the island’s socialist labor movement during the 1910s and 1920s. This was a period of
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Arocho, Juanita intense labor unrest on the island when Puerto Rican women workers joined men in the socialist Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Labor) and participated in many of its sponsored strikes, demonstrations, and organizing activities. Both men and women workers were combating the low wages and exploitative working conditions in the sugar, tobacco, and needle industries mostly controlled by U.S. absentee corporations and Creole proprietors. In 1919 the Primer Congreso de Mujeres Trabajadoras (First Congress of Women Workers) was held in Puerto Rico to define an agenda focused on the needs of women workers. Franca de Armiño was a delegate to the congress representing women workers from the town of Cataño. One of the congress’s results was the founding, a year later, of the Asociación Feminista Popular (Popular Feminist Association) aimed at securing equal rights for women, including the right to vote. Franca de Armiño was elected president of this working-class suffragist association. As a result of the efforts of both working- and middle-class suffragist organizations, Puerto Rican women were first allowed to vote in 1929 when suffrage was granted to literate women. It would take six more years before the passage of an amendment to allow universal women’s suffrage. During her years of labor activism in Puerto Rico, Armiño published a few articles in Justicia (Justice), the workers’ leading newspaper. Her article “A la mujer obrera” (To the Woman Worker) argues for the need for women workers to come together, assert their rights as citizens, and demand social justice. In her own words: “La Organización se impone. Sin Organización no hay salvación” (Organizing is the rule. Without organizing there is no salvation). Armiño migrated to New York during the years of the Great Depression, but little has been discovered about her activities in the U.S. metropolis, except for the self-publication of her play Los hipócritas: Comedia dramática social (The Hypocrites: A Social Drama) in 1937. According to its introduction, Los hipócritas is a drama dedicated to “the oppressed and all those who work for ideas for social renovation.” Thus this work is a continuation of the author’s earlier ideological stances and labor activism. The play focuses on the clashes between the poor and the wealthy and ends with a call for a socialist workers’ revolution. The action begins with the Great Depression of 1929 that shattered the lives of most workers worldwide, and takes place in a Spanish setting shortly before the outbreak of the civil war between Republicans and fascists. It was also during this period that a large number of Spanish exiles began to come to New York, and this perhaps explains the chosen thematic focus of Armiño’s play. In the inside cover of Los hipócritas it is
mentioned that the author was working on three other works—a book of poems, a collection of essays, and another play—but so far these works have not been found. See also Journalism and Print Media; Theater SOURCES: Armiño, Franca de. 1937. Los hipócritas: Comedia dramática social. New York: Modernistic Editorial; Kanellos, Nicolás. 1993. The Hispanic-American Almanac. Detroit: Gale. Edna Acosta-Belén
AROCHO, JUANITA (1910–1998) A pioneering presence in the Puerto Rican community of East (Spanish) Harlem, Juanita Arocho was a dedicated organizer and independentista who worked for the rights and freedoms of Puerto Ricans both on the island and in her adopted home of New York. An active political figure, she was in addition an integral member of the Orden de la Estrella de Oriente, a local Puerto Rican Masonic order that figured prominently in both her personal and political activities. Born in Lares, Puerto Rico, in 1910, Arocho migrated to the United States in 1933 on the USS San Jacinto, joining the many other Puerto Ricans who took advantage of increased steamship travel between New York and the island to seek better opportunities abroad. Settling with her mother on 112th Street and Seventh Avenue, Arocho quickly became active in community and independence politics. Taking impetus from her work on the women’s right-to-vote campaign in Puerto Rico and the inspirational political work of Pedro Albizu Campos, Arocho was involved in the founding of Casa Borinquen, la Asociación Cívica Lareña, and the Comité de Manhattan del Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, of which she was president. She also worked as a political assistant to Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem, during three of his campaigns, starting in 1936. In addition, Arocho was an active journalist and wrote weekly columns for a number of Spanishlanguage newspapers. These columns included commentaries on the state of women in the Puerto Rican community, editorials, and discussions of community events. In the course of her political and community work Arocho became acquainted with such figures as the poet Julia de Burgos, political leaders Pedro Albizu Campos and Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, political prisoner and nationalist Lolita Lebrón, and political activists Erasmo and Emilí Vando. Of particular note was her relationship with Albizu Campos, who looked to her to heighten the awareness of women’s issues in the independence movement.
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Arroyo, Carmen E.
Juanita Arocho (sitting in the middle) and other members of the Orden de la Estrella de Oriente. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
In 1948 Arocho married Homero Rosado. He was also active in independence and nationalist circles, and the couple supported each other’s efforts toward the empowerment of Puerto Ricans in New York and on the island. In 1959 they moved to Brooklyn, where they resided for the rest of their lives. Arocho remained with her husband until his death in 1994. Juanita Arocho died on August 22, 1998, in Brooklyn, New York. A seminal presence in the pionero community of East Harlem and the general Puerto Rican community of New York, she left a legacy exemplified by her extensive community work and support for the independence of Puerto Rico. A collection of Arocho’s memorabilia is held at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. It provides but a hint of the extent of her activism and is supplemented by interviews that are part of the Centro Oral History Project. SOURCE: Arocho, Juanita. 1940–1994. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Mario Ramírez and Pedro Juan Hernández
ARROYO, CARMEN E. (1933–
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Carmen Arroyo is the first and only Puerto Rican woman elected to the New York State Assembly and also the first Puerto Rican woman elected to any state assembly in the United States. She represents the Eighty-fourth Assembly District, which includes the South Bronx, Mott Haven, Melrose, and part of Highbridge. Describing Arroyo, the Village Voice calls her “a mixture of political pragmatism and deep sense of moral responsibility.” She was born in Corozal, Puerto Rico, in 1936, where she lived a life of struggle and raised seven children, often as a single parent. She arrived in New York in 1964 intending to find her husband, who had come to the city and stayed several
years before. Instead, she found a man no longer interested in maintaining a relationship. In her own words, “When I found him, he was drinking, had a negative attitude. . . . And I said no. I don’t need this.” Rather than return to the island, Arroyo found a job at a bookbinding factory in the Bronx, saved enough money to send for her mother and children, and established a new life in New York City. When Arroyo’s mother and oldest daughter returned to Puerto Rico, Arroyo found herself unable to care for the children and work at the same time. Unable to find day-care services, she quit her job and applied for public assistance, a situation that continued for nine months until her youngest child was in school. An involved, outspoken figure in her children’s education, Arroyo soon became adept at managing the systems of welfare and the politics of the New York City schools. She became an advocate for others in both arenas and in the process laid the foundations for a career in politics. The welfare experience was humiliating for Arroyo. She recalls, “But it was training for me. I went to school; I learned English and I got involved in the community.” She organized a welfare mothers’ organization, the South Bronx Action Group, that succeeded in attracting funding for subsidized housing and helped prepare women on welfare for employment. In addition, Arroyo became involved in Democratic Party politics and helped launch the careers of local politicians. Among the many politicians endorsed by Arroyo was the young Herman Badillo, who went on to become the first Puerto Rican congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. “In those days,” Badillo remembers, “it was mostly women who filled the volunteer pools; men just liked making the speeches.” For Arroyo, the political system became an important venue for community advancement. Throughout the 1970s Arroyo continued to work in party politics and to expand her own opportunities.
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Arroyo, Martina She graduated from Hostos Community College with an associate’s degree in 1978; two years later, at fortyfour years of age, Arroyo earned the baccalaureate degree from the College of New Rochelle. Arroyo became the executive director of the South Bronx Community Corporation, a nonprofit social service organization, and chairperson of School Board 7. In both positions Arroyo’s contribution was tempered by her own experiences as a struggling welfare mother and a commitment to bettering the life of those around her. She established senior citizens’ food programs, promoted health issues, worked in drug rehabilitation, and continued to work closely with the district’s assemblymen. From 1978 until 1993 Arroyo served as district leader of the then Seventy-fourth Assembly District. She sat on the Lincoln Hospital Advisory Board for seventeen years. In 1973 Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed Arroyo to the New York State Medicaid Council. In 1994 Arroyo ran in a special election called by Governor Mario Cuomo to replace the district’s assemblyman. Arroyo won the election with 50 percent of the vote and the support of the Bronx Democratic Party establishment. In 1998 she won reelection with 98 percent of the vote. She serves on the following committees: Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, Children and Families, Education, and Aging. Arroyo’s political positions have not always found favor within the party. A pro-choice advocate, Arroyo also considers herself a Catholic. She is among the most respected political leaders in the state. Her determination to advocate for others remains her primary focus. SOURCE: New York State Assembly. 2005. Official Biography of Assemblywoman Carmen E. Arroyo, 84th Assembly District, New York. http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?ad= 084&sh=bio (accessed June 15, 2005). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
ARROYO, MARTINA (1937–
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Gifted soprano and distinguished professor of music at Indiana University Martina Arroyo was born in Harlem in 1936 during the Great Depression. Her father, Demetrio Arroyo, who hailed from Puerto Rico and was a mechanical engineer employed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, provided a stable home environment for his family. Martina’s mother, Lucille Washington, came from Charleston, South Carolina. Lucille taught Martina to play the piano and encouraged her passion for performing. With few black or Puerto Rican role models in the world of classical performance, Arroyo’s zeal was greatly driven by film musicals popular in the 1940s and 1950s. “I had a lot of dreams when I was a
kid, and my mother humored them,” explained Arroyo in a New York Times Magazine interview. Nonetheless, her mother also instilled the idea that Arroyo should have a career to fall back on in case the stage was unattainable. An exceptionally bright student, Arroyo graduated from the prestigious Hunter High School and majored in romance languages and literature at Hunter College. Following her mother’s sound advice, Arroyo prepared herself for a teaching career. In college Arroyo joined a graduate-level opera workshop and impressed the director, Joseph Turnau, with her abilities. He subsequently arranged a meeting with Marinka Gurewich, a noted voice teacher who accepted Arroyo as a student. Turnau, Gurewich, and Thea Dispeker, Arroyo’s concert manager, remained with her from those first encounters and throughout her career. But in those early college years opera was not a serious option for Arroyo, and the dearth of black women opera singers failed to offer an optimistic picture of singing as a profession. It was not until 1952 that the Puerto Rican soprano Graciela Rivera debuted at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lucia di Lammermoor, and it was not until 1955 that Marian Anderson also sang there. Licensed to teach high-school literature, Arroyo accepted a position in the Bronx but continued to train with Gurewich. An effort to devote more time to her music led to another position with the New York City Welfare Department as a case worker. Arroyo immersed herself in the process of helping others. Her big break came in 1958 when she sang an aria from Aida in the Metropolitan Opera’s Auditions of the Air competition. Awarded $1,000 and a scholarship, Arroyo embarked on the study of German, English diction, drama, and fencing. The following year she debuted at Carnegie Hall in Assassinio nella cattedrale and received critical acclaim from the press. Resigning from her position with the Welfare Department, Arroyo officially entered the world of classical performance with an overseas tour of European opera houses singing minor roles. Arroyo earned a reputation for dependability and for tackling difficult roles. In Italy she met and married violist Emilio Poggioni and joined the Zürich Opera Company. Soon thereafter, according to a New York Times Magazine interview, a visit to her family in Harlem opened a whole new chapter in her career. As the story goes, she received a call from Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, which she immediately assumed was a hoax. He invited her to substitute for the suddenly ill soprano Birgit Nilsson as the lead in Aida. Clearing up the embarrassing situation, Arroyo debuted at the Met on February 4, 1965. The audience’s standing ovation at the final curtain was extraordinary and convinced Bing
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Artists to offer her a contract with the company. Arroyo’s career soared. Rave reviews and recording contracts accompanied her interpretations of the works of the masters. At London’s Covent Garden she appeared as Valentine in Les Huguenots and was the first Puerto Rican/African American artist to portray Elsa in Lohengrin. A series of triumphs throughout the years brought fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and Arroyo also became a celebrated personality in popular culture through numerous appearances on national television. Marking his 1,000th performance with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein specifically invited Arroyo, one of his favorite singers, to perform with him in concert. Married for a second time to financier Michel Maurel, Arroyo maintains residences in New York City, where she keeps in touch with the old family neighborhood from time to time, and in the Caribbean. Remembering her own experiences as a child in Harlem, she is acutely aware of the importance of role models in all professions and devotes time to Hunter College, where she sits on the board of trustees, and the Carnegie Hall board. Nowhere is this sentiment more pronounced than in an interview with Opera News, in which Arroyo posits the importance of extending a helping hand to young generations of opera hopefuls. SOURCES: Cole, Thomas. 1968. “Martina, You Watch What You Say, Hear?” New York Times, April 28, sec. 1, p. 21; Levy, Alan. 1972. “Life at the Opera with Madame ‘Butterball.’ ” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 20, 26–31, 38; Story, Roslyn M. 1991. “Positively Martina.” Opera News, September, 26–28. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
ARTISTS Latina visual artists offer a wide range of expression representative of the cultures from which they derive their inspiration. As a result, it is as problematic to define what constitutes a Latina aesthetic as it is to circumscribe the parameters of what it means to be a Latina in the United States. Their aesthetic products describe the many ways in which women of Latin American descent interpret and reinvent the quotidian elements of their lives. Because the traditions that form the basis of Latina artistic expression are so varied, many artists enjoy success in a variety of art forms. They excel as printmakers, easel and wall painters, sculptors, photographers, textile artists, and crafters of papel picado (intricate paper cut-outs), as well as creators of assemblage, digital, conceptual, and installation art. As a result, there are many cultural influences woven into the tapestry of Latina visual artistry.
In spirit and articulation, Latina artistic production is rooted in the many ethnic heritages found in the Americas. Some artists speak directly to the role of mestizaje in the development of Latina/o identity. One such work, Un nuevo mestizaje: The New Mix (1987– 2001), an oil-on-canvas and oil-on-wood series by Chicana artist Margaret García, is comprised of sixteen canvases. García’s painting borrows from castesystem typographies created in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Illustrations depicting different visages were labeled and positioned in a social hierarchy that valued the lightest complexion. In opposition to this racial phenotypic hierarchy, García’s paintings present an intensely humane visual accounting of the ethnic complexity that shapes contemporary Latina/o identity. Numerous inspirational elements are blended in varying amounts within Latina visual art. The outcome is complex, rich, and deeply rooted in the cultural elements—indigenous, African, and Spanish; modern, traditional, handmade, mass produced, emotive, and intellectual—that form a multifaceted foundation. Exemplary utilization of a nontraditional genre that repositions traditional iconography is seen in the work of multimedia Chicana artist Alma López. Her Lupe y Sirena (1999–2000) digital print series juxtaposes two popular images in Mexican culture: the Virgen de Guadalupe and the mermaid, or la sirena, from the bingo game, la lotería. One print in the series situates the figures in an alluring environment and, in doing so, evokes an erotic atmosphere. López says of this print, “In Lupe & Sirena in Love (2000) they embrace, surrounded by angels with the Los Angeles cityscape and the U.S./Mexico border as their landscape. Guadalupe and Sirena stand on a half moon held by a Viceroy butterfly instead of the traditional angel.” Another example of a traditional form redefined through its juxtaposition within a contemporary medium is the Totem series created by Cuban artist María Martínez-Cañas. This series derives its inspiration from the indigenous totem pole, whose function is to narrate the story of a clan, family, or community. Yet Martínez-Cañas’s work is not the usual carved wooden form; instead, she creates a series of collaged fragments, including personal photographs and reproductions of ancient manuscripts and cartographic illustrations, duplicated as contact prints on photographic paper. Her silver print Totem Negro XVI (1992) recollects her search for an ethnic identity. For many Latinas, artistic expression often emerges from concerns about human welfare and social justice. The vernacular aspects of life inspire artists to tell the stories of ordinary people in the course of everyday life: factory workers and farmworkers, domestics in
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Artists the home, teachers in the classroom, and cultural workers in public venues. The resulting artistic representations depict women and men clothed not in military uniform, but in the uniform of service work. The heads of their subjects are crowned not with feathers, but with sweat, and the hands of their subjects are raised not in the rage of battle, but in the task of daily labor. These highly accessible images belie complex social and political significance. Juana Alicia’s mural Las lechugeras (1983), Yolanda López’s digital print El trabajo de las mujeres no termina nunca: Homenaje a Dolores Huerta (1995), and the mural masterpiece Latinoamerica (1974) created by Las Mujeres Muralistas, a Chicana/Latina group, all draw inspiration from the role that Latinas play in the labor force. Using a less polemical but no less potent approach, the work of Carmen Lomas Garza captures the fantastical delight and mystery found in everyday domestic life. She calls upon childhood memories for her inspiration. Such a moment is seen in her gouache-on-paper Tamalada (1987), in which she details the multigenerational, multifaceted work that takes place when families gather together for the making of tamales. For historical scale, particularly in documenting Latinas/os’ contributions in Los Angeles, the work of Chicana muralist Judith Francesca Baca is unparalleled. Although disparate in presentation, all of these artists’ works are evidence that it is possible to relay the historical development of the Latina/o communities without relying on a reductive heroic saga that forecloses the contributions of numerous individuals. Many Latina artists locate themselves as agents of social change operating within various liberation movements. These identities are rooted in the social activism of the 1960s and 1970s when such expression assumed a scope of mass mobilizations. This period serves as an activist antecedent for popular political expression among Latinas/os in the United States today. Latina artists who came of age during this time responded to the social and cultural potency of the time in their artistic expressions. Inspirational social justice issues for Latina artists included the farmworker struggles, civil rights, student protests, antiwar demonstrations, and land-grant concerns. Two works on paper that capture different expressions from the period are Libertad (1976), a lithograph by Ester Hernández that recasts the Statue of Liberty as an Amerindian stele being carved by a Chicana who foregrounds a contemporary skyline, and Linda Lucero’s Lolita Lebrón (1978), a silk-screen print that foreshadows the U.S. Latina/o activism of the 1980s and 1990s that occurred in response to U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries such as Jamaica, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Peru, and Colombia.
Because of the civil unrest that results from such intervention, Latin American artists have frequently sought asylum in the United States from their native lands. Such artists include Salvadoreña Martivón Galindo, whose monoprints Mujer Maya devorada por los perros (1998) and Fuga del mito (1998) are influenced by the social conditions that exist in her homeland of El Salvador. Chicana artist Yreina Cervántez expresses the solidarity between Chicanas/os and the people of Central America in the title and imagery of her silk-screen print El pueblo Chicano con el pueblo centroamericano (1986). In Cervántez’s work recurrent images of Rigoberta Menchú, Augusto Sandino, and Che Guevara border an urban landscape through which Chicanas/os traverse. Their means of travel is the ubiquitous automobile, whose bumper sticker displays an anti-intervention message. Although struggles exist around the sexual politics of the various liberation movements, Latina artists receive encouragement for their involvement as creative contributors to the movements. The holistic meld of their artistic talent and social consciousness results in artwork that functions as a form of critical reflection. Some Latina artists emerged from predominantly male organizations with painting styles so strong that their work is readily identifiable. Such Chicana artists include Irma Lerma Barbosa, Lorraine García, and Celia Rodríguez from the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), Judith Hernández from Los Four, and Patssi Váldez from ASCO, a cutting edge East Los Angeles art collective. The autobiographical paintings of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo established the representational foundation for some of the late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century artistic production by Latinas in the United States. Artists influenced by Kahlo’s work recognize her dual aesthetic commitment to political action and cultural allegiance. The simultaneity of Kahlo’s representations depicts the celebrations and challenges of being Latina. Artists such as Chicanas Barbara Carrasco, Diane Gamboa, and Xochitl Nevel Guerreo, as well as Costariqueña Marta Chávez and Chilena Paula Pía Martínez, have produced profoundly emotive and thoughtful autobiographical works. In Carrasco’s silk screen Self-Portrait (1984), she illustrates herself as a runner breaking the finish-line tape in a race against time. Instead of breaking a sweat, the paintbrush she holds aloft like a victory torch splashes color against a calendar whose days are being rolled out of existence by a giant paint roller. Her image reminds us that there is little leisure time for Latina artists. As Ester Hernández quips “All of my work is done with a child in one hand, a brush in the other.” Photography is another medium used for autoreflective narratives. Chicana photographers Laura Aguilar, Christina Fernández, Delilah Montoya, and Kathy Var-
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Artists
Looking at the Primitive. By and courtesy of Delilah Montoya.
gas demonstrate the breadth of form, style, and worldview possible in this singular genre. Aguilar’s provocative self-portraiture, such as that found in Three Eagles Flying (1990), In Sandy’s Room (1990), and Don’t Tell Her Art Can’t Hurt (1993), draws upon her identity as a Chicana lesbian artist. Aguilar’s intimate work contrasts with Fernández’s stylized figurative approach exemplified by her series María’s Great Expedition (1995), whose sociohistorical presentation provides the backdrop to her visual narrative. Montoya presents her abstracted figurative prints as installation art, as in the case of Shooting the Tourist (1995), an antidocumentarian work. Vargas, best known for her compelling use of multiple exposure and text, as in the series My Alamo (1995), brings to her art a Tex-Mex influence that derives from living on the border. Parallel in spirit is the Arbol de la vida (1977) series of the now-deceased interdisciplinary Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, who produced as a sculptor, as well as a conceptual and performance artist. Mendieta’s performance piece, which
she documented as a series of photographic prints, placed her nude body, covered in mud, against a mammoth tree trunk. Mendieta both emerges from and is engulfed by the power of the tree as she demonstrates the essential connection between nature and human life. Latina artistic production is embedded within the overarching social and cultural structures and pressures that result from mainstream racism and misogyny. Paramount for success as a working artist is identifying and affiliating with mentors. In their quest to develop as mature artists, Latinas are challenged by the persistent lack of mentors who understand artistry culled from traditions other than mainstream culture and shaped by the unique vision that springs from being a woman of Latin American descent. Novelist Ana Castillo dramatically illustrates how some Latinas are unable to overcome the paucity of support and the social pressure placed on them for their gender-role transgressions when she says: “Many women who showed great creative promise did not continue. Some were forced to stop. Some went mad. Others died.” In an effort to sustain their artistic impulses and find rigorous critical commentary, some Latina artists form collective organizations. One such group of middle- to elder-aged Chicanas based in Sacramento, California, Co-Madres Artistas, has worked together since 1992. Their success as a collective is due in large measure to the strength of presentation derived from their cooperative art-making processes and the commercial success of their paintings. As one member of the group says, “Solo, we are not that important. But, as CoMadres we are giants. We belong as a whole to the community.” Latinas also form alliances with feminists, most notably with other women of color, as a means of gaining
Sewa Virgen. By and courtesy of Consuelo J. Underwood.
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Artists support and inspiration; these collaborations frequently result in hybridized expressions that reflect the cultural traditions of contributing artist members. The mural Maestrapeace (1994) was painted by the multicultural, multiracial group of the same name and is described as the “largest mural in the San Francisco– Oakland Bay Area.” The group counts among its seven members Chicana artists Juana Alicia and Irene Pérez. Artistic embellishment of everyday goods also provides for an outpouring of expression that celebrates life and self. Quilts, serapes, rebozos, arpilleras, comida, altares, and monitos are but some examples of the material culture that is incorporated into Latina artistic expression. This particular formulation of visual art provides the means for their largely Latina/o audiences to contextualize and reflect on the daily realities of their lives. Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, a textile artist, combines elements of quilt making with colcha embroidery and graphite illustrative work in the piece Virgen de los Caminos (1994) and creates a powerful work of art that conveys the dangerous act of crossing the physical and psychological borders separating the United States and Mexico. Textile art also serves as a form of historical memory and sustainable development for those who elect to work cooperatively within a traditional framework in the application of contemporary design. Tierra Wools, a northern New Mexico–based weaving collective of Hispanas founded in 1992, is unique for its growth as an arts and cultural group that enjoys success as an economic development venture providing college credits and employment for its member weavers. Hybrid formulations of contemporary form and traditional iconography are also apparent in the works of installation and conceptual artists. The art of Amalia Mesa-Bains elicits praise for her use of abstract concepts embedded and presented within readily accessible formulations. Cuban artist Coco Fusco presents her installation and performance pieces as satirical challenges to mainstream notions of Latina identity. Working on a more intimate scale, Chicanas Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Santa Barraza, and Patricia Rodríguez and Puertorriqueña Marina Gutiérrez create works that hearken to the ex-voto or retablo traditions. Their allegorical, multimedia boxes depict the miraculous occasions found in the secular sphere rather than the usual telling of the religious moment. Among the emergent generation there are those Latina artists whose works resist traditional boundaries of expression and sources of inspiration. These artists pull from animation and cartoon or anime (futuristic Japanese animation) for their inspiration and frequently rely on contemporary processes of creation such as gicleé (a high-resolution digital print process). One such Chicana artist, Camille Rose García, is de-
Ana Mendieta, Silueta, Mexico, 1971. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection. Galerie Lelong, New York.
scribed as deploying “personally edgy contemporary iconography and language” as she “explores themes of invasion and replication” in intriguingly titled paintings such as Cherry Girls vs Contaminatron, Creepcake Annihilation Plan, and Parasite Eradication Squad. It is important to restate that Latina visual artists are prolific and multidimensional and reframe their forms of expression as their artistic trajectories shift in interest. No one artist or group of artists can stand as the essential representatives of Latina aesthetic expression. The approaches and articulations of Latina artists share only the coincidence and richness of complexity born from a hemisphere of influence. What this artistry might be said to hold in common is that the works cause their audiences to marvel at the vibrancy of each piece. SOURCES: Arnoldo, García, and Elizabeth Martínez, eds. 1993. “A Salute to Latinas in the Arts.” Crossroads Magazine: Contemporary Political Analysis and Left Dialogue, May; Goldman, Shifra. 1994. “Mujeres de California: Latin American Women Artists.” In Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Guzmán, Juana. 1987. Latina Art: Showcase ’87/ Arte de Latinas: Muestra ’87. Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Museum; Ochoa, María. 2003. Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Smithsonian Institute Latino Art
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Asociación Nacional México-Americana Archives. http://artarchives.si.edu/guides/latino (accessed January 8, 2003).
María Ochoa
ASOCIACIÓN NACIONAL MÉXICOAMERICANA (ANMA) (1949–1954) As the cold war and McCarthyism intensified their grip on the domestic life of the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, Mexican Americans organized to challenge what many regarded as their status as second-class citizens. One such group, the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), was formed in 1949 as a progressive and leftist civil rights group with a significant multiethnic coalition base. The association promoted immigrant rights, cultural and social rights, political representation, and opposition to the Korean War. By 1950 ANMA boasted a membership of more than 4,000, with thirty or more locals throughout the Midwest and Southwest. Mexican American women gained prominence within the association as leaders, intellectuals, and organizers. In the struggle for first-class citizenship, these women challenged racial, class, gender, and sexual barriers that circumscribed their daily lives. ANMA women brought significant experience in progressive and radical political activism. Some had long advocated the development of a national organization for the defense of the Mexican American community. Few exemplified this more than Francisca Flores. Born in 1913 and reared in San Diego’s poorest barrios, Flores was profoundly influenced by the political climate within the barrios following the Mexican Revolution. She moved to Los Angeles during the 1940s, a time of heightened anti-Mexican sentiment. In 1943 twelve Mexican American youth were unjustly convicted of murder in what was called “The Sleepy Lagoon Case.” Francisca Flores joined a grassroots defense committee, composed of such prominent activists as Josefina Fierro and prominent author Carey McWilliams. This committee generated visibility for the defendants’ plight and raised money for their appeal. In 1944 the 2nd District Court of Appeals overturned their convictions. The case and the defense committee would be memorialized in the popular 1979 play Zoot Suit. Francisca Flores emerged as a local civil rights leader during her work with the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. She became a mentor to young Mexican American activists who looked to her for intellectual guidance and inspiration. Ralph Cuarón, an organizer with the furniture workers and ANMA’s first national youth director, remembered that Flores introduced him to the political milieu of the Left in Los Angeles. Flores supported grassroots democratic projects
and organizations that educated the Mexican American electorate and working class. She was a board member of the statewide California Legislative Conference and worked as an instructor for the California Labor School. In 1949 she taught a course on the problems of Mexican American people and methods for organizing this community. At ANMA’s founding national convention in October 1950, she and Alfredo Montoya, the national president, coauthored a pamphlet, Towards the Unity of the Mexican People in the United States, that outlined the group’s long history of struggle and resistance. Despite her poor health stemming from tuberculosis at a very young age, she remained active and a key figure influencing the course of Mexican American intellectual development, leadership, and political activism. Isabel Gonzáles and Virginia X. Ruiz also gained prominent positions on ANMA’s national executive board. A longtime activist in Denver, Colorado, Gonzáles operated an agency that provided social services to the Mexican American and immigrant communities. Described as a firebrand, she frequently spoke and wrote critically of the nation’s racist policies that forced Mexican Americans into the margins of society. A regular outlet to the public was a local publication out of Denver called the Letter; she was on its editorial advisory board. In 1949 Gonzáles was elected first vice president of ANMA’s executive body. In the same year Virginia X. Ruiz became secretary general of the national executive board. Highly visible and active, Ruiz addressed issues of civil rights, immigration policies, and the plight of immigrant workers. She spoke for the repeal of the 1940 Smith Act, the first peacetime sedition act in American history; the 1950 Internal Security Act; and the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. Others involved in ANMA’s formative phase included Celia Luna Rodríguez and her sister, Julia Luna Mount. Both supported unionizing efforts and civil rights. Active in regional and state conventions, the sisters spearheaded the organization of the Eastside chapter and held offices in the organization. Julia was secretary-treasurer to the southern California regional office; María Galloway was vice president; and Celia became vice president of the national office. ANMA represented a new spirit that was moving Mexican American communities to resist oppressive conditions nationwide. It reached out to other communities of color, such as African Americans, to form progressive coalitions. Unfortunately, ANMA’s activities raised the ire of anti-Communist and conservative groups that readily labeled the association as subversive and anti-American. By 1954 ANMA could no longer withstand the continued harassment of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, local police, and federal and state investigative committees charged
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ASPIRA with ferreting out Communist organizations. The association fell into disarray and never recovered. SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo. 2004. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 5th ed. New York: Longman; García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930– 1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Vargas, Zaragosa, ed. 1999. Major Problems in Mexican American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Enrique M. Buelna
ASPIRA (1961–
)
ASPIRA was founded as a nonprofit community organization in 1961 by the Puerto Rican educator and activist Dr. Antonia Pantoja and other community leaders. The name ASPIRA is derived from the Spanish verb that means “to aspire.” The group’s stated goal was and continues to be the socioeconomic development of the Puerto Rican community in the United States through the education of its youth. According to Pantoja, a staunch supporter of education, “ASPIRA’s program is based on the absolute belief that there is only one certain avenue remaining for the Puerto Rican to lift himself out of the grip of poverty—education.” ASPIRA’s primary objectives are high-school retention, college placement, and college retention. It operates a wide range of programs and services for Puerto Rican and other Latino young people and their families, including educational counseling, academic tutoring, and information about financial assistance. ASPIRA also sponsors parent workshops. An important aspect of its mission was to foster cul-
tural awareness and pride in Puerto Rican identity through social activities and Puerto Rican history and culture classes. The organization continues to do that but has broadened its focus in recent years to include other Latino communities. Funded originally by private foundations and corporations, ASPIRA has subsequently been supported by government money, as well as continued foundation and corporate support. ASPIRA first operated in Manhattan but later expanded to four borough offices throughout New York City. In 1968 it became ASPIRA of America and established centers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Throughout the years ASPIRA has served many thousands of Puerto Rican and Latino students and has sought to influence public education policy through its efforts as a pressure and interest group. A prime example of this was its successful 1972 classaction legal suit brought in partnership with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund against the Board of Education of New York City for failing to educate the city’s limited-English-speaking children. The result was the ASPIRA Consent Decree that established bilingual education in the city’s public school system. ASPIRA recognizes that its achievements can only be acknowledged within the context of progress against unequal access to adequate schools, decent housing, good jobs, and better business and career opportunities. Several generations of aspirantes or ASPIRA alumni, now found in leadership positions in local, state, and national government, the health professions, universities, schools, and law and corporate offices, attest to the organization’s success. See also Education SOURCES: ASPIRA of New York. 1974. Annual Report; Santiago Santiago, Isaura. 1981. ASPIRA v. Board of Education
ASPIRA founder Antonia Pantoja (seated in the middle with a black vest) with organizers and aspirantes. Courtesy of Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Avila, María Elena of the City of New York: A History and Policy Analysis. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.
Carlos Sanabria
Board of Education. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, Office for Minority Education; ——— . 1981. ASPIRA v. Board of Education of the City of New York: A History and Policy Analysis. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.
Carlos Sanabria
ASPIRA V. NEW YORK CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION (1972–1974)
AVILA, MARÍA ELENA (1953–
On September 20, 1972, ASPIRA, a Puerto Rican community educational organization, employing attorneys from the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, filed suit against the Board of Education of the City of New York. This class-action suit alleged that as a result of their ethnicity and language, 182,000 Puerto Rican children of little or no English-language ability in the New York City public schools were being discriminated against and denied an equal educational opportunity because they were unable to understand their teachers or read their textbooks. The plaintiffs argued that the city’s school system had failed to provide adequate educational programs to meet these student’s special pedagogical and cultural requirements. ASPIRA petitioned the court to order the board of education to initiate bilingual education programs as the only way to satisfactorily meet the needs of non-Englishspeaking Puerto Rican children in the public schools. As a result of the suit, an agreement known as the ASPIRA Consent Decree was signed by both parties on August 29, 1974. This decree provided that the New York City Board of Education would establish and implement a bilingual education program and that it would identify students whose limited Englishlanguage proficiency precluded them from completely availing themselves of the education being offered. Instructors and support personnel would be provided to all children entitled to the program. Moreover, the consent decree promoted minimum educational standards to be met by all districts in the school system and stipulated that a maximum effort be made to obtain the needed financial resources and the number of teachers required to implement a bilingual program by September 1975. The policies on special educational programs that resulted from ASPIRA v. Board of Education augmented national rulings and laws, among them Lau v. Nichols and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the rights of language-minority children. Federal policy now mandated federal aid to hundreds of school districts throughout the nation to provide language-minority students with equal opportunities for full participation in the educational process. See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: Santiago Santiago, Isaura. 1978. A Community’s Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity: ASPIRA v.
)
Born on April 18, 1953, in a small village in Guanajuato, Mexico, María Elena Avila has become one of the most successful Latino entrepreneurs in Orange County, California. She and her brothers, the children of Salvador and Margarita Avila, own and operate the popular Avila’s El Ranchito restaurants, with ten locations in southern California. A former bracero, her father brought the family to the United States when María Elena was only five years old. With the help of relatives, the Avilas put down roots in Huntington Park, California, and there in 1966 her parents, borrowing pots and pans, started their first restaurant. Her mother was the cook, her father, the janitor, and her grandfather, the dishwasher. After school and on weekends, María Elena and her siblings (three brothers and one sister) went to work at the family restaurant. Her parents taught the children the importance of family unity, faith, hard work, and cultural pride. In María Elena’s words, “I know first hand what it means to be an immigrant.” In 1974 María Elena Avila started her first restaurant. Although she was only twenty-one years old and a single mother, she was determined to succeed in business despite her father’s misgivings. “After I got divorced, my dad said, ‘Honey, you’re a woman. You don’t belong in the restaurant business. You can’t run the restaurant on your own. We’ll take care of you and your daughter.’ But I said, ‘I’ve got a daughter to support and I’m going to make it.’ So I rolled up my sleeves and I was determined.” She continued, “I saw my mom as a partner in the business; I had her as a role model.” Avila owns Avila’s El Ranchito in Costa Mesa and the family catering business. As the keeper of her mother’s cherished recipes, she oversees the quality control at all of the restaurants. In addition, she has tinkered with a few of the dishes over the years in order to create more heart-healthy versions that remain true to authentic flavors. María Elena Avila is one of the area’s most recognized Latina civic leaders. For example, she has served as a founding member of the Orange County Hispanic Education Endowment Fund and the Latino Leadership Council. A devout Pentecostal, Avila credits her success as a businesswoman, philanthropist, and mother to her Christian faith. She is justifiably proud of her daughter Elizabeth, who is now an attorney. A tireless fund-raiser for college scholarships, Avila has partici-
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Avila, Modesta
María Elena Avila, a successful Latina entrepreneur, with her daughter Elizabeth. Courtesy of María Elena Avila.
pated on a number of local university boards. Since 2001, she has been the madrina of the University of California at Irvine’s Community Outreach Partnership Center, which engages faculty, staff, and students in applied research, service learning, and outreach activities that foster community development through initiatives that promote collaboration, inspire civic engagement, and advance the cultural, social, and economic welfare of neighborhoods, focusing on Orange County. Reflecting on her family’s business philosophy, María Elena Avila stated, “They’re not just restaurants. . . . They are an extension of our family.” See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Avila, María Elena. 2004. Interview by Vicki L. Ruiz, August 23; Newspaper clippings on María Elena Avila (private collection of María Elena Avila); Tertrault, Sharon. 2003. “Orange County Families: The Avilas.” Orange Coast, March, 152–156. Vicki L. Ruiz
AVILA, MODESTA (1867–1891?) Modesta Avila was born into a ranching family in 1867. Her kin lived on a small plot of land in southern California’s San Juan Capistrano that they owned until about 1888 and continued to occupy and cultivate after having sold it. This land and the region’s cultural and gender politics thrust Avila into the center of a dramatic tragedy of great personal and symbolic import. In 1889, when Avila was in her early twenties, some of the region’s Anglo residents wanted to secede from
the larger Los Angeles County and create Orange County. Rapidly populating the area, migrants of all origins joined Mexicans who had been there for generations. More often than not, the newcomers did everything possible to acquire (or appropriate) Mexicanowned land. Among those who looked voraciously at the region were the owners of the railroad companies who sought to spread their tracks into the south. Modesta Avila and the Santa Fe Railroad almost literally collided shortly before Orange County was created. The railroad, increasingly the most powerful economic interest in southern California, expanded over people’s property without permission or recompense, and in Avila’s case the Santa Fe did just that: their tracks ran through her former property, and she had no say in the matter. Nonetheless, like many others violated in this way by the powerful railroads, Avila objected strenuously. Sometime in June 1889 she challenged the railroad through a gesture that would come back to haunt her a few months later. She laid a railroad tie or a wooden post across the tracks that passed through her property. It is said that she attached a paper to the post on which she had written, “This land belongs to me!” Shortly thereafter she informed a railroad agent, and he removed the tie before a train passed. Four months later the newly elected sheriff of the recently created Orange County, together with the newly elected district attorney, had Modesta Avila arrested and charged her with obstructing a railroad track. She was tried before a jury twice; the first trial ended in a hung jury, and the second with her conviction on November 1, 1889. (It is interesting to note that between the first and second trials, people had learned that Avila was pregnant, a socially unacceptable condition for a young single woman in nineteenth-century San Juan Capistrano.) Avila was sentenced to three years in the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin, where she joined a handful of other women imprisoned there. There is every reason to believe that the sequence of legal events that occurred four months after Avila’s symbolic protest was connected to the fact that Orange County’s criminal justice apparatus had yet to accomplish a successful prosecution. Its first felony trial had culminated earlier with an acquittal, and county leaders were anxious to show the state leaders that they could make a strong stand against crime. Avila thus became the vehicle for polishing Orange County’s lawand-order image. It did not hurt the prosecution’s cause that Avila was portrayed in the press of the time as a loose woman, nor that she was one of many Mexicans who had once owned land. Her lawyer, George Hayford, represented her during her two trials at no cost to her and continued to help
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Aztlán unknown, the image of that young and fearless female David challenging the railroad Goliath is appealing and dramatic. Her actions ensure her a place beside thousands and thousands of nameless Chicanas and other Latinas who have stood up to demand their rights. SOURCE: Haas, Lisbeth. 1995. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press. Victoria Ortiz
AZTLÁN
Modesta Avila when she was incarcerated in San Quentin. Courtesy of California State Archives.
her while she was at San Quentin. He petitioned unsuccessfully for a writ of habeas corpus in February 1890 and subsequently petitioned two governors, again unsuccessfully, for a pardon. Hayford argued that Avila’s conviction was more a reflection of the community’s moralistic disapproval of her unwed pregnancy than of the strength of the criminal case against her. He also maintained that Orange County’s political leaders needed a conviction on the books in order to measure up to the larger and more established Los Angeles County from which they had seceded. Finally, he accused Avila’s father of having misled her as to her rights as a property owner, implying that the father had received some benefit by allowing the railroad to build tracks on the land. In any event, Avila remained in San Quentin, and prison records show that she was discharged on March 3, 1892, eight months before the end of her three-year sentence. Other sources, however, allege that she died in prison. Indeed, her obituary appeared in the Santa Ana Standard on September 26, 1891. Modesta Avila led a short life, one that might have gone unnoticed but for her short burst of celebrity, the stark symbolism of her spontaneous protest against the violation of her rights, and the brutal punishment she received for it. While the details of her death are not chronicled, and even the details of her daily life are
Scholars generally believe that the word Aztlán derives from Aztatlan, a Nahuatl-language contraction of two words: aztatl, which means heron, and tlan, which means close together. According to the oldest Mexica sources, which became known and transcribed after the 1521 Spanish conquest, Aztlán was described as a place in Mexico’s north, populated by many white herons, with seven caves, and surrounded by water. Those who interpret the details of Aztlán literally place it variously in Lake Chapala in the Mexican state of Jalisco, in Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington, in New Mexico, and on the island of Mezcaltitlán in Nayarit, Mexico. Even to the Aztecs themselves, Aztlán was already a place deeply shrouded in mythology and little concrete reality by the fifteenth century. Sometime between 1440 and 1469, for example, Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, the Mexica ruler, is said to have summoned his priests, hoping to learn what was known of their place of origin. According to Fray Diego Durán, who recounted this story in 1581, the royal historian Cuauhcóatl appeared before Moctezuma Ilhuicamina to explain:
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Our forebears dwelt in that blissful, happy place called Aztlán, which means “Whiteness.” In that place there is a great hill in the midst of the waters, and it is called Colhuacan because its summit is twisted; this is the Twisted Hill. On its slopes were caves or grottos where our fathers and grandfathers lived for many years. There they lived in leisure, when they were called Mexitin and Azteca. There they had at their disposal great flocks of ducks of different kinds, herons, water fowl, and cranes. . . . Our ancestors went about in canoes and made floating gardens upon which they sowed maize, chili, tomatoes, amaranth, beans and all kinds of seeds which we now eat and which were brought here from there. However, after they came to the mainland and abandoned that delightful place, everything turned against them. The weeds began to bite, the stones became sharp, the fields were filled with thistles and spines. They encountered brambles and thorns that were difficult to pass through. There was
Aztlán no place to sit, there was no place to rest; everything became filled with vipers, snakes, poisonous little animals, jaguars and wildcats and other ferocious beasts. And this is what our ancestors forsook. I have found it painted in our ancient books. And this, O powerful king, is the answer I can give you to what you ask of me. (Durán 1964, 134)
While a few other historical sources from the colonial period offer more details on Aztlán, most are highly suspect because they are thoroughly saturated with Spanish influences and tell more about Mexica acculturation under colonial rule than about any authentic pre-Columbian past. In 1885 William G. Ritch, then secretary of the Territory of New Mexico and the recently elected president of the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, issued a promotional book on the resources of New Mexico titled Aztlán: The History, Resources and Attractions of New Mexico, which was meant to attract Anglo immigrants to the territory. Published in more than 100,000 copies, the book asserted that archaeologists generally agreed that Aztlán was “near the portion of New Mexico and Arizona bounded by the 35th and 37th parallel of latitude.” The bulk of Aztlán was devoted to a glorious description of all the resources and opportunities that awaited American immigrants, promising investment returns as high as 80 percent. “Rich mines are found in almost every direction . . . our mountains contain illimitable treasures, in the shape of lead, iron, copper, silver, mica and gold, and in the near future this beautiful country is destined to be known as the true El Dorado.” The fantasy of Aztlán that William G. Ritch cultivated was one in which Anglos would become so numerically dominant that they would subordinate the Mexican and Indian residents of the territory, and that New Mexico would become a state. Ritch promised Anglo immigrants a place “on the top of the ladder,” but if they were “not prepared to take their place at the top, it would have been better if they stayed away.” Through Anglo industry, individualism, and republican spirit New Mexico would be brought into the “last” epoch of history, to be ushered in by the “advent of the ever restless and irresistible American, to whom has been reserved the gigantic task of developing the illimitable resources of this most wonderful country, and by whom, eventually, the entire universe will be enriched in a most material manner.” Aztlán was a particularly poignant example of how a myth was selectively appropriated, reinterpreted, and selectively transformed to serve concrete political gain far from central Mexico. In 1885 William G. Ritch wanted to attract immigrants to New Mexico so that Anglos would outnumber Hispanos to create an
Anglo-dominated state. Indeed, Ritch accomplished his goal in 1912. For Chicanos and Chicanas, Aztlán is both a very specific geographic concept, which encompasses the southwestern states of the United States, and a very general sentiment, a national sense of belonging to an oppressed racial group that yearns for the return of their homeland known as Aztlán. This specific place and general sentiment came to consciousness among Chicanos in 1967 because of the writings of a San Diego, California, poet known simply as Alurista. In 1967 Alurista picked up a copy of Life magazine that contained an article on the discovery of the main altar of the Aztecs’ high temple in Mexico City when the underground metro was being constructed in preparation for the 1968 Olympics. The article reported that the Aztecs had come from Aztlán, which was generally believed to exist somewhere in northern Mexico, perhaps even in the U.S. Southwest. Alurista was so intrigued by what he learned that he began to wax lyrically in his poems about Aztlán as the stolen homeland of Chicanos that he and others hoped would soon be returned, if necessary as the result of a national revolution.
Embracing cultural nationalism, Chicano students sought to reclaim a glorious Aztec past. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department.
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Aztlán Alurista’s role in placing the concept of Aztlán into circulation was certainly catalytic, but it was not until March 1969, at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, organized by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, that Aztlán took concrete form in the ideology of the Chicano radical students gathered there. With more than 1,500 persons in attendance, representing more than 100 different student groups from all over the United States, the participants declared their quest for nationhood and announced that Aztlán was the stolen homeland they wished restored. Articulating their demands in a conference manifesto, which they called El plan espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), they proclaimed: We, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny. We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows and by our hearts. Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the Bronze Continent. Brotherhood unites us and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggle against foreigner “Gabacho,” who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, We Declare the Independence of our Mestizo Nation. We are a Bronze People with a Bronze Culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the Bronze Continent, We are a Nation, We are a Union of free pueblos, We are Aztlán. (Valdez and Steiner 1972, 402–403)
chose to call themselves el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), referred to by the acronym MEChA, which literally means matchstick. Through MEChA students orchestrated and coordinated their curricular and pedagogical demands at various colleges and universities across the land. If by the early 1970s many Chicano studies programs looked similar in shape, content, and outreach activities, it was because students had been successful in imposing the plan, or some part of it, on their campus. Aztlán inflamed the imagination of Chicanos and Chicanas in 1967 and 1968 precisely because of the racism, segregation, poverty, police brutality, and lack of educational access they faced in American society. They imagined a land of plenty, of justice and racial equality, an autonomous nation governed by selfdetermination, and those sentiments seemed possible in a mythic place called Aztlán. In the decade that followed, a number of literary and artistic works used Aztlán as a potent symbol of Chicano identity. In 1969 at UCLA the scholarly journal Aztlán published its first issue, introduced by Alurista’s “Poem in Lieu of Preface.” In 1974 Miguel Méndez’s novel Peregrinos de Aztlán described a U.S. Southwest in which Chicanos were an oppressed and occupied population. Rodolfo Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlán followed in 1976, in which the reverse journey from Mexico City/Tenochtitlán to Aztlán was imagined as a return to an original state of might and splendor. These are the lineages of the concept of Aztlán as it has been used over the ages. See also Chicano Movement
Within a month of the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education (CCHE), a network of faculty, students, and staff in California institutions of higher education, organized another conference, this one on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in April 1969. The goal of the group was to improve Mexican American access to higher education through the elaboration of curricula and appropriate support services. Armed with El plan espiritual de Aztlán, brought by some of the student activists from Denver, the students at the conference made their first order of business the adoption of a militant identity and name that would unite many different student organizations into a national force. Many students were determined that whatever name was chosen, it had to include Chicano and Aztlán. After much debate they
SOURCES: Alurista. 1971. El ombligo de Aztlán. San Diego: San Diego State College, Centro de Estudios Chicanos Publications; Anaya, Rudolfo. 1976. Heart of Aztlán. Berkeley: Justa Publications; Anaya, Rudolfo, and Francisco Lomelí, eds. 1989. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque: Academia/el Norte Publications; Bruce-Nova, Juan. 1980. “Alurista.” In Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interviews. Austin: University of Texas Press; Durán, Diego. 1964. The Aztecs: the History of the Indies of New Spain. Trans. Dories Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas. New York: Orion Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1989. “Aztlán, Montezuma, and New Mexico: The Political Uses of American Indian Mythology.” In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, eds. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí. Albuquerque: Academia/El Norte Publications; Méndez, Miguel. 1979. Peregrinos de Aztlán. Berkeley: Justa Publications; Muñoz, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso; Ritch, William G. 1885. Aztlán: The History, Resources and Attractions of New Mexico. Boston: D. Lothrop and Co.; Valdez, Luis, and Stan Steiner, eds. 1972. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.” Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Ramón A. Gutiérrez
B q BABÍN, MARÍA TERESA (1910–1989) Dedicated to a life of learning, teaching, and the dissemination of Hispanic culture, María Teresa Babín had been encouraged as a young girl by her mother to pursue a life in literature and higher education. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Babín went on to study at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she received a master’s degree in Hispanic studies in 1939. There her interest in the work of the famous Spanish author Federico García Lorca took root and was the topic of her master’s thesis, which was later published as Federico García Lorca y su obra (1939). From 1932 to 1940 Babín taught Spanish and French in high schools in Puerto Rico and the United States, and in 1940 she became an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico. In the mid-1940s Babín moved to the United States and taught as an instructor at Hunter College in New York. She began to write what would be considered one of her major literary contributions, Introducción a la cultura hispánica (1949), which was used as a textbook on several college and university campuses. Babín’s passion for Lorca’s writing became the topic of her doctoral dissertation from Columbia University in 1951, as well as that of several books, among them El mundo poético de Federico García Lorca (1954), García Lorca: Vida y obra (1955), and La prosa mágica de García Lorca (1962). At Columbia Babín met her first husband, Estevan Vicente, a Spanish artist. Her scholarly interests were not limited to Lorca; Puerto Rican themes also became a focus of her prolific intellectual output. Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña is an overview of the island’s cultural development before the date of the work’s publication in 1958, and Babín’s literary creativity is expressed in her Fantasía Boricua: Estampas de mi tierra (1956). This work combines nostalgic remembrances of the island with Puerto Rican customs, folk traditions, and diverse cultural and historical data. In 1962 Babín compiled an anthology of the respected but controversial nineteenthcentury poet Francisco Gonzalo (Pachín) Marín, whose poetry championed the cause of Puerto Rican indepen-
dence. Her own affinity for poetry was revealed in her collection of poems, Las voces de tu voz, published in 1962. In the 1960s Babín met her second husband, José Nieto, also a college professor. Babín’s professional career in higher education transpired on a number of campuses. In the 1950s she became an assistant professor of Spanish at New York University; in the late 1960s she joined the faculty of Lehman College of the City University of New York, where she founded and headed the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, in addition to holding a faculty position at the City University of New York Graduate School. Recognized for her literary accomplishments, as well as her promotion of Puerto Rican culture, with numerous awards and honors from her native Puerto Rico, Babín received the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña literary prize in 1954, the Ateneo Puertorriqueño literary prize in 1955, the Unión Mujeres Americanas prize in 1962, and the Prize of the Year in literature from the Instituto Puertorriqueño in 1970. The Puerto Rican author Cesáreo Rosa-Nieves has expressed his admiration of María Teresa Babín, citing her “passionate attachment” to the culture of her country and her work as an educator on the island and in the United States. See also Literature SOURCES: Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña. 1974. Vol. 1. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña; Notable Hispanic American Women. 1993. Detroit: Gale Research. Margarite Fernández Olmos
BACA, JUDITH FRANCESCA (1946–
)
Judith Baca’s influence on the development of public art in Los Angeles is such that any discussion of contemporary wall art in the United States must reference Baca’s many murals found throughout the city. Baca is a native of Los Angeles. Her early childhood was influenced by her grandmother, mother, and two aunts. When she was six, her family moved to a suburb north of Los Angeles. Baca keenly felt the loss of her grand-
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Baca Barragán, Polly mother, who remained in the city. She also experienced a cultural uprooting that resulted from her family’s departure from the neighborly atmosphere of the barrio. Artistic expression became Baca’s source of affirmation and consolation. Her early interest and talent in art developed as she matured into a young adult. Baca earned a baccalaureate degree in 1969 and an M.A. in fine art from California State University, Northridge, in 1979. Murals painted at Hollenbeck Park (1970) and Venice Pavilion (1974) were among Baca’s first encounters with the power and promise of collaborative mural work. After the completion of her undergraduate studies, she taught art in a high school and was also a member of the local parks and recreation staff. While she was coordinating a community art program, Citywide Mural Project, she invited gang members from rival neighborhoods to successfully work together on mural projects. Baca is credited with coordinating the first mural in Los Angeles to be painted by a racially mixed group of artists. These germinal experiences provided Baca with a vision for utilizing mural painting as a means of bridging cultural difference and articulating commonality among people of diverse backgrounds. Central to Baca’s approach is her emphasis on collective practice that brings artists, community members, civic leaders, and young people together in creative partnership. Billed as the “longest mural in the world,” The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1974–1984) was created by more than 400 people, mostly youths, working with Baca. The resulting heritage mural is notable for its illustration of the quotidian elements of peoples’ lives. A decade in the making, the mural is more than 130 feet high and more than 2,400 feet in length; restorative work on it was begun in 2002. In 1976 Baca founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). A cross-cultural art service center, SPARC serves as an institutional home to muralists and interested art historians, educators, and collectors from around the world. The organization exists as Baca’s enduring contribution to public discourse regarding wall art, its artists, and the relationship of community to public artwork. Its programs and services reach beyond the boundaries of Los Angeles and touch the lives of people around the world. Baca coordinated The World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear (1987–1994), which consists of fourteen panels, seven of them painted in Los Angeles and the remaining seven by artists in countries that served as sponsors of this traveling mural. The World Wall was first exhibited in Finland in 1990; it later traveled to Moscow, where it was on display in Gorky Park. Baca works in the traditional mural genre of painting, as well as in digital art format. La memoria de nuestra tierra (2000) was commissioned for the Denver
Airport. Digitally produced on aluminum tile, this mural tells the stories of indigenous, Mexicana/o, and Anglo residents of the area. It required two years of historical research conducted by Baca while on fellowship at Harvard University. The City of Durango, Colorado, commissioned Baca to create reCollections (2002), a digital mural whose figurative narrative relates the stories of local residents living in this small rural town. In addition to her work as a muralist and art administrator, Baca serves as a faculty member affiliated with the César Chávez Center for Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She previously taught at California State University, Monterey Bay, and at the University of California, Irvine. The Liberty Hill Foundation honored Baca in 2000 for her leadership and artistic contributions with the Creative Vision Award. She received the National Hispanic Heritage Award from the Hispanic Heritage Awards Foundation in 2001. See also Artists SOURCES: Barnett, Alan. 1984. Community Murals: The People’s Art. New York: Art Alliance Press; Cockcroft, Eva, and Holly Barnet-Sánchez, eds. 1990. Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Cockcroft, Eva, John Weber, and James Cockcroft. 1998. Toward a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Social and Public Art Resource Center. www.sparemurals.org (accessed June 19, 2005). María Ochoa
BACA BARRAGÁN, POLLY (1941–
)
Among the earliest Chicanas to hold public office, Polly Baca was born in 1941 on a small farm in Weld County, between Greeley and La Salle, Colorado. Reared in a family that valued education for women, Polly and her two sisters were encouraged to aspire to higher education. “My mother always talked about the importance of education. We would never know, when we got married, if our husbands would die or leave us.” Despite hardships and discrimination against Mexican Americans, Baca attended Colorado State University on a state scholarship and in 1963 earned a baccalaureate degree in political science. In 1992 she earned a master of arts in public administration. She was named honorary doctor of humane letters by the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley and received an honorary doctor of law from Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. Baca married civil rights activist Miguel Francisco Barragán and has two adult children. Her areas of interest are leadership/management styles and women, how Hispanics dealt with the “old guard” in established institutions, and investigating different
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Baez, Joan Chandos leadership/management styles of Hispanic men and women. Baca was a member of the Colorado state legislature for twelve years. Elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in 1974 and to the Colorado Senate in 1978, Polly Baca became the first minority woman to serve in a leadership capacity in any state senate in the United States. In 1977 Baca chaired the House Democratic Caucus. From 1981 until 1989 she was vicechairman in the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and in 1992 and again in 1996 she cochaired the Colorado campaign for the Clinton/Gore ticket. In 1994 President Bill Clinton named Polly Baca his special assistant to the Office of Consumer Affairs. As the chief consumer advisor for the president, Baca served as chair of the Consumer Affairs Council and chaired the delegation to the Organization of Economic Development’s Committee on Consumer Policy. Before joining the Clinton administration, Baca was the executive director of the Colorado Hispanic Institute, a nonprofit agency whose goal is to promote multicultural leadership. Her primary responsibility was as director of Visiones. A statewide leadership development program, Visiones assisted community leaders from different ethnic and racial groups in becoming more conversant with each other’s needs and contributions. Polly Baca has received numerous recognitions, among them induction into the national Hispanic Hall of Fame. She can be found in Who’s Who in American Politics and in Who’s Who in the West. In 1993 she received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and was recognized as an outstanding humanitarian by the Denver branch of the NAACP. She also earned the 1994 Leadership Award from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Baca was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame and in 2002 was appointed executive director of the Latin American Research and Service Agency (LARASA), a prominent Colorado nonprofit organization whose educational, health, and community programs reach 500,000 area Latinos yearly. From 1995 to 1998, Baca served as regional administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), Rocky Mountain Region VIII. With a staff of 474 employees, she oversaw a six-state region that supported 48,000 government employees for forty-three federal agencies and had a budget of $246 million. Currently, Polly Baca is chief officer of Sierra Baca Services, a consultant firm that specializes in motivational presentations, multicultural leadership development, and diversity training. In 2004, she was appointed to the Diversity Action Council for Burger King. In an interview given for the 9News Profile, “Chief
Executive Office of Sierra Baca Services, Polly Baca,” she referred to several community problems that she saw as still unresolved, among which were teaching people to appreciate and trust the diversity of others, the lack of quality education for all children, and universal health care. She listed the need for safe neighborhoods and streets and affordable housing. Baca believes that hard work and her faith have brought her to her current position in life. “I’ve been so lucky.” she stated in an interview. “I met John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and worked for Lyndon Johnson. My young, single life was an incredible opportunity and I loved it. My second life was as a mother. We will see how my third life goes.” See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Bonilla-Santiago, Gloria. 1992. “Polly Baca, Pioneer for Hispanic Women in Politics.” In Breaking Ground and Barriers: Hispanic Women Developing Effective Leadership. San Diego: Main Publications; InSites (Colorado non-profit organization). “Polly Baca.” http://www.insites.org/board/ baca.html (accessed June 19, 2005); RockyMtNews.com (online version of Rocky Mountain News). Olvera, Javier Erik. 2004. “Shifting spectrum: Anglos no longer majority in Denver, census indicates.” September 30. http://www.rocky mouintainnews.com/drmn/census/article/0,1299,DRMN_42 9_3219406,00.html (accessed June 19, 2005). Linda C. Delgado
BAEZ, JOAN CHANDOS (1941–
)
Joan Chandos Baez was born on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York, the middle daughter of Joan Bridge and Albert Baez. She is named after her mother, who is of Scottish descent, and her father, who is Mexican. Baez inherited not only her parents’ multiethnic heritage, but also their nonviolent Quaker religious beliefs, which eventually sparked her interests in acquiring peace and justice for society. Despite growing up in a peaceful and tolerant family environment, Joan Baez was confronted with the harsh realities of racism and discrimination at an early age. In junior high school Baez’s multiethnic roots and her dark complexion were cause for ridicule among her peers. Those early and impressionable years were filled with isolation and displacement for Baez. In an attempt to gain popularity and recognition and escape her loneliness, coupled with rejection, Baez took up singing. She developed her voice and soon became known as an entertainer around school. Baez made her first stage appearance in a school talent show. The very people who initially ignored and discriminated against her began to praise Baez’s singing and artistic talents. In June 1958 Baez graduated from Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, California. After graduation she
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Baez, Joan Chandos
Folk singer and civil rights activist Joan Baez. Courtesy of Joan Baez. Photograph by Dana Tynan.
and her family moved from California to Boston, Massachusetts, where she enrolled in Boston University. In college her focus was diverted from her studies, and her music became top priority. During the 1950s folk music was reemerging, and the public’s interest in this genre of music was at an all-time high. Baez displayed her talent as a folk musical artist on a small scale in local coffeehouses. Initially, Baez sang duets with her roommate, but her decision to become a solo artist proved successful as she gained a large following of fans. In 1959, while Baez was singing in a Chicago nightclub, Bob Gibson, a popular folksinger of the time, discovered her. Gibson invited Baez to perform with him at the first annual Newport Folk/Jazz Festival in California. Baez’s performance and her unique voice captivated a crowd of 13,000. With this singular performance Joan Baez became an instant star, and several record companies fought to get her on their labels. Ultimately Baez signed her first record contract with Vanguard, a small independent label. In 1960 Joan Baez’s self-titled album was released. Within the album Baez embraced her heritage by integrating both her Scottish and Mexican musical roots. As she toured for three years alongside legendary entertainer Bob Dylan, her political activism began to develop. Baez grew more aware of the injustices plagu-
ing society, and with her newfound fame she felt an obligation and had the advantage to make positive changes. In 1963 Baez stood beside civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington. She led a crowd of more than 300,000 in singing the black spiritual “We Shall Overcome.” Baez performed at a concert for Lyndon Johnson, where she petitioned the president to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam. In protest of the Vietnam War, Baez refused to pay federal income tax. She believed that the money acquired from this federal tax was going directly to support the U.S. Defense Department and its war efforts. In 1965 Joan Baez created the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Palo Alto, California. Today it is known as the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Despite her many supporters, Baez had an equal number of opponents. Her antiwar beliefs drew anger from conservative groups such as the U.S. military and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). In 1967 Baez’s strong opposition to the Vietnam War ultimately landed her in jail, where she served a ninety-day sentence. On March 26, 1968, Joan Baez married David Harris, a former leader in the draft resistance movement. In the summer of 1969 she experienced one of the highlights of her musical career when she performed at Woodstock, New York. After only three years of marriage and the birth of their son, Gabriel, Joan and David Harris divorced in 1971. The following year Baez had her biggest commercial hit with the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Joan Baez served on the national advisory board of Amnesty International, a worldwide organization that advocates for the release of people imprisoned for their religious or political beliefs. She not only served on the board, but also helped create the group’s California branch, Amnesty, West Coast. In 1979 she founded another organization, Humanitas International, which promotes human rights, disarmament, and nonviolence through seminars and other educational opportunities. By the 1980s, Baez’s popularity began to decline. Nevertheless, in 1985, in a familiar fashion, she used her music and a concert forum, Live Aid, to rejuvenate her career and awaken people’s awareness of injustice and oppression around the world. During the 1990s, she served as a mentor for several emerging women singers and composers and on her 1995 album Ring Them Bells, some of the guest performers included the Indigo Girls and Tejana sensation Tish Hinojosa. In 2003, Universal Music released a special boxed set of her music from the 1970s. Joan Baez’s living legacy is based upon the premise of staying true to one’s self and on the principal of nonviolence and freedom. Her talents, words, songs, and activism, coupled with her compassion for humanity and equality, have served as
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Barceló, María Gertrudis an example and have proven to be powerful instruments throughout her career. SOURCES: Chabran, Richard, and Rafael Chabran, eds. 1996. The Latino Encyclopedia. Pasadena: Salem Press; Joan C. Baez/Diamonds and Rust Productions; Levy, Arthur. 2003. “Official Biography of Joan Baez.” www.joanbaez.com (accessed June 19, 2005); Meir, Matt S. 1988. Mexican American Biographies: A Historical Dictionary, 1836–1987. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press; Perry, Joellen. 2002. “Music & America.” U.S. News and World Report, July 8/July 15; Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research; Unterburger, Amy L. 1995. Who’s Who among Hispanic Americans, 1994–95. New York: Gale Group. Dorian Chandler and Jeannette Reyes
BARCELÓ, MARÍA GERTRUDIS (“LA TULES”) (1800–1852) First and foremost, María Gertrudis Barceló, familiarly known as “La Tules,” was an astute New Mexican businesswoman. The red-haired, bejeweled, and cigarillosmoking La Tules was also a dexterous monte card dealer who combined her intelligence, conviviality, and card skills to become the wealthiest citizen of Santa Fe. She earned her fortune as the proprietor of a thriving gambling hall and saloon that served as the social center for Santa Fe’s Spanish Mexican citizenry, Euro-Americans, foreign merchants, and traders who passed through town. After the U.S. war with Mexico (1846–1848) her establishment became a haven for the
newly posted American officers from whom she took pleasure and gambling profits while introducing them to Santa Fe’s distinctive Spanish-based culture and customs. Hispanic Santa Fe was an amalgam of Spanish tradition, frontier spirit, and Native American influence that allowed women a considerable degree of independence. Single and married women enjoyed the right to own personal property, retain their maiden name after marriage, have their own money, sue in court, obtain a legal separation, and will their property to their daughters if they chose to do so. When corsets, bustles, and floor-length hoopskirts were considered proper attire in the East, and female ankles risqué, Hispanic women could dress for an active outdoor life in off-the-shoulder low-cut blouses with short sleeves and midcalf-length full skirts. Women, as well as men, took pleasure in dancing, drinking, and gambling, as often as not, as customers of La Tules’s saloon. Some women presumed themselves to be on an equal footing with men and shared a single sexual standard. La Tules (meaning “reed” in Spanish and used as an affectionate diminutive referring to her size) was a unique and colorful woman in a vibrant town that allowed her entrepreneurial talent to flourish. However much she was appreciated by the majority of her community, La Tules was the target of slander aimed at her by Euro-Americans and a handful of resentful local women who begrudged her popularity and power. She dealt with the latter by taking them to the alcalde court and winning apologies. The Euro-
La Tules (Gertrudis Barceló) dealing monte in her Santa Fe gambling house. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Women: A Gateway to Library of Congress Resources for the Study of Women’s History and Culture in the United States (Digital ID: ppmsca 02901).
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Barnard, Juana Josefina Cavasos American traders and travel writers of the day presented a different problem. They created a legend around La Tules that enveloped her in Santa Fe intrigue that reverberated as far as the Atlantic seaboard. Misunderstanding the cultural milieu that was Santa Fe in the 1830s and 1840s, these traders and writers unfairly judged the redheaded saloon keeper who dealt cards, served whiskey, and raked in gambling profits as a woman of loose morals and scandalous escapades. Rumor and innuendo continually swirled about her because of the mystery that surrounded her early years, when she may have operated a brothel in Tome, and her choice of business in Santa Fe, along with her self-possessed ease in male company. Some believe that everything was exaggerated in proportion to her being a woman. Although married to Manuel Sisneros in 1823, she maintained a close friendship with New Mexico’s governor Manuel Armijo, with whom she may have shared a more private relationship. Adultery, while not totally unheard of in Santa Fe, was nonetheless against the law. Whatever La Tules’s relationship with Governor Armijo may have been, she remained his trusted friend and political confidante. As one of the few literate women in town, La Tules was in a position to know and understand the political ramifications of what was told to her, and the governor may have appreciated this wealthy woman’s counsel. Amassing a fortune in business, María Gertrudis Barceló bought properties and entertained lavishly. However, she was always conscious of her obligation to the less fortunate. She frequently made charitable gifts to the Catholic Church and to her own and other needy families and adopted a number of children. Her civic-minded foresight prompted her to contribute more than her share of taxes in the form of a “forced loan” to keep the government functioning during periodic budget shortages. She created goodwill among her Euro-American customers, too, by ingeniously lending money to the U.S. Army to pay its troops in 1846, thereby assuring their continued patronage. La Tules was held in high esteem by her community, and even those who disdained this remarkable character acknowledged the admiration showered on her by the “best society.” In 1852 La Tules died, leaving behind a legend and a legacy. Her industriousness and resourcefulness defied Euro-American stereotypes of “lazy and degenerate” Spanish Mexican women. La Tules smoothed the path for the first Americans to be accepted in Santa Fe by encouraging the use of her saloon as an economic and social center that brought the two worlds together. La Tules herself was the drawing card because her opinions were sought by merchants, army officers, and politicians on a range of subjects affecting the well-
being of the community. Astute businesswoman that she was, she used her notoriety to attract visitors who brought much-needed currency into Santa Fe’s beleaguered economy. She was an unusually clever woman who assisted the peaceful transition of the inevitable American takeover of Hispanic New Mexico. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: González, Deena J. 1993. “La Tules of Image and Reality.” In Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera, 75–108. Berkeley: University of California Press; Lecompte, Janet. 1981. “The Independent Women of Hispanic New Mexico, 1821–1846.” Western Historical Quarterly. Vol. 22 (January): 17–35; ——— . 1989. “When Santa Fe Was a Mexican Town: 1821 to 1846.” In Santa Fe: History of an Ancient City, ed. David Grant Noble, 79–95. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Carole Autori
BARNARD, JUANA JOSEFINA CAVASOS (1822–1906) During her lifetime Juana Josefina Cavasos Barnard’s experiences ranged from Indian captive to African American slave owner in Texas. Born in Mexico to María Josefina Cavasos, she was reportedly of Spanish, Italian, and Canary Island descent. Her grandfather was Narciso Cavasos, a large landowner in southern Texas. In 1900 she related her life in an oral testimony to her granddaughter, Verdie Barnard Alison, titled “My Life with the Indians.” According to her narrative, in 1840 a group of Comanches raided southern Texas and took the eighteen-year-old Cavasos captive. She testified that they held her for about a month. When her captors visited the Tehuacana Creek Trading House just south of present-day Waco, they sold her to George Barnard for $300 in horses and merchandise. She married his brother, Charles Barnard of Connecticut, who reportedly was on good terms with various Indian nations. Juana Josefina Cavasos Barnard worked with her husband and brother-in-law operating the trading post known as the Comanche Peak Trading House for fifteen to twenty years in an area considered remote for white settlers. The post served as a church, as a jail, and later as a courthouse. Business was brisk until the U.S. government removed the Comanches to the Fort Belknap reservation in Oklahoma. She did not romanticize her captivity in her later years, but did remember the Indians as friendly traders. Cavasos Barnard and her husband owned African American slaves; she reported owning “plenty.” The slaves built a limestone mill in 1859, the first building
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Barraza, Santa Contreras in the present-day town of Glen Rose near Waco. The family estate was valued at $100,000, but they sold the mill in 1870 for $65,000. The family fortune declined steadily after this period. In her oral narrative Cavasos Barnard saw herself as a mother, grandmother, gardener, pioneer settler, slave owner, trader with Indians, and wife. She related, “I am the mother of fourteen children. Ten dead and four living. . . . I have twenty-five grandchildren and thirteen great grandchildren. . . . I raise a big garden every year. . . . We were the first settlers in Hood County. For months and months I never saw a white woman. We had plenty of Negro slaves. We kept our trading house for the Indians for fifteen or twenty years.” Juana Josefina Cavasos Barnard had fourteen children, but only six reached adulthood. She and her husband also raised Ambrosio Hernández, a Mexican boy ransomed from Indians. Contemporary writer Pearl Andrus wrote a fictional account of Barnard’s life titled Juana, a Spanish Girl in Central Texas in 1982. Josefina Juana Cavasos Barnard developed a reputation as a gifted healer, no doubt learning about the medicinal qualities of local herbs from the Indians with whom she traded. Intersecting Mexican, Indian, African American, and European American worlds, her life reflected on a daily basis the heterogeneity of the Mexican North, and certainly her position as a slaveholder was unusual for a Tejana. She died of a stroke in 1906. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Elliot, Raymond, and Mildred Padon. 1979. Of a People and a Creek. Cleburn, TX: Bennett Printing; Nunn, W. C. 1975. Somervell: Story of a Texas County. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Juana Josefina Cavasos Barnard.” New Handbook of Texas, 2: 2:385. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
BARRAZA, SANTA CONTRERAS (1951– ) Santa Contreras Barraza, daughter of Frances and Joaquín Barraza, was born in Kingsville, Texas, among the desert cacti, javelinas, and vast landholdings of the King and Kenedy Ranches where members of the Barraza family earned their living. In this harsh southern Texas environment Barraza’s artistic sojourn, marked by resistance, self-empowerment, self-definition, and survival began. Barraza grew up in a traditional Catholic home and participated in church activities such as las San Juanitas, catechism classes, and the Catholic Youth Organization. Her knowledge of Catholic images, especially the Virgin, and the dusty, coarse landscape of southern Texas eventually found an important
place in her artwork. Today many of these images are recycled and incorporated in her paintings. As a child Barraza did not have opportunities to develop her art, but her parents wanted her to have every chance. In 1969 she enrolled at Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University, Kingsville), the same institution her mother had attended in the mid-1940s, to pursue a career in science and math. However, she enrolled in a printmaking class and took courses in art history, pre-Columbian, and Mexican art. Overwhelmed by the subject matter, Barraza changed her major to pursue a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. The late 1960s and 1970s reverberated with the voices of the Chicano movement, the women’s movement, and the peace protests against the Vietnam War across many university campuses in the Southwest, including Texas A&I. While the voices of the activists that fueled these movements informed Barraza, it was the Chicano movement, particularly the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), formed by Carlos Guerra, that made the greatest impression on Barraza. Artists such as César Martínez, Carmen Lomas Garza, and Amado M. Peña, among others, became major figures in Chicano activist organizations. The impact of these experiences and contacts with Chicano social reformers eventually informed Barraza’s philosophy of life and art. It was a pivotal moment in her life. With the support of Chicano artists like César Martínez, she began to exhibit her work in alternative spaces for Chicano art. By the mid-1970s Barraza was invited to join Los Quemados (The Burned Out Ones), an association of Chicano visual artists based in Austin and San Antonio with progressive political views and objectives. Santa Barraza was one of three women who formed the group. Later Barraza left the group and founded a Chicana/Latina visual arts organization, Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste (MAS). Their mission was to support Chicana and Latina visual artists. In 1979 MAS organized one of its most ambitious programs in the Austin area, the Conferencia Plástica Chicana. The conference, a forum for scholars and visual artists of Mexican descent, was recognized as a historic step. It was the first platform where Mexican American visual artists engaged in cultural exchanges with other artists of Mexican American and Mexican national descent. In 1980 Barraza was accepted into the graduate program in studio art at the University of Texas at Austin. The program, entrenched in the Western classical tradition, was for a Chicana cultural artist like Barraza a disappointing experience, but cultural bias could not prevent this woman of sturdy character from graduating two years later with a master of fine arts. In 1985 Barraza left Texas and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to accept a teaching position at La
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Barrera, Plácida Peña Roche College. It was a difficult period for Barraza, who was raising a child as a single parent and establishing an artistic career. By this time she began to incorporate printmaking with drawing and painting in her artworks. In 1986 Barraza received a fellowship to study printmaking at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City. She became a member of the advisory board of the INTAR Latin American Gallery and soon thereafter joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Pennsylvania State University. These associations led to numerous exhibitions in major U.S. and European cities, including New York, Chicago, Mexico City, and Rome. Grants from Pennsylvania State University’s Arts and Humanistic Studies and the Reader’s Digest–Lila Wallace fund took Barraza to Mexico to continue research on Mexican images, especially the Virgin of Guadalupe, and indigenous and folklore formats of the codex and retablo tradition (small paintings on sheets of tin presented to a holy personage to commemorate a favor received or a miracle performed). From 1993 to 1996 Barraza was associate professor at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Painting and Drawing Division, and after a long absence from Kingsville and South Texas, she returned to her homeland. In Barraza’s words, “Twenty-five years ago, I left my birthplace seeking knowledge to enrich myself as a person and as an artist. Ironically I discovered that the information I sought always had been at my disposal, in my own family, home and town.” In 1996 she was commissioned to paint a dramatic mural at the Biosciences Building of the University of Texas at San Antonio. The mural, forty-three feet in diameter, combined ancient Aztec symbols, Mayan concepts, pictographs from the Texas Pecos region, and contemporary scientific images. Since 1998 she has chaired the art department at Texas A&M University, Kingsville. Throughout her career Barraza has sought a vision and a voice in her myriad of drawings, paintings, and mixed-media creations. The surfaces she utilizes in her compositions include canvas, handmade and standard paper, and aluminum, tin, and galvanized steel. Her painting and drawing media incorporate oils, acrylics, enamel paint, pastels, ink, crayon, and mixed media. She also utilizes printmaking techniques such as lithography, silk screen, and collagraphy (a printing technique using found objects affixed to a template, inked and rubbed on a surface). The result is vivid and colorful paintings that express her identity as a Mexican American with deep roots in the heartland of the Texas-Mexican border. Many of her paintings broaden the retablo tradition to include contemporary visions of ordinary or historical figures as central characters in the visual story. Additionally, she has introduced collaged surfaces with photographic and xerographic re-
productions and paintings modeled after the preColumbian codices. Some of her works have also included silver milagros (charms of small body parts placed in a church in search of a physical cure). In her latest works Barraza features frontal figures against flat, bright-colored landscapes such as La Diosa de Maiz con la Llorona, the weeping woman who is a ghostly apparition of a female wanderer crying for her lost children. Her most recent installation work, in collaboration with disenfranchised and undocumented women, depicts Adelitas and Cihuateteos. Today Barraza’s résumé reflects three decades of dedication and hard work. Among her achievements are numerous individual and collective exhibitions in galleries and museums across the United States and Mexico, commissions, awards, and publications. In addition to her countless credits, in 2001, Texas A&M University Press published Santa Barraza, Artist of the Borderlands, the first scholarly work on the life and work of a Chicana artist. The book received the 2001 Southwest Book Award. As chair of the art department at the Texas A&M, Kingsville, campus, Barraza has initiated many programs in her department through collaboration with regional museums and internship programs. Additionally, Barraza has played an important role in instituting a faculty and student exchange program with the faculty of the Visual Arts Department of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Mexico. In Oaxaca Barraza developed and established the Art Institute of Texas A&M summer program for students to study at the Art Institute of Benito Juárez. See also Artists SOURCES: Block, Gay, Annette Carlozzi, and Laurel Jones. 1986. 50 Texas Artists. San Francisco: Chronicle Books; Chicago, Judy, and Edward Lucie-Smith. 1999. Women and Art: Contested Territory. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications; Henkes, Robert. 1999. Latin American Women Artists of the United States: The Works of 33 Twentieth-Century Women. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Herrera-Sobek, María, ed. 2001. Santa Barraza: Artist of the Borderlands. College Station: Texas A&M Press. María de Jesús González
BARRERA, PLÁCIDA PEÑA (1926–
)
Born on July 13, 1926, to Reynaldo and Josefa (Ramírez) Peña in Guerra, Texas, forty miles northwest of Roma, Plácida Peña was the oldest of three children. She vividly remembers her childhood days in the dry heat of Guerra, also known as El Colorado Ranch, where she helped her father plant corn, pumpkins, and watermelons. During the depression the economics of the country and the availability of goods were sharply different than today. Coffee cost ten cents per pound; the average working wage was twenty-five cents an
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Barrera, Plácida Peña hour; a stamp cost three cents; and an average meal consisted of beans, rice, and a little meat. “It was a really strange life back then, especially during the Depression,” Barrera said. “It was a hard life, but we never did without.” Food assistance sent to the county commissioner provided some people in Guerra with apples and flour, but the politics underlying the welfarelike assistance did little to help the community. “The county commissioner would hold back relief goods because it wasn’t profitable for the stores in town,” Barrera recalled. “We really didn’t get too much help from anyone or anything.” As a teenager, she stayed with her mother’s youngest sister, “Tia Cata,” in Mission during the week so she could attend school. One Sunday, as Tia Cata was driving her the 100 miles from the family’s ranch back into Mission, they heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbor. She remembers arriving at the school auditorium on December 8 to hear President Franklin Roosevelt declare war on Japan. Upon graduation in 1945, Peña Barrera enrolled in Texas A&I University at Kingsville with aspirations of
Plácida Peña Barrera. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
becoming a nurse or teacher. Although she thought that it would be easy, attending college was harder than she expected, and she withdrew three weeks later. “I cried because I wanted to go to school, but financially we couldn’t afford it,” she recalled. Her father was suffering from multiple sclerosis. “I panicked,” she said. In 1948 Peña Barrera met her husband-to-be while visiting her aunt in Mission. “It was funny because I knew him while in school in Mission, Texas, when I was 14 years old,” said Barrera, adding that they were neighbors, “but he was too quiet.” He seldom talked to her when they were young. Drafted on March 31, 1944, Raymundo Barrera pursued her, courting her with letters while he was stationed in Delaware as a soldier with the U.S. Air Force. “He proposed to me by mail, our courtship was by mail and he even sent the rings by mail,” Barrera said. Following their marriage on June 4, 1950, Raymundo and Plácida Barrera began a military life of constant moves. Equipped with a $1,400 Buick convertible and, eventually, six children, the Barrera family became world travelers, moving from sweltering climates to bitter winters. In 1950 Peña Barrera traveled by car with her husband to Cleveland, Ohio, where he received his transfer orders. During this time Peña Barrera was trained as a nurse at the Cleveland Lutheran Hospital and earned 65 cents per hour. Months later the couple moved to Rome, New York, and then to Presque Isle, Maine. “Maine was very primitive,” she said. “We had no gas . . . and were without a refrigerator.” They used charcoal stoves, she said, “and because it was so cold, we had an icebox on an outside window ledge where we would keep our milk, but then it would freeze and expand, and there was milk everywhere.” Before they moved back to Mission for two months, their first child, Nora Myrna Barrera, was born on June 24, 1951. In 1952 the Barreras were transferred to Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, where Raymundo Jr. was born on January 26, 1953. Sgt. Barrera went to Korea in 1954, and Peña Barrera, who was expecting, moved back to Mission, where Cynthia Yvonne was born on April 5, 1954. Upon returning from Korea, Sgt. Raymundo Barrera was assigned to Wichita, Kansas, and again Peña Barrera joined him. There Sandra Yvette was born on May 14, 1956. Soon after her birth, the Barreras received new orders, this time to Tachikawa Air Force Base in Tokyo, Japan. The Barreras traveled for nineteen days in a ship across the Pacific Ocean from Seattle, Washington. The ship traveled through the Yellow Sea to Inchon, Korea, to drop off some soldiers and pick up others who were to be returned to the United States. The Barreras lived in Tokyo for three years. Sgt. Barrera was the sergeant of communications and supply.
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Belpré, Pura Peña Barrera said that the Japanese viewed most Americans as likable and loved the American children; however, there were demonstrations against the war and the ships in Tokyo Bay. “Sometimes I felt as if they didn’t want us there,” Peña Barrera said. “We were interfering with their lives.” Carlos Humberto and Judith Margot rounded out the Barrera family, both born at the air force hospital in Tokyo, in 1957 and 1959. After Judith’s birth, the Barrera family moved back to Texas—a thirty-six-hour flight with six children—and Sgt. Barrera was assigned to Laredo Air Force Base. But in 1963 Raymundo Barrera was reassigned to Korea, and later that year his family flew overseas to be with him. The following year he was reassigned to Japan, and again the family followed. They stayed there until July 1968. The family was sent to Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas, on September 30, 1969. Sgt. Barrera retired as a technical sergeant and relocated to Laredo, where he and his wife pursued additional education. In 1971 Peña Barrera began taking courses at Laredo Junior College and received her degree in 1978 from Texas A&I University at Laredo, with a major in political science and Spanish, at age fifty-two. Her husband received a bachelor of science degree in political science and law enforcement. Both taught in the United Independent School District in Laredo. He retired from teaching in 1990, and she retired a decade later. Throughout all the struggles and travels during the war, Peña Barrera said that she is very pleased with her life and experiences. “I am very happy with the way my life has turned around. I feel that I have accomplished a lot,” she said. See also World War II SOURCES: Barrera, Plácida Peña. 2002. Interview by Virgilio Roel, Laredo Vet Center, September 28; Burgess, Emily. 2003. “Texas Girl Traveled World as Air Force Wife.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 18 Emily Burgess
BELPRÉ, PURA (1899–1982) A pioneer in shaping the early New York Puerto Rican community, Pura Belpré was born in 1899 in Cidra, Puerto Rico. Her father was a building contractor who moved the family frequently, and she attended school in various towns throughout the island. In 1919 she graduated from Central High School in Santurce and enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico, intending to become a teacher. Her studies were interrupted in 1920 when she accompanied her family to the wedding of her sister Elisa in New York City. New York turned
out to be her home for the rest of her life. At the start she worked briefly in the needle trades industry. In 1921 she accepted a position as Hispanic assistant at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). She began working with adults, but soon discovered a preference for working with children. This was the beginning of her legendary career as a children’s librarian, storyteller, folklorist, and writer. “I grew up in a home of storytellers listening to stories which had been handed down by word of mouth for generations,” recalled Belpré. A story her grandmother told her as a child about the courtship and marriage of a mouse named Pérez and a cockroach named Martina was the first Puerto Rican folktale to be shared with New York children at a story-hour session in the public library. The story became her “golden key,” said Belpré in an interview. It opened up a special place for her inside the library and established her reputation as a gifted storyteller. The publication of Perez and Martina: A Porto Rican Folk Tale in 1932 was the first of her many successes as an author. Some years later, in 1946, she compiled and published The Tiger and the Rabbit and Other Tales, the first collection of Puerto Rican folktales in English published in the United States. Subsequently, she became a wellpublished writer, editor, and translator of children’s stories. Although she collected children’s tales from many countries, her primary concern always remained the preservation and dissemination of Puerto Rican folklore. As a librarian, Belpré was a pioneer in advocating for services to Spanish-speaking communities and instituted bilingual story hours. She implemented programs based on traditional Puerto Rican holidays such as Three Kings Day and insisted that the libraries buy Spanish-language books. Belpré was also an active participant in the life of the Puerto Rican community and attended the meetings of organizations such as the Porto Rican Brotherhood of America and La Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana. She helped these kinds of groups organize activities and obtain library space for gatherings. In 1943 Belpré married African American composer Clarence Cameron White and a year later resigned her position at the library to go on tour with him and to devote herself to writing. Throughout their lives together the couple maintained their residence in Harlem. Upon White’s death in 1960 Belpré returned to the NYPL as the Spanish children’s specialist. She had principal responsibility for branches serving a predominantly Latino population and traveled all over the city, delighting children, as well as adults, with her stories. Despite her full schedule during this period, she published Juan Bobo and the Queen’s Necklace: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale in 1962. This story introduced one of
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Pura Belpré tells a story to children. Courtesy of the Pura Belpré Papers, Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
the best-known characters in Puerto Rican folklore to the American public. In 1966 a long-overdue Spanish translation of Perez and Martina was also published. Although she retired in 1968, Belpré was persuaded to return to work with the South Bronx Library Project, a community outreach program to promote library use among Latinos and other minorities. Belpré was an accomplished puppet maker and puppeteer, a skill she had developed over the years. For the project she designed a mobile puppet theater and gave performances throughout the Bronx based on all of her favorite folktales. Between 1968 and 1978 Belpré published five more books and translated numerous stories. One of these books was Once in Puerto Rico (1973), which drew on Puerto Rico’s early history, including stories about the Taínos and the Spanish conquest. Her interviews and personal papers give testimony to her great love of children and of storytelling. In describing her experiences with children in the library, she used words like “magical,” “priceless,” “rich,” and “beautiful.” These very words also describe the extraordinary effect her stories had on people. She died in 1982, leaving a rich literary and public service legacy. See also Literature
SOURCES: Belpré, Pura. 1976. Oral history interview by Lillian López. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; Belpré, Pura. 1896–1985. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; Hernández Delgado, Julio. 1992. “Pura Teresa Belpré, Storyteller and Pioneer Librarian.” Library Quarterly 62, no. 4 (October): 425–440; Mapp, Edward. 1974. Puerto Rican Perspectives. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Nélida Pérez
BENCOMO, JULIETA SAUCEDO (1923– ) As a fourteen-year-old, Julieta Saucedo Bencomo convinced her mother that she could drive. The highschool freshman promptly crashed her oldest brother’s car into a fire hydrant, and her older sister wound up with a broken nose. That same daring spirit—tempered by experience—later led her to challenge Arizona’s education system. Bencomo was the fourth of five children born in El Paso, Texas, to Guadalupe García Saucedo and José Silvano Saucedo, immigrants from Durango, Mexico. Her father was a locksmith. Her mother had been a business teacher and a college graduate, a rare occurrence for a Mexican woman in the early 1900s. Julieta embraced her mother’s love of
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Bernal, Martha learning and became valedictorian of El Paso High School’s class of 1941. Because of the outbreak of World War II she decided to decline a college scholarship in order to work in the family’s locksmith shop. In her words, she met “the love of my life,” Joseph D. Bencomo, in 1941. They married in 1944. After workrelated moves to Arizona, Ohio, and New Jersey, the couple and their growing family moved to Phoenix permanently in 1959. Julieta Bencomo blossomed. From advocating for special education instruction for Arizona’s incarcerated youth to helping pass state legislation to fund programs for the gifted and talented, Bencomo frequently testified before state and local officials, demanding that children’s needs be met. Making sure that resources for non-English-speaking students were provided led her to become a volunteer tutor. “I champion vulnerable people,” she said with pride. Her own eight children provided opportunities for taking a stand. When her youngest children were not being challenged academically in the local school district, she transferred them to another district. She then ran for the school board, intent on making changes, and won. In 1979, after serving as the first Latina president of the Phoenix Elementary School District Board of Trustees, she was
appointed to the Arizona State Board of Education by Governor Bruce Babbitt. She became the first Latina to serve on the board and later was its vice president. While education was her focus, her activities often extended beyond the classroom. Bencomo’s community activism included fighting for the rights of older Americans and immigrants, promoting the arts, and serving on urban planning committees. When the Arizona state legislature refused to recognize the birthday of the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as a national holiday, she marched in support of the holiday. She was also involved in the protests against an anti– bilingual education initiative. Other activities have included distributing condoms as a Planned Parenthood volunteer. She has also counseled Spanish-speaking parents for Parents Anonymous. One of her proudest moments was when a former elementary student she had tutored appeared at her home with an invitation to her college graduation. The young woman told her, “I became a teacher because of you.” Her own children have excelled, with one Harvard, two Stanford, and two Northwestern University graduates. The other three have attended Arizona colleges. Bencomo’s accomplishments as a mother who was determined to make a difference have been widely recognized. In 1985 Arizona State University named her one of the state’s 100 most influential people and awarded her a Medallion of Merit for Leadership in Public Education. In 1990 the local NBC station named her one of the “12 Who Care,” for which she received the Hon Kachina Award. She also received the Jefferson Award Medallion presented by Luke’s Men and the American Institute of Public Service. One profile of her work succinctly stated: “Without a doubt, she has been a leading force in education and civil rights for the minority communities. . . . When there was nowhere left to turn, Julieta was always there.” SOURCES: Arizona Republic. 1977. “School Board’s Chief Refuses to Step Down.” March 16; Phoenix Gazette. 1979. “Senate Panel Oks Bencomo Nomination.” March 15; RoseClapp, Margery. 1985. “High Profile: Improved Education from Hispanic Tops Advocate’s Priority List.” Arizona Republic, May 23; Shanahan, Deborah. 1982. “Two Members Oppose Enlarging Board of Education.” Arizona Republic, August 24. Julia Bencomo Lobaco
BERNAL, MARTHA (1931–2001)
Julieta Saucedo Bencomo at her seventy-eighth birthday celebration. Photograph by Armando Bencomo. Courtesy of the Bencomo family.
Noted psychologist Martha Bernal was born to Alicia and Enrique de Bernal on April 13, 1931, in San Antonio, Texas. Originally from Mexico, Bernal’s parents came to Texas as young adults and raised their daughter in El Paso, where she received most of her schooling. In 1962 Martha Bernal graduated from Indiana
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Bernasconi, Socorro Hernández University and became the first Latina to receive a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in the United States. During a span of four decades Bernal made significant inroads in the profession, broadening the paradigm to include an emphasis on women clinicians, diversity in the faculty and scholarship, and ethnic identity, particularly as it pertained to treatment modalities and the university curriculum. Bernal’s colleague Dr. Melba J. T. Vásquez remarks, “She contributed to an increase in the use of empirically validated interventions in child treatment . . . through both her scholarship and professional activities, she helped to advance a multicultural psychology—one that recognizes the importance of diversity in training, recruitment, and research.” In bringing about changes in the field of psychology, Bernal focused on creating academic opportunities for Latinos/as and other people of color by finding ways to increase access to university education and developing strategies for retention. Congruent with major shifts in higher education, increases in minority student populations, and curricula revisions throughout the United States, Bernal repeatedly called attention to the invisibility of scholars of color in her profession and the lack of diversity in treatment modalities. As part of her ongoing research, Bernal statistically documented poor minority representation in university departments of psychology across the nation. Moreover, she supported the inclusion of coursework on the experiences of people of color in the graduate and undergraduate curriculum. Such changes, she believed, should also extend to the institutions and organizations that further structured the profession. Equally important was the need to acknowledge the importance of the contributions, past and present, of ethnic minorities. Awarded numerous National Research Service Awards while on the faculty at the University of Denver and later at Arizona State University, Bernal pushed for developing methods and opportunities to educate clinical psychologists about the culture, issues, and needs of ethnic minorities. The dimensions and characteristics of ethnic identity, particularly among Mexican American children, became an important area of research for Bernal, and she created the first courses on ethnic identity in the field. An active participant in the American Psychological Association, Bernal helped draft the bylaws for the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs. She served on its committee on training and education and on the Steering Committee Task Force that was charged with creating the National Latino/a Psychological Association. Bernal sat on the American Psychological Association’s Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention, and Training and on the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest and
was also an active member of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Affairs. Bernal was an important, inspirational role model and mentor to young Latinas in the profession. Her accomplishments garnered recognition and praise from many sectors. She received the Distinguished Life Achievement Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, the Hispanic Research Center Lifetime Award from Arizona State University, the Carolyn Attneave Award, and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest Award. By 2001, however, Bernal’s involvement in public and professional activities was on the wane due to continued bouts with various types of cancer. On September 28, 2001, Bernal succumbed to the disease in Arizona. Her students, colleagues, and friends remember her as a formidable pioneer in the field, an inspiration for an entire generation of psychologists of color. An obituary published in American Psychologist (2002) describes Bernal as passionate about her ideas, outspoken against injustice, an advocate of high standards in scholarship and professionalism, and compassionate for fellow human beings. SOURCES: Bernal, Martha E., and George P. Knight, eds. 1993. Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission among Hispanics and Other Minorities. Albany: State University of New York Press; Vásquez, Melba. 2003. “The Life and Death of a Multicultural Feminist Pioneer: Martha Bernal (1931–2001).” Feminist Psychologist (Newsletter of the Society for the Psychology of Women, Division 35 of the American Psychological Association) 30, no. 1 (Winter); Vásquez, Melba. 2002. “Martha E. Bernal (1931–2001).” American Psychologist 57: 880–888. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
BERNASCONI, SOCORRO HERNÁNDEZ (1941– ) Socorro Hernández Bernasconi was born in 1941 to Ruperto and Ramona V. Hernández on the outskirts of Guadalupe, Arizona, a community established in 1910 as trust land for local Yaqui Indians. The family moved to Guadalupe after fire destroyed their home. In this tiny town, bordered on all sides by Tempe and Phoenix, Mexican Americans and Yaquis lived and intermarried, and most worked in the surrounding fields. Growing up in a strongly Catholic family, Socorro decided as a teenager to become a nun. She saved enough money to join the Precious Blood Convent in San Luis Rey, California, at the age of sixteen and later transferred to the motherhouse in Ohio. There, in 1967, she trained to become a nun and pursued a teaching degree at the University of Dayton, becoming the first Guadalupe resident to earn a bachelor’s degree in ele-
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Betances Jaeger, Clotilde mentary education. After graduation she hoped to return to Guadalupe and serve its residents. Instead, the order sent her to various locations to teach, and eventually to Phoenix. After deep consideration Socorro chose not to renew her vows to ensure that she would remain in Guadalupe. In 1969 she began working for the Tempe School District No. 3, which oversaw Guadalupe’s Veda B. Frank Elementary School. Socorro supported the emerging Arizona United Farm Worker union movement and worked for the AFL-CIO in its labor organizing efforts. She received an opportunity to attend Texas Tech University to train as a counselor and earned her master’s in education counseling in 1970. Later that year she married Santino Bernasconi, a member of the Guadalupe Organization, a citizens group. In 1970 Socorro Bernasconi became a counselor at the Frank School. There she noticed a disproportionately large number of Spanishand Yaqui-speaking students attending “specialneeds” classes for the mentally handicapped. Concerned about the placement of Mexican American and Yaqui students of normal intelligence in special-needs classes through English-only testing methods, she conferred with local parents, the district, and the U.S. Office of Civil Rights. She discovered that parents were not notified of their children’s placement, and that students were not routinely retested to determine if they needed to stay in the classes, which restricted their educational advancement. In 1971 the Guadalupe Organization filed a lawsuit against Tempe District No. 3 and the Arizona State Board of Education, alleging discrimination based on ethnicity, race, and language. The court case revealed that Yaquis and Mexican Americans composed only one-fifth of the district’s student population, but more than two-thirds of special education classes. The U.S. district court ruled in favor of the Guadalupe Organization in 1972, mandating that the school district institute a new set of regulations regarding special education testing. The following year the district transferred Bernasconi to a nearby school and changed her position from counselor to teacher. She entered into another legal battle with the district, and in 1977 the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this transfer had violated Bernasconi’s rights. Bernasconi went on to other important work. She raised eight children, and in the 1980s she helped found an alternative school, I’tom Escuela, which provided a trilingual education for local children. In 1987 Bernasconi became director of Guadalupe’s Refugio de Colores, the first women’s domestic violence shelter to offer bilingual services and traditional cultural practices in the Phoenix area. After the death of her nineteen-year-old son, Sergio, she organized a community group in 1995 called Guadalupe Libre de Alco-
hol, Armas, y Drogas (GLAAD), initiating a program that encouraged teenagers to exchange their guns for rewards. GLAAD gave the guns to local welders who fashioned art and tools out of them, including candleholders for the altar of the Guadalupe church. In addition, Bernasconi started a college scholarship fund for local youths. In 1996 she won the Petra Foundation Award and was honored in 1999 as a Peacemaker at the National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. In 2002 she received the Arizona State University Martin Luther King Jr. Servant Leadership Award. A fierce advocate for women, children, and her community of Guadalupe, she holds the honor of being the first resident to receive a college degree and the first Latina counselor in the Tempe School District. See also Education SOURCES: Hernández, Leticia. 1987. “Hernández Family.” Manuscript, CHSM-326, Chicano Research Collection, Arizona State University Libraries, Tempe. December 1; Marín, Christine. 1992. “From the Cesspool to Equality: The Tempe Elementary School District No. 3 and Guadalupe.” Manuscript, E-244, Chicano Research Collection, Arizona State University Libraries, Tempe; Shattuck, Jessica. 1998. “Hellraiser: Socorro Hernández Bernasconi.” Mother Jones, July–August. Jean Reynolds
BETANCES JAEGER, CLOTILDE (1890–197?) Writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, in 1890 and was the grandniece of the island’s most prominent nineteenth-century independence leader, Ramón Emeterio Betances. Most of what is known about Clotilde Betances Jaeger’s literary pursuits is related to her still-scattered contributions to newspapers and journals in Puerto Rico and New York. Some of these include the island’s Puerto Rico Ilustrado (Puerto Rico Illustrated), La Democracia (Democracy), Alma Latina (Latin Soul), and El Mundo (The World) and New York’s Grafico (Illustrated) (1927– 1931), Revista de Artes y Letras (Journal of Arts and Letters) (1933–1945), and Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples) (1943–1944). Betances Jaeger went to elementary and secondary school in Puerto Rico, but left the island in 1912 to complete an undergraduate degree in natural sciences at Cornell University. After she graduated in 1916, she taught in Puerto Rico’s public schools for a few years. She moved to New York in 1923 and remained in the United States for the rest of her life. For many years she was a teacher at the Beth Jacob Teachers’ Seminary of America in New York. She also continued her graduate education, earning a master’s degree from Butler Uni-
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Betanzos, Amalia V. versity in Indiana and completing additional studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Salamanca. She was married to a North American of German descent. For several decades Betances Jaeger continued to write on a variety of topics, including socialism, women’s issues, music, religion, and the historical significance of the Lares insurrection and the separatist movement. She wrote for periodical publications in Puerto Rico, New York, and other Latin American countries. She was a member of the Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas Puertorriqueños (Association of Puerrto Rican Writers and Journalists). According to literary critic and historian Josefina Rivera de Alvarez, Betances Jaeger left several unpublished works, including a biographical profile of her famous granduncle, a novel, and a couple of plays. SOURCES: Reyes Bermúdez, José. 1937. “Puertorriqueños Ilustres: Clotilde Betances.” Puerto Rico Ilustrado, no. 1522 (May 20). Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1974. Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña. Vol. 2, tomo 1. 203–205. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Edna Acosta-Belén
BETANZOS, AMALIA V. (1928–
)
A native New Yorker, Amalia Betanzos was born and raised in the South Bronx of Puerto Rican parents. A graduate of New York University, Betanzos became a vital force in the New York Puerto Rican community through her efforts to advance women’s and workingclass concerns. In particular, Betanzos concentrated on education as a transformative outlet, and her initiatives brought her to the attention of city and state elected officials. Amalia Betanzos has extensive administrative experience in the public and private sectors. She was appointed to numerous government positions in New York City under mayors John Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and Edward Koch. An outstanding administrator, Betanzos has served as chairperson of the New York Commission on the Status of Women and as a member of the Temporary New York State Commission on Constitutional Revision, the Citizens’ Commission on AIDS, the New York City Board of Education, the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Police Management and Personnel Policy, the Commission on Integrity in Government, and the New York City Housing Authority. She has chaired the Rent Guidelines Board and was commissioner of the Youth Services Agency, commissioner of relocation and management services in the Housing Development Administration, and executive secretary to John Lindsay in charge of programs for the poor, physically handicapped, and mentally challenged. Before joining city government, Amalia Betanzos was executive director of the Puerto Rican Community
Development Project and president of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights. She now serves as chairperson of the National Puerto Rican Coalition. Since 1978 Amalia Betanzos has been president and chief executive officer of the Wildcat Service Corporation. This organization was established in 1972 as a nonprofit education, training, and employment program. The corporation works with chronically unemployed individuals such as ex-offenders, public assistance recipients, former alcohol and drug abusers, high-school dropouts, and people with limited Englishlanguage skills in order to successfully bring them into the labor force. The Wildcat Service Corporation also sponsors the John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy, an alternative high school founded in 1992 and funded by the New York City Board of Education, as well as private corporations such as the Soros Foundation. Perhaps Betanzos’s most important achievement, the Wildcat Academy has been touted among the most successful alternative schools, a model for charter schools and similar initiatives throughout Latin America. The school, which began with only 100 students, had by 2001 served more than 4,000 individuals. The objectives, according to Betanzos, are to help students realize their potential, expose them to the arts and humanities, and then facilitate future employment. SOURCE: Unterburger, Amy L., ed. 1995. Who’s Who among Hispanic Americans, 1994–95. Detroit: Gale Research. Carlos Sanabria
BILINGUAL EDUCATION Contrary to popular opinion, bilingual-bicultural education has existed in the United States since the eighteenth century, reflecting the nation’s diversity from its very beginnings. Bilingual education was practiced among the Dutch and German communities of the colonial era and was used as an accepted instructional methodology for some religious group education in American society. Ohio was the first state to officially adopt a bilingual education law. Responding to parental requests, in 1839 the state authorized classroom instruction in German and English. In 1847 the state of Louisiana provided for French and English instruction, and the territory of New Mexico followed suit for Spanish and English instruction in 1850. Until the mid-nineteenth century public and private educational institutions in northern Mexico, what is today the American Southwest, primarily taught in Spanish. By the century’s end bilingual education laws were enacted in a dozen states; however, other states unofficially provided bilingual instruction in languages such as Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Czech, and Cherokee.
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Bilingual Education During World War I the political climate in the United States discouraged pluralism, multiculturalism, and instruction in any language other than English. Viewed as a loyalty issue in American society, non-English speakers, especially German Americans, were ostracized, and states embarked upon Americanization programs in the schools and other institutions that left no room for “foreign” cultures. English-only instruction dominated pedagogical practice, and bilingual schools throughout the nation drastically declined. By the 1930s children with limited English-language skills were fully expected to leave the home culture and language at the schoolroom door. In the classroom they only received total English immersion instruction. For more than thirty years limited English proficiency (LEP) students experienced low academic achievements and increased dropout rates. Some did well in the sink-orswim learning environment, but many did not. By the 1950s Latino youngsters constituted the largest population of LEP students. Alarming rates of poor academic achievement became a rallying cry in Latino communities throughout the country during the civil rights era. Confronted with ethnocentrism and discrimination, Latino communities organized for equal educational opportunity, bilingual education, and English as a second language. In 1963 the first bilingual two-way program for grades one through twelve was established in the Coral Way School in Dade County, Florida, in response to the needs of the children of Cuban refugees in the district. Directed by Pauline Rojas, the school served as a model for the rest of the nation and became the focus of extensive pedagogical research. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s communities increasingly mobilized to argue for bilingual and bicultural education as a civil right. Coupled with an un-
A child listens to a message in a bilingual program, 1968. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
Puerto Rican Discovery Day, food-tasting party, November 1969. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
precedented rise in immigration, community activism resulted in the passage of the Bilingual Education Act (Public Law 90-247) on January 2, 1968. This federal regulation provided for bilingual education in the public schools and secured funds for program development, teacher and staff training, evaluation standards and procedures, curricular initiatives, and other resources. Priority was given to those states with the largest concentrations of LEP students, among which were New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, California, and Texas. In 1974 two court cases on bilingual education attracted national attention. In Lau v. Nichols the Supreme Court ruled that 1,800 Chinese students in San Francisco were denied their rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the federally aided public school district did not provide for their language needs. In New York City, then the largest urban public school system in the country, ASPIRA of New York, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), and a class of children plaintiffs brought a suit against the New York City Board of Education on the grounds that thousands of students of Spanishspeaking background were denied their civil rights. City schools had failed to provide an education that met their language needs. The result was the ASPIRA Consent Degree, which mandated that the city offer a broad-based instructional program for children with limited English proficiency. The Bilingual Education Act was also revised in 1974 to create a National Advisory Council on Bilingual Education charged with articulating a national policy on bilingual education.
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A meeting of parents and teachers, 1968. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
The actual implementation of bilingual programs was left in the hands of the states. Although the overall goal in educating LEP students remained the mastery of the English language and content in academic areas, different methods of instruction emerged. Immersion required teachers to use simple language in teaching academic subjects, allowing the students to absorb the English language while learning. Transitional bilingual programs offered instruction in the students’ language over the course of several grades but gradually shifted into total English-language instruction. Developmental or maintenance programs prioritized the students’ skills in the native language as they became proficient in English as a second language. In the 1990s bilingual and multicultural education became controversial. Opposition arose among Anglo and Latino parents who wanted faster results. Bilingual education was deemed too costly or ineffective by organizations like English First and U.S. English, which led the political movement to mandate English as the official language of the United States. Several states, including California and Arizona, repealed bilingual education laws. But supporters of bilingual education, as well as foreign-language programs, cited multiple academic benefits. They believed that proficiency in more than one language is well worth the effort, particularly in light of increased globalization, foreign commerce, advanced technologies, and national intellectual advancement. See also Education SOURCES: Acosta-Belén, Edna, Margarita Benítez, José E. Cruz, Yvonne González-Rodríguez, Clara E. Rodríguez, Carlos E. Santiago, Azara Santiago-Rivera, and Barbara Sjostrom.
2000. “Adíos Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History and Contributions. Albany, NY: Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, SUNY; Cockcroft, James. 1995. Latinos in the Struggle for Equal Education. New York: Franklin Watts; Nieto, Sonia. 2000. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. 3rd ed. New York: Longman.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol
BLACK LEGEND In 1914 Spanish intellectual Julián Juderías coined the phrase “Black Legend” to describe the prevalent belief among European intellectuals that the Spanish were not only a backward people but also lecherous, deceitful, and cruel. Juderías traced this defamatory tradition of Spanish cruelty to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose defense of the Indians subsequently provided damning examples and criticisms of Spanish colonial rule and fueled anti-Spanish propaganda, beginning in the sixteenth century. Spain’s far-reaching and successful colonization in North Africa and the New World engendered tremendous antagonisms from its European enemies, particularly among emerging Protestant countries. There are two distinctive phases in defining the significance of the Black Legend: first, the historical events surrounding the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas; second, why Spain’s foreign rivals continuously engaged in and promoted antiSpanish propaganda based on Las Casas’s writings. In the sixteenth century the Spanish Crown faced a two-pronged religious battle within its wars of expansion. The Spanish Crown spearheaded the spread of
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Blake, María DeCastro Catholic hegemony in the New World while simultaneously battling the Protestant Reformation in Europe through the establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which sought to maintain religious orthodoxy in both the Old and New Worlds. Initial Spanish Christianizing efforts met with uneven success that prompted imperial officials to reform their Christianizing and judicial administration in the New World. Central to these reforms were establishing the legal rights of native Indians and their effective conversion to Catholicism. The most antagonistic opponents of these reforms were the conquistadores who resurrected the almost extinct encomienda system. Effectively used against the Moors in the reconquest of Spain, the encomienda system rewarded Spanish warriors with grants of labor in newly conquered territories. In New Spain labor tribute led to wealth. Therefore, extracting labor was often brutal, excessive, and dehumanizing. Formerly a soldier in the Aztec Conquest, Bartolomé de Las Casas became a Dominican friar after an intense religious experience. He eventually became the bishop of Chiapas and the most vociferous champion of Indian rights. In a celebrated debate against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the doctrine of natural slavery legitimized Spain’s Indian wars and the encomienda system, Las Casas argued that all humans were naturally free and rational beings with rights to self-determination; therefore, the encomienda system relegated Indians to the status of hereditary serfs, a condition with potentially disastrous results to Indian and royal interests. In 1552–1553 Las Casas published in Seville nine treatises severely critical of the Spanish conquest in America, one of which was his Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). The Brevisima Relación described in horrifying detail examples of murder, rape, torture, and shameless abuse by the Spanish overlords. Las Casas’s persistent criticisms encouraged the abolition of the encomienda system, and the Reform Laws of 1572 effectively ended the conquest era. Las Casas’s Brevisima Relación found a wider audience among Spain’s enemies after 1552; the first foreign translation (Dutch) appeared in 1578, followed by French (1579), English (1583), and German (1599) versions. The Black Legend was born in these foreign translations. Envy of Spain’s New World riches and the desire to carve out their own empires at Spain’s expense assured the blackening of Spain’s international reputation. Pointing to Spanish wrongdoings justified the righteousness and aggressive actions of European rivals such as the English, French, Italians, and Dutch in the New World. As early as the fourteenth century Italians published unfavorable opinions of Spaniards, and after Spain invaded the Dutch Low Countries, the
Dutch became their most strident critics. In one of the most circulated editions, the Dutchman Theodore de Bry added horrific sketches depicting Spanish torture and violence against defenseless Indians. De Bry’s images of Spaniards dashing out the brains of Indian infants and feeding their bodies to dogs and of Indians being simultaneously hung and burned were quickly and uncritically accepted by the English. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 international rivalry between these two countries increased. England’s rise as the staunchest defender of Protestantism brought forth a surge of fanatical Protestant writers who advanced the development of a national consciousness that made Englishmen distinctive. As the staunchest of enemies, fanatical English Protestants promoted the Black Legend in North America to remind other Europeans of the innate defectiveness of the Spanish and all their institutions. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Hilgarth, J. N. 2000. The Mirror of Spain, 1500– 1700: The Formation of a Myth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Keen, Benjamin. 1998. Essays in the Intellectual History of Colonial Latin America. Boulder, CD: Westview Press; Maltby, William S. 1971. The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1556–1660. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. María Raquel Casas
BLAKE, MARÍA DECASTRO (1911–2001) María DeCastro Blake, Puerto Rican community activist and pioneer, was the second oldest of six children born into an impoverished family on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1911. Her father, Francisco DeCastro, a fisherman and a native of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, abandoned the family while she was still young. Her mother, Clotilde Smaine, supported the family as a cook. A literate woman with a passion for romantic novels, Smaine instilled a love of learning in her children. Blake graduated from high school and completed a secretarial course before her mother died. Her mother’s death in 1932 left Blake in the difficult role of having to support her younger siblings during the Great Depression. After more than a year of failed job searches, she placed her siblings with various relatives and migrated to New York City. A family she had known in Vieques welcomed her into their tiny apartment on Ridge Street and for several years let her sleep on a cot in the living room. The women in that family also helped her find work in a garment factory, because she did not yet speak English. Without any other skills besides her secretarial training, Blake was hired as a “dress finisher.” Her tasks were to inspect the garments and to trim any loose threads. The job paid ten dollars a week.
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Blake, María DeCastro From this sum she contributed two dollars a week for her board, covered her daily expenses, and purchased clothing and books. She also saved in order to bring one of her sisters to New York. On evenings and Saturdays she took courses to improve her English. Four years after her arrival in New York, Blake had saved enough to pay for her sister Nilda’s passage and to rent a one-bedroom apartment on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. Nilda found work in a factory, and together they saved for the fares for the remaining sisters in Puerto Rico, Genoveva and Margarita. Blake continued to take courses in stenography, English, and typing in preparation for a secretarial job. She also enrolled in the extension division of Columbia University and the New School. In time she was hired for her bilingual skills by some of the import-export companies on Wall Street that did business with Latin America. At Columbia she met Thomas Blake, an insurance underwriter and part-time fencing instructor. A college graduate, “Tom was,” according to María Blake, a “frustrated white-collar worker” who “preferred carpentry to office work,” but not wishing to “disappoint his immigrant parents, who had sacrificed to give him an education,” he never pursued that line of work. María Blake, on the other hand, was happy with her secretarial work. By the time she married Thomas Blake in 1942, her salary had increased to fifty dollars a week. After marriage she continued to work for nearly a year, until their first child, Clotilde, was born. The need for additional space for their daughter, and Thomas’s frustrations at work, led the couple to move from Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1943, where Thomas opened a stationery store. The business failed after five years. With two additional children, the couple decided to purchase a home in East Orange, a suburb close to Newark, New Jersey, so that Thomas could return to the insurance business. Thomas died shortly thereafter, leaving María to support and care for the three children. She took a part-time job as a Berlitz instructor and rented the upper floor of her house to a young couple. By the late 1950s the children were in middle school and quite active in sports. Blake in turn began to do volunteer work at St. Patrick’s Church in Newark. Mostly she taught English to the Puerto Rican families that had begun to settle in the city along Plane Street, now known as University Avenue. She taught the children in the afternoons and adults in the evenings. In 1960 she returned to full-time work, taking a secretarial job at the Alumni Department of Rutgers University at Newark. Still interested in helping the Puerto Rican community, she mobilized the Alumni Office to partner with St. Patrick’s in its campaign to send Newark’s poor children to camp. She was particularly
Civic leader María DeCastro Blake. Photograph by Máximo Blake. Courtesy of the Blake family.
interested in this project because the children who were selected were also given medical exams and free sneakers. As a staff member of Rutgers University, she began to promote the idea of enrolling Hispanic students at the Newark campus for the first time. In the early days she had to convince the parents as well. In all cases she helped the students fill out the application forms and apply for financial aid. In many instances she provided the needed aid whenever the financial aid funds were late or fell short. Many of those who went on to become professionals are proud to say that without María Blake’s help they could not have done it. By the time the first seven Hispanics graduated from Rutgers, Newark, Blake had become a very instrumental ally, known affectionately among them as “the Dean.” Rutgers took notice of her efforts and promoted her to the position of assistant dean of admissions five years after she was first hired. With a secretary of her own, a small budget, and a large office, Blake recruited hundreds of Hispanic students for Rutgers, Newark. Never one to limit her role, she sought scholarship funds and internships for her students from corporations and government agencies. She served the university and the larger community for twenty-four years. Hundreds
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Borrero Pierra, Juana attended her retirement party in 1984 and eagerly paid homage to the woman who had helped them obtain the college education she was unable to secure for herself. Part of Blake’s activism led to the creation of several institutions, such as ASPIRA of New Jersey, the Association for the Professional Education of Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Rican Congress, and the Black and Puerto Rican Convention. For her many efforts she was recognized as Woman of the Year by the Hispanic Women’s Task Force of New Jersey (1991) and by the 208th New Jersey Legislature (1998), which placed her name alongside those of Clara Barton, Millicent Fenwick, and other notable New Jersey women. Many of her former students continued to visit her at the small apartment she rented in New York after she left Rutgers and New Jersey. She moved, she said, “to speed her commute to the New York Public Library and to the Museum of Natural History,” the two places where she volunteered her services every week for the next seventeen years. She stopped only when her legs could no longer carry her. But until her death, July 22, 2001, one day short of her ninetieth birthday, she remained a concerned citizen and an eager student.
other war of independence against the Spanish Crown. As a rebel combatant during the Ten Years’ War (1868– 1878), Don Esteban came under the suspicion of colonial authorities. The Borrero family fled to the United States to avoid certain imprisonment and perhaps death. They settled in the cigar-making community of Key West, Florida, which, along with Tampa and New Orleans, had one of the largest Cuban exile communities of the nineteenth century. After their departure the ancestral home was destroyed by Spanish authorities, who burned the family’s vast collection of books, paintings, and manuscripts, an act that forever scarred Borrero, exacerbated her frail health, and perhaps contributed to her early death. In Key West she met and became engaged to the Cuban poet Carlos Pío Uhrbach, who returned to Cuba to fight in the war of independence and died on the Cuban battlefields. Borrero produced five volumes of poetry. Her bestknown work is Rimas (1895), a collection of poems that earned her international acclaim. Among her literary admirers were José Martí and Rubén Darío. The collection includes the poem “Los proscriptos,” which
SOURCES: Blake, Brian. 2001. Draft of “Maria’s Obit.” July 24; Blake, María DeCastro. 1997. Oral interview by Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, April 8; Hidalgo, Hilda, and Elia Hidalgo-Christensen. 1979. “Two Women: A Story of Success.” In The Puerto Rican Woman, ed. Edna Acosta-Belén. New York: Praeger. Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim
BORRERO PIERRA, JUANA (1877–1896) Cuban poet Juana Borrero, like many women artists, has only recently been “rediscovered” by literary and art critics and has yet to receive the attention that many feel she deserves as one of the continent’s first modernists. Indeed, even the basic biographical information published on Juana Borrero is contradictory. She was born in Puentes Grandes, Cuba, on May 18, 1877, one of three daughters of an aristocratic Creole family. Her love for literature and the arts began at a very early age, perhaps encouraged by her father, Don Esteban Borrerro y Echevarría, a physician and poet who hosted numerous gatherings at the family home that were attended by the leading artists and intellectuals of Cuban society. Among the visitors to her home was the poet Julian de Casal, who became her literary mentor and great friend, and who dedicated several of his poems to her. Borrero wrote her first poem at the age of four and published her first work at the age of thirteen in the literary magazine La Habana Elegante, one of the leading periodicals of this period. In 1895 Cuban rebels, led by José Martí, initiated an-
Poet Juana Borrero. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
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Boyar, Monica was written shortly after her arrival in Key West and describes her last night in Cuba. Because many of her poems describe the pain and loneliness of exile, she has become a favorite of a new generation of Cuban exiles—those who arrived after the Castro revolution of 1959. Like Casal and Pío Uhrbach, she was a central figure in the modernist movement known as Kábala— the only female modernist in Cuba. The Kábala also included such writers as Eulogio Horta, Raúl Cay, José Francisco Piedra, and Vicente Tejera. She was a prolific letter writer. Her letters are compiled in the twovolume Epistolario. Juana Borrero died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen on March 9, 1896. She was buried in Key West in a tomb belonging to friends of her family. The grave site remained unidentified until 1972, when it was rediscovered following a lengthy study by the Cuban Society of Archeology and Ethnology in Exile. The remains were exhumed and transferred to her own tomb, with a gravestone that reads “Glory of Cuba.” See also Literature SOURCES: Borrero, Juana, 1966. Juana Borrero: Epistolario. Havana: Instituto de Literatura y Linguística, Academia de Ciencias de Cuba; Hauser, Rex. 1990. “Juana Borrero: The Poetics of Despair.” Letras Femeninas 16 (Spring–Fall): 113– 120; Nuñez, Ana Rosa. 1975. “Juana Borrero: Portrait of a Poetess.” Trans. Graciella Cruz Taura. Carrell: Journal of the Friends of the University of Miami Library 16:1–24; Vertical Files, Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami; Rivero, Eliana. 1990. “Pasión de Juana Borrero y la critica.” Revista Iberoamericana 56 (July–December): 829–839.
in New York City. She was hired instantly to replace Diosa Costello, the star of the show, who was hospitalized. Borrowing the graduation prom dresses of two friends and lowering the necklines, she opened for a four-week engagement. This was the beginning of her long and successful professional singing career. Her songs were orchestrated by Desi Arnaz, who led the band at La Conga. Boyar was the first to sing commercial calypso in the supper clubs of New York City. She recalls, “Harry Belafonte and I both sang calypso well, but neither of us was authentic. We just helped to make calypso popular by watering down the lyrics so they could be understood.” Boyar is proud of the heritage of West Indian folk music and has lectured on the varied rhythms and musical origins of the Caribbean. She sang in seven languages and four dialects. The songs in her large repertoire of music ranged from the earthy chants of the sugarcane workers to the gentle whisper of a lullaby. She sang the blues and dramatized their anguish, along with songs about the love of a woman for her man. Her singing had the fire of the Latin she is, as well as the American sense of humor that she grew up with. She set a record of forty-two weeks singing at Le Ruban Bleu supper club and six months at the Vien-
María Cristina García
BOYAR, MONICA (1920–
)
Dominican entertainer Monica Boyar was born in Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. Her birth name was Argentina Mercedes María González Morel Valerio Ureña. Her parents, Pablo Duarte and Juanita, moved to the United States when she was six years old for political reasons. She grew up in New York City, where she attended Manhattanville Junior High School and Textile High School. At the age of twelve Boyar performed in a choral group at the Metropolitan Opera House singing soprano, which she disliked, and she developed an allergy to tenors as well; in later years she became a contralto. Her love of the theater developed in her early school years. She appeared in many plays and won the yearly dramatic award for her portrayal of Miriam in Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset. After her mother’s death her father was taken ill. To bring money into the house, and with her father’s permission, she auditioned at the famous club La Conga
Dominican singer and actress Monica Boyar. Photograph by James Kreigsmann, New York. Courtesy of Monica Boyar.
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Bozak, Carmen Contreras nese Lantern, both in Manhattan, with yearly return engagements. Her appearances in New York included performing at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Blue Angel, Café Society Downtown, and the Château Madrid. In a review written by Lee Mortimer of the New York Daily Mirror, Boyar is described as “tall, olivecomplexioned and slim. Her hair is forty inches long. Her eyes are light brown when in good spirits, almost black when annoyed. Her mouth, sensuous and pouting, is quick to express an opinion. Her hands are as much a part of her songs as the very lyric and music she is feeling. She is an exciting performer to watch as you experience her constantly changing moods.” He once dubbed her the “Satin Latin,” and the appellation has stuck with her throughout her life. The international press praised her style and individuality. During World War II she performed in many benefit shows in the War Bond Drive headed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She worked with the coordinator of Inter-American affairs, broadcasting Dominican folk music, and recorded for the Library of Music of the World for its files in Washington, D.C. She entertained in hospital units for the USO Camp Shows and introduced the first postwar V-E song, called “Hail, Hail, There’s No More Heil.” While appearing at the Blackamoor supper club in Miami Beach, Florida, she sang requests from the audience on one condition: that they deposit $10 in a March of Dimes cash box she passed around on behalf of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the disease that plagued President Roosevelt. She is also proud of having received her U.S. citizenship papers in 1947. Boyar was involved with her second husband, Federico Horacio Hénríquez, in the first unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the brutal dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Hénríquez, who had enlisted in the U.S. Navy so he could remain in the United States, was killed during the revolution in 1949. He was the nephew of Horacio Vázquez, who was president of the Dominican Republic until he was deposed by Boyar’s godfather, Rafael Estrella Ureña. Estrella Ureña was the provisional president until he was ousted by Trujillo. In 1960 Boyar became the secretary to Captain Enríque Jiménez Moya, who led a second unsuccessful attempt to topple Trujillo. In 1961 Trujillo was assassinated. Years later Boyar married the American film star Leslie Nielsen. Their honeymoon was abruptly interrupted when she was invited to return to New York City to open as the solo act at the new Château Madrid nightclub. Boyar has been an international singing star who has also appeared as an actress on Broadway. She originated the role of Rosa González in the Broadway production of the Tennessee Williams play Summer
and Smoke, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on October 6, 1948. She also costarred as Don Ameche’s “lovely and vibrant native Hawaiian wife, Emmaloa,” in the Broadway musical 13 Daughters, which played at the Fifty-fourth Street Theatre. Her résumé is filled with international singing engagements, including many exclusive hotels, supper clubs, cabarets, boîtes, and salones de gala throughout the world. Honored by being asked to sing a command performance for His Highness Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Boyar also sang at a benefit performance for Prince Rainier of Monaco and a special concert for Aristotle Onassis. She was invited, as well, to appear for a request performance at the Dominican Embassy in Washington, D.C., in celebration of her country’s 101st Independence Day. Monica Boyar is not just a singer/actress. She is a major personality and the epitomé of a chanteuse. She introduced the merengue, the native dance of the Dominican Republic, to the United States at the 1939 New York World’s Fair after teaching it to Arthur Murray, the dance maven. Xavier Cugat told her, “The merengue will never catch on. It’s too similar to the samba.” Boyar proved him wrong. An ardent baseball fan and aficionada of the bullring, Boyar defends both sports with equal vehemence, as she does with everything she believes in. She is also an accomplished painter, working mostly with watercolors. Boyar is now retired and lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. SOURCES: Blum, Daniel, ed. (Theatre World 1952–1953.) Greenberg; Hirschfield, Al. 1961. American Theatre as Seen by Hirschfeld. New York: G. Braziller; Nathan, George Jean, ed. Theatre Book of the Year, 1948–1949. New York: Alfred Knopf; Theatre World, 1960–1961. Philadelphia: Chilton Co.; Who’s Who in Theatre, 1948–1949. New York: Pitman. Ben Tatar
BOZAK, CARMEN CONTRERAS (1919– ) Carmen Contreras was born on New Year’s Eve, 1919, in Cayey, Puerto Rico, near San Juan, the oldest of three children. She attended elementary school in Puerto Rico, where her mother, Lila Baudilia Lugo Torres, worked as a seamstress and raised her children by herself. The family moved to New York City, and young Carmen attended Julia Richman High School. Upon graduating from high school she went to work for the National Youth Administration. Shortly afterward she took the civil service test and accepted a job as a payroll clerk in the War Department in Washington, D.C. Bozak found that the job at the War Department ignited her patriotism and excitement at the beginning of World War II and drove her to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). “Oh, I had to go,” Bozak re-
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Carmen Contreras Bozak in Rome with a carabiniere, 1944. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
called. “I thought, ‘It’ll be a change. I’ll get to travel.’ I was so happy that I did join, that I got a good job.” As one of 195 members of the 149th WAAC, Bozak set sail from New York for Europe in January 1942. She remembers watching as her ship passed the Statue of Liberty and realizing that they were sailing off to battle. The women who made up the 149th were chosen for their ability to speak more than one language. Bozak felt special to be among them. “I was only out of basic training not two months, and I was going overseas already,” she said. “I was so happy, even though I got seasick.” She was stationed in Algiers, Algeria, for most of her time overseas. There she worked as a teletype operator, transmitting encoded messages to the battlefield. Algiers was not far from battlefield action. Bozak recalled that during her eighteen months there, she witnessed four air raids and the dropping of a bomb near one of the residences. She and one of her friends seldom sought cover like the rest of the women in her unit. They liked to go up on the roof of the hotel where they worked nights to watch the artillery fire. “We were never afraid,” Bozak said. “Some girls were scared, but I never was.” After her time in Algiers Bozak spent a short time in Italy before returning to the United States. She was discharged as a technician fourth grade and earned several medals, including the European-African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, two Battle Stars, a World War II Victory Medal, an American Campaign Medal, a WAAC Service Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal. After she came home, an eye infection she had con-
tracted in Algiers flared up, and she was sent to Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania in July 1945, which turned out to be a fortunate twist of events. During a trip back to the hospital from Washington, she met her future husband, Theodore J. Bozak, who was also a patient at the hospital. After dating for less than five months, the two married. “That was my lucky day (the day he was transferred to Valley Forge),” Carmen Bozak said. “That was the day I met my husband.” The couple was married for forty-six years until his death in 1991. They had two sons, Brian and Robert, and a daughter, Carmen. Bozak maintained that her Puerto Rican heritage never deterred her from accomplishing any of her goals and that she was never the victim of discrimination based on her culture or her gender. She did not teach her children to speak Spanish because her husband was of Polish descent and did not speak the language. In retrospect, Bozak said that she has some regrets about “not teaching the children the Spanish language.” It has been nearly sixty years since Bozak served in the U.S. Army in World War II, but her time in the war continues to be a part of her everyday life. In 1989 she started a chapter of WAC Vets in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she currently lives. She was the chapter’s first president and also founded a chapter of the Society of Military Widows in 1998. She volunteers at the Oakland Park VA Outpatient Clinic, attends Veterans of Foreign Wars meetings, and travels to WAC reunions and conventions. Bozak is living a life whose course was determined by a simple decision to enlist in the army. See also Military Service; World War II SOURCES: Bozak, Carmen Contreras. 2002. Interview by Vivian Torre, Miami Vet Center, September 14; Kennon, Katie. 2003. “Choice to Enlist Changes Course of Woman’s Life.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 55. Katie Kennon
BRACERO PROGRAM (1942–1964) On August 4, 1942, Mexico and the United States launched a contract labor program, commonly known as the Bracero Program. The United States originally proposed this program as a temporary measure to alleviate perceived World War II agricultural labor shortages. The Mexican government urged its men to lend sus brazos (their arms, hence the term bracero) in this effort to expose them and, upon their return, its citizenry to modern U.S. agricultural skills, values, and work habits. An estimated 4.6 million Mexican men
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Bracero Program between the ages of twenty and forty left their families and friends to temporarily maintain railroad lines and plant and harvest U.S. cotton, fruit, sugar-beet, and vegetable fields, previously worked by poor black, Latino, and white laborers who opted for better-paying jobs in war production. Under the 1942 agreement and supplementary legislation in 1943, the U.S. Employment Service of the Department of Labor, its state branches, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in collaboration with Mexico’s Dirección General del Servicio Consular, the Oficialia Mayor, and the Dirección de Asuntos de Trabajadores Agricolas Migratorios of the Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, all offices of participating state governments and municipal county presidents, recruited, transported, and supplied bracero candidates to U.S. agricultural employers. Soon thereafter centers located closer to or at the U.S.-Mexico border in Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Hermosillo, Mexicali, Monterrey, Tampico, and Zacatecas were included. Depending on whether one uses Mexican or U.S. statistical sources, the yearly number of legally contracted braceros ranged from 49,000 to 80,000 in 1942–1946. The yearly estimates ranged between 116,000 and 141,000 from 1947 to 1954 and were approximately 333,000 in 1955–1964. From 1942 to 1946 and less so from 1947 to 1964, at the insistence of the Mexican government, U.S. agricultural employers attempted to enforce protective clauses on behalf of braceros that were not then available to domestic U.S. laborers. For example, these clauses assured that upon signing a contract, 10 percent of the prevailing wage would be placed into a savings account and redeemed upon completion of the worker’s contract. Both the administration of the program and contract compliance rested on the governments of Mexico and the United States. With the assistance of the United States, agricultural employers would pay for workers’ transportation and subsistence costs. Discrimination against braceros, securing their labor for the purpose of displacing U.S. domestic workers, or depressing wages were prohibited. Nonetheless, the U.S. government and agricultural employers often violated these terms and failed to provide braceros with fair wages or the same social benefits available to U.S. domestic laborers. Furthermore, in 1947 Texas’s overt violation of these terms resulted in the Mexican government’s refusal to export legally contracted braceros into this state. Approximately 2,600,000 braceros were separated from their wives and children, and by 1964 an estimated 1,375,000 of these men permanently separated from their families because they remained in the United States or journeyed to Mexico’s urban centers instead of returning to their families and places of ori-
gin. Although these figures reflect high rates of bracero family separation, they cannot possibly approximate the exact number of bracero families that participated in this program. Not all participating braceros signed official contracts with agricultural employers or Mexican government agents. Therefore, the participation of hundreds of bracero families was not documented and is not reflected in these figures. It is uncertain approximately how many braceros reunited with their families in the United States or Mexico. Overwhelmingly, bracero wives in Mexican rural villages and urban towns did not have a say in their husbands’ participation and were abandoned, ostracized, and stigmatized. Adela Piñeda, a former bracero wife, remembers anxiously waiting at her door for her husband to return from work, only to find out two days later that he had left and joined the Bracero Program. Convinced that he would quickly send “letters stuffed with money,” her family and friends failed to understand her shock and desperation. They did not sympathize or offer emotional or financial support, and letters “stuffed with money” never arrived. Consequently, and much to their horror, Adela sold her furniture and livestock and left with their child for Guadalajara, Jalisco. Upon her arrival she opened a fonda (makeshift lunch counter) and introduced herself to her neighbors and customers as a single teenage girl of recently deceased parents caring for her newborn brother. It struck her as a plausible story; after all, she was only seventeen years old. Committed not only to make ends meet, but to prosper socially and financially, she desperately used whatever means were necessary to start anew. Parents and relatives did offer emotional and financial support to some bracero wives, but not unconditionally. One example was the case of María Elena Jiménez, who endured her husband’s desertion. She repaid his debts, commuting two hours to and from work as a laundress, seamstress, and restaurant hostess. Her parents and siblings repeatedly urged her to restore their and her reputation by moving in with them and relying on their limited financial support. Working eleven hours a day, six days a week, among women and men in the service sector shamed her family. Jiménez explained that rather than live at the “mercy of her mother, father, or anybody else’s whim that she preferred working three times as hard to make ends meet.” However, there were women like Julia Méndez who relied on their parents’ and other relatives’ moral and financial support to cope with their husbands’ negligence, so much so that these relatives took an active role in reprimanding their sons-in-law’s behavior. In fact, angry letters like those written by Arturo Ortega,
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Bracero Program in which he condemned Angel Méndez for never bothering to “send so much as a few coins” to his daughter, were fairly common. He, like many other angry fathers and relatives, stressed in lengthy letters that like Angel, their estranged sons-in-law “never sent their daughters enough money to buy a loaf of bread, let alone a dress, and that they were not men but desgraciados.” Not all braceros abandoned their wives and families. Many marriages endured while partners lived for long periods apart. María Ruiz, Ester García, and Laura Camacho would hand over their husband’s remittances to either their parents or mothers-in-law. They in turn would purchase shoes for their grandchildren, rebozos (shawls), tejanas (cowboy hats), guaraches (sandals), and zarapes (warm drapes) for themselves, and a large supply of maize and other grains, beans, bread, coffee, cheese, and milk for the entire family and save whatever was left. Nevertheless, bracero wives were not permitted to administer these funds or purchase so much as a dress or a new pair of shoes for themselves. These wives asserted that had they managed their husband’s remittances themselves, this would have been interpreted by society as selfish and disrespectful and would have made them the talk of the town. Bracero wives’ experiences further confirm that their husbands’ absence augmented the intensity of gender norms. They abided by their respective families’ and peers’ values or risked losing their support, reputation, and marriage’s livelihood. Women’s behavior was severely scrutinized, forcing many to assume subordinate or autonomous roles in the extreme to survive. In sharp contrast, and in spite of strong opposition from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Farm Labor Union, and the American Federation of Labor, U.S. agricultural employers were satisfied with the Bracero Program. Moreover, upon the program’s expiration in 1947, they managed to secure a substitute. Again, U.S. and Mexican government officials proved sympathetic, and the result was a new set of arrangements that allowed U.S. agricultural employers themselves to recruit braceros. This was the general procedure under the agreements of March 1947, April 1947, February 1948, and August 1949. All of these agreements except that of 1948 also allowed employers to sign contracts with illegal Mexican workers already in the United States. Employers regarded this postwar arrangement as more satisfactory than the wartime program. Mexico, however, complained about employer abuses and the drainage of vitally needed labor from the border area. In 1951 the Mexican government refused to renew the agreement unless the United States guaranteed compliance with employment contracts, penalized employ-
ers of illegal Mexican workers, and agreed to some system of interior recruitment. U.S. agricultural employers mobilized their forces and astutely secured the ratification of Public Law 78. This law authorized U.S. agricultural employers to recruit braceros, transport them to reception centers near the border, and assist them in negotiating contracts and guaranteed contract compliance. Illegal Mexican workers who had been in the United States five years or longer could also obtain a contract. However, there were a number of restrictions and protective clauses. Mexican workers could not be recruited or imported until the U.S. secretary of labor had certified that there was a need for them. The government would be reimbursed for transportation costs, and in accordance with the executive agreement of 1951 and its later extensions, agricultural employers had to pay braceros the prevailing wage, guarantee employment for at least 75 percent of the contract period, provide compensation for occupational injuries and diseases, and furnish adequate housing and transportation facilities. Despite persistent criticism on the part of the aforementioned labor groups throughout the 1950s, Mexican Americans, and humanitarian reformers and the 1954 implementation of Operation Wetback, which resulted in the deportation of thousands of illegal Mexican workers, the program established under Public Law 78 remained substantially intact. Repeatedly, critics called for reform. They wanted to establish minimum wages, determine labor shortages in public hearings, and require that agricultural employers offer U.S. domestic laborers the same fringe benefits guaranteed to braceros. They failed, however, to achieve anything of the sort. On the contrary, only minor changes were made. In 1955, for example, an amendment required the Employment Service to consult with laborers, as well as employers, to determine agricultural labor shortages. The Interstate Commerce Commission was empowered to regulate the transportation of braceros and forced a raise in minimum wage rates under a stricter set of administrative rules. Nevertheless, braceros, and to a lesser extent U.S. domestic laborers, were still overwhelmingly discriminated against and were dealt poor working and living conditions and miserable wages. On December 31, 1964, the Bracero Program came to an end. Agricultural labor shortages declined, and U.S. agricultural employers replaced braceros with machines and illegal Mexican workers without contract labor guarantees. Ultimately, this program was an agent for Mexican solidarity and turmoil, demonstrating that agricultural interests and gender conventions conditioned opportunities and responses and enabling people to participate and interact in very different ways. Most important, this program laid the founda-
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Briones, María Juana tion for what would become the second-largest wave of Mexican and Central American immigration to the United States. See also Immigration of Latinas to the United States SOURCES: Calavita, Kitty. 1992. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS. New York: Routledge; Galarza, Ernesto. 1964. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin; Gamboa, Erasmo. 1990. Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947. Austin: University of Texas Press; García y Griego, Manuel. 1996. “The Importation of Mexican Contract Laborers to the United States, 1942–1964: Antecedents, Operation, and Legacy.” In Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. Ana E. Rosas
BRAGA, SONIA (1950–
)
The life of Sonia Braga is one of transcendence. She was born in 1950 to a black-Portuguese father and white-Indian mother in one of Brazil’s poorest states, Paraná. After her father’s death in 1958 she worked to support her mother and six siblings. Braga’s life influenced her advocacy on behalf of children’s rights to education, food, and shelter. Braga became a typist at fourteen; she also starred as a princess on a children’s television show. By age eighteen Braga caused a scandal by appearing nude onstage in the Broadway show Hair. Her fame soared as she took lead roles on Brazilian soap operas and in various Brazilian films during the early 1970s, and in 1976 her starring role in Dona Flor e seus dois maridos gave her career an international character. Among her best-known films are Moon over Parador (1988) and Angel Eyes (2001), in which Braga portrays Jennifer López’s battered mother. Throughout her career Braga has produced two films and appeared in more than twenty-five films and nineteen television series. For many, Sonia Braga both personifies and reproduces an international perception of Brazilian women as sexy and erotic bombshells. Following Carmen Miranda, Braga reinforced an ideal for Brazilian femininity that became synonymous with her physical appearance. Whether appearing nude in Hair, in Dona Flor e seus dois maridos, or in Playboy (1984, 1987), Braga has used her sexuality to market herself as an actress. Despite this, Braga does not embody a simplified heterosexuality; she has never married and admits to having once fallen in love with another woman. Braga’s career demonstrates that women’s sexuality moves beyond the reductionism that often characterizes Carmen Miranda’s public image. Braga uses sex to challenge women’s vulnerability, the cult of virginity, gender roles, age stereotypes, and homo-
phobia. In her first film, O bandido da Luz Vermelha, she plays a nineteen-year-old rape victim. In what is perhaps her most famous international role, in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Braga is the subject of a gay man’s (Molina’s) fantasy. In Molina’s imagination Braga is both conventional femme fatale and the force that allows him to transcend the confines of his imprisonment. In Tieta of Agreste (1996) a forty-sixyear-old Braga plays a rich woman who has a sexual affair with her young nephew, who is headed for the priesthood. Finally, she plays the role of a lesbian in several episodes of the hit television series Sex and the City. Braga’s life and career also confronted political conflict. She knew activists jailed or killed during Brazil’s military dictatorship. In her role in the 1988 film The Milagro Beanfield War, Braga plays an activist bodyshop owner who rallies the town in defense of the bean field. In 1995 Braga was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe award (best supporting actress) for her role in 1994’s The Burning Season, a film about the infamous Amazon rain-forest preservation activist Chico Mendes. She was also nominated in 1986 for a Golden Globe award (best supporting actress) for Kiss of the Spider Woman and for another in 1989 for Moon over Parador. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: Braga, Sonia. 1993. Interview by Edney Silvestre, New York, on July 25. Revista da TV, O Globo. http://geocities.yahoo.com.br/novela_dancindays/entre vista_sonia.html (accessed October 11, 2003); Ferber, Lawrence. 2001. “Return of the Spider Woman: As the 1985 Classic Kiss of the Spider Woman Returns to Theaters, Sonia Braga Talks about Falling in Love with a Woman, Gay Men’s Fantasies, and Her Secret Sex and the City Role.” Advocate 841 (July 3): 42; Richman, Alan. 1988. “ ‘Ugly’ Teen Turned Temptress, Sonia Braga Clouds Male Minds but Brightens a Beanfield.” People Weekly 29, no. 15 (April 18): 66–69. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
BRIONES, MARÍA JUANA (1802–1889) Businesswoman and landowner María Juana Briones was a woman of vision who served as a role model for later generations. María Juana Briones y Tapia de Miranda was born in 1802 in Villa de Branciforte, or present-day Santa Cruz, California. Her father, Marcos Briones, originally from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, was a corporal in the military, and her mother, María Isadora Tapia de Briones, came from Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. María Juana Briones lived with her family at Polin Springs near the San Francisco Presidio. Her mother Isadora died when Briones was only ten years of age.
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Burciaga, Mirna Ramos However, she was able to teach her daughter survival skills, how to sew, and about the power of the yerbas (herbs) before her death. In 1820 Briones married Apolinario Miranda. They lived in Polin Springs until 1833, when he received a land claim, el Rancho de Ojo de Agua de Figueroa, near the presidio. Throughout the time Briones lived at this ranch, she helped mistreated young sailors, who sometimes were virtually enslaved by their captains. These young sailors escaped the horrendous conditions of the ships and took refuge in the Miranda home, where Briones sheltered and healed them. About this time Miranda became abusive toward his wife, causing Briones to pack up her children and belongings and petition the authorities for her own land grant. In 1836 Briones received a grant called Yerba Buena, now known as Washington Square in San Francisco. Although the militario reprimanded Miranda five times because of his abusive behavior, in 1844 Briones sent a letter to Bishop Diego in Santa Barbara asking for a separation. The bishop then asked the alcalde (mayor) to protect her, and he did. Briones supported her eight children in a number of ways, including raising cattle, selling and trading the hides and tallow, selling milk, growing and selling vegetables, and working as a seamstress. The single head of a large household, she also adopted an orphan girl named Cecilia Chohuilhuala. Along with her various business ventures, Briones never stopped caring for people. She was known as a curandera (healer) and partera (midwife). Her first lessons in healing with herbs were from her mother. Later she continued to develop this expertise by studying with local Indian healers. Historian J. N. Bowman noted that the pioneers of the late 1830s, as well as travelers of the early 1840s, seldom failed to mention her. She was unafraid of disease. Ships arrived in port bringing in men who were suffering from smallpox and scurvy, and Briones took them in as readily as if all they had was the mildest fever. She was known to say, “I want no pay. If they get well, I am satisfied.” In 1844 Briones paid $300 for 4,438 acres of land in Mayfield, in what is now the Los Altos Hills and a small part of Palo Alto. She moved there in 1847 and continued her life as a rancher. In that same year Briones’s husband Miranda died. The following year the United States annexed California. In 1851 the U.S. Land Commission came to California to verify land deeds. The Land Commission ruled that since Briones’s husband had died, the land was no longer in use. Briones petitioned the commission, stating that she used the land to raise cattle, horses, and vegetables. After twelve years she won her case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Al-
though she never learned to read or write, Briones chose trustworthy people to read and write for her. She was also very careful with her paperwork and precise in the drafting of her contracts. Throughout the remainder of her life she continued her work as a healer, traveling from Santa Clara to Half Moon Bay, healing people, and helping women bring children into the world. In addition, Briones continued to take in people who were ill and gave them shelter. In 1884 Briones finally bought a house in Mayfield so she could be close to her daughters. By this time arthritis made it difficult for her to be alone. Five years later, on December 3, 1889, Briones died. She lived long enough to see the railroad come into the area and change the way of traveling. She saw governments change twice in her lifetime. She witnessed the changes in San Francisco as the presidio grew from a wideopen space with few inhabitants to a very crowded city. She lived through the gold rush and the changes it caused in the land and the people. Despite a patriarchal system, Briones thrived as she did what she loved best—raising her children, managing the affairs of her ranch, healing the sick and the infirm, and buying and selling property. María Juana Briones’s contributions were viewed negatively by some who believe that she exploited the labor of the very people she saved from hardship, but others emphasize her humanitarian qualities within the historical context in which she lived. On October 5, 1997, María Juana Briones’s contributions to early California were recognized when a monument was erected in her honor in San Francisco’s Washington Square, not far from where her Yerba Buena house stood nearly 150 years earlier. Briones remains a strong role model who has set an example for women everywhere. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Bowman, Jacob N. 1957. “Juana Briones de Miranda.” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 39:3 (September): 227–241; Gates, Mary J. 1895. Contributions to Local History: Rancho Pastoria de los Borregas, Mountain View, California. San Jose: Cottle and Murgotten Printers; Pitt, Leonard. 1970. The Decline of the Californios. Berkeley: University of California Press. Olga Loya
BURCIAGA, MIRNA RAMOS (1960– ) Mirna Burciaga, an activist and entrepreneur, immigrated to the United States in 1980 as a direct result of death threats issued by citizens of El Salvador rebels in the midst of the civil war that had begun a year earlier. Like Burciaga, the citizens of El Salvador were caught
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Burciaga, Mirna Ramos between the government and the rebels and were often the innocent victims of both factions. In the spring of 1980 Burciaga was riding in the back of a pickup truck when a government soldier wielding an automatic weapon strafed the rear of the truck with bullets because the driver misunderstood an order to pull over for document verification. One bullet ripped the heel of her hand and thumb from her palm, and another tore into her leg. After several months in the hospital she returned home, but it was no longer a safe refuge. Terrorism in the form of murder, kidnapping, and violence was used by extremist groups in an effort to block the political process. Soldiers warned her that she was on a terrorist list and had only a few days of safety because a close relative was in the military and working for the government. Convinced that she was a target, she left El Salvador and crossed the border into Guatemala. This was the start of a four-month odyssey that ended in southern California and reunited her with her father and two younger sisters, who had left before the civil war erupted. Burciaga, a third-year university student studying to become a pediatrician, borrowed money from her stepmother in the United States for living and traveling expenses while waiting for official papers to enter the country from Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of people left the carnage of war-torn El Salvador before the peace accords were signed in 1992 between the government and leftist guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí Para Liberacion Nacional (FMLN). Burciaga arrived with few resources other than her intelligence, a strong work ethic, and a will to succeed. Whatever her expectations had been of her family, she was told that she would have to support herself and repay the loan. This was true for most people who emigrated from El Salvador because families and friends did not have the financial resources to help them. Within a week she started work as a live-in nanny/housekeeper in a household with five children. With the aid of a Spanish-English dictionary she was able to communicate with her employers after six months. Her small salary was turned over to her stepmother until she paid off the debt for her escape. After sharing the rent and food expenses, Burciaga saved enough to leave her job and look for more lucrative employment. Studies reveal that Central American women now dominate in private domestic jobs, but their sheer numbers push wages down. Within a short period Burciaga circumvented this pattern by working for a number of clients and hiring an assistant. Cleaning private homes gave her more money and the time to return to school. While continuing to work, she received her associate’s degree in fashion from a local community
Salvadoran entrepreneur Mirna Burciaga. Courtesy of Mirna Burciaga.
college, married Sal Burciaga, a man who had emigrated from Mexico in 1983, and gave birth to three children, Natalie, Sal, and Stephanie. Armed with her degree in fashion and her savings, she opened a clothing store, but success eluded her. Undaunted, she looked around for another opportunity. On the site of a failing Mexican restaurant she opened a Salvadoran restaurant. Without professional expertise, but with faith in her abilities and recipes from her native country, she introduced a new cuisine to the neighborhood. Ten years later, when her lease could not be renewed, she found a better location and opened a larger restaurant, El Chinaco, with great success. Burciaga’s striving and unrelenting hard work made her a successful businesswoman, and, as the mother of three school-age children, she was determined to use the same energy to create a better and safer educational environment for the children in her community. To accomplish this new goal, she sought out and worked with local politicians and community organizations devoted to children’s welfare. She is on the board of the University of California at Irvine’s Community Outreach Partnership Center, among many other organizations. Her unwavering commitment to her adopted country and her close association with the political process have led her to run for election to the Costa Mesa City Council in 2004. Though she was unsuccessful in her first bid for political office, she vows
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Burciaga, Mirna Ramos to run again and someday serve as the first Hispanic woman mayor of Costa Mesa. SOURCES: Burciaga, Mirna Ramos. 2004. Interview by Carole Autori, October; Hamilton, Nora, and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. 2001. Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press; Menjívar, Cecilia. 2002. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Carole Autori
C q CABALLERO, DIANA (1947–
)
Diana Caballero is an educator, community organizer, and activist. She has dedicated much of her life to developing civil rights and educational reform organizations. She was a member of the Young Lords Party (1970s), president of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights (1983–1987), and director of the Puerto Rican/Latino Education Roundtable (1984–1997). Caballero was born and raised in the South Bronx area of New York and went to public schools. After receiving an associate’s degree in secretarial studies from the Borough of Manhattan Community College (1967), she went on to complete a B.A. in elementary education at City College of the City University of New York (1970). In 1978 she graduated summa cum laude with a master’s degree in elementary and bilingual education from Long Island University, and she obtained both an M.A. and an Ed.D. in educational administration and bilingual education from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1996. From Hofstra University she received a certificate of advanced study in educational administration. In 1972 Caballero successfully coordinated the efforts of a coalition formed to pressure the Public Broadcasting Network, WNET, Channel 13, to produce and fund Realidades, the first bilingual television series transmitted in the United States. Later, as a member of the project team, she helped develop program philosophy and content. From 1972 to 1984 Caballero worked in different settings, but always as an advocate for bilingual education. She was, for example, an elementaryschool teacher, and as a trainer and resource specialist, she presented workshops for teachers, administrators, and parents. As the director of the Puerto Rican/Latino Education Roundtable based at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, she effectively advocated for educational reform and the needs of Latino students throughout the public school system. As a strong proponent of the right to a bilingual education, she served as coordinator of the Bilingual Education Task Force of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights
Educator Diana Caballero. Courtesy of the Luis O. Reyes Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
and the New York Coalition for Bilingual Education. Caballero participated on numerous boards, committees, and commissions concerned with public education, such as the Manhattan Borough President’s Task Force on Education and Decentralization, Chancellor Fernández’s Multi-cultural Advisory Board, and the City-wide Community School Board Elections Committee. She also served on Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol’s Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence that published the controversial report “Curriculum of Inclusion,” which was highly critical of the exclusionary school curriculum in effect throughout the system. Her activism went beyond educational advocacy, as is demonstrated by her work with the Committee against Fort Apache (1980–1981) (formed
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Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola to counter media racism and oppose the film Fort Apache: The Bronx) and the Black and Latino Coalition against Police Brutality (1979–1980). Caballero has been widely recognized for her educational advocacy, her organizational leadership, and her dedication to upholding the democratic and civil rights of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos. In 1990 she received an award from the Women for Racial and Economic Equality and in 1989 from the Parents Coalition for Education of New York City. She was also the recipient of the Charles Bannerman Memorial Fellowship Award in 1988. Caballero is currently an assistant professor in the Bilingual Education Program of the Department of Childhood Education at the City College of New York. The Diana Caballero Papers at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College are important sources in the areas of bilingual education, language rights, and educational reform. They provide information about organizations such as the Committee against Fort Apache and the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights and community activism in the 1980s. See also Education; Young Lords SOURCE: Caballero, Diana. 1967–1999. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Ismael García, Nélida Pérez, and Pedro Juan Hernández
CABEZA DE BACA, FABIOLA (1894–1991) Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, a Hispanic New Mexican writer also known as Fabiola C. de Baca Gilbert, was born on May 16, 1894, in La Liendre, New Mexico Territory, to Graciano and Indalecia C. de Baca. As a writer and folklorist, Cabeza de Baca touched the lives of many people throughout her long career. Some historians and folklorists consider her a “legendary” figure of New Mexico, while among Hispanic literary critics her writings are viewed as a precursor of Chicana literature. C. de Baca, as she often identified herself, lived a life of privilege. Her wealthy and influential family included lawyers, writers, politicians, and a New Mexico governor. C. de Baca idealized this society in her books and identified with it throughout her life. She was inculcated by her paternal grandmother with the practice of noblesse oblige, the obligation of the rich to help those less fortunate. It profoundly affected her life and work. C. de Baca lived in a highly stratified society steeped in interethnic racism. Many Hispanos felt genetically superior to Mexicans and Indians because of their light
skin, blue eyes, and Iberian origins. Still, C. de Baca crossed class lines frequently; she socialized with elites, but taught in rural schools. For most of her life she worked with the poor and needy. C. de Baca attended Loreto Academy, where Hispanic elites sent their daughters. Because of insubordination (she slapped a nun) she was expelled from kindergarten and enrolled at New Mexico Normal, where she earned a teaching credential in 1912. During C. de Baca’s childhood education among Hispanos was limited. School statistics show that while illiteracy fell from 79.0 percent in 1875 to 14.0 percent in 1920 throughout the state, more than 50 percent of Hispanos were not literate. Few women progressed beyond third grade. Appalled at the lack of education among the poor, C. de Baca applied to teach in a rural schoolhouse. Hired to teach for the Santa Rosa School District, she rode a pony to the schoolhouse. In bad weather she was forced to take the train. The mostly poor students from nearby ranches rode ponies to the one-room school that lacked drinking water and a privy. C. de Baca appealed to her father for funds to purchase the school supplies the cashstrapped district could not afford. She taught school for twelve years while attending college. Her efforts were rewarded when she became the first female in the C. de Baca clan to attain an advanced degree. She earned a baccalaureate in domestic science at what is today New Mexico Highlands University and a master’s degree in pedagogy from New Mexico State University. As the first Hispana hired by the New Mexico Agricultural Extension Service (NMAES), a New Deal government agency, C. de Baca worked with farm women. NMAES was an important component of the 1930s reform programs designed to “Americanize” (native Indian) women. For more than thirty years C. de Baca taught domestic skills and food preservation. She is often credited with reviving the Hispano colcha (quilting) tradition. During World War II she helped organize victory gardens and child-care centers for women working in war-related industries. The high-school 4-H clubs that she developed became a source of personal pride, especially when in 1940 her students won blue ribbons in dressmaking at the New Mexico State Fair. In the 1940s C. de Baca rebelled against her conservative Catholic grandparents to marry Carlos Gilbert, a divorced man. There were no children from this union, and in time she and Gilbert divorced. Soon afterward, while she was driving on a country road, C. de Baca’s car collided with a train, and she almost lost her life. She was hospitalized for more than a year, and her rehabilitation was hampered by a limited supply of antibiotics. Ultimately she lost her left leg to gangrene. Fitted with a prosthesis, she continued her work with NMAES.
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Cabrera, Angelina “Angie” As the family historian, C. de Baca knew well the history of most Hispanos in northern New Mexico’s Staked Plains. She documented many historical events throughout the state. Her writing career began with her translations from English to Spanish of NMAES nutrition pamphlets. Her first recipe books, Historic Cookery (1939) and The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food (1949), placed traditional Hispanic recipes within a cultural context. We Fed Them Cactus (1945) chronicles the history of Hispanos in northern New Mexico, her family among them. It was one of the first works to cite the important contributions of Hispano ranch women to the settlement of that state. The Chicano movement of the 1970s led to the rediscovery of C. de Baca’s writings. We Fed Them Cactus is today considered an important contribution to early Hispanic American literature. C. de Baca has been honored by numerous organizations, including her alma mater, New Mexico State University. Among her best-known publications are Los alimentos y su preparación, Historic Cookery, The Good Life, and We Fed Them Cactus. See also Literature SOURCE: Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 2002. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Merrihelen Ponce
CABRERA, ANGELINA “ANGIE” (1927– ) Angelina (Angie) Cabrera was born to Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she continues to live. Upon graduation from Girls’ Commercial High School during World War II, Cabrera’s ambition was to join the air force, but “nice” Puerto Rican girls were expected not to leave home until they were married nor to work far away from home. Instead, she became a secretary at Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn and unsuspectingly entered a lifelong career that would be filled with glamour, travel, excitement, politics, finance, and advocacy for minority and women’s rights. At Fort Hamilton she met and married a young navy man, and soon thereafter they moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he pursued an architectural degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology. From 1952 to 1954 Angie Cabrera worked for H. J. Heinz Company as its official Spanish translator. Assigned to the Foreign Sales Division, she became secretary to the director and also translated for H. J. Heinz Sr. because of his many holdings in Spain. Returning to New York, Cabrera attended Fordham University and completed a baccalaureate degree in political science. She was employed at the Office of the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico as executive secretary to the director of tourism, but graduated to confidential executive secretary to the governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín. In this position Cabrera traveled extensively throughout Puerto Rico and accompanied the governor on his many trips to Washington, D.C. This was a heady time in Puerto Rican politics because the island was embarking on a massive economic reorganization, Operation Bootstrap. Cabrera’s deep involvement in Puerto Rican affairs stems from this experience. “I learned to take risks even though I was afraid,” remarks Cabrera. “That experience was responsible for the strong commitment I have to help my Puerto Ricans.” That phase of her life also opened other doors for Cabrera, particularly connected with Democratic Party politics. From 1965 until 1968 Cabrera was the New York secretary for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and special staff assistant on Hispanic affairs. At the forefront of the American political scene, Cabrera traveled extensively with the Kennedys and organized rallies, meetings, and personal matters. Cabrera became the liaison between the senator and the Latino community. On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Cabrera faced the most heartbreaking responsibility of her career when she was called upon to personally arrange for the closing of the senator’s New York apartment and office. When Cabrera was sworn in as New York governor Hugh Carey’s deputy director of the Women’s Division in 1975, Ethel Kennedy’s presence at the ceremony indicated the closeness that had developed between the two women. After Kennedy’s assassination Cabrera branched out into her own business. She founded Capital Formation (1969–1972), the first nonprofit pioneering organization of its kind. Devoted to assisting minority entrepreneurs in preparing business plans and loan packages, Capital Formation acted as an intermediary between the Small Business Administration and banking institutions. In 1972 Cabrera decided that it was time for a change, and she was offered the position of national director for public relations and community affairs at the National Puerto Rican Forum, a nonprofit organization designed to provide a variety of services to the Latino community throughout the city. At the forum she created a cultural center “to develop awareness of our fabulous artists, many of whom had never been properly exposed.” Cabrera’s political contacts and understanding of government and community services provided her with the broad experience needed for appointments to a number of administrative positions. She was a member of the Manhattan Women’s Political Caucus and a board member of ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Family Institute, the National Association of Puerto Rican Women, and the National Association of Minority Busi-
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Cabrera, Lydia city of New York. She completed the previous commissioner’s two remaining years and was reappointed. Cabrera has been honored on countless occasions for her service and dedication to the city, the state, and the Latino community. However, her greatest reward has been the opportunity to “encourage all Hispanics, especially Hispanic women, to participate more fully in city, state, and national politics, so that our children can have a fair share of the benefits enjoyed by other American citizens.” See also Politics, Party SOURCES: Hispanic America. 1995. “Angela Cabrera, Assistant Deputy Commissioner.” Special edition. 1, no. 1 (May); Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1984. “Angela Cabrera.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, ed. Louis Reyes Rivera and Julio Rodríguez. New York: IPRUS Institute. Hector Carrasquillo and Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CABRERA, LYDIA (1899–1991)
Angelina Cabrera, president of Cabrera and Associates, a well-respected leader in Puerto Rican, minority, and women’s causes. Courtesy of Angelina Cabrera.
ness Women. She was advisor to the First Women’s Bank and the Citizens’ Union. Cabrera served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1972 and was vice-chairperson of the State Democratic Committee and a member of the Compliance Review Commission created by the Democratic National Committee to oversee affirmative action in delegate selection for the 1976 Democratic National Convention. At that point Cabrera was working as assistant deputy director for the Women’s Division for the Executive Chamber of the State of New York. For ten years Cabrera was in a position to represent women’s and minority issues to state legislators, reaching out especially to African Americans, Latinos, and smallbusiness entrepreneurs. In May 1984 Cabrera became the business development specialist in the New York State Department of Economic Development’s Division of Minority and Women’s Business Development. Two years later Governor Mario M. Cuomo appointed her assistant deputy commissioner for that division. Cabrera held this position for eleven years. In 1998 Cabrera was appointed as a commissioner in the Equal Employment Practices Commission by Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of the
Lydia Cabrera, one of Cuba’s foremost Afro-Cuban culture writers of the twentieth century, was born in Havana on May 20, 1899, and died in Miami on September 19, 1991. She has become an indispensable source of study for scholars and individuals interested in the African presence in Cuba, especially its religious and linguistic aspects. Born into an educated and socially prominent family of Havana—her father was Raimundo Cabrera, writer and editor of Cuba y América, one of the most important Cuban cultural journals of the early twentieth century—she had the opportunity of being immersed from childhood in the magic realism of AfroCuban reality through the “nanas” who took care of her and fed her with the folktales, religious stories, legends, and rhymes that filled her imagination with the sense of awe that would be evident in the years to come. Hers was a firsthand early life experience that left a unique imprint on her future work. Equally important was the influence of Fernando Ortiz, Cuba’s most renowned scholar of Afro-Cuban culture. The Paris of the 1920s and 1930s influenced Lydia Cabrera’s cultural life decisively. The years during which she lived in that city—almost two decades, with brief trips to her homeland—awakened and strengthened in her the memories and feelings of her childhood and adolescence. It was the Paris of Josephine Baker, “La Revue Nègre,” and “Le Bal Nègre” at the Théâtre de Champs Elysées; of the encounter of a city with jazz and the realization of Negritude as a transforming and powerful social and cultural force. It was in Paris, in 1936, that Contes Nègres de Cuba, her first collection of short stories, was published in a French translation.
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Calderón, Rose Marie After her return to Cuba in 1939, she published the original Spanish version titled Cuentos negros, which appeared in 1940. Another collection of short stories, ¿Por qué?, followed in 1948. In 1954 El monte, a monumental work now in its eighth edition, appeared in print for the first time. The book, which, according to the author, studies “the religions, magic, superstitions and folklore of black ‘criollos’ and of the Cuban people,” has become a classic in the genre. Between 1955 and 1958 three other books were published: Refranes de negros viejos (1955), Anagó (vocabulario Lucumí) (1957), and La sociedad secreta Abakuá (1958). In 1960, after the Cuban Revolution, she went into exile and never returned to Cuba. Lydia Cabrera’s work is impressive for its vastness and originality, and most of it has been published outside Cuba. After leaving the island she went to Spain, where she published La laguna sagrada de San Joaquín (1973) and another extraordinary work, Anaforuana: Ritos y símbolos de iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakuá (1975). The latter included a substantial number of her own symbolic drawings. Lydia Cabrera’s passionate love for Cuban culture in general and Afro-Cuban culture in particular translated into a remarkable and extensive body of work, written and published in the United States during a twenty-year span. Significantly, this began when she was already in her seventies and ended near her
death at ninety-two years of age. Perhaps the most productive period of her life, the years 1970–1988, demonstrated, once again, the sensitivity, astounding knowledge, intellectual rigor devoid of arrogance, and the human touch, so ingrained in both her scholarly and creative discourses, of a woman full of vitality and joy for life. Titles for this period include Otán y Iyebiyé: Las piedras preciosas (1970), Ayapá: Cuentos de jicotea (1971), Yemayá y Ochún (1974), Francisco y Francisca (1976), Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba (1977), La regla kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje (1977), Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe (1979), Koeko Iyawó: Aprende novicia, pequeño tratado de regal lucumí (1980), Siete cartas de Gabriela Mistral a Lydia Cabrera (1980), Cuentos para niños, adultos y retrasados mentales (1983), Vocabulario Congo (1984), La medicina popular en Cuba (1984), Supersticiones y buenos consejos (1987), and La lengua sagrada de los ñáñigos (1988). In 1993 Isabel Castellanos posthumously published Lydia Cabrera’s Consejos, pensamientos, y notas de Lydia E. Pinbán and, in 1994, Páginas sueltas. A person of courage, full of intellectual vitality, with a deep sense of personal integrity and a compassionate view of life, ahead of her times in many ways, Lydia Cabrera stands as an exemplary woman who paved the way for others to walk along the path she discovered. See also Literature SOURCES: Castellanos, Isabel, and Josefina Inclán, eds. 1987. En torno a Lydia Cabrera. Miami: Ediciones Universal; Hiriart, Rosario. 1988. Cartas a Lydia Cabrera: Correspondencia inédita de Gabriela Mistral y Teresa de la Parra. Madrid: Ediciones Torremozas. Reinaldo Sánchez
CALDERÓN, ROSE MARIE (1956– )
Specialist in Afro-Cuban culture Lydia Cabrera. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
Born to New Mexican parents, Rose Marie Romero Calderón has combined her workplace responsibilities and family roles with community organizing. Alongside her husband, José Calderón, she helped develop a community-based organization and center in Greeley, Colorado, Al Frente de Lucha. Through this organization Calderón organized yearly community fundraisers, marches, and fiestas to commemorate Mexican holidays and to economically sustain the organization. Believing that gender transformations must begin in the home, Calderón instituted a division of labor in which the males in the family all took part in the domestic chores. In Monterey Park, California, she headed a parents’ group in her children’s day-care center that led to the establishment of various neighborhood groups. She connected her roles in the family
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California Missions Diversity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Pardo, Mary. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
José Z. Calderón
CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
Rose Marie Calderón. Courtesy of José Z. Calderón.
with community activism by supporting political candidates for local, state, and national positions. With her husband, Calderón organized various parent groups in the Alhambra School District to challenge the practice of tracking Latino students into vocational education classes and the lack of a multicultural educational focus in the curriculum. Working with parents from diverse backgrounds, she advocated for her sons, as well as pushing for changes that affected the entire school district. As part of the Multi-ethnic Task Force, she helped develop a list of ten proposals that included a policy for dealing with hate-motivated behavior. This policy required principals to create an environment that would allow all persons “to realize their full individual potential through understanding and appreciation of society’s diversity of race, ethnic background, national origin, religious belief, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation.” As part of this policy, the school district institutionalized conflict-resolution classes and gave students the option of mediation as an alternative to expulsion. Calderón also helped establish another parent advocacy group at the local Boys’ and Girls’ Club that brought Latino and Asian youth together around sports programs and issues of diversity. In recent years she served on the board of the House of Ruth, a domestic violence shelter in Claremont, California. She is also a staunch advocate for the rights of immigrant workers to obtain driver’s licenses, good jobs, quality education, and adequate health care. SOURCES: Calderón, José. 1995. “Multi-ethnic Coalition Building in a Diverse School District.” Critical Sociology 21, no. 1: 101–111; Horton, John, and José Calderón. 1995. Politics of
In 1769 Junípero Serra, a Franciscan missionary, founded the first of twenty-one Catholic missions as part of Spain’s effort to colonize California. Serra and his missionary colleagues had two goals. Most important, they intended to convert the Indians to the Roman Catholic faith. Second, they meant to inculcate Spanish ways, the Spanish language, and Spanish social mores in the Indian converts, whom the missionaries called neophytes. This task necessarily involved an effort to reconstruct the gender roles and relations of California Indians. Missionaries regarded their work as a divinely sanctioned effort to save Indian souls and improve Indian society. For Indians, the missionaries’ demands were often confusing and sometimes cruel. Indian and Spanish societies constructed gender roles according to long-standing customs and religious beliefs. Generalization about Indian ideas concerning gender is difficult because the social structures of native California were complex and varied. There were more than 100 languages spoken in California and dozens of distinctive tribal cultures. In general, California Indians were hunters and food collectors who exploited well-established territories. For the most part, men hunted and fished, while women collected wild plant foods. According to anthropologists, women probably provided more food for their communities than men. Oak trees were ubiquitous in California, and the acorn meal that women processed was a staple of the Indian diet. Spanish and Indian ideas about men’s and women’s economic roles overlapped at many points. In the Spanish system women were expected to prepare food and work at other domestic tasks such as sewing, much as Indian women were expected to cook and make baskets and clothing. However, missionaries expected men to till fields, which was more like women’s work than anything that they had done before. Men held most of the spiritual and leadership roles among Indians in pre-Spanish times, but in some societies there were female chiefs and shamans. In Spanish society religious and political authority was vested in the men. The mission system provided some appointive and elective positions for neophytes, such as alcalde (mayor), and these went to men. Within the missions there were few leadership roles available to women that the priests sanctioned. However, some
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California Missions neophyte women held considerable influence by virtue of their jobs within the mission. For example, priests named a woman to oversee the unmarried female barracks (monjero). She reported on the women inmates and locked them in at night to stymie illicit sexual liaisons or perhaps closed her eyes to certain transgressions. Priests’ attempts to transform Indian sexual and marriage customs probably caused the most trouble. They taught that spousal intercourse was the only permissible sexual activity. All other sexual activity was execrable sin. In native society there were fewer constraints on sexuality, especially before marriage, when sexual experimentation usually occurred. Once married, however, spouses were expected to be loyal to their partners. Sexual misbehavior was a legitimate ground for divorce, which usually occurred if one of the parties desired it. Some Indian cultures permitted polygamy, but the practice of taking multiple wives
Santa Barbara Mission, Santa Barbara, California. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850–1920 (Reproduction no. 117845).
was usually restricted to wealthy men and chiefs. Among Catholics marriage was a permanent arrangement ordained by God, and divorce was extremely difficult. There was no provision for polygamy in Catholic or Spanish society. These rules seemed unnecessarily strict to neophytes who were accustomed to serial monogamy. The presence of berdache, males who dressed as women and performed female roles, among California Indians shocked and horrified Spanish priests and laymen alike. Evidently Indians regarded the berdache as a third gender with male and female characteristics, although researchers disagree on this matter. Highranking Indian men often took a berdache as a second wife because it was believed that they could work harder than women. Priests, however, regarded berdache behavior as a sin against nature and punished them, and their male partners, wherever they were found. The berdache were common when the missionaries first arrived, but eventually became rare in the vicinity of Spanish settlements. While marriages occurred between Spanish-Mexican men and Indian women, there were comparatively few of these formal unions in California. They evidently preferred to marry their own. Nevertheless, there were many informal unions between soldiers and Indian women. Some of these were based on mutual attraction, but missionaries frequently complained about soldiers raping Indian women. Sexual assaults were among the causes of Indian rebellion against Spanish authority. Prostitution seems not to have been practiced in California before 1769, but references to Indian prostitutes were common by the end of the eighteenth century. Priests’ concerns about illicit sex of all kinds led them to construct monjeros at the missions. Once they reached sexual maturity, unmarried female neophytes had to sleep in these locked rooms in order to prevent philandering. Sequestering young women failed to prevent illicit sex, but the close living quarters fostered the spread of communicable diseases. Some researchers think that these living conditions contributed to high death rates among women. Despite the efforts of priests to instruct neophytes in the normative sexual behavior of eighteenth-century Catholic Spaniards, many Indians continued sexual behavior that offended priests. Whether this was a form of rebellion or the continuation of age-old customs is an open question. One of the unintended results of Spanish settlement was the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, especially syphilis, to which Indians had not been previously exposed. This was especially true in the missions, where large numbers of Indians were concentrated in novel living conditions. Syphilis low-
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California Sanitary Canning Company Strike ered the birthrate, raised the death rate, especially among women, and contributed to the overall decline of Indian population in the missions. In sum, the missions affected Indian gender roles and relations in several ways. Men and women’s roles were altered. The once numerous berdache were eliminated or driven underground. Indian sexual behavior came under surveillance. New diseases reduced the native population in general and were especially deadly among women, thus reducing the birthrate. Therefore, it must be said that the attempts to reconstruct gender roles in the mission had a disastrous effect on the neophytes. Nevertheless, substantial numbers of Indians survived the mission experience, and some of them are practicing Catholics today. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Castañeda, Antonia I. 1990. “Presidarias y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Castillo, Edward D. 1994. “Gender Status and Decline, Resistance, and Accommodation among Female Neophytes in the Missions of California: A San Gabriel Case Study.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18, no. 1:67–94; Cook, Sherburne F. 1976. The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press; Hackel, Steven W. 1997. “The Staff of Leadership: Indian Authority in the Missions of Alta California.” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (April): 347–376; Hurtado, Albert L. 1992. “Sexuality in California’s Franciscan Missions: Cultural Perceptions and Sad Realities.” California History 71 (Fall): 370–385; ——— . 1999. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Albert L. Hurtado
CALIFORNIA SANITARY CANNING COMPANY STRIKE On August 31, 1939, at the height of the peach season, 400 (out of 430) workers walked off their jobs at the California Sanitary Canning Company (Cal San), one of the largest food-processing firms in Los Angeles. The next day sixteen of the thirty who stayed behind joined their picketing co-workers outside the plant. Though their jobs were at stake and they pounded the pavement in record-breaking heat, the strikers (the majority were Mexican and Russian Jewish women) were demanding not only higher wages and better plant conditions but also the recognition of their union, Local 75 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). Their militancy marked the beginning of unparalleled labor activism among cannery workers in southern California. This canning labor force included young daughters, newly married women, middle-aged wives, and widows. Occasionally three generations worked at a par-
ticular cannery—daughter, mother, and grandmother. They pooled their resources to put food on the table. Carmen Bernal Escobar recalled, “And to keep the family going . . . in order to bring in a little more money . . . my mother, my grandmother, my mother’s brother, my sister and I all worked together at Cal San.” At Cal San women clustered into specific departments—washing, grading, cutting, canning, and packing—and were paid according to the production level. Women jockeyed for position near the chutes or gates where the produce was plentiful. Standing in the same spots month after month, women often developed friendships that crossed family and ethnic lines. Their day-to-day problems (slippery floors, peach fuzz, production speedups, tyrannical supervisors, and even sexual harassment) cemented feelings of solidarity. They even employed a special language when talking among themselves, often referring to an event in terms of when specific fruits or vegetables arrived for processing at the plant. For instance, the phrase “We met in spinach, fell in love in peaches, and married in tomatoes” indicated that the couple met in March, fell in love in August, and married in October. In July 1939 Dorothy Ray Healey, a UCAPAWA organizer, began to distribute union leaflets outside the Cal San gates. Meetings were held in workers’ homes so entire families could listen, and membership cards traveled from one kin or peer network to the next. Within three weeks 400 Cal San employees had joined. The cannery owners, the Shapiro brothers, refused to recognize the union, and a strike was called. In addition to the twenty-four-hour picket line around the plant, the workers set up boycotts and picketed local grocery stores that refused to take Cal San products off their shelves. After a two-and-one-half-month standoff the workers implemented an innovative strategy that brought management to the bargaining table— their children picketed the front lawns of the Shapiros’ homes. Within days of the child pickets, who carried signs such as “I’m underfed because my Mama is underpaid,” a settlement was reached. Wages and conditions improved at Cal San as workers nurtured their local. In 1941 Luisa Moreno, a UCAPAWA vice president, arrived to organize other canneries in southern California. She enlisted the aid of Cal San workers in union drives at several area foodprocessing firms. The result was Local 3, the secondlargest UCAPAWA affiliate in the nation. Moreno encouraged cross-plant alliances and women’s leadership. In 1943, for example, Mexican women filled eight of the fifteen elected local positions. The local provided benefits that few industrial unions could match—free legal advice and a hospitalization plan. A fierce loyalty developed as the result of rank-and-file participation and leadership. Forty years after the strike Carmen Bernal
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Callejo, Adelfa Botello
Women of the California Sanitary Canning Company, 1936. Courtesy of Carmen Bernal Escobar.
Escobar declared, “UCAPAWA was the greatest thing that ever happened to the workers at Cal San. It changed everything and everybody.” See also United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA) SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ——— . 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
CALLEJO, ADELFA BOTELLO (1923–
)
Adelfa Callejo, attorney, civic leader, and activist, was born in Millett, Texas, on June 10, 1923, the eldest of four children of Felix Botello and Guadalupe Guerra. Her father migrated to Texas in 1911, but her mother was Texas born. Although her parents lacked in formal education, they encouraged and assisted her to gain an education. Callejo aspired to become a lawyer after seeing an uncle deported without the benefit of a hearing. Educated in the “Mexican” schools of southern Texas, Callejo graduated from high school in Cotulla, Texas. She moved to Dallas with her family and began the first of many years of night-school study at Southern Methodist University (SMU). Her education was postponed near the end of World War II when she moved to California to assist her brother, who had been wounded in the war. In California she met William “Bill” F. Callejo, and they married in Dallas. Adelfa Callejo returned to night classes at SMU and earned her law degree in 1961. She was the only Hispanic and one of only three women in
the class. Passing the bar exam, she became one of only two Hispanic lawyers in Dallas at that time. By 1966 Bill added a law degree to his degrees in architecture and engineering, and they formed the law partnership of Callejo and Callejo, with Adelfa specializing in personal injury, criminal, and family law. These specialties allowed her to concentrate on one of her goals, aiding the disadvantaged. In addition to representing criminal defendants and those who had suffered catastrophic injuries, Adelfa Callejo also was active in the community. An advocate for minorities in the fields of education, housing, immigration, voting rights, and other social justice issues, she challenged at-large elections to the Dallas City Council, a violation of the Voting Rights Act, and was successful when the local federal district court agreed that the process diluted minority votes. In education she lobbied six Dallas district superintendents until a dropout-prevention program was implemented. Among the many boards on which she served were the Dallas Housing Authority, Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Dallas County Mental Health and Mental Retardation, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (where during her time on the board 72 percent of $75 million for concessions at the airport were awarded to women- and minority-owned businesses). She served as president of the Dallas County Criminal Bar Association and as regional president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, an organization she helped found. Recognized for service to both the community and the legal profession, Callejo has received the 1998 Spirit of Excellence Award from the American Bar Association Commission on Opportunities for Minorities in the Profession, the Martin Luther King Justice Award
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Callis de Fages, Eulalia Francesca y Josepha (the first Hispanic ever to receive this award), a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mexican American Bar Association of Texas, the 1996 Distinguished Alumni of the SMU Dedman School of Law, the Ohtli Reconocimiento award from the government of Mexico for her dedication and commitment to the rights of persons of Mexican origin, the 2002 Award for Excellence in Community Service for Volunteer Community Leadership, and the 2004 Dallas Bar Association’s Fellows Award. Additionally, she was profiled during the American Bar Association’s celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month in 2001. In 2004 it was announced that she and her husband were donating $1 million to create the Adelfa B. Callejo Leadership and Latino Studies Professorship at the SMU School of Law. This gift will create a leadership institute that includes coursework on ethics, governance, dispute resolution, and arbitration. SOURCES: American Bar Association, Division of Public Education. 2001. “Raising the Bar: Pioneers in the Legal Profession: National Hispanic Heritage Month, Adelfa Botello Callejo.” http://www.abanet.org/publiced/callejo.html (accessed July 21, 2005); Callejo, Adelfa B. 2004. Personal correspondence with Kinchen C. Pier III, April; Olivera, Mercedes. 2004. “Alum to SMU law school: Thanks a million.” Dallas Morning News, April 16, 3B. Kinchen C. Pier III
CALLIS DE FAGES, EULALIA FRANCESCA Y JOSEPHA (1758– ?) Eulalia Callis was the first woman to petition for divorce in Spanish colonial California (1785), creating what was considered the scandal of the century in that region. She was born in Barcelona, Spain, on October 4, 1758, the daughter of Don Agustín Callis and Doña Rosa Casañas Masón. Doña Rosa and her children followed Don Agustín to New Spain around 1771, after he was commissioned captain of the Free Company of Catalonian Volunteers charged with stabilizing the northern provinces of New Spain. Among the troopers was fellow Catalonian Lieutenant Pedro Fages. The Callis family was part of a prominent group of Catalans who lived in Mexico City. Eulalia enjoyed a privileged upbringing, receiving formal education and living in a sumptuous home amid many servants. Although Pedro Fages was almost twenty-nine years older than Eulalia, Don Agustín considered him a fitting suitor for his daughter. In 1780 Fages, now a lieutenant colonel in command of the Company of Catalonian Volunteers assigned to Sonora, married Callis in Mexico City. His position required frequent travel to places such as Guadalajara, Hermosillo, Santa Cruz, and Mexico City. Callis sometimes traveled with her husband but more often remained behind. Shortly after
they married, while Callis was five months pregnant, the couple moved to Fages’s new assigned post at Arizpe, in the frontier province of Sonora. One month after their arrival, in May 1781, Callis gave birth to a son, Pedro José Fernando Fages. Soon after the birth of their son Fages again left his wife to fight the Seri Indians and, later that year, to battle with the Yumas. This assignment kept the couple apart for almost two years and left Callis in isolated, solitary, and unimpressive surroundings. When Fages was appointed governor of California in 1782, he attempted to persuade his wife to join him at Monterey, the capital of Alta California. Fearing further loneliness and isolation, Callis at first refused to go, but after much pleading by Fages, she reluctantly followed her husband to that northernmost frontier region of New Spain. The trip to Monterey was a very arduous one for Callis and her infant son. From her initial arrival at the Pacific coast, where she set sail across the Gulf of California, she encountered great difficulties. The ship from San Blas was very small, and thus her carriage and some of her luggage were left behind. Fages joined her at Mission Loreto in Baja California to escort her on the remaining trip north. The rugged journey would have been strenuous and fatiguing for any person, but even more so for a woman of the elite unaccustomed to the hardships of the frontier. During this trip Callis, now pregnant with her second child, suffered a miscarriage. Her tenure as the governor’s wife was largely an unhappy one. Although the colonists throughout Baja and Alta California enthusiastically welcomed Callis, she was not impressed by the condition of the settler communities. She appeared distressed at the nakedness of the Indians and gave them some of her own clothing. In addition, Callis continued to suffer from ill health. Callis was six months pregnant when she again traveled with her husband to the dedication of the church at Santa Clara Mission. She was, however, unable to complete the journey and stayed at Mission San Francisco until she gave birth in August 1784 to her daughter María del Carmen. Callis was forced to temporarily remain there to recuperate from a postpartum illness. Shortly after her return to Monterey, because of her continued frail health and nostalgia for Mexico City, Callis began to request that her husband allow her to return there. He adamantly refused. This reportedly caused significant conjugal discord, and some propose that it ultimately led to the infamous scandal. In February 1785, after discovering her husband in a compromising position with an adolescent Yuma Indian girl, Callis accused her husband of adultery and petitioned for divorce, something unheard of in the region at that time. According to colonial honor codes,
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Calvillo, Ana María del Carmen which held a woman honor-bound to submit to both her husband’s and the church’s will, Callis’s accusation of adultery against her husband was deemed censurable, if not condemnable. Her role as the wife of the Spanish colonial governor was to uphold the honor status of her husband. She was severely berated by the mission authorities for making her accusations public. Callis refused to recant her charges, and as a result, the missionaries attempted to silence her. At the request of her husband the missionaries detained her and transferred her under military guard to Mission Carmelo, where she was to meditate on her actions, was subjected to harsh conditions, and was prohibited contact with family and friends under the threat of excommunication. Ultimately Callis, under continued pressure by the missionaries, reportedly retracted the charges and renewed marital life with her husband. During her tenure in California Callis was pregnant two more times. One child, Josefa Agustina Rosa, born in May 1786, died eight days later; the other, María Josefa, was born in May 1788. The Fages family eventually returned to Mexico City after the governor resigned his post in 1790. Little else is known about Callis after her departure from California and the death of her husband in 1794, which left her a widow at the age of thirty-six. Some of the residents of Monterey spoke fondly of Callis’s generosity and sympathy for the indigenous people of the region. Until recently historians, however, referred to Callis as a hysterical woman suffering from either premenstrual syndrome or postpartum depression, or as a fiery, tempestuous Catalan woman who was disgraceful, scandalous, and headstrong. Inevitably, Callis will be remembered as the First Lady who, attempting to free herself from the severity of the frontier and from a philandering husband, became one of the most infamous women of early Spanish colonial California. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Dakin, Susanna Bryant. 1963. Rose, or Rose Thorn? Three Women of Spanish California. Berkeley, CA: Friends of the Bancroft Library; Nuttall, Donald A. 1998. The Señoras Gobernadoras of Spanish Alta California: A Comparative Study. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. Bárbara O. Reyes
CALVILLO, ANA MARÍA DEL CARMEN (1765–1856) Ana María del Carmen Calvillo, a successful rancher and entrepreneur, was born in San Antonio de Bexar in 1765. Her father, Ignacio Francisco Xavier Calvillo, married Antonia Arocha, daughter of prominent cattle
raiser Francisco de Arocha and Juana Curbelo, originally settlers from the Canary Islands. They had four children, one of whom was Ana María del Carmen. Ana María del Carmen Calvillo’s marriage to Juan Lucas Gavino de la Trinidad Delgado, also descended from Canary Islanders, is recorded in census records in the Bexar Archives and in Frederick Chabot’s genealogical studies. The marriage took place around 1781 (no record of it has been found) and produced two sons, Juan Bautista in 1783 and José Anacleto in 1784. Ecclesiastical proceedings record their baptisms and the younger son’s death seven months after he was born. There is no known death date for the firstborn, but he is not listed in his mother’s will. One may assume that the firstborn preceded her in death. The census of 1795 listed María Calvillo (no age given) and Gavino Delgado (age thirty-six) as living in Villa de San Fernando and gave Delgado’s occupation as rancher. In 1811, however, the couple was living on La Santa Cruz y Paso de la Mugeres [sic] Ranch that belonged to her father, Don Ignacio Calvillo, and that his daughter would eventually inherit. Gavino Delgado was a revolutionary involved in the political intrigue that surrounded San Antonio de Bexar in 1813. María Calvillo inherited Rancho de las Cabras (Wilson County, Texas), formerly an outpost of Mission San Francisco de la Espada located in San Antonio de Bexar, from her father. He had successfully petitioned for land that had formerly been part of the extensive ranch lands owned by Mission Espada. Rancho de las Cabras adjoined his holdings situated on El Paso de las Mujeres on the San Antonio River. Unlike other women who relinquished control over their assets to their husbands, and who assumed control of spousal holdings only after his death, Calvillo left her husband for unknown reasons and established economic independence, single-handedly operating her ranching enterprise. Calvillo added to her inheritance by petitioning for land within the mission compound where she had been living. She also expanded the ranches’ operations by building a granary, a sugar mill, and an extensive irrigation system with the help of neighboring ranching families and families that lived on the ranch with her. Widows enjoyed a degree of social acceptability and were granted full protection of the law; however, a woman who abandoned her husband was a different matter. Surely she was scorned by frontier society of the time. Yet Spanish law protected women from spousal abuse in general and liability in regard to debt, as well as giving them the right to sue and be sued. Petitions found in the Bexar Archives demonstrate that Calvillo knew her legal rights. She kept her maiden name and thus her individuality and maintained her property separate from that of her husband. A strong
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Canales, Laura and determined woman, not unlike others shaped by harsh frontier conditions, Calvillo defended her inheritance in 1828. She asked the court to provide her with a legal survey of her holdings “because the deeds which she had to it by her deceased father together with the chest were taken from her by officials of the Spanish Government.” According to her grandnephew, Jacobo Cruz, she dressed like a man and could shoot and rope like one. On one occasion a surveyor spent long, tedious hours astride a horse, marking off and measuring her lands, and Calvillo went along, seeing to it that her interests were properly looked after. No one dared cross her. She endured the angry criticisms of her neighbors by paying tribute to rampaging Indians. She offered them beef in exchange for protection of her property. According to unsubstantiated sources, raising cattle and sheep was not Calvillo’s only source of income. One of her relatives carried on a flourishing trade in contraband between Texas and Louisiana. Since the ranch was situated on two main roads, it served as an excellent base for such operations, and Calvillo was rumored to be a very agreeable silent partner. By 1833, however, she was again having troubles with the Indians. She filed a petition citing “deterioration of her landed property caused by the hostile wars of the enemy tribes.” She also stated that she had given whatever aid she could to help wage war against them. By 1851 her legal representative appeared in court on her behalf. Calvillo was declared non compos mentis. She died on January 15, 1856, at the age of ninety-one. According to local folklore, her ghost still roams the countryside around Rancho de las Cabras astride a great white horse, her raven hair flowing in the wind. One Texas writer used the same description but added the words “scandalizing the countryside.” Like other women of the frontier, Calvillo broke through societal confines to assert her personhood, expand her economic outlook, and, most important, open the doors to political and legal recognition enjoyed by women today. Evelyn Carrinton, in Women in Early Texas, portrayed Doña María Calvillo as a modern-day feminist: “Cherished by no one, ostracized by all women,” she refused to accept the lot of the women of her era, which was “inexorable wifehood and motherhood.” See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Bexar Archives, 1781. “Inventory of Rancho de las Cabras, San Fernando de Bexar.” October 10; ———, 1782. “Report on the Roundup Ordered by Governor Domingo Cabello.” February 26; ———, 1806–1828. “Petition for Return of Property and Various Other Land Petitions and Request for Title Searches,” Eugene C. Barker Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin; Carrinton, Evelyn. 1994. Women in
Early Texas. Austin: Texas State Historical Society; Chabot, Frederick C. 1970. With the Makers of San Antonio. San Antonio: Artes Grafícas; McMillan, Nora E. Rios. 1999. “ ‘Siendo mi derecho . . . ’ The Hispanic Woman’s Legal Identity in the Spanish Southwest,” South Texas Studies, 102–142; San Fernando Church Marriage Records. 1811. Archdiocese of San Antonio.
Nora E. Rios McMillan
CANALES, LAURA (1954–2005) Laura Canales was born in Kingsville, Texas, on August 19, 1954. The undisputed “reina de la onda Tejana/Queen of Tejano music” broke through the traditional male-dominated genre in the 1970s, making her singing debut with Los Unicos in 1973, a year after graduating from H. M. King High School in Kingsville, Texas. Canales briefly performed with the legendary El Conjunto Bernal from 1973 to 1975. She then became part of Snowball and Co., led by Ramiro de la Cruz, with whom she recorded her first hit, “Midnight Blue,” in 1975 on the Fireball Records label. Canales’s bands went through several structural changes, but her popularity and impact on the Tejano music market never faltered. In 1978 Canales and her band became Felicidad, and in 1981 the band disassembled into two groups. From there Canales moved on to form her next band, Laura Canales y Encanto. It was with this band that Canales released one of her most significant albums, Si viví contigo, in 1981. The title-track single to this album established Canales as the top female artist in Tejano music. The early 1980s represented a major shift for the Tejano music industry with the formal establishment of the Texas Talent Musicians Association and the Tejano Music Awards, and it was Canales who symbolically assured the larger public that Tejanas would not be left out. Over the years she has appeared on a wide range of television programs, such as Siempre en Domingo, Mundo Latino, and The Johnny Canales Show. Canales was nominated for Tejano Music Awards in Female Vocalist of the Year and Female Entertainer of the Year categories from 1982 to 1990. Beginning in 1982, Canales won the Tejano Music Awards for Female Vocalist of the Year and Female Entertainer of the Year for four consecutive years, a record broken only by Selena in the 1990s. December 22, 1985, marked her last public performance with Encanto before taking several years of leave from the music industry. She remained involved in the music scene as a disc jockey for KYST in Houston in 1988. In 1989 Canales signed a five-year contract with Capital/FM Latin, with whom she recorded “No Regrets,” a gesture of affirmation to those who doubted her decision to take a leave of ab-
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Canales, Nohelia de los Angeles sence. The early 1990s showed that Canales’s presence within the Tejano music industry was as assertive as ever; she produced such hits as “Cuatro caminos,” “Dile a tu esposa,” and “Frente a frente.” In 1994 Canales signed a contract with Fonovisa Records. By the end of the 1990s Canales was arguably the most significant female presence within the musical landscape of Tejano music since the post–World War II era, when Tejana duets and other solo artists created a significant space for women. No other Tejana singer since the 1970s can display a Tejano music career that has spanned nearly three decades. Although still releasing Tejano music CDs, Canales’s priorities were also invested in the area of higher education. In 1997 she obtained her bachelor of arts degree in communication disorders from Texas A&M University in Kingsville. She pursued her master of arts degree in psychology from the same institution. In April 2005 Laura Canales died unexpectedly after gallbladder surgery. SOURCES: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books; “Laura Canales, 50, Star of Tejano Music, Is Dead.” 2005. New York Times, April 20. Deborah Vargas
CANALES, NOHELIA DE LOS ANGELES (1974– ) Born in Nicaragua and raised in Los Angeles since the age of five, Nohelia Canales is a nationally recognized activist who has fought for the rights of Latinas/os in California and throughout the United States. As a young immigrant in Los Angeles, Canales’s own experiences of “living between two cultures” and facing discrimination in the school system drove her “to see what is just and unjust” and greatly influenced her perspective on racism, cultural rights, and women’s rights in U.S. society. In 1996 Canales completed her B.S. in biology and philosophy at Mount St. Mary College (MSMC) in Los Angeles. While attending Mount St. Mary College, Canales and two other students in the MSMC Leadership Program were selected to participate in the National Education for Women (NEW) Leadership Program, a national workshop held at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. She describes this workshop as “one of the most amazing experiences” she had because she was given “an opportunity to feel connected, become politicized, and meet women revolutionaries” like Bella Abzug, Geraldine Ferraro, and Ruth Mandel. With a public policy grant from CAWP, Canales and her fellow classmates returned to Mount St. Mary College to co-
found the first women’s group on campus, WAKE-UP (Women Advocates for Knowledge and Empowerment, also called WAKE), an organization created to “bring women of color into feminism.” A primary goal of WAKE was to “make feminism relevant to the lives of women of color” and to challenge the stereotype that “feminism is only for white women.” She cofounded another student advocacy group, Latinas Unidas, a first-of-its-kind organization that was dedicated to addressing the intersection of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the lives of Latina students. Canales organized with members of WAKE and Latinas Unidas to bring Eleanor Smeal and Dolores Huerta to campus, worked with the United Farm Workers, volunteered in the campaign against Proposition 187, and created public forums to address complex issues such as abortion rights, women’s autonomy, and sexuality. In 1996 Canales deferred medical school at the Mayo Clinic in order to work with Freedom Summer/ Fall ’96, a Feminist Majority Foundation affirmative action and voter registration project. As a full-time intern and later as “the only woman of color” core staff member for Freedom Summer/Fall ’96, Canales helped spread the word to Latino communities in East Los Angeles to vote against Proposition 209, legislation designed to dismantle hard-won affirmative action policies in California. As a result of her work educating Latino communities about Proposition 209, Canales was awarded a Gloria Steinem Award from the MS. Foundation in 1997, making her one of the youngest women ever to receive this honor. During the same year Canales was nationally recognized by Ms. Magazine in its twenty-fifth anniversary issue as one of the top twenty-one most accomplished, promising young feminists aged thirty and under. Canales entered the master’s program at the Mayo Clinic in 1997, where she focused on tumor biology with an emphasis on breast cancer research. She continues to integrate her feminist perspective into the “white, male-dominated field” of science and medicine and hopes to challenge dominant perceptions of women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities in medicine, including “the very structures of knowledge that shape medical professionals’ views on medicine, bodies and women’s health.” Being the only Latina in her graduate program at the Mayo Clinic, Canales faced “a huge contrast” between her professional field and the Latino community in Los Angeles. She continues to “stay in touch” with her activist side, participates regularly in third-wave feminist conferences and workshops, and continues her educational work to bring awareness around issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and heterosexism in the medical field. In 2005, she is working on her doctorate in Oral Biology
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Canino, María Josefa and Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also serves as the program manager for the Anti-Violence Project of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and sits on the advisory board of Ms. Magazine. For Canales, the most rewarding thing about being an activist is “creating a community and being the impetus for change.” She states, “Unless you put yourself out there it’s never going to happen . . . that’s how I see all of the great women who have put themselves out there for me.” Canales integrates her beliefs into her passion for science, where she hopes to break down stereotypes about scientists as “objective and non-biased” and educate people about the revolutionary role of scientists in creating a more humane society. SOURCE: Ms. Magazine. 1997. “Next Generation: 21 for the 21st.” September/October. Amy Lind
CANINO, MARÍA JOSEFA (1944–
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Dr. María Josefa Canino’s academic work and public service range over a thirty-year career centered on community-based institution building, the development of professional education curricula, and advocating on behalf of the poor, the non-English-dominant, and the disenfranchised, as well as pioneering the establishment of an academic department, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Rutgers University, Livingston. A product of New York City, Canino was born in the heart of El Barrio on 106th Street and Fifth Avenue. The daughter of a bodeguero, Canino is a proud and outstanding representative of that fusion of the island and the urban experience. Educated in the Northeast, Canino holds an Ed.D. (1981) in administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University, an M.S. (1967) in social work with a specialization in community organization from Columbia University, and a B.A. (1964) in sociology from the City College of New York. She was appointed by New York mayor John Lindsay to the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York and subsequently served on Governor Mario Cuomo’s Task Force on Poverty and Social Welfare. She was honored by her alma mater when she received the 125th Anniversary City College Alumni Medal. Throughout her career she has been affiliated with several committees and organizations, such as the Board of Directors of El Barrio Popular Education Project, the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), ASPIRA, the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights, and the Board of Directors of the Field Foundation. Her career has been characterized by her dedica-
tion and commitment to the point of personal sacrifice, as was evident in 1993 when she withdrew her candidacy to direct the prestigious Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in order to break the deadlock in which the president and chancellor had placed the center because, despite demonstrations held by students and staff along Lexington Avenue in support of her nomination, they ignored the recommendation made by the research committee. It was, ironically, her support for the very creation of that research center, along with her stand on issues such as remedial education and the preservation of Hostos Community College while she was a CUNY trustee, that played a part in the political undertones surrounding that decision. One of the most exciting periods of her career was a ten-year effort as a member of an educational team that pioneered in the design and implementation of competency-based curricula in social work and public administration, the experimental Master’s in Social Work Program for Hispanics and the Graduate Bilingual Program in Public Administration. Canino has also served on the faculty of the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Social Work during its implementation of a new curriculum geared to preparing a cadre of professionals in social service, policy, and administration. At Rutgers University, Newark, Canino cocoordinated the public administration certificate in nonprofit management, an innovative graduate-level credential open to personnel from the nonprofit sector, as well as graduate students from all disciplines. She has served as acting chairperson of that department, directed its Executive MPA Program, and taught in the master’s program. She is presently working on publishing the research results of a Nonprofit Sector Research Fund grant to study Latino advocacy and welfare reform in New Jersey, editing a book on higher-education policy in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, and, with other founders, establishing a Hispanic Foster Care Family Recruitment agency in New Jersey. Canino sits on various nongovernmental organization (NGO) boards. She is vice-chairperson of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), a founding board member of the New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP), and cofounder of the Children’s Advocacy Resource Association of New Jersey (CARANJ). She most recently served on the Advisory Committee to the Newark Museum for its exhibit Puerto Rican Santos de Palo: Sculptures between Heaven and Earth. Canino’s advice to young Latino/a students is simple and exemplifies her credo and entire career: “Have integrity, and by which I mean personal honesty about what they are confronting, what their
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Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union role is in the community and what their contribution is to the collective welfare, while asking themselves questions about what they can do to advance that welfare.” See also Education SOURCES: Canino, María Josefa. 2002. Oral history interview by Luis Gordillo, March 19; Cruz, Evidio de la. 1993. “Critican al presidente del Hunter College por vetar a educadora boricua.” El Diario/La Prensa (New York), July 7, 3; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. “María Josefa Canino.” http://www.rutgers-newark.rutgers.edu/pubadmin/phd/fac ulty/Canino.htm (accessed March 1, 2002). Luis G. Gordillo
CANNERY AND AGRICULTURAL WORKERS INDUSTRIAL UNION (CAWIU) (1931–1934) The Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) was formed in 1931 as the agricultural arm of the Communist Party’s (CP) national federation of unions, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL). The TUUL entered California agricultural fields in 1930, joining strikes by Mexican agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley. Continuing this work, the CAWIU organized strikes during the contentious depression years of 1931 to 1935. Although it was briefly active in Arizona, the union organized primarily in California. In 1933 a wave of strikes by some 47,575 workers hit California; twenty-five of these, involving 37,565 workers, were under the aegis of the CAWIU. This “general strike” in agriculture began in southern California with the El Monte berry strike, moved north into the San Joaquin Valley, crested in the October 1933 cotton strike, and then began again in the Imperial Valley in early 1934. By 1933 CAWIU leaders had studied agricultural wages and working conditions, developed a union strategy, and attempted to establish a regional confederation using as its base the camp committees, composed of farmworkers elected by their fellow workers. Yet the organization remained skeletal, and as one organizer said, “it was a union in name, a rally point, but as far as organization . . . it was actually nonexistent.” CAWIU activist Caroline Decker pointed out that even without the union “there would have been strikes anyway. Strikes were breaking out all over. . . . Those strikes would have happened union or no union.” As strikes broke out, the CAWIU joined workers. The union began to take on a shape and identity as the strikes spread across the state. The CAWIU had a good reputation among agricultural workers, especially those who had worked with the CP in unemployed workers’ councils or in various fights for civil
rights. Yet the union was small. The few formal organizers received little or no salary, depended on sympathizers for food and donations, and traveled on freight cars or in dilapidated automobiles; they even hitchhiked. The 1933 cotton strike had only six CAWIU organizers covering the 200-mile-long San Joaquin Valley. Some, such as Pat Chambers, had worked with Mexican workers. Others had not, and few spoke Spanish. The union sounded impressive in newspaper accounts and party minutes, and a red-baiting press, growers, and federal and state officials’ denunciations of the Communist union magnified the organization’s size. The CAWIU was important as a rallying cry, as an organization that could make demands and negotiate for workers, and as a structure around which the informal networks, families, crews, and groups could coalesce. Yet as organizer Pat Chambers recognized, “Although the directives in some superficial way could come from the outside, the actual organization had to come from the workers themselves.” The CAWIU depended on Mexican Communists, leftists, fellow travelers, and workers experienced in labor fights who served as the conduits between the union and Mexican labor camps, families, and labor crews in the fields. These workers met with CAWIU organizers, strategized, and organized in their own communities. The union’s base and much of the strategy and leadership came from the Mexican workers themselves. Few workers, male or female, actually joined and paid dues, although they felt that they belonged to the union. Women seemed ignored by the union structure. Some women attended strike meetings. Younger bilingual women translated for union organizers. While some women were aware of the CAWIU, it is possible that the majority did not know the union by name. Yet focusing on union structure obscures the crucial role of women and women’s networks. Groups of women set up soup kitchens, fed strikers, and organized child care. Mexican women hid CAWIU organizers in the Imperial Valley, transporting them house to house and successfully eluding police. They organized picket lines, and at least one EuroAmerican migrant worker learned from a Mexican striker how to shout “Huelga pizacadores.” Women confronted growers, law enforcement, and vigilantes, fought both strikebreakers and deputy sheriffs, and were arrested in these conflicts. California business and agriculture pressured officials to stop the CAWIU. In the wake of the San Francisco general strike of 1934, and under mounting pressure from business, police raided the CAWIU office in Sacramento and arrested union organizers. Fifteen were indicted on charges of violating the Criminal Syn-
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Cántico de la Mujer Latina dicalism Act. The lengthy trial effectively removed the CAWIU from the fields. Eight of the union organizers were convicted and sent to jail. Yet the Communist Party itself administered the coup de grace to the union. In 1934 the party shifted to the popular-front strategy and abandoned separate unions to work within established labor organizations. See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Weber, Devra. 1989. “ ‘Raiz Fuerte’: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers.” Oral History Review 17, no. 2:47–62; ———. 1994. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Devra A. Weber
CÁNTICO DE LA MUJER LATINA (1998– ) In 1998 pastoral musician Rubi Martínez Bernat received a call from Father Virgil Funk, president of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. He said, “We are coming to Grand Rapids, can you do something Hispanic?” Martínez Bernat knew that the Latino population in Grand Rapids was growing. Thus she wanted to do something that showcased Latino culture. She received the application for the conference entry and considered what she wanted to do. She recalled, “I knew I wanted to do music, poetry, and readings by Latinas.” She went to the choir she directed and talked to the members. She explained, “I told the women we would not be paid; it would just be for the glory of the performance.” From this discussion Cántico de la Mujer Latina was born. The founder of Cántico, Martínez Bernat came to pastoral music at the age of nineteen. Her parents, Nohemy González and Pedro Martínez, believed that piano lessons would keep Martínez Bernat from smoking, hanging out with the wrong crowd, or getting into trouble. Thus she took music lessons throughout her childhood. Her pastoral career began in an unlikely way. After the birth of her first son Derrick, Martínez Bernat went to St. Francis Church in Ecorse, Michigan, to request baptism. During her meeting the priest explained to her that they needed a volunteer musician to play the organ for the morning masses. Martínez Bernat did not know how to play the organ, and she had just become a mother. The priest allowed her to use the church to practice, and a young couple from the church offered to take care of her son during her practice times. Later Martínez Bernat went to Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, where she studied organ, pastoral music, and theology. As Martínez Bernat explained, “Before I knew it, I went from being a volunteer to being a fulltime employee.”
Martínez Bernat eventually left St. Francis Church and went to St. Anne’s shortly after her divorce. Martínez Bernat has questioned her role within the church. She stated, “I am a woman, Mexican, divorced, a single woman. . . . I am on the edge before I open my mouth. . . . How can I be a Church lady and divorced?” Martínez Bernat has received support from the pastor of St. Anne’s, Father Robert Duggan, and the parish community. It was at St. Anne’s that she founded Cántico de la Mujer Latina. At its first performance in Grand Rapids, Cántico received the conference’s highest evaluation. After the concert the choir members returned home. Martínez Bernat recalled, “We thought this would be a one-time opportunity.” However, a short time later they received an invitation to perform at the Southwest Liturgical Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Someone from Albuquerque had heard Cántico perform in Grand Rapids. The group learned new songs and new material and headed to Albuquerque. From its performance in Albuquerque, it was invited to Chicago. Since its appearance in Chicago, Cántico’s success has continued to grow. In August 2002 it performed at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Cántico is composed of eighteen women from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Their music blends literature and poetry by Latinas such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Esmeralda Santiago with Latina theology by Ada María Isasi-Díaz and liturgical music by Mary Frances Reza. The group also showcases the creativity of members, such as poetry by Martínez Bernat and music by Marcela Salas. Cántico teaches awareness about the role of Latinas in the church, celebrates the achievements and accomplishments of Latinas, and empowers women to be agents for change in the church and in society. Cántico reflects the grassroots community activism in the church, and it challenges the hierarchical and patriarchal structures that exist in the church and society. Building on the theories of Anzaldúa, Martínez Bernat stated that the church, like society as a whole, views Latinos as “optional people.” She elaborated, “Other people are making decisions for us and about us without even consulting us.” Through their music and creative ministry Martínez Bernat and Cántico make the lives, history, experiences, and accomplishments of Latinas and Latinos central to the church and to society. See also Religion SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. La frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books; IsasiDíaz, Ada María. 1996. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
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Carbonell, Anna
CAPETILLO, LUISA (1876–1922) Although Luisa Capetillo was recognized in her lifetime as an important labor and feminist pioneer in the Americas—one of her essays was included in a 1921 anthology of leading international feminist and radical figures, such as Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, among others—there has been little historical writing about her. Luisa Capetillo was born out of wedlock in the northern town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1876. Her mother, Margarita Perone, was a domestic of French ancestry, and her father was Luis Capetillo Echevarría, an unskilled worker born in Spain. Capetillo’s mother made sure that her daughter received a solid education at home and encouraged her interest in literature. Capetillo became active in the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT, Free Federation of Workers) from its inception in 1899. The FLT was Puerto Rico’s most important labor organization during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and Capetillo figured as one of its more prominent leaders. At that time Capetillo worked in cigar factories in Arecibo. She was also a reader in these factories, paid by cigar workers themselves to read novels, philosophical and political essays, and other writings aloud as they prepared the cigars. This job was one of great prestige among turn-of-the-century cigar workers in the United States and the Caribbean. In 1904 Capetillo started what became a lifelong endeavor: writing short pieces for labor newspapers and magazines. Throughout the decade she continued her activism and her writing on behalf of the FLT. Her first book, Ensayos libertinos, published in 1907, engaged socialist and anarchist discourses familiar to the Puerto Rican (and international) working class. In 1909 she founded a short-lived feminist working-class magazine called La mujer and moved to Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan. Unfortunately, researchers have not been able to find any remaining copies of this magazine. Capetillo published a utopian novel, La humanidad del futuro, in 1910. The novel is organized around the anarchist concept of a general strike. In 1911 Capetillo published her most important and influential book, Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos, y deberes de la mujer. This book is considered the first feminist treatise in Puerto Rico and one of the very first in Latin America and the Caribbean. By 1911 Capetillo was a wellknown figure both in Puerto Rico’s labor movement and in literary and feminist circles. In 1912 Capetillo began her work as an international labor intellectual and organizer. She moved to New York and worked closely with the Hispanic labor press. Her commitment to working-class issues led her in 1913 to collaborate with Cuban, Spanish, and African American cigar workers in Ybor City and
Tampa. In 1915 she moved to Havana, Cuba. There she was arrested and subsequently acquitted for wearing trousers, considered at the time exclusively men’s clothing, in public. Capetillo continued the practice of wearing men’s trousers at public events after this incident. In 1916 Capetillo was deported for her work on behalf of syndical and anarchist organizations in Cuba. Back in Puerto Rico, Capetillo published her fourth and final book, Influencias de las ideas modernas. Although the book was published in Puerto Rico in 1916, the project had been gestating since her days in Tampa. Between 1916 and 1919 Capetillo actively organized and participated in strikes and collaborated with working-class newspapers and magazines. She moved back to New York City in 1919–1920, where she ran a hostel, continued to serve as a reader in cigar factories, and kept writing for the local Spanish press. She returned to Puerto Rico and died of tuberculosis in 1922, at the age of forty-six, in San Juan. A feminist, union organizer, journalist, and activist for social justice, Capetillo argued for nonconformism premised on a profound sense of natural harmony, gender, and social equality. She often questioned deeply held social, sexual, political, and economic assumptions of her time. See also Cigar Workers; Feminism; Tabaqueros’ Unions SOURCES: Hewitt, Nancy. 2005. “Luisa Capetillo: Feminist of the Working Class.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. New York: Oxford University Press; Quintero Rivera, Angel. 1976. Workers’ Struggle in Puerto Rico: A Documentary History. New York: Monthly Review Press; Ramos, Julio, ed. 1992. Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo. Río Piedras: Ediciones Huracán; Sánchez González, Lisa. 1996. “Luisa Capetillo: An Anarcho-Feminist Pionera in the Mainland Puerto Rican Narrative/Political Tradition.” In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Erlinda González-Berry and Chuck Tatum, 2:148–167. Houston: Arte Público Press; Valle Ferrer, Norma. 1990. Luisa Capetillo: Historia de una mujer proscrita. Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
CARBONELL, ANNA (1952–
)
In July 2002 Anna Carbonell was named vice president of the National Broadcasting Corporation for Station Relations at NBC4 and Telemundo East Coast. Carbonell’s responsibilities include philanthropic budgets, development of public service announcements, and maintaining the FCC public inspection files. She serves on the NBC Diversity Council and has been a key senior advisor on ethnic diversification issues at NBC. Her appointment was publicly hailed by industry insiders because of her outstanding work in the media.
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Cardona, Alice She was born Anacandia Fermaints and came to New York City from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in the early 1950s when she was a year old. Her parents, Francisco Fermaints, a merchant seaman, and Adela Sánchez, left the oppressive poverty of Puerto Rico and came looking for a better life. Adela had suffered from tuberculosis during her pregnancy with her daughter but felt that her health had improved and that with better medical care she would prosper in New York City. Shortly after their arrival their daughter Anacandia was hospitalized because she was found to have a tubercular growth in her knee. Anacandia was taken to an upstate hospital, which made it almost impossible for her parents to visit often or for an extended amount of time. To be an infant hearing a strange language for the first two years of life without her parents became Anacandia’s lot. Upon release she spoke only English and was taken to a home where only Spanish was spoken. These early traumatic experiences made communication a priority for this young child and helped shape her successful future in media. “Be good to yourself, be proud of yourself” has been the trademark signoff for Anacandia, today known as Anna Carbonell. She is well known today to millions in the New York metropolitan area who have seen her for more than twenty-five years on public service television shows, at colleges, universities, and public events, and at the numerous boards and organizations where she serves. Carbonell is a product of the public school system and attended New York University, where she majored in English. Initially Carbonell began to work with community organizations but soon became employed as supervisor of press relations for the International Paper Company. In 1981 she was offered the opportunity to work for the American Broadcasting Company in the press information office. In 1983 she launched the station’s first major public affairs issues program geared to the interests and needs of the growing Hispanic community in the tristate area. For more than thirteen years she produced and hosted the program, Tiempo, which was broadcast every Sunday morning. All socioeconomic issues that affected Hispanics were of interest to Carbonell. She became very active in all facets of New York life. In 1995 she joined the National Broadcasting Corporation as director of press and public affairs for WNBC-TV. She was a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Puerto Rican Coalition, the Association of Hispanic Arts, the New York Investment Fund, Marymount Manhattan College, YWCA of New York, the National Association of Puerto Rican Women, and numerous other organizations. A strong advocate for fairness in media, she directed the
Northeast Region of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and served on the editorial board of WABC-TV. For her many efforts, Carbonell garnered critical recognition. She is the recipient of numerous awards. Because of her activism, Carbonell has been honored by the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, and numerous other organizations. She was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the Nation by Hispanic Business Magazine in 1989 and was listed among 50 Influential Latinos by the New York Daily News in 1995. Carbonell resides in Staten Island, New York, is divorced, and has one daughter, Diana Carbonell, who is an attorney with a major brokerage firm in New York City. See also Television SOURCES: The New Tomorrow (online publication for Black and Hispanic Young Adults). “Anna Carbonell.” http://www.tntomorrow.com/A&L_speakers_and_consult ants_pg12.html (accessed June 21, 2005); wnbc.com (NBC Channel 4 New York City web site). “Anna Carbonell.” http://www.wnbc.com/station/1169234/detail.html (accessed June 21, 2005). Edward Mercado
CARDONA, ALICE (1930–
)
Grassroots political activist and community organizer Alice Cardona was born and raised in New York City, one of nine children of Puerto Rican parents who came to New York in 1923. Her family was part of the pioneer generation of migrants who left the island before World War II. Cardona was reared in a large and loving family. “My childhood,” she recalls, “was rich in love and friendship, if not always [in] material possessions. . . . we learned early to share what we had with those less fortunate.” Sharing, collaboration, collective action, and group empowerment permeated Cardona’s early years and were reflected in the organization and group efforts she engendered in later life. Above all, Cardona’s dedication to the advancement of the disenfranchised, especially the Puerto Rican and Latino communities of the city, has served her as a steady guiding principle. This mission is most evident in Cardona’s contributions to her brother Luis Antonio’s efforts to research and write The Coming of the Puerto Ricans. Self-published in 1974 to fill the abysmal void on documentation of the U.S. Puerto Rican experience, this historical compilation ranks among the earliest resources on this group. In the 1960s Cardona worked as a program coordinator for the United Bronx Parents, a group founded by
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Carr, Vikki community leader Evelina López Antonetty to advocate for minority rights and quality education. Cardona developed knowledge and expertise about the public schools, encouraged parental involvement, and worked with summer youth employment programs. All of this prepared Cardona for a position with ASPIRA in the 1970s. Founded in 1961 by the venerable Antonia Pantoja, ASPIRA promoted an educational agenda designed to develop youth leadership and provide access to a university education. One of a cadre of organizers who worked with Pantoja in several of her empowerment initiatives, Cardona became a counselor at ASPIRA and later directed its Parent Student Guidance program. As was the case with many Puerto Rican and Latino leaders during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cardona was an experience-based activist without the academic credentials that would later become requisite for employment once these organizations became institutionalized or received government funding. In 1973, however, at the age of forty-three, Cardona received a college degree from New York University. The university recognized Cardona’s life experience and credited long-distance studies at Goddard College. That life experience included a wealth of contributions. She was a charter member of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW), cofounder with Norma Stanton of the Hispanic Women’s Center (HACER), a mediator, a policy maker, and an advocate for numerous community programs. In 1995, Cardona worked alongside Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski and others to create the group 100 Hispanic Women. Among its activities, the group is involved with voter registration and electoral participation. Cardona was appointed program associate director of the New York State Division for Women in 1983. She promoted an impressive array of issues, from bilingual education to AIDS and domestic violence. She retired in 1995. As an intrepid septuagenarian, Cardona has turned her attention to the trauma of being a first-time voter. “It hit me like thunder, right on top of my head,” Cardona exclaimed to a Newsday journalist in 2000. “People are afraid to vote . . . when you go to vote, the first thing you see is a police officer in uniform.” This revelation motivated Cardona to develop a new voter education pamphlet with the help of a Queens College professor. The table of contents includes a history of minority voting rights, filling out various voter forms and ballots, a synopsis of the party system and primary elections, and the rationale for stationing police officers at the polls. After a lifetime of grassroots and organized activism, Cardona has received countless recognitions and awards. Not one to rest on past achievements,
Alice Cardona remains committed to empowering marginalized communities for generations to come. SOURCES: Cardona, Luis Antonio. 1974. The Coming of the Puerto Ricans. Bethesda, MD: Carreta Press; Duggan, Dennis. 2004. “A life that is far from random.” Newsday, November 28, G2; Gudrais, Elizabeth. 2000. “Walking Tall into the Polling Booth.” Newsday, July 7, G6; Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1984. “Alice Cardona.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience. New York: IPRUS Institute. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CARR, VIKKI (1940–
)
Born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martínez Cardona to Carlos and Florence Cardona in El Paso, Texas, Vikki Carr was the oldest of eight children. Her family moved to Rosemead, California, when she was only an infant. At age eighteen, with the stage name “Carlita,” she performed as a singer with a band in Palm Springs and in 1961 landed a contract with Liberty Records. Her first headliner shows were at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Her fame began that same year with the hit song “He’s a Rebel.” It was soon followed by another hit single, “It Must Be Him,” which was later featured in the movie Moonstruck (1987). In the late 1960s she changed “Carlita” to Carr and added Vikki as her first name. Her father’s initial disappointment with her name change reinforced Carr’s commitment to her heritage and the desire to record in Spanish. Carr soon persuaded Columbia Records to record her first Spanish-language album in 1972. Although she remains one of the most successful and prolific Latina singers, the early days at Las Vegas hotels reflect harder times. In the public relations materials announcing her 1999 PBS special, Vikki Carr: Memories, Memorias, Carr recalled when she was starting her career in the 1960s and was performing in the lounge of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Nat King Cole was headlining in the hotel’s Copa Room, where Carr watched his act nearly every night before performing in her own lounge show. One night Cole brought a group of his friends to hear her sing. She was disappointed by their lack of interest. She recounts, “I was devastated. When I finished my set, I walked away feeling pretty low and suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and there he was, Nat King Cole. He smiled and said, ‘I’d like to apologize for my friends. Maybe you thought no one was listening, but I was, and you keep singing.’ ” She has won three Grammy awards: in 1985 for Best Mexican-American Performance for Simplemente mujer; in 1992 for Best Latin Pop Album for Cosas del amor, which included a duet with Mexican artist Ana Gabriel; and in 1995 for Best Mexican-American Performance, Vocal or Instrumental, for Recuerdo a Javier
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Carrillo de Fitch, Josefa Solis. Carr has made many television appearances, including an appearance as a guest host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and as guest star on The Carol Burnett Show. She has performed in theater and on the radio. In 1971 she founded the Vikki Carr Scholarship Foundation, which has distributed more than 200 scholarships. The scholarship encourages Mexican American youth to pursue a higher education. She has received numerous other awards, including Hispanic Woman of the Year in 1984 for her civic and humanitarian contributions. Her public service includes 1998 radio spots to educate the Hispanic community on how to deal with credit. Over the years she has performed for the queen of England and for five U.S. presidents. Her 1999 PBS special Vikki Carr: Memories, Memorias celebrated Mexican and Latin American music in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Having divorced twice, Carr is currently married to San Antonio physician Dr. Pedro DeLeón. SOURCES: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books; Hispanic Times. 1998. “Avoiding Bankruptcy: Educating Latinos to Use Credit Wisely.” 19, no. 3 (June 30): 46; Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit: Gale Research; Vikki Carr: Memories, Memorias. 2001. http://www.kcet.org/vikkicarr (accessed October 3, 2002). Mary Ann Villarreal
CARRILLO DE FITCH, JOSEFA (1810–1893) Born on November 27, 1810, María Antonia Natalia Elija Carrillo was affectionately called Josefa in honor of her godmother. She was the oldest of thirteen children born to María Carrillo López and Joaquín Victor Carrillo, captain of the San Diego Presidio. The Carrillos were an influential and socially well connected family with relatives through blood or marriage scattered throughout the various presidios and settlements in California, and by the 1820s they developed their rancho holdings and were raising livestock to supplement the family’s limited military salary. Landholding was the surest means of aggrandizing social and economic status for the second generation of Californios. Josefa Carrillo was born into this ranchero elite. Carrillo early life was rather typical of the ranchero class. She had little formal education but became adept at the female skills of sewing, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and ordering Indian servants; in short, she acquired the necessary skills for maintaining a rancho household. Two socioeconomic factors greatly affected nineteenth-century California. First, the aftermath of Mexican independence and its liberalizing so-
cial forces ushered in the secularizing of the California missions, thereby removing hundreds of thousands of cultivated acres from the power of the clergy. Second, the introduction and steady growth of a trade route that established the hide and tallow trade with New England merchants expanded the rancheros’ economic power and social ascendancy. Young Californianas were expected and pressured to marry early. Rather than marrying a fellow Californio, Carrillo fell in love with Henry Delano Fitch, an American merchant seaman, who formally presented a written marriage request to her parents in 1827. On April 15, 1829, the wedding ceremony was in progress, but was stopped by order of the governor, José María Echeandía. Carrillo believed “that the governor’s persecution of herself and her husband was . . . prompted by the hatred which possessed his soul when he realized that she preferred a rival whom he detested.” Echeandía actually detested Fitch’s failure to become a naturalized citizen and his smuggling activities. Undaunted, the couple eloped, escaping in Fitch’s ship, and they were married in Valparaiso, Chile. The elopement was the greatest social scandal of its time. Business brought the Fitches and their newborn son Eduardo back to California in July 1830. According to Carrillo “All the resident ladies of the port came to visit her and within a few days her mother and sister came, they welcomed her and after so many greetings her mother told her that her father was very offended with her.” Upset by this news, since “she preferred risking death rather than live in anger with the author of her days,” she attempted reconciliation. Finding her father sitting next to a shotgun, Carrillo literally begged on her knees for forgiveness, and moved by this emotional display, Joaquín Carrillo reluctantly reconciled with his daughter. While the Fitches reconciled with one male authority, they greatly displeased another, Governor Echeandía. The governor declared the couple’s marriage illegal, imprisoned Fitch, and simultaneously placed Carrillo in deposito, the practice of separating eloped couples in order to ascertain whether the young woman had consented of her own volition. The ecclesiastical authorities investigated the governor’s acts but simultaneously initiated an annulment trial in October 1830. Carrillo was removed from the state’s control and placed under another house of deposito in San Gabriel, while Fitch was sent to the prison at Monterey. In December 1830 the ecclesiastical authorities found the marriage valid but not legitimate under canonical law. To show penance and put an end to the scandal, the recalcitrant couple was ordered to hold lit candles while attending a high mass at the San Gabriel Mission and was instructed to pray the third part of the Rosary of the Virgin Mary for thirty days. In time Henry and
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Casal, Lourdes Josefa Carrillo Fitch had eleven children and settled in northern California, where the couple purchased the Sotoyomi rancho. According to Carrillo, Henry Fitch had promised to make her happy “for the rest of her days” on the night they eloped. Later in her life she related that her husband kept that promise loyally and faithfully for the twenty years she lived at his side. She never remarried after Fitch’s death in 1849 and died on January 26, 1893. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Sánchez, Rosaura. 1995. Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Weber, David J. 1992. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. María Raquel Casas
CASAL, LOURDES (1938–1981) Cuban writer and public intellectual Lourdes Emilia Irene de la Caridad Casal y Valdés was born in Havana. Her life was consumed by a passionate love of learning. Casal believed that the purpose of knowledge was to further human development. Thus she devoted her life to finding the answers that she ardently believed would bring progress and justice to society, and she did this with extraordinary honesty and integrity. Born to professional, mulatto parents, Casal enjoyed the benefits of middle-class life. Her commitment to education was probably due to the influence of her parents. Her father, Pedro Casal, was a physician and dentist, and her mother, an elementary-school teacher. Like many other middle-class mulattoes, Casal struggled with the tensions between race and class in prerevolutionary Cuban society. There were always reminders of the “color line.” In a short story Casal relates how a girlfriend did not invite her to her birthday party because (Casal) “was a pretentious mulatto girl who felt she was better than everybody else because her father was a doctor.” The Catholic University of Villanueva in Havana, from which Casal graduated with a degree in chemical engineering, was the stage for her first involvement in student activities. She edited student newspapers, participated in literary contests, and, as a practicing Catholic, became involved in organizations of religious women. It was obvious that Casal was moving away from the natural sciences and evolving into a multifaceted, Renaissance-like intellectual and activist. Later her commitment to Catholicism waned. As happened with most Cubans, the Revolution of 1959 marked Casal’s life in dramatic ways. As a university student at the time, Casal participated in revolutionary activities. With other Catholic students she became involved with the Directorio Estudiantil Revolucionario
(Student Revolutionary Directorate), an important antiBatista movement. But in the midst of intense ideological conflicts, and disappointed at what she saw as a betrayal of the original objectives of the Cuban Revolution, Casal became active in counterrevolutionary affairs in Cuba for a while and eventually left for exile. She came to New York in 1962, where she worked and studied, always with Cuba on her mind. Her desire to understand human behavior had led Casal to take some psychology courses at the University of Havana shortly before leaving Cuba. In New York she enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where she completed a Ph.D. in social psychology. She taught at the City University of New York and later at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, she wrote prolifically, not only about social science research, but also about literature and politics. Among her early literary works are El caso Padilla (1971), about the Cuban dissident writer, and Los fundadores: Alfonso y otros Cuentos (1973), both published in Miami, Florida. She wrote many poems about the exile experience and about life in New York, a city that she also loved. Although she wrote in Spanish, many of her poems have been translated into English. As a social scientist, Casal’s research focused on the fate of U.S. minorities, especially African Americans and Latinos. In this society, where race categorizations are more rigid than they are in Cuba, Casal clearly became “black” rather than mulatto. Her position as a black woman awakened her interest in the study of race and ethnicity. In 1974 she published The Cuban Minority in the United States with Rafael Prohias, another Cuban-born scholar, a report that identified the needs of those Cubans in the United States who were not as “successful” as other Cuban exiles of the 1960s. She also studied black Cubans (only about 3 percent of the total Cuban immigration of the 1960s and 1970s) who concentrated between white Cuban and black neighborhoods in Miami. But a great deal of her energy was devoted to the study of Cuba. In 1969 she cofounded the Institute of Cuban Studies, a group of Cuban academics in the United States committed to scholarship and pluralism. She also contributed to the magazine Nueva Generación, a publication that called for measured analysis and new ideas about Cuban reality. Casal’s life took a decisive turn in 1973 when she was invited by the Cuban government to visit the island. This invitation was an uncommon occurrence at the time, since Cuba considered exiles betrayers for having left the country, especially those who had left voluntarily as adults. Casal accepted, and her journey to Cuba opened the door for future exile visits and perhaps was instrumental in the eventual Cuban govern-
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Casals, Rosemary ment’s policy change toward the Cuban community in the United States. The trip had a profound impact on Casal. Her intellectual attempts to understand the 1959 Cuban Revolution turned into an open, albeit critical, support for it. Upon returning to the United States, she accepted an invitation from a Cuban-born colleague and friend to edit and publish a new magazine, Aréito. They talked to various individuals, including many members of Nueva Generación, who agreed to add their names to a long list of supporters of this new project. But when the first issue of Aréito came out, many strongly criticized the content, which they saw as an unconditional support of the revolution, and they asked for their names to be removed. Casal’s evolution had caused a rift among existing groups of Cuban Americans. At the same time, many other Cubans, especially among the young, became attracted to Lourdes Casal’s ideas and joined her projects. She helped found the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a group of young, progressive Cuban Americans who had come to the United States at a very early age. In 1978 she participated in the Dialogue, a meeting between members of the Cuban government and a group of exiles that led to the release of political prisoners, family reunification, and travel agreements. At the academic level Casal immersed herself in the analysis of Cuban society and politics. She continued to be an important voice at the Institute of Cuban Studies, where she contributed sympathetic, yet rigorous assessments of the Cuban Revolution. Casal’s love of life was often frustrated by poor health. She was diabetic. Beginning in 1977, she had to receive dialysis treatment due to renal dysfunction. In December 1979, during one of her trips to Cuba, Casal was hospitalized. Her health continued to deteriorate, and she stayed in Cuba, where she died on February 1, 1981. Casal served as a bridge between Cubans on the island and in the diaspora. She wanted to bring them together in a spirit of dialogue. Although she was a controversial figure in exile circles, Casal had the ability to express her positions firmly without disrespecting those who opposed her beliefs. Her untimely death represented a great loss for all Cubans who yearn to end years of hostility between Cuba and the United States. Her last book, Palabras juntan revolución, received a posthumous award by Casa de las Américas in Cuba. This collection of poems reflects different facets of Casal’s rich life. For example, “Siempre he vivido en Cuba” is a proud statement of loyalty to her native land. Another poem, “Para Ana Veldford,” is a sorrowful reflection on the uprootedness of exile, the high cost of multiple identities: “I carry this marginality inside me, immune to all returns, too habanera to be
New Yorker, too New Yorker to be—even to become again—anything else.” Lourdes Casal’s honest quest influenced many who knew her. Her integrity gained her much respect, even among those who disagreed with her views. She is terribly missed. SOURCES: Bryce-Laporte, Roy S. 1981. “Obituary to a Female Immigrant and Scholar, Lourdes Casal (1938–1981).” In Female Immigrants to the United States: Caribbean, Latin American, and African Experiences. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution; Cuesta, Leonel Antonio de la. 1982. Perfil biografico, itinerario ideologico: Antología de Lourdes Casal. Miami, FL: Instituto de Estudios Cubanos; Sunshine, Catherine, and Keith Warner, eds. 1998. “Poems of Exile: Lourdes Casal.” In Caribbean Connections: Moving North. Washington, DC: Network of Educators on the Americas. Yolanda Prieto
CASALS, ROSEMARY (1948–
)
Rosemary Casals is known in the world of tennis as “Rosebud,” but it is said in the world of sports that she was far from the picture of serenity suggested by that nickname. She was born in San Francisco on September 16, 1948, to Central American parents, immigrants from El Salvador. While she was still an infant, she and her sister Victoria were placed in the care of a greataunt, María, and a great-uncle, Manuel Casals, who raised them as their own. Manuel Casals introduced Rosemary to tennis on the city’s public courts. He served as Casals’s only coach throughout her impressive career. Casals enjoyed the competitiveness of the sport, but like other pioneers who achieve recognition for their accomplishments, she faced numerous challenges along the way. Tennis was considered a sport of the upper classes, played on country estates and at expensive country clubs. Casals’s poor family background and Latino heritage immediately set her apart. She could not afford the pricey trappings of the sport: the expensive clothes, shoes and rackets, tournament fees, and transportation. In time Casals revolutionized the sport by wearing bright colors on the court, breaking a long tradition of wearing only white clothes during matches. This act of necessity became a signature style for her, and Casals, who often received standing ovations for her robust games, became known for her colorful tennis outfits. Determined to be the best tennis player ever, at five feet, two inches, Casals faced another disadvantage in playing taller players. As a result, she developed an explosive playing style on the court, with incredible acrobatic strokes and stamina honed from constant competition in tournaments against older, more experienced players. In an interview for the International
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Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia Tennis Hall of Fame, Casals remarked, “I’m out there with [5-foot-11 Margaret ‘The Arm’] Court with those arms and legs that stretch forever, and I had to make my shots count right away.” Before her eighteenth birthday Casals was ranked as the top junior and women’s player in northern California and eleventh in the country. Professional women’s tennis in the 1970s fought for equality on several fronts and paved the way for acceptance of women tennis players on a par with men. Casals emerged as a leading figure, along with Billie Jean King, in bringing about changes. Women players attempted to boycott tennis tournaments in 1970, citing the differences in the prize purses awarded men as opposed to women players. They demanded that equal prize monies be given to both men and women. The U.S. Lawn Tennis Association ignored their demands, and women players led by Casals and King established the Virginia Slims Invitational tournament. The slogan of Virginia Slims cigarettes, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” could not have been more appropriate as Casals, King, and others marched into history. “Those early Slims days were an exciting time, and a little scary, too,” recalls Casals. “We knew we had to break away, go on our own. . . . the USTA didn’t like our rebel ways and threatened to suspend us Americans if we played. They did, and for a while we wondered if that was the end of tennis for us. Of course it wasn’t.” Casals was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1996. Her victories include the 1966 U.S. hard-court and indoor doubles tournaments with Billie Jean King and the doubles crown at Wimbledon and at the U.S. and South African championships in 1967, also with King. King and Casals remain the only doubles team to have won U.S. titles on grass, clay, indoor, and hardsurface courts. An incomparable team throughout the 1970s, the two women won fifty-six titles and were unbeatable. Casals also entered tournaments as a single contender in all the majors. During her career, she won 11 singles and 112 pro doubles titles. Five years later Casals underwent knee surgery and left competition. She started a business in California but continued to promote a women’s classic tournament for seniors. At the age of forty-one, Casals and Martina Navratilova won the U.S. Open Seniors’ women’s doubles championship in 1988. SOURCES: International Tennis Hall of Fame. 1996. “Rosie (Rosemary) Casals, 1996 Enshrinee.” http://www.ten nisfame.org/enshrinees/rosie_casals.html (accessed October 6, 2004); Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1998. “Rosemary Casals.” In The Hispanic American Almanac. Detroit: Gale Research; Thomson Gale online. “Rosemary Casals.” http://www.gale group.com./free_resources/whm/bio/casals_r.htm (accessed September 10, 2004). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CASANOVA DE VILLAVERDE, EMILIA (1832?–1897) Born in Cuba in 1832 or 1833, Emilia Casanova was the first Cuban woman to write political essays, address the Congress of the United States as the representative of Cuban women fighting for independence, and make an attempt to internationalize Cuba Libre by writing to both Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi. At the age of twenty-two she became the wife of the noted Cuban novelist Cirilo Villaverde, the author of Cecilia Valdés, a nineteenth-century Cuban literary masterpiece dedicated to “all Cuban women.” The second version of the novel was written in New York City during Villaverde’s political exile and documented the complex universe of slavery in Cuba and the Ten Years’ War in light of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Most of the information about Emilia Casanova de Villaverde comes from the text and context of her political addresses. A pamphlet published in New York in 1874 included a biography and selections from her political writings. In it Cirilo Villaverde describes his wife as an exemplary woman patriot. She was born to a rich slaveholding family of Cárdenas, and she did not have coquettish manners “which were natural in young girls,” because from an early age she was consumed by “the fire of freedom.” Young, beautiful, vivacious, and rich, Casanova “was adored by her parents, and idolized by her slaves.” A member of the Creole elite, young Casanova distanced herself from her father’s conservative views. At a banquet, in the presence of the Spanish authorities, she lifted her glass and courageously toasted “to the freedom of the world and to the independence of Cuba,” making the cheerful reunion dissolve. Her first trip to the United States in 1852, in the company of her father and two brothers, had a profound impact on her. There she could admire the monuments erected to the heroes of Cuban independence and find a solid confirmation of her republican principles. She thought to stay in New York to continue her education and polish her English, but a letter from her adored mother, who felt lonely and sad, made her decide to spend only three months in the city and return to Cuba. But the period she spent in New York was enough for her to come in contact with eminent members of the Cuban exile community, and she agreed to bring some important documents back to the island. Casanova avidly read these subversive documents and with the help of her two brothers circulated them in Cuba. She was still a girl when she helped one of her brothers, accused of conspiracy, flee to the United States. In 1854 the entire family moved to Philadelphia. There the twenty-two-year-old Casanova met and
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Casita Maria, New York married Cirilo Villaverde, who was twenty years older. When her family returned to Cuba, she moved with her husband to New York, sharing with him “the bitter bread of exile.” She quickly integrated into the exile community, organized public meetings, and opened her home to the friends of the Cuban revolution. She witnessed the events of the Civil War, in which “she discovered the symptoms that later stirred the revolution in her country.” When the Ten Years’ War broke out in 1868, she welcomed it as the beginning of the end of slavery and the beginning of Cuban independence. To raise funds for the Cuban army, she founded the first political club of women, the Liga de las Hijas de Cuba. Informed that her father, a naturalized American citizen who held property in the United States, had been imprisoned in Havana, she immediately wrote to the U.S. secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, asking for the protection of the American government. The following day she traveled to Washington to meet members of Congress and managed to meet President Grant in the White House, who, apparently moved by her passionate attempts to free her father, promised that the Spaniards would not dare touch him. After her father was released, Casanova continued to build networks with eminent Americans and foreigners friendly to the cause of Cuba Libre. In January 1869 she wrote to Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was then living on the island of Caprera, about the Cuban quest. She explained that “the beginning of our revolution means the freedom of our slaves, giving them arms and incorporating them in our patriotic ranks.” She could not understand why European leaders kept silent about the Cuban cause. After a full year Garibaldi responded that he would always be on the side of the oppressed “whether the oppressors are kings or nations,” and that he wished that beautiful Cuba would gain independence. Casanova had hoped for a more substantial commitment. In 1871, as the representative of “Cuban mothers,” Casanova went to Washington for the third time to petition the government to make all diplomatic efforts on behalf of the students of the medical school imprisoned by the Spanish authorities in Havana, and to bring them to the United States. In 1872 she returned to Washington representing the Liga de las Hijas de Cuba to petition Congress to recognize the state of belligerence against the Cuban insurgents. She explained the situation in Cuba as a “popular, political and social revolution” against a U.S.-supported Spanish colonial domination. She provided evidence that attempts made from the 1820s to the 1850s to abolish slavery in Cuba had faced opposition from the United States, as had efforts to liberate the island because that would have ended slavery as well. Casanova’s powerful arguments failed to gain support. It was in the best eco-
Portrait of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, in Juan Casasus, La emigración cubana y la independencia de la patria (Havana, 1953). Courtesy of Alexandra Lorini.
nomic interests of the United States to preserve a weak colonial power rather than a strong newly independent republic. Emilia Casanova de Villaverde remained in exile until her husband died in 1894. She transported his remains to Cuba as he had wished, but returned to New York City, where she died on March 4, 1897. She never abandoned the cause of Cuban independence. See also Journalism and Print Media; Ten Years’ War SOURCES: Apuntes biográficos de Emilia Casanova Villaverde. 1874. “Escritos por un contemporaneo.” New York; Pertierra Serra, Enrique. 2000. Italianos por Cuba. Havana: Editorial José Martí; Villaverde, Cirilo. 2002. Cecilia Valdés. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Alessandra Lorini
CASITA MARIA, NEW YORK (1934–
)
The oldest settlement house serving New York City’s Latino community is Casita Maria, a Catholic but nonsectarian institution. Its hub location is at 928 Simpson Street in the borough of the Bronx, but it originated in Spanish Harlem in 1934 during Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s first term in office. Serving primarily Puerto Rican youth, Casita Maria was founded by two public
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Casita Maria, New York school teachers, Elizabeth and Claire Sullivan, with the assistance of a Catholic nun, Sister Mary Imelda. The Puerto Rican community in East Harlem originated in the early 1920s and was culturally reflected in the area’s thriving business sector, complete with movie houses, record stores, and markets often refurbished to meet Puerto Rican needs. Tenements in East Harlem (Spanish Harlem or El Barrio) sheltered Italians, Jews, African Americans, West Indians, and Puerto Ricans. In the 1930s and 1940s eastern Europeans and Italians began to move northward to the Bronx. As the black and Puerto Rican communities expanded in the densely populated region, property values declined, and unemployment and poverty increased. Rapidly El Barrio deteriorated into a city slum area, an environment particularly deleterious to the cultivation of potential leadership among the youth. With few social service agencies available, limited open park spaces, and restrictions on the use of certain recreational facilities, the Sullivan sisters and Sister Mary Imelda encouraged the formation of clubs and youth activity programs. The Royals and their rival club, the Dukes, composed of teenage boys, who organized to play stickball and cards in the homes of club members but also posed problems of delinquency, were invited to join Casita Maria. The Sullivan sisters supplied funding to furnish the Royal Club in a vacant ground floor, attracting the interest of barrio residents and volunteers. Community volunteers, including the Sullivans, Royal Club members, and local leaders constituted an organizing committee. They met at the Catholic Church, La Milagrosa, to draw up plans for structuring, financing, and expanding Casita Maria. In 1934 the group established Casita Maria on the first floor of the building at 32 West 113th Street. This, in essence, became the first Puerto Rican community
house in the city. It is noteworthy that the Dukes rarely participated in the venture, and eighteen of their twenty-three members had run-ins with the law, but the sports-conscious Royals, who supported the settlement house, completed school. Some received scholarships and became professionals. Among the members of girls’ clubs and other gangs joining Casita Maria, many became leading citizens, including Judge John Carro, who was a member of a teen gang, the Zeniths. The earliest Casita Maria programs targeted children during and after school, offering English-language instruction, games, and activities. Soon parents joined the organization, and classes in English for adults developed, taught by city teachers. Casita Maria rapidly outgrew its space and opened a second building on East 110th Street that was renovated to incorporate two adjacent houses. The City Housing Authority invited Casita Maria to sponsor a center at Carver Houses, a low-income development on East 102nd Street. In 1945 Casita Maria was able to buy another building at 61 East 107th Street, but was forced to sell it in the 1960s to the municipal government as the future site of the Madison Park Housing Project. After demolition of the 107th Street building Casita Maria moved to larger quarters in the South Bronx. By this time it had become one of the largest multiservice organizations of its kind. Assisted by funding from the city of New York, initiatives such as remedial reading classes, preschool Head Start programs, child care, day camps, summer camps, youth clubs, and job and leadership training became hallmarks of the organization. Offering a wide range of services, Casita Maria continues to serve the Latino population of the South Bronx and East Harlem, and education remains its focal point. From its humble, self-funded origins in a
Casita Maria organized summer youth activities. Courtesy of Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Sister Carmelita, a reformer at Casita Maria, with a group of children at the Doctor White Settlement House in Brooklyn, 1920s. Photograph by C. Spero. Courtesy of Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity archives.
vacant ground-floor apartment to its headquarters in the South Bronx, Casita Maria developed into one of the city’s premier institutions. With the Carver and Corsi Centers in East Harlem, the Mount Pleasant Senior Housing complex, social services, and educational and recreational programs, Casita Maria has earned its place in the history of New York Puerto Ricans and Latinos. See also Americanization Programs SOURCES: Casita Maria, United Neighborhood Houses. www.unhny.org/member/agency_detail.cfm?ID=5017 (accessed September 10, 2004); Ribes Tovar, Federico, ed. 1970. “Casita Maria” and “Some Outstanding Former Juvenile Members of Casita Maria.” In Enciclopedia puertorriqueña, vol. 2. New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CASTILLO, ANA (1953–
)
Born on June 15, 1953, in Chicago, Ana Castillo ranks among the most prolific and versatile writers in Chicano literature. Although her Mexican American family was originally from the Southwest, Castillo has strong midwestern roots. She attended community college and received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. Castillo discovered her poetic talents during her college years and gave her first public poetry reading at the age of twenty. Her poetry reflected on the instances of racism and sexism that she and her family encountered. Through this outlet Castillo began to realize her voice not only as a poet, but as an emerging Chicana feminist. After graduation from Northwestern Castillo moved to Sonoma County, California, and for one year taught courses in ethnic studies. She returned to Chicago and
completed a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean studies at the University of Chicago. She later earned a doctorate in American studies at the University of Bremen in Germany. Castillo’s first three publications were collections of poetry: Otro canto, The Invitation, and Women Are Not Roses. Her poetry ranges from the emotional explorations and meditations of modern poets to works with a distinctly Chicana activist overtone. Her “protest poetry” and unabashedly feminist insights garnered the attention of other Chicana artists and activists. Castillo became a prominent influence in the Chicana/o movement. The Invitation, a self-published chapbook, represents a bold critique of sexism within the Chicano movement. She elaborated on these themes in her later fiction and nonfiction essays. During the 1980s Castillo’s poetry began to take on a much more musical tone as the result of her involvement with the AlAndalus Flamenco Dance Company. The rhythm and meter of her work display distinctly aural qualities that are complemented by the chosen word. One of her most celebrated publications is The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986). The novel tracks the lives of two women who travel to Mexico to discover their place in a world that has them divided between being American and being Mexican. It is narrated through letters written between these two women, providing an emotionally captivating and thought-provoking medium. The novel received much praise for its discussion of gender roles in both American and Mexican societies and the traps that such roles create for women. The book won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Castillo’s novel So Far from God gained even more critical acclaim. The novel incorporates folk mythology, political and social commentary, and issues of
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Castillo, Guadalupe gender within Chicano society into a story that at heart helps provide a positive answer for the darkest questions. The novel won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and further cemented Castillo’s position as one of the important voices in Chicana literature. Castillo’s work includes journalism and editing. Along with Cherríe Moraga and Norma Alarcón, Castillo edited The Sexuality of Latinas, a collection of essays that explored issues of sexual liberation and repression in Latino culture. Castillo’s most recognized nonfiction work is her collection of essays Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. For Castillo, Xicanisma is an ever-present consciousness of Chicana interdependence specifically rooted in Chicana culture and history. Although Xicanisma is a way to understand Chicanas in the world, it may also help others, both men and women, who are not necessarily of Mexican background. Its philosophy is yielding, never resistant to change, one based on wholeness, not dualism. For women, men are not their opposites, their opponents, their ‘other.’ ” As feminist philosopher, poet, and novelist, Castillo continues to expand her own literary style by publishing children’s books, newspaper articles, and nonfiction essays. A vibrant literary voice and guardian of Latina feminist traditions, Ana Castillo is currently Writer in Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. See also Literature SOURCES: Ana Castillo online. www.anacastillo.com (accessed October 6, 2004); Benson, Sonia G., ed. 2003. The Hispanic American Almanac. 3rd ed. Detroit: Thomson/Gale Publishing; Castillo, Ana. 1994. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Palmismo, Joseph M., ed. 1998. Notable Hispanic American Women, Book II. Detroit: Gale Publishing. Daniel Ruiz
CASTILLO, GUADALUPE (1942–
)
Born and raised near the Mexican border in Tucson, Arizona, on March 23, 1942, Guadalupe Castillo has always maintained a strong affinity with immigrant rights, workers’ issues, and history. Driven by the memories and oral histories of her venerable Tucsonense ancestors, Castillo became a historian in order to document and highlight Mexicano and Chicana/o contributions to the area’s and nation’s development. She was the first Chicana to obtain a master’s degree in history from the University of Arizona, pursued doctoral studies, and received a Ford Foundation Fellowship for three years. Castillo became an early advocate of education, urging academia to recognize and institutionalize Chicana/o studies programs and was one of the first professors to develop Chicana/o studies courses. Guadalupe Castillo, along with Herminio Rios,
pioneered in the field by publishing detailed bibliographic resources on Chicana/o history in El Grito. Castillo’s commitment to social justice is also evident in her pedagogical methods. As a professor at Pima Community College since the 1980s, she requires that students take an active role in community events and organization. Activists in southern Arizona often credit Castillo with playing a vital role in awakening, formulating, and encouraging their political activism. Castillo is also recognized for her commitment to social justice issues. She played a pivotal role in launching the Chicano movement in Tucson. A founder of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) at the University of Arizona, she rallied to ensure Chicana/o representation in the political arena through her work in La Raza Unida Party. Ultimately these grassroots efforts resulted in a heightened political awareness in Tucson about Chicana/o issues and the movement. The struggle forced the city of Tucson to establish local community centers, like El Rio Neighborhood Center, designed to promote Chicana/o cultural, intellectual, and health needs. In the 1980s Castillo focused on another pressing issue as a mounting number of Central American refugees arrived in the United States desperately in need of protection and legal information. Their dilemma motivated Castillo to devote herself to providing critical assistance. A member of the Manzo Area Council, a social service organization, Castillo and others organized asylum counseling and legal recourse work for El Salvadoran refugees. These actions set in motion the sanctuary movement, and Castillo personally assisted refugees by processing hundreds of asylum petitions to ensure shelter and safety in the United States. During this period Castillo founded La Mesilla Organizing Project, an advocacy group to educate and demand immigrant rights. In the 1990s Castillo helped found and cochaired the Derechos Humanos Coalition, an advocacy organization designed to promote respect for human and civil rights in southern Arizona and along the U.S.Mexican border. The organization emerged as the flagship agency of its kind in the region. It challenged the increasing militarization on the border and exposed human rights abuses by federal, state, and local law enforcement officials of migrants and U.S. citizens. A speaker on radio programs and at community and educational events, Castillo passionately argues that “ningún ser humano es ilegal” (no human being is illegal). As a result of her activism on immigrant rights and border issues, Castillo has received many awards, including the National Lawyers Guild Recognition Award in 1999. Other awards are the Dedication to Community Arts by Borderlands Theater, the Recognition Award for Best Teacher by Minority Affairs at Pima
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Guadalupe Castillo at an immigrant rights conference in Tucson, Arizona, 2004. Photograph by and courtesy of Lydia R. Otero.
Community College, and the Presidential Teacher Award from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). In the fall of 2001 Castillo received the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Arizona’s Department of History for her “effective teaching and political activism.” SOURCES: Castillo, Guadalupe, and Margo Cowan. 2001. “It is not our fault”: The Case for Amending Present Nationality Law to Make All Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation United States Citizens, Now and Forever. Sells, AZ: Tohono O’odham Nation, Executive Branch; Rios, Hermino C., and Lupe Castillo. 1970. “Toward a True Chicano Bibliography: Mexican-American Newspapers, 1848–1942.” El Grito 3, no. 4 (Summer): 17–24. Lydia R. Otero and Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith
CASTRO, ROSIE (1947–
)
Longtime activist Rosie Castro has been an advocate for the rights of women and minorities both in and out of the political arena since her college days. An only child raised by her mother, Castro grew up on San Antonio’s West Side after immigrating to the United States from Mexico. She went to Little Flower High School. When Castro first got involved in politics, her mother was alarmed. Reflecting on changing attitudes, Castro commented, “It’s very different now, but at that period of time, it was a real shock that I would want to be involved because that was not a womanly thing to do.” As a student at Our Lady of the Lake University, she studied to become a teacher and began her journey of political campaigning and activism. She founded a chapter of Young Democrats and later served as president at the county level and vice presi-
dent at the state level of that group. Early on, Castro “came to really believe the only way to make significant change in this country is through the political process, to affect public policy. At that time public policy was so stacked against people of color.” In 1971 Castro, then twenty-three, ran for city council. She finished second out of four candidates running on the Committee for Barrio Betterment slate. “Of course, we didn’t win,” Castro says, but the organization was able to claim a victory: “We increased the number of mexicanos that started to run, and we brought out the issues.” After the loss Castro vowed, “We’ll be back.” Castro once told reporter Elda Silva, “I think most of my life what I’ve tried to do is to look at where the deficits are that most minorities encounter and then try to do something about those deficits. Also what I’ve tried to do is to take the strengths inherent in our culture and use that as much as possible to forward a positive agenda.” That agenda led to more than thirty years of volunteer teaching for migrant children, the establishment of a Latino collection of books at the San Antonio Central Library, and important work with the San Antonio Housing Authority. Pregnancy and motherhood did not deter Rosie Castro from her commitment to politics. In fact, she went into labor while working on a Raza Unida campaign. On September 16, 1974, Castro gave birth to twins Julián and Joaquín, born one minute apart. Now the mother of two, she took the twins to a multitude of activities, including political rallies and meetings. Her sons graduated from Harvard Law School in 2000 and in 2001. Julián became San Antonio’s youngest city council member with Joaquín’s help as campaign manager. In November 2002 Joaquín won the District 125 Texas House seat with Castro as his campaign manager. Castro has reiterated in several interviews, “They are my legacy.” Castro remains active in the San Antonio community, addressing a variety of issues, including Hispanic voter turnout and Latinas in public policy at San Antonio College. Her history as an organizer in La Raza Unida Party and a veteran of the Chicano movement remains a part of her reputation as a leader and advocate for women and poor people. SOURCES: Cardenás, José A. 1997. “Rosie Castro a success as civil rights pioneer and a mother.” San Antonio Express-News, June 29, 6J; Gutiérrez-Mier, John. 1998. “Mexican Americans ‘birth’ commemorated at daylong discusión.” San Antonio Express-News, February 2, 7A; San Antonio Community College. “Rosie Castro: Civil Rights Advocate, Member of La Raza Unida.” http://www.accd.edu/pac/lrc/chicana leaders/castro.htm (accessed July 21, 2005); Schiller, Dane. 2001. “Castro upholds family’s involvement.” San Antonio Express-News, May 20, 18A.
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Castro, Victoria M. “Vickie”
CASTRO, VICTORIA M. “VICKIE” (1945– ) Los Angeles educator and activist Victoria M. Castro was born and raised in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. Her parents were a seamstress from El Paso and a furniture maker from Mexico. She attended area schools and eventually went to Roosevelt High School, where she describes herself as “a little above-average student” and very active in school. Because she grew up in a traditional family and was the only girl among four other siblings, Castro’s parents held few educational expectations for her other than to finish high school. Yet her parents influenced her greatly and contributed to her emerging social and political awareness. “They were quietly leaders in their workforce,” Castro recalls. In particular, her mother was part of the organizing of the downtown garment industry, and Castro remembers going on picket lines with her at a young age. Castro’s social awareness continued during her high-school years. As a senior, Castro experienced a moment of “awakening.” When she inquired about an application to attend Mills College, a school counselor urged her to consider a local community college instead. “I was devastated [and] that’s where my hostility [emerged]. . . . I started reflecting on my own education and I could just see where it lacked.” Soon after, Castro was invited to attend a Mexican American youth leadership conference sponsored by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. Students from all over the county participated, and Castro for the first time heard others talk about ethnic discrimination. It was at the youth conference that Castro made lasting connections with a group of students who went on to forge the Chicano student movement in Los Angeles. After graduation Castro attended California State University, Los Angeles, where she remembers the shock of a predominantly Anglo campus, a stark contrast to her largely Latino high school. Here, increasingly active, Castro tapped into her growing network and helped organize the Young Citizens for Community Action (YCCA, later renamed Young Chicanos for Community Action), an organization committed to a variety of issues, including the improvement of the educational system. In March 1968 Castro and the YCCA helped organize the East Los Angeles high-school walkouts, or “blowouts,” which Castro describes as a “massive display of discontent with the education system.” On March 1, 300 students walked out of Wilson High School, and by the end of the next week 15,000 highschool students had walked out of five Los Angeles schools. The students demanded attention to long-
ignored problems afflicting their schools. Citing high dropout rates (described by some as “push out rates”) and regular discrimination from faculty and administration, they called for immediate change and put forth a list of demands ranging from the inclusion of Mexican American history into the curriculum and the hiring of more Mexican American teachers to an end to the tracking system that channeled Chicano students into a vocational education curriculum and discouraged them from enrolling in college-bound classes. Of her role in the first day of the walkouts, Castro remembers, “I was being interviewed for a teaching assistant assignment, but my thing was to stall the principal. . . . I made [the appointment] . . . specifically for the time that the rest . . . were gonna go into the hallways and yell ‘walkout.’ . . . [The principal] . . . takes me into his office . . . [but] he starts to go in and out of his office . . . and I know exactly why! And then he finally just comes to tell me that he has an emergency and will have to reschedule, and then I just skipped out!” The blowouts mobilized many Chicano youths and brought widespread attention to the need for educational reform. Further, the events launched Castro’s lifetime commitment to educational advocacy. Castro remained active, particularly in United Mexican American Students (UMAS), while she pursued a bachelor’s degree in math. After graduating from college in 1973, Castro worked in an array of educational posts that ranged from teaching math to administration. Active in the Association of Mexican-American Educators, she eventually served as the organization’s state president and acquired invaluable experience and knowledge in the politics of California’s educational system. She also pursued her own education, receiving teaching credentials from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a master’s degree from Pepperdine University. In 1986 she assumed her first position as school principal at Belvedere Junior High School. In 1993 Castro was elected to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board. She served for eight years on the board, including one year as president. Castro describes her decision to run for office: “I had been the principal of Belvedere Junior High and I had just had a horrific year where I lost five kids to gang violence in one year. I think we took three or four shootings during the day, and I . . . just could not . . . get assistance. . . . I was under siege and losing kids, and I was being blamed more than being assisted. And so I was very angry. . . . I could not get assistance for my students in the sense of additional police, programs. . . . I sort of had to fend for myself. . . . So I ran for office!” As a member of the LAUSD Board, Castro worked tirelessly to improve the Los Angeles school system.
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Ceja, Amelia Moran time with her daughter and two grandchildren. She reflects, “It’s just a great place to be in life because I’m not building a career. . . . [I have a strong] knowledge level of how to work with the system . . . and I have no fears!” As an activist, an educator, and a community leader, Castro leaves a significant legacy for the city of Los Angeles. Her activism, dedication, and leadership continue to contribute to community empowerment and educational reform. See also Chicano Movement; Education SOURCES: Castro, Victoria M. 2003. Interview by Julie Cohen, September 22; Los Angeles Unified School District. “Los Angeles Unified School District Board Member: Victoria M. Castro.” www.lausd.k12.ca.us/lausd/board/castro.html (accessed February 10, 2004); National Latino Communications Center, Galán Productions, Inc., and KCET, producers. 1996. “Taking Back the Schools.” CHICANO! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, vol. 3. 57 min. Videocassette. Los Angeles; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Julie Cohen
Chicano movement student leader and, years later, school board member, Victoria Castro. Courtesy of Victoria Castro.
CEJA, AMELIA MORAN (1955– She faced frustrations, including a political firestorm over construction of new high school. The problems with the Belmont school site continued to obstruct the need for a high school in the area. In addition, she fought against the firing of Superintendent Ruben Zacarias by outside political and financial influences. Castro explains her disappointment “just seeing a political force of the city, and I mean the old white guard of the city . . . determine what our politics were, and not being in a position to fight it.” Yet despite the difficulties of the job, Castro accomplished a great deal for the Los Angeles district. In her first year she focused on school safety and also helped bring more college counselors to the schools. She cites as her greatest accomplishment work on a successful bond measure that provided desperately needed funds for school repair and construction. It was the first bond measure put to voters in seventeen years and did much to address the serious problem of overcrowding. In addition, she helped the district create a parentcommunity service organization that gave a powerful voice to the parents of Los Angeles. After her eight years on the board of education, Castro returned to school administration in 2001 as the principal of Hollenbeck Junior High School in Los Angeles. When she is not focusing all her energies at school, Castro concentrates on her family, spending
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The life of Amelia Moran Ceja provides a unique example of attaining the American dream. When she was born to Felipe and Francisca Moran on June 13, 1955, in the village of Las Flores, Jalisco, Mexico, not even Amelia’s devoted parents and family could have possibly envisioned her dynamic future. She spent her childhood years in Las Flores, a small agrarian village that consisted of a population of “no more than sixty people, had no electricity or running water,” and was a place where one “rode donkeys to the river to wash clothes!” Amelia was primarily raised by her mother and grandparents, because her father worked in the United States. While her family had very little in material things, her life “was richer than most people” due to the unconditional love and nurturing she received from her mother and family members. This loving, accepting environment provided her with a strong sense of self-confidence and “can-do” attitude that has served her well throughout her life. The Morans also instilled the importance and love of education in their daughter. Although her parents had not received an education, they understood that it was “the bridge” to bettering oneself in life. The Morans took great pride in knowing that despite their long separations, they were able to provide education for their daughters beyond the one-room village school that had only six grades. Thus Ceja was sent to the
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Ceja, Amelia Moran larger town of Teocaltiche in order to complete seventh and eighth grade, while her older sister attended the well-known Colegio La Paz, a private girls’ preparatory boarding school in the city of Aguascalientes. After years of making the journey to northern California by himself, Felipe Moran decided that it was time for his family to join him in the Napa Valley. The family arrived in September 1967, just in time for the fall harvest and the start of school. While Ceja was very eager to join her father in the lovely land of “el Norte,” she found herself experiencing a great deal of culture shock when she started her school year at Robert Louis Stevenson Junior High in St. Helena. It was a difficult transition for her. Although she had always been a top student in Mexico, the teachers at this school placed her in special education classes, as they did all non-English speakers. Fortunately, a Spanishspeaking teacher quickly determined that Ceja did not belong in special education and placed her in an entry-level class until her English improved. Ceja also received her first taste of prejudice when classmates made fun of her accent and culture. While it hurt her deeply, it also made her determined to succeed. She drew on her sense of self-confidence and on her parents’ encouragement for her to “just be very happy and proud to be who she was.” At the end of junior high she received numerous achievement awards, had participated in various school sports, and was fluent in English. Having arrived at harvest time, Ceja discovered the wonderful world of the vineyards and winemaking, and her father proudly showed her the vineyards where he had earned his livelihood. She eagerly joined him during weekends and observed all the tasks involved in maintaining a vineyard. She recalls “falling in love with the smell of the harvest” and began entertaining the possibility of working in the wine industry someday. “I just knew that someday, I’d be part of it.” Her newly acquired fascination with the vineyards was put aside in 1969 when she accepted her parents’ offer to attend the same preparatory school from which her sister had graduated in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Not only did the next two years enable Ceja to reconnect with her Mexican culture and family, but she also discovered another passion—a love of cooking. She had the unique opportunity to learn and prepare the regional cuisines of Mexico. Returning to California to finish high school and pursue a degree in history and literature at the University of California at San Diego, she was well versed in the history, culture, and cuisine of Mexico. Studying in Mexico for two years was a lifechanging event for her. “I was so proud of my heritage and I felt so empowered!”
Always close to her family and mindful of her first passion, the vineyards, she returned to the valley during college vacations and learned how to prune vines and other viticulture practices. It was during this period that she was able to get reacquainted with Pedro Ceja, whom she had known since junior high school. As they dated, they discovered that they shared the same dream of someday owning a vineyard. In 1980, two years after her college graduation, Amelia and Pedro Ceja were married after the harvest season. In 1983, while residing in the Silicon Valley with their three preschool-age children, Amelia and Pedro Ceja, along with family members, purchased their first piece of vineyard property. The following years were difficult and required great sacrifice from all family members. When the senior Cejas lost their jobs, Amelia and Pedro promptly moved their family to a tiny, one-room studio on the property in order to contribute more to the mortgage. Although a “for sale” sign went up, fortunately no offer was received, and by 1986 the first vines were planted. Their first harvest was sold to the well-respected Domaine Chandon Winery. In turn, the Cejas were presented a great business opportunity when the winery assisted them in obtaining root stocks to plant on their property. In the coming years the family continued investing in land until they eventually owned 113 acres of prime Carneros vineyards. As their vineyard operation prospered, in the late 1990s the Cejas explored the possibility of expanding their operation to include bottling their own wines on a commercial scale. They were well aware that one person was needed to take charge of this part of the business. The logical choice was Amelia, because she had been busy working for well-known wineries and educating herself in all aspects of the winery business since their first harvest. The family encouraged her, stating, “You’re not afraid of anything!” During 1999 she immersed herself in writing a marketing plan, incorporating the vineyard, and overseeing the development of a website, along with a company logo and label. Her determination saw the “birth” of Ceja Vineyards, which bottled commercially for the first time in 2000. As the president of Ceja Vineyards, she became the first Mexican American woman to head a winery operation. With her typical hands-on approach, she handles a myriad of duties from marketing and sales to public relations and compliance issues. Despite her heavy schedule, she always welcomes the opportunity to promote Ceja wines. She demonstrates how well the wines and food complement each other by serving one of her many specialties with a matching Ceja selection to visiting distributors, retailers, and writers and at numerous benefits.
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Central American Immigrant Women
Amelia Ceja, president of Ceja Vineyards. Courtesy of Amelia Ceja.
Fulfilling the roles of wife, mother, gourmet chef, and president of a winery with great finesse, Amelia Ceja is adamant about her belief in “giving back to the community.” Her involvement spans a variety of both civic and professional organizations, as well as many charitable endeavors throughout the Napa Valley and beyond. She is especially proud of her work with outreach and mentoring programs that are aimed at youths and teens in her community. Having experienced discrimination firsthand, she has great empathy for youths who are facing their own struggles. She eagerly shares her family’s story in order that it may inspire young Latinos to create and attain their own dreams. Ceja is determined to dedicate the rest of her life to building Ceja Vineyards into a viable enterprise in order that the company can continue to serve future generations. Her goal is to change the perception of Mexicans in the wine industry, emphasizing that the wine industry could not exist without the hard labor and dedication of the vineyard workers. “I want people to realize that we don’t work only in the vineyards or cellars; we’re wine makers, we’re growers, and we have college degrees.” See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Farr, Louise. 2003. “Field of Dreams.” More, October; Heeger, Jack. 2004. “Ceja Honorary Co-Chair of Three Tenors’ Concert.” Napa Valley Register, June 7; Macias, Robert.
2004. “The Worker’s Wine.” Hispanic Business, 25th anniversary issue, June; Shaw, David. 2003. “Braceros to Vintners in a Generation.” Los Angeles Times, June 5.
Yolanda Calderón-Wallace
CENTRAL AMERICAN IMMIGRANT WOMEN The presence of Central Americans in the United States began to attract notice since the 1980s. However, Central Americans have a long history of migration to the United States. Since 1900 Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, and Panamanians have immigrated to many cities in the United States. Salvadoran and Nicaraguan coffee growers traveled back and forth for business motives and pleasure in the early 1900s. Arriving on commercial ships that transported bananas from Honduras to the United States, Hondurans became acquainted with opportunities in the United States. In spite of this enduring immigration, Central Americans remained relatively invisible, “passing” as, or often being mistaken for, Mexicans. They constituted a relatively small group, and many arrived at a time when immigration laws were far more relaxed. This changed when the political and economic crisis that had been brewing for decades erupted in civil
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Central American Immigrant Women wars and armed confrontations in Central America in the late 1970s. A civil war from roughly 1979 to 1991 in El Salvador, an armed conflict in Guatemala that flared for more than thirty years, and another in Nicaragua that began in the mid-1970s, when Anastasio Somoza was in power, and continued for a decade after he was deposed in 1979 contributed to tripling and sometimes more than quintupling, as in the case of the Salvadorans, the number of these immigrants in the United States. These immigrants established vibrant communities and constitute one of the fastest-growing Latino groups in the United States. Salvadorans are the most numerous, accounting for 43 percent of all Central Americans in the United States; Guatemalans account for 20 percent, and Nicaraguans for 15 percent. Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Panamanians, and Belizeans make up the rest. Central Americans come from dissimilar contexts and constitute sociocultural and economic groups different from one another. Moreover, they have received differential treatment from the U.S. government as well. The U.S. Latin American population includes well-educated and unskilled immigrants, political refugees, wealthy landowners, and peasants, as well as a variety of ethnic groups such as Garifuna (black Caribs) from Belize and Honduras and several Maya groups from Guatemala. They have settled in a number of U.S. destinations, such as metropolitan Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Miami, New York and New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. Women have figured prominently in Central American migration, sometimes as pioneers. For instance, women, mostly Salvadorans, initiated the Central American immigration to Washington, D.C. American diplomats working in El Salvador and other Central American regions in the 1960s brought their housekeepers back to the United States. In the United States these women petitioned for their relatives, who in turn brought other family members, thus initiating an enduring pattern of chain immigration. In the 1980s Central American immigration increased exponentially, quintupling the Salvadoran population and quadrupling the Guatemalan group. Women took part in this exodus in great numbers. Some moved to reunite with or accompany husbands, parents, or other relatives, but many came on their own. In fact, two-thirds of the Central American women made the decision to leave on their own, without the collaboration or assistance of male partners or fathers, and thus demonstrated an unusual degree of autonomy. These women sought a better future for themselves and their children and to avoid the consequences of political conflicts occurring in Central America during that period. The 2000 Census revealed that as a whole, for Central American immigrants, there is almost an equal
number of men and women (50.5 percent are men and 49.5 percent are women) with some striking differences by country. At one end, 56 percent of Belizeans and 59 percent of Panamanians are women, and at the other end 55 percent of Guatemalans are men. Salvadoran men and women maintain almost equal representation. Women head approximately one-fifth of Central American households; however, in the Panamanian case this proportion reaches one-third. Central American women’s educational levels are varied. In general, men have higher levels of education than women. Panamanians and Costa Ricans are highly educated; one fourth of them have a high-school diploma, one third some college education, and slightly more than 10 percent have completed bachelor’s degrees. In contrast, about 16 percent of Guatemalans and Salvadorans have a high-school diploma, approximately 15 percent have some college, and fewer than 4 percent have bachelor’s degrees. Central American immigrants and their descendants have settled everywhere in the United States, and with the exception of Panamanians, the overwhelming majority of Central Americans live in large metropolitan areas. California receives more than half, followed by Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and the Washington, D.C., area, with increasing concentrations in other states, such as Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kansas. But Los Angeles remains the preferred destination for half of all Central Americans in the country, with more than half of Salvadorans and Guatemalans residing there. More than half of Nicaraguans call Miami their home, whereas New York is the most popular destination for Panamanians. The bulk of the Central American immigrants arrived in a period of stiffer U.S. immigration laws, and for many, obtaining permanent residence or a legal permit becomes nearly impossible. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates that close to 60 percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and approximately 40 percent of Nicaraguans are in the United States without proper documentation. Indeed, Salvadorans and Guatemalans are described as especially vulnerable because of their undocumented and non-refugee status. Immigration law, theoretically gender neutral, affects men and women dissimilarly, and often the legal status of women is tied to reunification with a husband or family group. Considerably more Central American women than men remain in the United States without proper documentation. Central American women work in clerical and administrative jobs, as well as in housekeeping, babysitting, and cleaning services. Although education acquired in the home country can make a difference in the kinds of jobs these women obtain, it is noteworthy that the legal status of many Central American women
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Central American Immigrant Women and men greatly determines their options in the labor force. Even women with higher educational levels, including college graduates, and substantial work experience are found in unskilled or limited-skills positions due to their undocumented status in the United States. For instance, a former mathematics and physics highschool teacher and a woman with a degree in psychology and philosophy from the National University in El Salvador worked, respectively, as a clerk and housekeeper in San Francisco. Neither could afford to look for a job more in line with their education—or to obtain necessary language instruction—because, as undocumented refugees, they did not have any other means of support. Thus many Central American women, sometimes despite semiprofessional or professional educational skills, care for the elderly and children and clean homes and offices in urban areas. Some Central American immigrants have opened businesses that cater mostly to compatriots and other Latino clientele, and there exists a growing proportion who are selfemployed, many as street vendors. The jobs that women perform tend to be available even during recessionary times. Such jobs tend to be unregulated and away from the public eye, which makes it easier for employers to hire these women under informal terms. For these reasons Central American women can often find jobs more easily than men, and in some cities, such as Los Angeles, Salvadorans, and other Central American women seem to have taken over the domestic work niche. For instance, Salvadoran women in Los Angeles are twelve times and Guatemalans are thirteen times more likely than the general population to work as private servants, cleaners, and child-care workers, whereas for Mexican women this factor is only 2.3. Salvadorans and Guatemalans are also five to six times more likely to work as maids. However, in spite of the relative ease with which these women find jobs in both the formal and informal economies, when men and women both work, men earn more than women do, and women experience less occupational mobility than their male counterparts. Work outside the home has been said to promote changes in gender relations among immigrant women. Central American women provide an interesting case to test this notion, since the overwhelming majority had paid work experience before their migration. Among these women U.S. paid work has not been equated with changes in gender relations in the home. Some Central American women have come to the United States single and have established families here; others have arrived alone but have left their families back home. Many women came undocumented, meaning that their journeys had to be undertaken by land, which would put accompanying children in much
danger. However, some have brought their children, but because of the high crime rates and ubiquity of drugs in the neighborhoods where many of these immigrants live, have sent their children back to their countries to shield them from such dangers. Meanwhile their mothers labor in the United States to send them money for school supplies and for the necessities of life. Many Central American women suffer the painful consequences of these separations, but they have little choice. If the children remain back home, the women worry about their children’s well-being, and if the children are with them in the United States, these mothers express concern about their neighborhoods and their schools and ultimately wonder about the ever more tenuous benefits of life in the United States. In some cases women, as well as their male counterparts, have established new families in the United States, rearrangements that do not always work out smoothly. These new family arrangements, coupled with the increased economic contributions of these women, have had important repercussions for gender relations among this group, though not always in the expected direction. For instance, as some women acquire more status within their families as a result of their increased economic contributions, gender relations become more egalitarian; other times gender relations become more unbalanced in favor of men because the women do not want to upset delicate arrangements in the home that would threaten the men’s position. In still other cases, most notably among indigenous Guatemalans who start out from relatively more egalitarian gender relations, no discernible change in gender relations occurs with women’s increased economic participation as a result of migration. The types of jobs that Central American women perform have been found to affect their social networks in important ways. Guatemalan indigenous women who worked as live-in domestics, for example, had reduced and weaker social networks than men. Women who work as domestics but do not live in their employers’ homes were found to have wide-reaching networks in the community. In fact, precisely because women actively sought resources in specific community organizations, given their responsibilities to provide for employer family needs, their networks proved to be more comprehensive than those of men. Spending time in community organizations gave women opportunities to forge networks independent of those of men and to learn and share crucial information about their rights and other important issues, such as legal protection for women against domestic violence. Through their informal networks Guatemalan women procured a range of medical treatments for themselves and their
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Centro de Acción Social Autónomo families. Thus, in the process of caring for their families, Central American women forged strong ties that enabled them to deal with their lack of access to formal assistance and services. One of the most important places for Central Americans to forge community ties and to obtain varied forms of assistance is the church. They attend Catholic or mainline Protestant services, as well as evangelical Pentecostal churches. Churches have instituted a range of services that help the immigrants with their settlement, such as legal counseling, job placement, food and clothing distributions, free clinics, and emotional and spiritual support. Additionally, they have created spaces that enable these immigrants to remain connected to their communities of origin. Thus, as was the case for early-twentieth-century immigrants, for current Central Americans, particularly Salvadorans and Guatemalans, organized religion, whether Catholic, mainline Protestant, or Pentecostal, plays a key role in their incorporation into U.S. society regardless of where they eventually settle. SOURCES: Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press; Lopez, David E., Eric Popkin, and Edward Telles. 1996. “Central Americans: At the Bottom, Struggling to Get Ahead.” In Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, 279–304. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Menjívar, Cecilia. 1995. “The Ties That Heal: Guatemalan Immigrant Women’s Networks and Medical Treatment.” International Migration Review 36:427–466; 1995. ——— . 1999. “The Intersection of Work and Gender: Central American Immigrant Women and Employment in California.” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 4:595–621; ——— . 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press; Repak, Terry A. Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rodriguez, Nestor P., and Jacqueline Hagan. 1999. “Central Americans.” In The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, ed. Anthony Gary Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin, 3rd ed. Dallas, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cecilia Menjívar
CENTRO DE ACCIÓN SOCIAL AUTÓNOMO (CASA) (1968–1978) In 1968 the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (Center for Autonomous Social Action) emerged as a mutualaid and social service agency for Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles, California. By 1975 it had become the self-proclaimed vanguard of an ethnic Mexican classbased revolution. New membership infused the mutual-aid organization with a Marxist-Leninist ideology. Yet while women’s issues often took a backseat to what were deemed the real issues of “the cause,”
women remained a central part of the leadership and life of the organization. The Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) emerged out of the Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (National Mexican Brotherhood) founded in the Los Angeles area in 1968 by local politician and educator Bert Corona and labor organizers Soledad Alatorre, Francisco Amaro, María Cedillos, Juan Mariscal, and Rafael Zacarias. As an offshoot of an already established Hermandad in San Diego, the Los Angeles Hermandad provided mutual aid and social services to Mexican immigrants in the area. As the popularity of Hermandad grew, its founders established CASA to provide expanded services such as processing residency papers and teaching English classes. CASA centers were also established in cities such as San Jose, San Diego, and Greeley, Colorado. Given its immigrant focus, CASA also supported workers’ struggles to improve their working conditions and wages and became involved with the National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression, an advocacy group for political prisoners. Through this involvement CASA came into contact with the Committee to Free Los Tres (CTFLT), an organization based in East Los Angeles, which struggled for the freedom of three young men (Los Tres) whom the CTFLT believed had been wrongfully imprisoned for trying to protect their neighborhood from drugs. In its struggle for Los Tres’ freedom, the CTFLT had merged Chicano cultural nationalism and Marxism to argue that the drug trade was a tool used by the capitalist system against working people, and therefore, Los Tres were political prisoners. In 1975, after their cause waned, the young, college-educated Chicano/a students and professionals saw a prime opportunity in CASA to continue an expanded struggle against capitalism because of CASA’s base among Mexican working-class immigrants. The two organizations merged in 1975, and the infusion of CTFLT members changed CASA’s political framework from one of traditional self-help and advocacy to one of a Marxist vanguard. The men and women who became the leadership of the new CASA viewed their cause in Marxist-Leninist terms and struggled for the liberation of the Chicano/Mexicano working class in the United States and Mexico. The new leadership also restructured the organization according to the ideals of democratic centralism. Sin Fronteras (Without Borders), the title of the organization’s newspaper, became the mantra for CASA’s struggle and spoke to its vision of a transnational working class and its focus on immigration. In fighting for the equal rights of undocumented workers, CASA waged battles against federal and state legislation that the organization believed did not benefit im-
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Centro de Acción Social Autónomo migrants, and helped organize workers in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In doing so, it organized around both labor rights and human rights and especially targeted abuses by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In addition to these activities, CASA participated in and organized conferences on various topics related to immigration and even on the “woman question,” participated in marches and demonstrations against immigration policy, participated in coalitions against unfair immigration laws and against political imprisonment, and published Sin Fronteras, which had an average circulation of 3,200 per month in Los Angeles. An additional 2,000 to 3,000 copies of the newspaper were sold through the other CASA centers in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Oakland/San Jose, Seattle, Chicago, and Colorado. CASA had subscribers as far east as New York and as far south as Florida. Sin Fronteras also had an international audience in Cuba, Colombia, the Philippines, and Venezuela. While CASA members focused on issues affecting the Chicano/Mexicano community, they also linked themselves to a larger world picture, positing themselves as another manifestation of the liberation struggles of third-world peoples. Thus they had ties to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Cuba, the revolutionary forces in Angola, and student and labor groups in Mexico. In 1978, because of dissatisfaction with leadership, financial difficulties, infighting, family obligations, and the stress of constant surveillance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CASA folded as an organization. Historian Ernesto Chávez argues that CASA’s attempt to merge nationalism and Marxism-Leninism led to a fundamental contradiction in philosophy, which be-
came the major cause of CASA’s demise. CASA had espoused the most openly Marxist political rhetoric of the Chicano movement and, therefore had situated itself at the far left of the movement’s ideological spectrum. Although members of CASA were influenced by the cultural nationalist thought of their contemporaries, they questioned the U.S.-specific nature of this ideology by imagining themselves as the representatives of a transnational Mexican working-class community. By doing so, CASA brought the plight of the immigrant to the forefront of the Chicano movement, as well as the class and racialized nature of inequality in the United States. In CASA, though the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and the ideology of cultural nationalism implied the liberation of women, issues that addressed women both explicitly and implicitly were often subsumed under the “real” cause, which was class liberation. For example, a study guide, “The Woman Question,” issued by CASA stated, “Women must awaken to the fact that the main fight is not with their men. Men are oppressed by the same evil, but not to such an extent. If women are not trained to take part in the revolution, they will become obstacles and hold the revolution back.” In this framework women themselves became subsumed in CASA’s organizational structure and took few leadership positions in CASA. Those women who did hold prominent positions found it difficult to wield power. Nevertheless, CASA did manage to have a significant female participation that in fact provided the backbone of the organization. It is easy to dismiss CASA as yet another example of Chicano movement organizations that placed women in supportive rather than leadership roles. Yet the women members of CASA, including Isabel H. Ro-
Children of CASA line up to march. Historian Marisela Chávez, pictured in pigtails, stands in the second row. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
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Centro Mater dríguez, Evelina Márquez, Patricia Vellanoweth, and Teresa Rentería, to name a few, dedicated their lives to this organization. To dismiss CASA as an organization is to dismiss the sacrifices and contributions that these women made to the Chicano movement as a whole. However, most of the women, as well as the men in CASA, presently work as professionals serving the needs of the working class and poor, as well as being involved in community and political issues. In essence, CASA was a training ground for future activism. SOURCES: Centro de Acción Social Autónomo Papers. M0325, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA; Chávez, Ernesto. 2000. “Imagining the Mexican Immigrant Worker: (Inter)Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles.” Aztlán 25 (Spring): 109–135; Chávez, Marisela R. 2000. “ ‘We lived and breathed and worked the movement’: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo–Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA-HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 83–105. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications; Gutiérrez, David G. 1984. “CASA in the Chicano Movement: Ideology and Organizational Politics in the Chicano Community, 1968–1978.” Stanford Center for Chicano Research, Working Paper Series, no. 5. Marisela R. Chávez
CENTRO HISPANO CATÓLICO (1959–
)
In 1959 Roman Catholic bishop Coleman F. Carroll, of the recently created Diocese of Miami, opened the Centro Hispano Católico to assist the growing influx of refugees from Castro’s Marxist revolution. Located in downtown Miami, near Little Havana, the Centro offered services such as housing and job referrals, English classes, preschool and educational programs for children, an outpatient and dental clinic, home visits to the elderly and infirm, food, toiletries, and used clothing. When the Belén Jesuit High School, one of Cuba’s best private Catholic preparatory schools for young men, was forced to close in Havana, it reopened first at the Centro Hispano Católico. Eventually it relocated to Little Havana and later to a middle-class suburb in southwestern Miami. During the early 1960s the Centro was one of eight refugee centers in southern Florida specifically set up for humanitarian assistance. It assisted hundreds of people each day, most of them women who acted as representatives and intermediaries for their families. Until the 1970s more than 90 percent of the Centro’s caseload was Cuban refugees. Since then the Centro has expanded its mission to assist immigrants from various Latin American countries, including the more recent arrivals from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia,
and Mexico. Women have played a key role in operating the Centro since its inception. In the early 1960s most of the people who staffed the offices and directed the various programs were nuns and laywomen, many of them of Latin American origin who could easily converse with—and often relate to—their clients. Over time the clients became the staff: Cuban women who were once the beneficiaries of the Centro’s generosity now donate their time and services to help others who find themselves in situations similar to theirs. A Ladies Auxiliary organization raises funds for the Centro’s various programs. Forty years after its creation the Centro Hispano Católico continues to be one of the most influential social welfare agencies in southern Florida. See also Religion SOURCES: “Centro Hispano Católico.” Vertical File, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami; García, María Cristina. 1996. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press. María Cristina García
CENTRO MATER (1968–
)
Centro Mater was founded in 1968 in southern Florida’s Little Havana to assist Cuban refugees and other immigrants. Over the years this nonprofit social welfare center has become a fixture in Miami’s Spanish-language community, assisting low-income families—and especially women and children—from twenty different nations. The Centro is run by a staff of more than 400 volunteers, the majority of whom are Latinas. It offers a variety of services to low-income mothers so they can work or study knowing that their children are cared for: a prekindergarten program, an after-school program for elementary-, middle-, and high-school students, and a summer camp program. In addition, the Centro offers medical and dental care and psychological counseling, as well as classes for parents on hygiene and nutrition. Latinas in southern Florida play an instrumental role not only in staffing and running the Centro but in its funding: Centro Mater receives most of its operating budget from fund-raisers such as fashion shows and banquets that are organized by middle- and upperclass Latinas in southern Florida. The Centro has been honored with a number of awards since 1973. Among its distinctions include the “Point of Light” Excellence in Education Award and the National Hispanic Heritage Presidential Tribute. SOURCE: “Centro Mater.” Vertical Files, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
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María Cristina García
Cepeda-Leonardo, Margarita
CEPEDA-LEONARDO, MARGARITA (1965– ) Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo, president of the Dominican American National Roundtable (2002–2003), was born in San Francisco de Macoris, Dominican Republic, on May 10, 1965. She is one of nine children born to María Trinidad Peña and Justo Ramón Cepeda. She came to the United States during her infancy. As a young woman she completed her education at Rhode Island Community College and Bryant College, where she studied management. Cepeda-Leonardo’s involvement in community service began at age sixteen after she won the Miss Hispana de Rhode Island contest. One of her early achievements included raising $3,000 to aid the victims of the eruption of the volcano Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia, where more than 100,000 natives perished. In 1987 she founded Quisqueya en Acción (“Quisqueya” is the indigenous name of the Dominican Republic), a community center that provides services for youth. Completing her formal education, Cepeda-Leonardo received a fellowship for leadership training under the National Fellowship Network of New Generation Leadership Program. As a leader and community activist, she received state and local government appointments, such as positions on the Commission on State Hispanic Affairs Advisory Board, the Rhode Island National Community Service Commission, and the City of Providence Minority Business and Women Development Enterprise. She was the keynote speaker at the 1994 Women’s Leadership Conference sponsored by Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and the John F. Kennedy Government Institute. Since 1995 Cepeda-Leonardo has served as founding executive director of the Miami Beach Hispanic Community Center, the first Hispanic social service agency in the city, which offers a variety of programs and services. She has overseen the development of the center to its current funding status of more than $2 million. Through a number of activities she has worked for the political empowerment of the Hispanic community of Miami Beach. She has been involved in election campaigning to support the first Hispanic public officials in the history of Miami Beach. Her other activities include voter registration drives, community education, and personal advocacy. The Dominican American National Roundtable is an advocacy organization that serves the interests of the Dominican community living in the United States and Puerto Rico. Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo’s involvement with this national organization dates back to the time of its creation in 1997, when she served as presi-
dent of the Dominican American National Foundation of South Florida, a civil rights and community empowerment organization concerned with low-income Dominican communities. During the early period of the organization’s creation Cepeda-Leonardo participated in organizing and hosting the initial meeting in Miami of more than 200 Dominican American leaders who gathered from different parts of the country to discuss issues of common concern. Later, as president of the Dominican American National Roundtable, she encouraged Dominicans in the United States to become involved in the political process at all levels of government from local to national. For her leadership efforts Cepeda-Leonardo has gained recognition and received numerous community service awards, including the Rhode Island Citizen Citation, the City National Youth Service Program Moccasin Award, and the Rhode Island State House of Representatives Citizen Citation for her contribution to promoting a positive image of youth and the Hispanic community. She received the Honorary Alumni Award from Rhode Island University for community services and the Leadership Award from the Rhode Island Chapter of the Boy Scouts of America. Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo is married to Julio Enrique Leonardo and has two children, Julian Enrique and Celina. She holds the greatest admiration for her mother, María Trinidad Peña, whom she considers her source of inspiration because of her dignity, courage, and love. SOURCE: Cepeda-Leonardo, Margarita. 2003. Oral history interview by José A. Díaz, October 17. José A. Díaz
CERVANTES, LORNA DEE (1954–
)
Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in San Francisco on August 6, 1954, and was raised in San Jose. Cervantes was five years old when her parents separated and she and her mother and brother went to live with her Chumash maternal grandmother in San Jose. Her grandmother exerted a profound influence on Cervantes’s sense of power and language. “My grandmother was sold into slavery at the age of eleven after her family lost their land in the land grabs of the late nineteenth century.” At the mercy of the California apprenticeship laws of the early 1900s, her grandmother, along with many other native people, was essentially forced into indentured servitude. Although her grandmother longed to learn to read and write, she lived as a servant to a white family until she married. A creative family fueled Cervantes’s poetic aspirations. Her brother possessed musical abilities, her
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Cervantes, Lorna Dee grandmother made and created prize-winning costumes for the Santa Barbara fiestas, and her father was a talented visual artist. Although the family was rich in creativity, it struggled to make ends meet. Cervantes’s mother and grandmother worked as domestics and also received public assistance. Life in a womancentered household allowed Cervantes to appreciate independence. Both her mother and grandmother derived their sense of autonomy from Native American tradition. “I think there is an indigenous feminism from the natural social patterns of the California Native Americans. It is an independence passed on from mother to daughter.” Cervantes composed her first poem at the young age of eight. However, she was accused of plagiarism and was threatened with suspension after showing the poem to her second-grade schoolteacher. Stunned into silence, Cervantes never shared her work with a teacher again. Nonetheless, she continued to write and developed an ear for poetry from listening to audio recordings of famous writers. At the age of seventeen she recalls ceremoniously accepting her role and destiny as she secretly wrote in her journal, “I am a writer,” forever committing herself to the joys and sacrifices of the craft. She shared her love of poetry with her brother, and they spontaneously collaborated; he played music while she “scribbled” poetry. Cervantes was influenced by the idealism of the Chicano movement and became involved in social protest in high school, participating in the antiwar movement, the school feminist debate team, teach-ins, and the Chicano cultural movement. During this time she heard Chicano poet Corky Gonzales’s reading of “I Am Joaquín” on a local radio program. She listened to feminist debates with Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Phyllis Schlafly and felt that “all the doors in my mind suddenly opened and everything was put into place. My experience living with my grandmother and mother . . . their experience, the sources of my mother’s bitterness” all blended into a developing political consciousness. She understood more clearly the economic, class, and gender forces that affect women’s lives. While Cervantes was a student at San Jose City College in 1972, her Chicano theater group accepted an invitation to participate in a Latin American Theater Festival in Mexico City. On the trip she wrote feverishly and completed up to five poems a day. During the festival she recited poetry between acts, and her brother accompanied her. She translated what became one of her most celebrated poems, “Refugee Ship,” into Spanish and recited it before a large and appreciative audience. In the audience were the editor of one of Mexico City’s daily newspapers and also the head of Revista
Chicana-Riqueña, Nicolás Kanellos. Both men praised her work and encouraged her to continue writing. Her presentation was featured in a Mexico City newspaper’s Sunday supplement, where the entire text of “Refugee Ship” was first printed. The poem later appeared in her first book, Emplumada, published in 1981. She was one of the first Chicana poets of her generation to be published. Her voice affirmed ideas of social change. Crossing the borders between language and silence, Cervantes connected readers to the complex and often contradictory circumstances of contemporary life. Cervantes combined a palette of memory, social commentary, storytelling, and prophecy to paint memorable images in rich poetic language. One of Cervantes’s literary projects that supported early Chicano writers in northern California was Mango, a home-pressed literary journal. In 1974 she used her savings to buy an offset printing press. After learning how to operate it, she began to publish chapbooks, and eventually the literary journal, Mango, was born. In 1978 she attended a retreat in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she studied with accomplished writers. During this time she completed her poetry manuscript and submitted it to the University of Pittsburgh Press. In 1981 Emplumada was released. Cervantes describes her book as strongly influenced by cultural nationalism and an understanding of language and power. “There is always this relationship between language and power for me: Being unable to speak Spanish was always a big issue for me, a personal issue and an ideological issue, and an issue in my writing certainly.” Nonetheless, Emplumada conveys an understanding of how “the intersection of all three multiple ironies as a woman, as an indigenous woman, and as a lower class welfare woman” define the complexities of the Chicana experience. Shortly after the book’s release Emplumada won the American Book Award. Cervantes’s ascent as a major poet, however, was accompanied by tragedy. In 1982 her mother was brutally killed in San Jose. Cervantes was paralyzed by the trauma and stopped writing. Years of healing allowed Cervantes to earn a B.A. from California State University, San Jose. She entered the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she engaged in writing a dissertation on the aesthetics of black music. Upon recovery Cervantes began the manuscript for From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991). The book gained wide recognition both nationally and internationally and won the Latino Literature Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Cervantes’s political and cultural activism is critical to her literary aspirations. “I have always thought of
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Chabram, Angie González myself as a cultural worker—this has been my way of working for and with Chicanos.” As a cultural worker, Cervantes sees art as a social force. “Art is not some elitist thing, but is a part of everyday life and is a part of understanding the history and spiritual practices and just joy.” See also Literature. SOURCES: Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 1981. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 1991. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. Houston: Arte Público Press; Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 1995. Oral history interview by Naomi H. Quiñonez; 1989. Lomelí, Francisco A. and Carl R. Shirley, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 82: Chicano writers, First Series. Detroit: Gale Research. Naomi H. Quiñonez
)
Newlyweds Harry and Angie González Chabram. Courtesy of Angie Chabram-Dernersesian.
Born on April 19, 1926 in El Paso, Texas, Angie González Chabram was part of the Mexican American generation that came of age during World War II. Her parents, Isabel and Cruz González, had journeyed to El Paso from Chihuahua, Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. Although they struggled financially, Isabel and Cruz had high hopes for their daughter’s education and sent her to a Catholic grammar school. However, when Cruz broke his spine, Angie had to quit school. The day after she completed the eighth grade, she went to work at her first job—as a salesclerk at the White House, a department store in El Paso. As was the case for most Mexican American youths, in order to ensure the survival of the family, wage work took precedence over education. Working at the White House, particularly during the depression, was considered a very good job for a Mexican American of any age. In 1930, for example, according to the U.S. census, only 10 percent of Mexican women workers in the Southwest held clerical or sales positions. In contrast, 20 percent of these women worked in factories and another 19 percent as farmworkers. During World War II Angie González secured employment as a messenger at Fort Bliss and at the base hospital. While enjoying a Sunday afternoon at the park with her girlfriends, she caught the eye of a young Puerto Rican serviceman. Her parents did not approve, but the couple wed on January 6, 1946, when she was only nineteen. Within ten years of their marriage, they had four children—Rafael, Yolanda, Richard, and Angie. In the photo that accompanies this entry, Angie González Chabram is twenty years old and sports the hairdo that she fashioned as a teenager, armed with
the help of an old-fashioned curling iron and a petroleum lamp. In 1960 Chabram reached a crossroads. With no education or technical skills, she had to work outside the home to support her four children because her husband left the family. Her parents urged her to come home to El Paso, but her oldest son Rafael, then a teenager, argued that educational opportunities were better in California than in Texas. Keeping all four children in parochial school, she scrubbed floors at a hospital, cooked for the nuns at the school, and cleaned private residences. She also made sure that though her children were third-generation Mexican American, they would speak fluent Spanish. Three of her children became significant Chicano studies scholars—Rafael Chabram, a professor at Whittier College, Richard Chabram, a University of California librarian who helped launch ChicanoNet, and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, a dynamic literary critic and professor at the University of California, Davis. Angie González Chabram is one of two El Paso residents who became matriarchs of academic dynasties. Her compatriot Alma Araiza García also notes with pride the accomplishments of her sons Mario and Richard, well-known historians, and her daughter Alma, a distinguished Chicana feminist scholar. Needing health insurance, Angie González Chabram went to work for the French Company, a garment firm that was a subcontractor for a number of high-end designers. She and her daughter Yolanda worked there for several decades. Now retired, she resides in Chino, California, with Yolanda and her sonin-law. When she recalled the difficulties of educating four children as a single parent, she explained, “God
CHABRAM, ANGIE GONZÁLEZ (1926–
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Chacón, Soledad Chávez helped me a lot.” She firmly believes that with faith and family anything is possible. Angie González Chabram hopes that young women, including those who are rearing their children alone with few resources, can pursue their dreams and lead happy, productive lives. Her motto is “You can do it.” SOURCE: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian
CHACÓN, SOLEDAD CHÁVEZ (1890–1936) Politician Soledad Chávez Chacón, “Lala,” was born in 1890 in Albuquerque, a decade after the railroad arrived. The railroad ushered in monumental changes for Hispanos. Albuquerque witnessed a population and building explosion that included schools of higher learning and a stream of new social and political ideas. The daughter of Melitón Chávez, a bank clerk, and Francisca Baca, Chacón had a middle-class upbringing. She played the mandolin and the piano. After graduating with honors from Albuquerque High School in 1908, she earned an accounting degree from the Albuquerque Business College. Fresh out of college in 1910, Chacón married Ireneo Eduardo Chacón, a furniture store manager in Albuquerque. Within two years she gave birth to Adelina and Santiago. Soledad Chacón and her husband held high expectations for their children. Adelina was one of the first Hispano graduates from the University of New Mexico, earning a bachelor’s degree in education. Santiago earned a law degree and became a businessman. In addition to her duties as a housewife, Chacón joined literary, civic, and service clubs: el Club Literario, el Club Latino, the Women’s Club, and the Minerva Club. One day, when she was baking a cake in her home in Albuquerque, five Democrats came to ask her to run for statewide office. The year was 1922, and Democratic power brokers—including her cousin, future U.S. senator Dennis Chávez, and two future governors—wanted thirty-two-year-old Chacón on the ticket to help retake control of the state legislature. They wanted to take advantage of the passage in 1920 of the women’s suffrage amendment. Democrats did not want to concede the women’s vote to Republicans, who had two women candidates. Although Chacón was a political novice, she was nonetheless college educated, belonged to several women’s civic and service organizations, and came from a prominent political family. After securing Chacón’s consent, as well as the permission of her husband and father, Democrats
nominated her for New Mexico secretary of state. In addition to Chacón, Democrats nominated Isabel Eckles for superintendent of public instruction. Every New Mexico Democratic candidate for state and federal office was elected that year. The 1922 election was a pivotal moment in New Mexico history. The state was one of the most conservative in the American West in terms of granting women political power. From 1869, when Wyoming became the first state to allow women the right to vote, to 1920, almost every state in the West extended voting to women. New Mexico was one of the exceptions. In 1921 an amendment to the New Mexico Constitution was ratified that granted women the right to hold public office. New Mexican women moved swiftly into public service. From 1922 to 1934 seventeen women were elected to the New Mexico legislature. Chacón’s first decision as secretary of state was selecting an assistant. After a female cousin declined the position, Democratic leaders were in a quandary. Following much debate they strongly urged Ireneo, Chacón’s husband, to take the job. He reluctantly accepted. In 1924 Lieutenant Governor José Baca died. Governor James Hinkle departed the state for two weeks to attend the Democratic National Convention, leaving Chacón as acting governor. The Albuquerque Morning Journal noted, “Mrs. Chacon is the daughter of a line of governors reaching back into the days when New Mexico was under Mexican rule.” On her first day in office she could do little but greet the throng of well-wishers who visited her. In a statement she honored the memory of the deceased lieutenant governor and thanked Governor Hinkle for his faith in her abilities. She understood the historic significance: “[I]t is my earnest desire to carry out the plans and wishes of our governor during his absence, in as fearless and conscientious a manner as has been his policy.” Chacón was reelected in 1924 when she defeated a Republican Hispano. She was invited to attend Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural as an Electoral College representative. She was elected to the state legislature the following year. Her assignments included chairing the Rules and Order of Business Committee. In 1936, at age forty-five, Chacón died of peritonitis after an operation. In her short lifetime Chacón distinguished herself by being the first Hispana to be elected to a New Mexico state office and the first woman (acting) governor in the United States. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: “Hand of Woman is Guiding N.M. Ship of State.” 1924. Albuquerque Morning Journal, June 22; Chávez, Dan D. 1996. “Soledad Chávez Chacón: A New Mexico Politi-
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“Charo”
New Mexico’s Soledad Chávez Chacón, the first Hispanic woman to serve as an acting governor in the United States, circa 1925. The New Mexico Blue Book. Courtesy of the Secretary of State of New Mexico.
cal Pioneer, 1890–1936.” Self-published pamphlet, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico; Coan, Charles F. 1925. A History of New Mexico. Vol. 3. Chicago and New York: American Historical Society; Salas, Elizabeth. 1995. “Ethnicity, Gender, and Divorce: Issues in the 1922 Campaign by Adelina Otero-Warren for the U.S. House of Representatives.” New Mexico Historical Review 70:4 (October): 367–382; Vigil, Maurilio E. 1996. “The Political Development of New Mexico’s Hispanas,” Latino Studies Journal. 7:2 (Spring): 3–28.
Benny Andrés Jr.
“CHARO” (MARÍA ROSARIO PILAR MARTÍNEZ MOLINA BAEZA) (1942–
)
María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza, known popularly as Charo or the “cuchi-cuchi” girl, was born in Spain on January 15, 1942. (Charo had a judge change her legal birth date to 1952.) She began playing guitar in school at the Catholic convent of the Sacred Heart when she was only nine years old. She eventually trained under Andrés Segovia, one of the fathers of modern classical guitar music, and became a classical guitarist. During the 1960s Charo met and soon married the “Rhumba King,” Xavier Cugat, who brought
her to the United States. Charo’s mother and sister were also brought to live in the United States. An accomplished musician, dancer, comedienne, actress, and singer, Charo is fluent in Spanish, English, French, Italian, and Japanese. Her professional achievements are impressive. Her album Guitar Passion (1994) remained on the Billboard Top 50 album charts for four months. Billboard Magazine named it the best Latin pop album by a female artist in 1995. In the following years Charo also released Dance a Little Bit Closer (1996) and Gusto (1997). She won the Guitar Player magazine’s Readers Poll as Best Flamenco Guitarist two years in a row and received the Distinguished Career Award from Hispanic Exhibitor and Distributor. Charo also appeared in several movies, including Tiger by the Tail (1968), Joys (1976), The Concorde: Airport ’79 (1979), and Moon over Parador (1988), and was the voice of Mrs. Toad in Thumbelina (1994). She often performs on the nightclub circuit in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Despite Charo’s professional accomplishments, she is perhaps best remembered by audiences in the United States for her earlier performances on television shows, including Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Hollywood Squares, The Carol Burnett Show, Cher, Chico and the Man, The Facts of Life, That ’70s Show, The Sonny and Cher Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show, and two Pee-Wee Herman Christmas Specials. During the 1970s, in Charo’s first appearances in the United States, she performed in big blond-hair wigs and tight and flamboyant clothes, squealing “cuchicuchi,” while hip-shaking her voluptuous figure. In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, however, Charo claimed that “around the world I am known as a great musician. But, in America I am known as the cuchicuchi girl. That’s okay because cuchi-cuchi has taken me all the way to the bank.” SOURCES: Club Josh. “Charo.” www.clubjosh.com/charo (accessed June 22, 2005); Internet Movie Database. “Charo” (I). www.imdb.com/name/nm0004819 (accessed June 22, 2005); TV Tome. “Charo: Biographical Information.” www.tvtome. com/tvtome/servlet/PersonalDetail/personid-6756 (accessed June 22, 2005); William Morris Agency. “Charo: Biography.” www.wma.com/charo/bio/CHARO.pdf (accessed June 22, 2005). Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
CHÁVEZ, DENISE (1948–
)
Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Denise Chávez gathered experiences on la frontera that she would later craft into her plays, short stories, and novels of small-town life in southern New Mexico. Chávez came from a family of readers, artists, and educators who
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Chávez, Denise prized literature and learning, as well as service to family and community. Chávez’s father, E. E. Chávez, grew up bilingual and bicultural in the barrio Chiva Town, the historical heart of Las Cruces. After obtaining a law degree at Georgetown University in the 1920s, “something that was unheard of for any Mexican-American,” her father returned to practice law in Las Cruces. Chávez’s mother, Delfina Rede Chávez, was a beloved schoolteacher in Las Cruces for forty-two years. Growing up in western Texas, “my mother’s family were the first Latino graduates of Sol Ross University.” One aunt was named Texas Mother of the Year, and another started a library in her grocery store. As a child, Chávez began her love affair with literature. She spent much of her free time in the public library in Las Cruces. When her parents divorced when she was ten, “we’d spend the summers in West Texas with my aunt in El Polvo, a very remote town. Of course there was nothing to do there; there were about 20 people in the town. And so we read, everybody read.” Chávez also began writing at age eight and kept a diary and wrote stories throughout her childhood. After attending Madonna High School, a private allgirls Catholic school, Chávez earned her B.A. in drama from New Mexico State University in 1971 and her M.F.A. in drama from Trinity University in 1974. In 1984 she completed an M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Combining her interests in theater and literature, Chávez considers herself a “performance writer.” Her one-woman play Women in the State of Grace was originally written as Novenas narrativas in 1988. It features Chávez in the role of nine different Chicanas, aged seven to seventy-eight. Chávez has also written two plays for young people, The Flying Tortilla Man (1990) and The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals/La mujer que sabía el idioma de los Animales (1993); numerous short stories, some of which are collected in The Last of the Menu Girls (1986); and two novels, Face of an Angel (1994) and Loving Pedro Infante (2001). Chávez has also worked as an actress and educator in many different settings. While she was in northern New Mexico for seven years, Chávez took part in la Compañía de Teatro, a bilingual theater company based in Albuquerque, and Theatre-in-the-Red. She has taught at such varied institutions as the American School of Paris, the College of Santa Fe, Northern New Mexico Community College, the University of Houston, New Mexico State University, and the Radium Springs Center for Women, a medium-security prison. Although Chávez ventured far from Las Cruces, she eventually moved back to her hometown. “I never thought of living any other place,” Chávez declares.
She still lives in the house in which she grew up. “This is where my roots are,” Chávez asserts. “I personally love living on the border. I’m a frontera person.” It is indeed the border and small-town life of southern New Mexico that provides the setting, characters, plots, and struggles for Chávez’s writing. She observes, “I’ve always worked with border characters, border themes, people who are working their lives out on the border, linguistically, spiritually, and so on.” In her work Chávez concentrates on themes of identity, balance, and service. She explores “how people become authentic human beings while embracing and taking the best from culture and traditions and retaining their intrinsic roots.” Chávez notes that her characters “are trying to find equilibrium, a state of grace, a state of balance.” She also believes that “the theme of service is very important to me: what it means to serve and be served.” Chávez ties this theme to her own experience. “It was just a given in our family,” she observes. “We were servers and we were served by other people. I think it’s a frontera thing, it’s a trading of personal services for different things.” Like her characters, Chávez is an exemplar of the service ethic. She initiated the Border Book Festival in 1994, an annual weeklong event that brings worldrenowned writers to Las Cruces to read from their work and to hold writing workshops for community members. The Border Book Festival also conducts a
New Mexico author Denise Chávez. Photograph by Marisol Garza. Courtesy of Mary Ann Villarreal and Marisol Garza.
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Chávez, Helen year-round program, Emerging Voices, of writers-inresidence at local schools, domestic violence shelters, prisons, senior centers, and other community organizations. For her writing, as well as her community service, Chávez has received numerous awards, including the American Book Award for Face of an Angel in 1995. Chávez has also been awarded the New Mexico Governor’s Award in Literature (1995) and the Woman of Distinction Award in Education (1996), as well as many other state and local awards. In 2000 Chávez received a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fellowship for her project La Frontera Divina/The Divine Frontier to gather oral histories with senior citizens in the historic Mesquite District in Las Cruces. Asserting that “all of my role models were within my family,” Chávez found inspiration in the everyday life of her small town and developed a unique frontera voice. She continues to write and to serve her community in her own ongoing quest for a state of grace. See also Literature; Theater SOURCES: Chávez, Denise. 1986. The Last of the Menu Girls. Houston: Arte Público Press; ——— . 1994. Face of an Angel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; ——— . 2001. Interview by Margaret D. Jacobs, April 23; ——— . 2001. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Heard, Martha. 1988. “The Theatre of Denise Chávez: Interior Landscapes with ‘sabor nuevo mexicano.’ ” Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 16, no. 2 (Summer): 83–91; Mehaffy, Marilyn, and AnaLouise Keating. 2001. “ ‘Carrying the Message’: Denise Chávez on the Politics of Chicana Becoming.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 26, no. 1 (Spring): 127–156; Richter, Francine K. Ramsey. 1999. “Romantic Women and la Lucha: Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel.” Great Plains Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Fall): 277–289. Margaret D. Jacobs
CHÁVEZ, HELEN (1928–
)
Born in Brawley, California, near the Mexican border, the second of five children in a poor, rural Mexican immigrant family, Helen Fabela Chávez represents the unsung Latinas who combined domestic responsibilities with social activism. The Fabela family survived by working in the fields and orchards of southern California’s fertile valleys before migrating to the central San Joaquin Valley near Delano during the Great Depression. Meager wages and inferior working conditions led to a life of substandard housing, inadequate sanitation, malnutrition, limited educational opportunities, and poverty. Helen Fabela began working around the age of seven. Lacking transportation, she walked with her family to the local ranches to pick cotton, grapes, peaches, strawberries, peas, and walnuts during the summer, on weekends, and after school. The death of
her father caused her to drop out of school at the age of fifteen to help her mother support the family. Courtship and marriage dramatically changed Helen Fabela’s life. During World War II she met César Chávez at a local malt shop. Two years after his service in the navy the couple married in a civil ceremony in Reno, Nevada, followed by a church wedding in San Jose in 1948. She was just nineteen years old. During the next eleven years Chávez bore and reared eight children. As was the case with her parents, economic survival required every member of the household, including the children, to contribute to the family finances. Traveling with her husband’s family, the Chávezes migrated up and down the state in search of work. Recognizing the bleak future that farm labor offered, Helen agreed with César’s decision to take a position with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civic-minded, self-help, Mexican American civil rights group that had sprung up in the barrios of the postwar urban Southwest. As a loyal wife, she moved her growing family to the small towns that dotted central California and then to Los Angeles to further her husband’s organizing activities. To advance his career, she spent her evenings writing in longhand the daily reports he dictated to her, as well as addressing envelopes and postcards and helping prepare for chapter meetings. Chávez supported her husband’s resolve to leave his CSO position, the first real economic security the family had ever enjoyed, to found the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers union). She chose this course of action not only out of commitment to her husband’s aspirations, but also because of her own working-class experience in the fields and the memory of her mother as a struggling widow trying to raise her family. Without César’s steady income, this choice held momentous consequences for her. In 1962, at the age of thirty-four, Helen Chávez reentered the agricultural work force. “I think the beginning of the Union was the roughest time we had,” she later recalled. In an interview César conceded, “Helen did most of the worrying about money for food and clothing,” freeing him to concentrate on the union. In addition to caring for the children, running the household with a largely absent husband, and working in the fields and packing sheds, Helen Chávez found time to demonstrate her commitment to a better life for “campesinos.” Her activism evolved in the context of her extended family. With her children and relatives she joined picket lines and marches. Taunts and threats came with the territory, and occasionally violence disrupted the normally peaceful protests. Chávez took her ideals to another level when she went to jail to publicize La Causa. A particularly notable event oc-
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Chávez, Linda curred in 1965 when she was arrested for shouting huelga (strike) with forty-four others at a demonstration against a local grower. The charges were later dismissed. Helen Chávez’s example gave other wives and mothers the courage to join picket lines, marches, and boycotts. But an emphasis on Helen Chávez’s arrests and participation in public protests distorts an important aspect of her quiet legacy to the union. Her dedication for nearly thirty years to one of the UFW’s earliest projects, the credit union, is an enduring, but less well known, contribution. Though initially reluctant because of her lack of education and experience, she began to work at the credit union full-time. Through her positions as secretary, bookkeeper, and finally treasurer-manager, she maintained an important service for union members who were traditionally denied credit at mainstream institutions. She grew to see the credit union as her own special charge, lobbying for its inclusion in union contracts. “Don’t you come back without that!” she admonished her husband when the union entered preliminary negotiations with a grape grower. The credit union helped a generation of farmworkers raise themselves out of poverty and provided opportunities for their children to enter the Chicano middle class. Comfortable with protesting in a group, Helen Chávez was by nature a shy and modest individual and resisted demands to make public speeches. Despite numerous requests from media and other organizations, she has preferred to stay in the background. Even after the unexpected death of her husband in 1993, she refrained from a more public presence, only venturing out to accept posthumous awards on behalf of her husband and to mark the annual celebrations of his birthday, now a state holiday in California. Helen Chávez practiced a more traditional form of social activism, one that merged family, work, and union activism. Despite shunning a prominent profile, she made a vital, but often hidden, contribution to the founding of the United Farm Workers. Her quiet strength and unassuming temperament led many in the union family to regard her as the union’s backbone. In the process of supporting the unionization of farmworkers, she has inspired many traditional Chicanas and Mexicanas of her generation, who suffered from lack of education and marginalization in the most impoverished sector of society, to raise their voices and join the most significant Mexican American protest movement in the second half of the twentieth century on behalf of agricultural workers and their families. See also Labor Unions; United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: Levy, Jacques E. 1975. Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. New York: W. W. Norton; Rose, Margaret.
1988. “Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union, 1950 to 1980.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles; ——— . 1990. “Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism in the United Farm Workers of America, 1962–1980.” Frontiers 11:26–32; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Margaret Eleanor Rose
CHÁVEZ, LINDA (1947–
)
Among the most outspoken voices in American politics and society, Linda Chávez is the product of a working-class family who made their living painting houses or working in department stores or restaurants. Exposure to working-class values during her early years influenced Chávez’s conservative attitudes toward privilege and labor in her adult years. She was born on July 7, 1947, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but by her tenth birthday her family moved to Denver, Colorado. There Chávez received much of her education. In 1970 she earned a baccalaureate degree from the University of Colorado. During the next two years Chávez completed graduate coursework in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. This background helped prepare Chávez for numerous positions she would hold in later years. Although Chávez writes a nationally syndicated political column that appears in numerous papers throughout the country, she is best known for her book Out of the Barrio: Towards a New Politics in Hispanic Assimilation (1991). The book, described as a text that “should explode the stereotypes about Hispanics that have clouded the minds of patronizing liberals and xenophobic conservatives” by the Denver Post, is considered highly controversial. Chávez sets forth conventional views regarding the rate and degree of assimilation among Hispanics, opposition to affirmative action programs, and to bilingual education. According to Chávez, who is a member of the American Civil Rights Union and heads a center that researches issues of race, ethnicity, and assimilation, people of color can succeed without government programs or special privileges. This ideology was evident when, as a U.S. Commissioner on Civil Rights (1983–1985), Chávez reversed government policies supportive of diversity, gender issues, and minority civil rights, alienating liberals in the U.S. Congress and civil rights groups throughout the nation. From 1977 until 1983 Chávez edited the awardwinning American Educator, the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, then headed by Albert Shanker. She served as Shanker’s assistant from 1982 to 1983 and was assistant director of the union’s legal
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Chávez Ravine, Los Angeles division. In the ensuing years she held a number of appointed positions. Among these, Chávez was staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983– 1985) and White House director of public liaison (1985), sat on the Administrative Conference of the United States (1984–1986), was chair of the National Commission on Migrant Education (1988–1992), and sat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The latter position required Chávez to serve on the Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chávez co-chaired the council’s Committee on Diversity (1998–2000). A failed attempt to become the Republican senator from the state of Maryland was a setback for Chávez in 1986. However, her influence on civil rights policy continued with her political analysis for the Fox News Channel, a syndicated column, and authorship of a second book, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal (2002). She became president of U.S. English, an organization dedicated to making English the official language of the United States, and served as an advisor to Ron K. Unz, the proponent of Proposition 227, a ballot initiative in California that essentially eradicated bilingual education legislation in that state. In 2000 President-elect George W. Bush named Chávez his secretary of labor, but she was forced to withdraw before confirmation because of a controversial incident involving the hiring of an illegal immigrant woman to care for Chávez’s children. She is currently the founder and president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a nonprofit public policy research institute in Virginia. Chávez is married to Christopher Gersten, and the couple has three children. SOURCES: ABC NEWS.com; “Profile: Linda Chavez.” http://abcnews.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/Chavez_ profile010201.html (accessed July 13, 2004); Chávez, Linda. 1991. Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. New York: Basic Books; Chávez, Linda. 2001. An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, or, How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America. New York: Basic Books; Kamen, Al. 2002. “Chavez Torching the Bridge.” Washington Post. January 21, A 15. Linda Chávez home page. “Linda’s Bio.” http://www.lindachavez.org (accessed June 24, 2005). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CHÁVEZ RAVINE, LOS ANGELES Today the site of Dodger Stadium near downtown Los Angeles, in 1950 Chávez Ravine was a bustling Mexican American barrio that included small numbers of Chinese Americans and one African American family. It is one of the best-known incidents of the use of emi-
nent domain to destroy a racial-ethnic community, first in the name of public housing and later for private profit. Named after Julian Chávez, a native of New Mexico who settled in Los Angeles during the 1830s, Chávez Ravine developed as a specific neighborhood with the influx of families who migrated to southern California during the Mexican Revolution. By 1950 two to three generations of Mexican Americans called the ravine home. Although most of the houses were poorly constructed and lacked adequate plumbing, and overcrowding was common, many families took great pride in their humble homes. Even Robert Alexander and Robert Neutra, the architects in charge of designing the new public housing units for the ravine, had to admit that the area was “charming” and that the residents themselves shared a strong sense of community. More than homes, Chávez Ravine had a grammar school, a Roman Catholic church, Santo Niño, and neighborhood merchants. As Henry Cruz later recalled to photographer Don Normark, “It wasn’t . . . Beverly Hills, but we were happy people here in this neighborhood.” In August 1949 the Los Angeles City Council endorsed a public housing plan that would use $110 million of federal money to construct 10,000 new housing units in eleven sites around Los Angeles, including Chávez Ravine. On July 24, 1950, in a memorandum, residents were notified about the city’s plans. “This letter is to inform you that public housing development will be built on this location for families of low income. . . . The house you are living in is included. . . . You will be visited by representatives of the Housing Authority who will . . . inspect your home in order to estimate its value. It will be several months at least before your property is purchased. . . . Later you will have the first chance to move back into the new Elysian Heights development.” Frank Wilkinson, manager of the City Housing Authority of Los Angeles (CHA), met with the residents of Chávez Ravine on several occasions to quell their concerns and to persuade them that a new and improved neighborhood was on the way in the form of twenty-four apartment buildings that would rise thirteen stories tall, along with 163 more modest two-story structures. Public housing was not embraced by powerful interests in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times, home builders’ associations, the Chamber of Commerce, and local real-estate boards began a concerted campaign to get the city out of the public housing business, calling it “creeping socialism.” In December 1951 the city council responded to the pressure and by one vote rescinded the public housing contract with the City Housing Authority. The CHA went to court, and the California Supreme Court in 1952 ruled unanimously that the Los Angeles City Council could not cancel the
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Chávez-Thompson, Linda contract. Council members decided to put the matter to the people in the form of a referendum, and the voters backed their decision to void the contract. California senators Richard Nixon and William Knowland then worked to pass federal legislation that would legitimate the council’s action. The targets of rampant red-baiting by the press and conservative state politicians, Frank Wilkinson and other members of the CHA lost their jobs. With the election of Norris Poulson, the anti–public housing candidate for mayor, in 1953, any hope for public housing in Chávez Ravine was effectively dead. What would happen to the families who had sold their homes under eminent domain, and what would happen to the land? Chávez Ravine was now desolate, a shell of a poor, but vibrant community with only a few families left who stubbornly refused eviction. In 1954 the U.S. Congress authorized the CHA to sell Chávez Ravine to the city for a $4-million loss and to void the public housing contract, but with the stipulation that the land could be used for public purposes only, not for private development. The Brooklyn Dodgers then became involved. After a series of controversial negotiations and much deal making the city council voted on October 7, 1957, to approve giving Chávez Ravine to Walter O’Malley in exchange for Wrigley Field, land O’Malley had recently purchased in South Los Angeles. The city also agreed to cover the costs of making the ravine suitable for the construction of the new stadium and to provide the necessary access roads. Outraged, current and former neighbors of Chávez Ravine filed suit, arguing, “It has been held (by the U.S. Supreme Court) that the power of eminent domain may be exercised only for public purpose and not for a private purpose.” Prominent civil rights activist Fred Ross (the mentor of César Chávez), labor organizer María Duran, and attorney Phil Silver worked with residents who formed the Committee to Save Chávez Ravine for the People. The committee gathered 85,000 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot that would allow voters to decide between baseball and housing. Proposition B went to the voters in December 1958, and by only a 2 percent margin they chose baseball. The next month the California Supreme Court rejected the claims brought by the residents and approved the actions of the city council. On May 8, 1959, the bulldozers arrived and more than thirty people were forcibly evicted from their homes. One newspaper described the scene: “Amid shouting and cursing the deputies arrived and carried one of the women bodily out the door. The others went but not quietly. . . . Ten minutes later, the roar of two giant bulldozers drowned out Mrs. Aréchigas’s sobs as she sat on a curb and watched the machine reduce the frail dwelling to rub-
ble.” Los Angeles city councilman Ed Roybal declared, “The eviction is the kind of thing you might expect in Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition.” Aside from displacing 7,500 people, destroying some 900 homes, and costing taxpayers $5 million, the arrival of baseball to Los Angeles did not change things much. However, the former residents of Chávez Ravine have not forgotten their past, a history that has now received a wider hearing. Judy Baca’s famous mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles recorded the destruction of Chávez Ravine (with the Dodgers depicted as aliens from outer space). In 1949 photographer Don Normark, unaware of the brewing controversy, recorded the daily rhythms of the barrio; fifty years later he published these photos for the first time alongside commentary from the people who called it home in Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story. In 2003 Culture Clash, the popular Latino comedy troupe, opened its play Chávez Ravine at the prestigious Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. At the time of the evictions one resident maintained a sense of hope. “Everyone in this area has suffered many losses, both personal and financial. . . . I shall not quit fighting for justice . . . for it may pave the way for [a] better and more glorious generation.” SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo. 1988. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row; Avila, Erik. 2004. “Revisiting Chávez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal, and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles.” In Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities, ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Tomás Ybarra Frausto, 125– 139. London: Palgrave Macmillan; Becerra, Victor. 1982. “The Untold Story of Chávez Ravine.” Paper, History Research Holdings, Chicano Studies Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Normark, Don. 1999. Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Victor Becerra
CHÁVEZ-THOMPSON, LINDA (1944–
)
During World War II Linda Chávez-Thompson was one of eight second-generation Mexican American children born into a cotton sharecropping family in Lubbock, Texas. The family struggled to make ends meet, and the children were all needed to labor alongside their parents in the hot, dusty western Texas fields. For their backbreaking efforts, adults earned fifty cents an hour, and the children received thirty cents an hour. Because it was necessary for the children to help support the family, schooling became sporadic, dependent on the crops and economic and agricultural cycles. Like countless other migrant children, Chávez-Thompson was forced to leave school without graduating from high school because of financial difficulties. In 1963, at the age of twenty, Chávez-Thompson married
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Chicana Caucus/National Women’s Political Caucus and embarked on her first “adult” job, cleaning other people’s houses. Chávez-Thompson joined the Laborers’ International Union in 1967 and became secretary for the Lubbock local. This position connected the young activist with the region’s Latino membership because she was one of the few Spanish speakers in the union. The position also provided Chávez-Thompson with a broad education in the daily operation of the labor union, the issues, and the personal and work-related problems faced by the membership. Four years later Chávez-Thompson was employed at the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In comparison with her previous employment, AFSCME carried a wider, more far-reaching range of opportunities and responsibilities. Chávez-Thompson rapidly became acquainted with labor legislation, negotiations, grievances, education programs, compensation issues, and politics. In 1995 Chávez-Thompson’s bid for elective office within the union proved successful. She became the first Latina executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, a position she holds today. Calling upon her own experiences as a leader, a woman of color, and a migrant laborer, Chávez-Thompson brings powerful perspectives to the union table. While she connects the labor movement to diverse Latino communities throughout the nation, Chávez-Thompson also calls for increasing the numbers of women in leadership positions. Since her high-profile election to the AFL-CIO Council, she has served on numerous boards and organizations. She sits on the board of governors of the United Way and is a vice-chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, a member of the executive committee of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and a member of the board of trustees for the Labor Heritage Foundation. Most important, in projecting for future advances for workers, Chávez-Thompson brings to bear the voices and concerns of thousands of individuals previously marginalized. See also Labor Unions; United Farm Workers of America SOURCE: National Women’s History Project. “Linda Chávez-Thompson: A Woman Pioneering the Future.” www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/chavez-thompson/chavezthompson-bio.html (accessed July 10, 2004). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CHICANA CAUCUS/NATIONAL WOMEN’S POLITICAL CAUCUS (1972–1973) The Chicana Caucus evolved out of the 1971 organizing conference of the National Women’s Political Cau-
cus (NWPC) in Washington, D.C. The NWPC committed itself to increasing the number of women in all aspects of political life. After that meeting the Texas Women’s Political Caucus (TWPC) was created. Each state held its own caucus meetings, so when the Texas Women’s Political Caucus State Convention held its meeting in Mesquite, Texas, on March 11, 1972, Chicana activists from throughout Texas came to participate. Almost 100 Chicana activists, including Martha Cotera and Evey Chapa, formed the Chicana Caucus when it became clear that NWPC leaders ignored the voices of raza women. Although Chicanas gave their full energies to their role in the NWPC, many Chicanas felt caught between the Chicano movement and the feminist movement. They negotiated their position by addressing concerns in both arenas, forming caucuses in both feminist and Chicano organizations to address their specific needs. In an address to the 1972 TWPC, Martha Cotera stated, “We are Chicanas and women. We have nothing now because of these two factors. And we can go for ‘broke.’ We certainly can’t do worse than we are doing now with the present system.” Chicanas who joined the NWPC found that the larger caucus was forced to recognize and find solutions for Chicanas as a group. Chicana organizers believed that if the NWPC was to succeed, it must include the point of view of Chicanas, and that only Chicanas could speak to the problems of Chicanas or advocate for their solution. More important, Chicanas felt that their Anglo counterparts were unaware of the power Chicanas held in their homes, an advantage that many Anglo women still did not have. The TWPC had the opportunity to host its first NWPC convention in February 1973 in Houston. More than sixty Chicanas from seven states met during the NWPC convention to address problems specific to employment, education, welfare, and politics, and in the end they focused their attention on seven resolutions. The Chicana Caucus presented two resolutions supporting the strike against the Farah Manufacturing Company and the lettuce boycotts sponsored by the United Farm Workers. A third resolution focused on the Education Act of 1973, garnering the NWPC’s support to address the problems of Chicanas in education. A fourth resolution recognized the National Chicana Welfare Rights Organization as separate and autonomous from the National Welfare Rights Organization. This allowed Chicanas to deal with the cultural and economic differences facing Chicano families. The fifth resolution opposed the Talmadge Amendment, which would require every person on welfare to register and accept whatever job was offered without being provided day care or job training. The sixth resolution made it official that NWPC would acknowledge the Raza Unida Party in its literature. At that time the Raza
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Chicano Movement Unida Party had become the most supportive and viable option for Chicanas to run for office. A final resolution called for the creation of Chicana political caucuses, proposing “that in those states where Chicanos reside, Chicana Political Caucuses be established and maintained on equal basis with the other State caucuses.” This resolution received the most opposition because those outside the Chicana Caucus did not understand why there was a need to form a separate official caucus. After much debate the NWPC finally approved the resolution. SOURCES: Chapa, Evey. 1964. “Report from the National Women’s Political Caucus.” Martha Cotera Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin; Cotera, Martha. 1972. “Feminism As We See It.” Keynote address to the Texas Women’s Political Caucus. Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Mary Ann Villarreal
CHICANA RIGHTS PROJECT (1974–1983) The Chicana Rights Project was a feminist civil rights and legal rights program that reflected the Chicana feminist movement of the 1970s. Under the auspices of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), this program sought to enhance Chicana self-sufficiency in employment, health, education, and housing. Founded in 1968, MALDEF continues to address the civil and legal rights of Latinos, using litigation for empowerment. In 1974 MALDEF’s first Mexican American woman director, Vilma Martínez (a native of San Antonio, Texas), initiated the Chicana Rights Project by establishing offices in San Francisco and San Antonio. Patricia M. Vásquez headed the Texas effort, and Carmen A. Estrada took charge of the San Francisco office. Norma V. Cantú served as a staff attorney from 1979 to 1983. The Chicana Rights Project included litigation, research, and community education. It monitored the impact of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a federal program designed to assist low-income persons. In 1976 the project filed suit, Hernández et al. v. Cockrell et al., against the city of San Antonio, alleging that the city did not include Mexican American women on equitable terms in its CETA programs. After the complaint the percentage of women and people of color in the San Antonio CETA programs rose from 20 percent to 50 percent. The project also filed a class-action suit against the Texas Employment Commission to seek unemployment compensation benefits for pregnant women. Lawsuits challenging sterilization abuses and health service cutbacks were also filed in California and
Texas. The Chicana Rights Project obtained compliance reviews and audits of San Antonio’s largest banks so as to assure equal opportunities for women. This pioneering Chicana feminist program initiated a pamphlet series on abortion, sterilization, mental health, immigrant rights, and employment. It also published information about immigration, employment rights, the 1980 census, and Texas women’s legal rights. The pamphlets were printed in English and Spanish. These publications included Profile of the Chicana: A Statistical Fact Sheet, with census data; Chicanas: Women’s Health Issues, on abortion and sterilization; CETA: An Economic Tool for Women; Chicanas and Mental Health, which addressed cultural sensitivity; Hispanic Women: Immigration Issues; Hispanic/Women’s Employment Rights; The 1980 Census: Impact on Hispanics and Women; and Texas Women’s Legal Rights, a handbook on federal and state laws. The Chicana Rights Project served as a resource for other Latina organizations, as well as state and federal agencies on the local, state, and national levels. Corporate sponsors included the following foundations: Ford, Rockefeller, Revlon, and Playboy. The project ended in 1983 because of a lack of funds. Though short lived, the Chicana Rights Project was significant for its concrete contributions and made a difference in the lives of thousands of Mexican American women. Furthermore, it demonstrated the gendered nature of legal rights because most Chicano organizations focused only on race and Chicano male nationalism. The Chicana Rights Project represented Chicana feminism in action, and several contemporary Chicana civil rights leaders, such as Norma Cantú, began their careers with this project. SOURCES: O’Connor, Karen, and Lee Epstein. 1985. “A Legal Voice for the Chicano Community: The Activities of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 1968–82.” In The Mexican American Experience, ed. Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Frank D. Bean, Charles Bonjean, Ricardo Romo, and Rodolfo Alvarez. Austin: University of Texas Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Chicana Rights Project.” In New Handbook of Texas 3:69. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
CHICANO MOVEMENT (1965–1980) The Chicano movement, which flourished in the southwestern United States from roughly 1965 to 1980, was a coalition of organizations and individuals that sought to address the effects of racial discrimination, low socioeconomic status, and police violence on persons of Mexican ancestry. The movement arose in embryonic form out of churches, community organizations, labor unions, and mutual-aid societies during the 1950s. It
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Chicano Movement gradually expanded from local and particular concerns to address the larger national issues of segregation, political disenfranchisement, and legal injustices. Inspired during the late 1950s by the rhetoric and tactics of decolonization movements around the globe and by the black civil rights movement, Mexican American activists increasingly drew attention to long-term structural inequalities produced by poor education, inadequate employment, residential segregation, and lack of access to good housing in their communities. By systematically focusing on these local concerns in many places they were able to forge a larger national movement. The campaign to improve the lives of ethnic Mexicans in the United States was often referred to as “La Causa” (the Cause); activists called themselves members of “La Raza” (the Race), implying a host of inequalities born of institutional racism. What differentiated the Chicano movement from the activities of such groups as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the American GI Forum, or the numerous mutual-aid societies that Mexicans had created to better their socioeconomic situation in the United States was the movement’s radical political stance. Civil rights organizations during the 1940s and 1950s had sought slow, peaceful change through assimilation, through petitions for governmental beneficence, and through appeals to white liberal guilt. Chicanos, in a revolution sparked by rising expectations, demanded equality with white America, demanded an end to racism, asserted their right to cultural autonomy, particularly in education, and demanded selfdetermination as an independent nation. Eschewing the ethnic label their parents had embraced as “Mexican Americans” during the 1940s and 1950s, these young men called themselves Chicanos, announcing their oppositional identity and resistance to assimilation and Americanization. Since much of the ethnic militancy that Chicanos articulated was profoundly influenced by black nationalism of the same period, it is important to recall one of the truly poignant insights in the autobiography of Malcolm X. Reciting the psychic violence that racism and discrimination had wreaked on African Americans, Malcolm X noted that the most profound had been the emasculation of black men. In the eyes of white America blacks were not deemed men. Thus whatever else the Black Power movement was, it was also about the cultural assertion of masculinity by radical men, most of them quite young. Chicanos faced what was undoubtedly a rather similar experience—social emasculation and cultural negation—by seeking strength and inspiration in a heroic and militant Aztec past. The Aztec past they chose emphasized the virility of warriors and the brute exercise of force. Young Chicano men, a largely power-
less group in American society, invested themselves with images of power, a symbolic inversion commonly found in the fantasies of powerless men worldwide and a gendered vision that rarely extends to women. Chicanos dreamed of reclaiming a lost homeland they called Aztlán, that mythical place of Aztec genesis, which they claimed consisted of the contemporary states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. Despite all the fuzziness of Aztlán as an actual spatial concept, meshed as it was in the deep recesses of Aztec mythology, the dream of an independent Aztlán sank deep roots in the imaginations of Chicano radicals, despite the fact that the nation had very imprecise geographic boundaries and previous claims to the territory that American Indians could justly assert. Aztlán was an internal colony of the United States that required national liberation, the radicals maintained. Chicanos were an internally colonized population that was socially, culturally, and economically subordinated and territorially segregated by white Anglo-Saxon America. This colonization was most profoundly felt in the barrios (ghettos) and colonias (shantytowns) of the Southwest. If they were to be liberated, Chicanos had to identify with la raza (the race or people), collectively promoting the interests of carnales (brothers) with whom they shared a common language, culture, and religion stemming from the putative Aztec blood that ran through their veins. The personal political identities young ethnic Mexican men living in the United States crafted as “Chicanos” clearly reflected their idealization of the Aztecs. The etymology of Chicano is the Nahuatl word mexica. In pre-Columbian times the Aztecs had been known in their own language as the mexica, whence the country’s name, Mexico. The “x” in mexicanos, or Mexicans, is pronounced as “ch.” Dropping the first syllable of mexicanos and replacing the “x” with a “ch” created the word chicanos. In Mexico the word chicano had long been a vulgar, derogatory, class-based term used to refer to persons of dubious character, to persons of lower-class origins, to tramps, and to guttersnipes. In the 1960s militants embraced this class-based term of insult and derision as an ethnic identity and transformed it into a badge of pride, thereby identifying with the downtrodden and weak of the world. For persons born into second- and third-generation Mexican immigrant households, Chicano identity, tied as it was etymologically to a heroic past of Aztec warriors, provided an alternative tradition of resistance to marginality and discrimination and proved a particularly expansive rhetorical arsenal for the construction of a usable national past. Sociological studies show that young men called themselves Chicanos more often than young women,
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Chicano Movement undoubtedly because of the vulgarity previously attached to the term’s older connotations; proper Mexican American women did not use such language in public. Economic status and Chicano self-identification were inversely related; the higher one’s socioeconomic status, the less likely one was to identify as Chicano. The term was also quite generationally deployed. Firstand second-generation Mexican-origin immigrants rarely embraced the identity. Chicanos were most often third-generation assimilated Mexican American males of radical political tendencies, often below the age of twenty-five, who did not speak Spanish, knew little of Mexico’s history, and had only the most marginal cultural memories of Mexico, its regions, and its peoples. Chicano identity was initially quite localized, popular primarily in California. But with time, and particularly after two nationwide student conferences on Chicano issues—the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference held in Denver in March 1969 and the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education held in April 1969 at the University of California, Santa Barbara— Chicano as a political identity became more widely diffused and embraced, at least among young males. Chicano identity seems to have provided the political glue to unify what had previously been a host of quite local and distinct concerns. Having arrived as students of Mexican American, Latin American, and Hispanic origin at the Denver Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969, by the meeting’s end they proclaimed: “We, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán . . . We are a Nation. We are a Union of free pueblos, We are Aztlán” (“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” 1969). Elsewhere in the American Southwest the older ethnic Mexican populations had forged much more place-specific identities as Latin Americans, Spanish Americans, Hispanics, Hispanos, Mexicanos, and Mexican Americans. Indeed, to outsiders, particularly to sociologists and anthropologists, the only thing that seemed to unite all of these groups was that they were “Spanish speakers” whose linguistic deficiencies hampered their Americanization and upward mobility. Many organizations and leaders, too numerous to discuss here, were to become the Chicano movement’s major participants. Four charismatic men stand out. Each had a unique organizational style, personal political commitments, a local constituency, and a specific set of social concerns. They were to become the organizational muscle that gave the Chicano movement its specific forms. César Chávez is perhaps best known for his peaceful, pacifist tactics inspired by Gandhi and often compared to those of Dr. Martin Luther King. Working with a largely rural constituency to improve the wage and work conditions of unskilled farm laborers in agribusiness, he was active mostly in California, later in Col-
orado, New Mexico, and Texas, and through a series of nationwide boycotts of agricultural products gained international visibility. The United Farm Workers of America, the labor union he began, still exists. Reies López Tijerina, a charismatic Baptist minister, militated on behalf of Hispanos of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado who had seen their ancestral land grants known as mercedes fraudulently stolen by unscrupulous lawyers and legal chicanery. Seizing federal property, engaging in armed confrontation with local authorities, and pressing his claims before the United Nations as international treaty violations, Tijerina sought to regain land through his organization, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. José Angel Gutiérrez began his activities as a student in Crystal City, Texas, there seeking Mexican American participation in school curriculum and governance. Faced with resistance from local school board members, he successfully organized, taking over the school board and city council and finally seeking political change through the formation of a political party known as La Raza Unida Party, which developed chapters throughout the Southwest. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, a professional prizefighter in his youth, with a “can-do” spirit, sought to improve the living conditions of ethnic Mexicans in and around Denver. Through his militant organization called the Crusade for Justice he organized high-school and college students locally and then nationally around a number of issues—educational reform, police violence, protest against the war in Vietnam and FBI surveillance, and, most important, the need for the creation of an independent nation that would be known as Aztlán. He is responsible for forging disparate and regionally isolated student militants into a national force, having hosted in Denver the March 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, from which emerged the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a foundational agenda for the betterment of Chicanos. The years 1965 to 1969 were heydays of Chicano activism, in the fields and streets, in courtrooms and classrooms, protesting racism, police violence, and limited access to educational opportunities, low wages, poor working conditions, and, eventually, the mounting number of Chicano deaths in Vietnam. Movement activists articulated most of these concerns largely in gendered terms, as problems faced primarily by men and their families. While the movement persistently advocated the self-actualization of all Chicanos, the term Chicanos really referred to men. A burgeoning feminist movement had begun to grip the imaginations of the young women participants in the movement, and by 1969 it was being given symbolic lip service. At the 1969 Chicano Youth Liberation Conference organized by “Corky” Gonzales, for ex-
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Chicano Movement ample, women met as a group to explore their common concerns. But when their discussions were reported to the conference as a whole, the facilitator declared, “It was the consensus of the group that the Chicana woman does not need to be liberated.” Reflecting on her experiences at the Denver conference, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez reported, “I felt this as quite a blow. . . . Then I understood why the statement had been made and I realized that going along with the feelings of the men at the convention was probably the best thing to do at that time.” While some women at other conferences devoted to Chicana feminist issues during the early 1970s expressed a similar lack of interest over their liberation, more common was the growing realization that Chicanas were triply oppressed—by their race, their gender, and their class. Within the Chicano student movement women were being denied leadership roles and were invited to perform in only the most traditional stereotypic roles— cleaning up, making coffee, executing the orders men gave, and servicing their needs. If women did manage to assume leadership positions, as some of them did, they were ridiculed as unfeminine, sexually perverse, and promiscuous and all too often were taunted as lesbians. A 1970 incident at San Diego State University was particularly telling about the tenor of the times. There women had managed to assume leadership over the campus Chicano student group. When it was announced that “Corky” Gonzales was going to visit the campus, an intense debate ensued. “It was considered improper and embarrassing for a national leader to come on campus and see that the organization’s leadership was female,” recalled one of the campus leaders. “Consequently, the organization decided that only males would be the visible representatives for the occasion. The female chairperson willingly conceded.” By 1969 articles began appearing in the movement press highlighting the contradiction between racial and sexual oppression in the Chicano movement and drawing attention to the rampant sexism. “Machismo or revolution?” was an often articulated question. Chicano men initially regarded the feminist critique as an assault on their Mexican cultural past, on their power, and, by implication, on their virility. If Chicanos were going to triumph in their anticapitalist, anticolonial revolt, divisiveness could not be tolerated. Men responded to the assault by resorting to crass namecalling, labeling Chicana feminists as malinchistas, traitors who were influenced by ideas foreign to their community—namely, bourgeois feminist ideology. Be “Chicana Primero,” the men exhorted, asking the women to take pride in their cultural heritage and to reject women’s liberation. Chicanas responded rather
uniformly that they did not want to dominate the movement. They only sought full equality and participation for all. The increased mobilization of women in the Chicano movement shifted the political agenda to a broader set of issues. If the aim of the Chicano movement was to decolonize the mind, as the novelist Tomás Rivera once proposed, Chicanas were determined to decolonize the body. Male concerns over job discrimination, access to political power, entry into educational institutions, and community autonomy and self-determination increasingly appeared alongside female demands for birth control and against forced sterilization, for welfare rights, for prison rights for pintas (women prisoners), for protection against male violence, and, most important, for sexual pleasure both in marriage and outside it. “La Nueva Chicana,” the new woman, was determined to see sexism as a form of oppression equal to racism. Unlike Chicanos who took their sex/gender privileges for granted, Chicanas, as victims of those privileges, realized that an essential part of their identity as political subjects had to include an exploration of their sexuality. “Our sexuality has been hidden, subverted, distorted within the ‘sacred’ walls of the ‘familia’—be it myth or reality—and within the even more privatized walls of the bedrooms. . . . In the journey to the love of female self and each other we are ultimately forced to confront father, brother, and god (and mother as his agent),” wrote Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga. Subjects that formerly had been taboo began to be openly discussed in the 1970s. Incest, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and lesbianism became frequent themes at conferences and in movement newspapers, which by necessity focused naturally on generational relations. Assessing the impact of feminism on the Chicano movement, one can easily say that women’s concerns highlighted the complexity of the ethnic Mexican population in the United States. It was a population that largely shared a similar class location as poor and working class. Yet it was a population deeply stratified by race and color, by gender and sexual preferences, by intractable generational divisions, by region and locale, and, most important, by differing political attitudes toward assimilation and Americanization. The failure of the Chicano movement was due not only to the limited political vision of its militant activists, but also to extensive government repression and large segments of the ethnic Mexican population who believed deeply in the possibilities of the American dream. SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo. 1988. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row; Bar-
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Chicanos Por La Causa rera, Mario. 1988. Beyond Aztlan: Ethnic Autonomy in Comparative Perspective. New York: Praeger; “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.” www.panam.edu/orgs/MEChA/aztlan.html (accessed July 21, 2005); Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky.” 2001. Message to Aztlán. Houston: Arte Público Press; 1969. Gutiérrez, José Angel. 1998. The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1986. “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring): 79–101; López Tijerina, Reies. 2000. They Called Me “King Tiger”: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights. Houston: Arte Público Press; Márquez, Benjamin. 1993. LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization. Austin: University of Texas Press; Miller, Michael V. 1976. “Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and Others: Ethnic Self-Identification and Selected Social Attributes of Rural Texas Youth.” Rural Sociology 41:234–247; Moraga, Cherríe. 1983. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Boston: South End Press; Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press; Muñoz, Carlos. 1989. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso; Navarro, Armando. 1998. The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; ———. 2000. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 2000. Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights. Houston: Arte Público Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Trujillo, Carla. 1991. Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press; Vigil, Ernesto. 1999. The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ramón A. Gutiérrez
CHICANOS POR LA CAUSA (CPLC) (1969– ) In the 1960s young Latinos and Latinas from minority and mainstream groups in the United States vigorously called on established leadership to honor the democratic ideals that were purportedly core values in the country. In the nation’s history no other era embodies the rise of youthful self-conscious idealism. Such a heady mix was bound to inspire Mexican Americans in universities who in college-mall rap sessions or in campus hangouts excitedly discussed potential reforms to ameliorate the subordination of their people. Caught up in this historic moment, students at Arizona State University organized the Mexican American Student Organization (MASO) in 1968. The group mainly pressed the university to meet the educational needs of the Chicano community. In their very first confronta-
tion, MASO members occupied the administration building and forced the university to sever a contract with a Phoenix linen service that discriminated against Chicano workers. After making this commitment to their community, students Alfredo Gutiérrez, Arturo “Frank” Rosales, Rosie López, and others quickly took the movement into the Phoenix barrios. In 1969 the students joined with community activists like Joe “Eddie” López, Manuel Domínguez, Terry Cruz, and farmworker organizer Gustavo Gutiérrez and incorporated Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC), a strident civil rights and community development organization. Arizona labor leader and board member of the Southwest Council of La Raza Maclovio Barraza steered the fledgling organization toward the Ford Foundation. CPLC acquired a small seed grant from the foundation and hired Juan Alvarez, a farmworker organizer, as director. The ambitious, idealistic group of young militants proceeded to transform the Phoenix Chicano community. The group’s initial activities dealt with educational and political issues. For example, CPLC ran a slate for an inner-city school board election consisting of the Basque activist parish priest Frank Yoldi and other barrio residents. The CPLC slate lost, but the event provided the first electoral experience for many activists who today form the core of Chicano political leadership in Maricopa County, Arizona. Regarding education, CPLC organized walkouts at Phoenix Union High School to protest inadequate funding, the lack of relevant courses, and the failure of the school to deal with constant racial tension between Mexican American and black students. Alfredo Gutiérrez, cochairman of MASO, helped organize the walkouts and formed a local Brown Beret chapter. In 1970 the Ford Foundation provided the group with full funding, and Ronnie López became director. Under his leadership the organization’s militant edge gave way to a more accommodating approach in dealing with government officials and potential funders. CPLC’s direction became more programmatic. By 1974, in the midst of an economic recession, Ford reduced funding, but within three years CPLC received $2 million in federal funds. The organization could now focus on economic development, job training, and housing issues in a more structured fashion. Tommy Espinoza succeeded López, who became a special assistant to the governor of Arizona in 1978. Until Espinoza’s resignation in 1988, he guided CPLC into its contemporary profile. During his directorship the organization opened centers in Tucson and Yuma, Arizona. Under the new director, Peter García, Hispanic News selected the organization as the second-top Hispanic nonprofit in the country because of its “22 years of dedicated service to their community.” Today CPLC has
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Cigar Workers thirty offices in twenty-three Arizona cities. The organization estimates that 45,000 people annually receive CPLC services through youth counseling programs, affordable housing, formation of positive cultural identity, senior citizen housing and recreation, rehabilitation, domestic violence prevention, and, true to its original goal, economic development. Few other organizations that came out of the Chicano movement have survived, let alone reached the mammoth proportions of CPLC. See also Chicano Movement SOURCES: Chávez, John R. 1998. Eastside Landmark: A History of the East Los Angeles Community Union, 1968–1993. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Luckingham, Bradford. 1994. Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860– 1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Luey, Beth, and Noel J. Stowe, eds. 1987. Arizona at Seventy-five: The Next Twenty-five Years. Tempe: Arizona State University Public History Program and the Arizona Historical Society; Navarro, Armando. 2000. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press. F. Arturo Rosales
CIGAR WORKERS (1860S–1940S) The thick sweet smell of tobacco permeated the lives of tens of thousands of women in the late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century United States. In small Pennsylvania towns, among Bohemian and German immigrants in New York City, Rochester, Detroit, and Chicago, amid the fields and factories of the Carolinas and Puerto Rico, and in the ethnic enclaves of Tampa and Key West, Florida, women stripped the wide green leaves from the stem, bunched or chopped tobacco in preparation for rolling, and placed brand-name bands around each cigar. Some gained highly skilled positions as cigar rollers, but women only came to dominate cigar production in the 1930s and 1940s when automation diminished the skill, pay, and prestige accorded cigar workers. Nonetheless, for many Cuban and Puerto Rican women in the United States, work in cigar factories offered better pay and working conditions than most sex-typed jobs and provided entrée to powerful tabaqueros’ unions and to a wide range of other social and political movements. Rolling tobacco leaves for smoking was an ancient art in the Americas and was taught to European invaders and settlers by native inhabitants. By the early nineteenth century women in Spain had become closely identified with the cigar trade. They were hired to work in the royal factory of Seville beginning in
1812; images of beautiful Hispanic women graced many cigar labels; and Bizet’s opera Carmen fueled the imaginations of smokers, writers, and audiences. The mass production of cigars in the United States developed in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s as Bohemians, Germans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans migrated in large numbers. In northern cities the factory production of cigars was almost entirely a male affair in this period, although home production in tenement districts used the skills of thousands of Bohemian and smaller numbers of Cuban and Puerto Rican women. In the South, however, especially in the “Cigar Cities” of Key West and Tampa, Florida, immigrant women played critical roles in both factory and home-based production from the establishment of the industry. In southern Florida cigar production followed the model developed by Spanish officials and factory owners in nineteenth-century Cuba. Beginning in the early 1800s, men, including slaves, produced cigars in factories owned and managed by Spanish entrepreneurs. During the 1820s women and children, mainly residents of charity homes, were introduced into the labor force to cut costs, but men continued to dominate the industry. By the 1880s and 1890s Spanish, white Cuban, Creole, African and Afro-Cuban (slave and free), and Chinese immigrant men vied for the wide range of skilled and unskilled positions in the tobacco factories, while women, mainly African and AfroCuban, were relegated to the least prestigious job of stripping tobacco leaves from the stem. During these same decades Puerto Rican women were also entering male-dominated cigar factories, again working mainly as tobacco stemmers. When the wars for independence erupted in Spain’s Caribbean possessions in the late nineteenth century, they sparked a mass movement of Cuban cigar workers and factory owners to southern Florida and led to the development of the industry first in Key West and then in Tampa. The first wave of refugees fled to Key West during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), after an unsuccessful attempt by Cuban insurgents to overthrow their colonial rulers. The independence movement and Key West’s émigré community both included white and Afro-Cuban men and women drawn from across the class spectrum. Like Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe, most Cubans came with families and the bare minimum of necessities. This ensured that many Cuban women—those who were older and married, as well as those who were young, single, or widowed—would be forced to find work. The newly built cigar factories offered immediate employment along with higher and steadier wages than domestic service or other jobs open to women immigrants. Because the Cuban émigrés were a highly politicized group, workers organized more effectively
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Cigar Workers than did their native-born counterparts in the latenineteenth-century South. Moreover, because of the economic boost the cigar industry brought to Key West, white civic leaders initially ignored the interracial and mixed-sex character of the cigar labor force and the militant unions it established. By the mid-1880s, however, extensive labor organizing, a series of volatile strikes, and a fire that destroyed much of Key West’s commercial district drove factory owners to search for a new home. In 1886 Don Vicente Martínez Ybor constructed the first factory on the eastern edge of Tampa, and the first 200 cigar workers and their families arrived that spring. Other owners quickly followed suit, and within two years Ybor City was home to a dozen factories, several churches and mission stations, two Spanish-language newspapers, coffee shops, bakeries, a brass band, Cuban restaurants, Chinese laundries, and hundreds of cigar workers. The Cuban cigar workers brought their unions and mutual-aid societies, along with another tradition that had important implications for their education and political activism. The reader, el lector, had been introduced into cigar factories in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the mid-1800s. Because cigar making was a relatively quiet process—only the rustle of tobacco leaves and the click-click of the cutting blades disrupted the silence—readers were paid by the workers to provide entertainment and education. In the mornings they generally read stories from Spanish-language newspapers and political tracts that presented a range of socialist and anarcho-syndicalist perspectives. In the afternoon they read novels in serial form, often selecting those with socialist realist themes or working-class heroes. Although most readers were men, women stem-
mers in at least one Ybor City factory hired their own reader in the 1880s, and those who gained positions as bunchers and rollers would listen to el lector alongside male cigar makers. By the early 1890s the education provided by los lectores, combined with renewed claims for independence in the Caribbean and the expansion of the cigar industry in the United States, increased women’s participation in factory work and political organizing. The independence movement also brought a new flood of Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles to southern Florida and to New York City. The resurgence of the Cuban independence movement rested on the political vision of José Martí. A member of New York’s exile community and active in the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), Martí argued that only a truly democratic movement, one that engaged the loyalties of whites and AfroCubans, workers and the middle class, could succeed in overthrowing Spanish tyranny. Many of the more affluent leaders of the PRC sought independence from Spain, but had little interest in a more thoroughgoing revolution in social relations. To gain leverage for his vision, Martí traveled to the Cigar Cities of southern Florida in 1892 to seek support from the workers there. White and Afro-Cuban women and men turned out by the thousands to hear Martí’s speeches, applaud his vision, and honor his heroism. Young Cuban girls presented Martí with flowers and gifts from the assembled throng, and some, like ten-year-old Pennsylvania Herrera, made impassioned pleas for Cuban independence before large audiences of exiles. In Ybor City two of Martí’s most ardent supporters were Paulina Pedroso, a boardinghouse keeper, and her husband Ruperto, a cigar roller. Leaders of AfroCuban educational and mutual-aid organizations in
Tobacco stemmers, southern Florida, circa 1900. Courtesy of University of South Florida Library, Tampa.
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Cigar Workers Key West and Tampa, they helped assure Martí’s success. So, too, did Carolina Rodríguez, a white Cuban who had served as a courier between separated insurgent forces during the Ten Years’ War. Working in an Ybor City cigar factory in the 1890s, she joined Martí in his efforts to establish organizations in support of the revolution. Women’s revolutionary clubs flourished among Cuban exiles during the next several years, and Ybor City and Key West were soon home to more than a dozen. When the war against Spain recommenced in February 1895, Cuban women exiles played increasingly prominent roles. As factory workers, they, like the men, often contributed a day’s pay per week to the independence struggle. As community activists, women cigar workers joined the wives of factory owners and professionals in establishing revolutionary clubs and hosting picnics, dances, bazaars, and other events to raise funds for the PRC and assist widows, orphans, and wounded soldiers. Martí recognized the critical importance of these donations by calling Ybor City “the civilian camp of the revolution.” As the war against Spain widened to include Puerto Rico, exiles from that island settled in New York City. There they became part of a vibrant radical community that, like its counterparts in southern Florida, relied on the wages of cigar work to fuel its political agenda and social development. The United States entered the war against Spain in the spring of 1898, and the status of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants changed dramatically after the American victory. The U.S. government controlled the postwar settlement. Cuba became a protectorate of the United States and Puerto Rico a colony within it. Cubans who remained in southern Florida after the war retained their status as immigrants. Puerto Ricans became American citizens, although clearly secondclass citizens. Yet as long as cigars remained profitable and the industry dependent on Caribbean labor, Cuban and Puerto Rican workers could sustain their militant traditions despite the new political context. As the industry expanded in Puerto Rico and southern Florida, women increased their significance in the cigar labor force and in the social activism it spawned. In 1899, for instance, only 60 women were listed as “operators,” that is, workers, in tobacco factories in Puerto Rico. By 1910 the number rose to 3,204 and in 1920 to 8,473. In Tampa women’s employment also grew with the industry. Beginning with a dozen or so factories operating in the 1880s, Ybor City counted 129 by 1900. The overall workforce numbered more than 5,000 by the turn of the century and reached more than 12,000 by 1920. Ancillary trades—box factories, bakeries, laundries, and coffeehouses—provided further employment. During this period the population of Ybor
City included a growing number of Italians, who, along with Cuban and Spanish workers, were considered, and considered themselves, part of a larger Latin community. By 1910 women constituted some 20 percent of the Latin cigar labor force—1,800 of nearly 8,800 workers—and their numbers continued to grow during the next decade. Among Italians, married women were as likely to work for wages as single women; among Cubans, single women outnumbered married, but many women who left the factory in the 1910s and 1920s to raise families returned once their children were old enough to care for themselves. In addition, a significant number of women, especially Cuban women, stripped and bunched tobacco and rolled cigars in home-based shops known as chinchales. In both Puerto Rico and southern Florida women were welcomed into the unions, a position at odds with the traditions established by the Cigar Makers’ International Union and other U.S.-based labor organizations. Moreover, women’s participation was important not only because it engaged them in shop-floor issues, but also because it encouraged their unions to consider society-wide debates over gender equity. La Federación Libre de los Trabajadores (FLT), the massive anarcho-syndicalist union in Puerto Rico, which included large numbers of women cigar workers among its members, advocated women’s education, improved infant and maternal health care, and female suffrage. Indeed, in 1908 it became the first organization in Puerto Rico to demand women’s enfranchisement. The FLT also provided opportunities for a few women to serve as organizers, building bridges with women cigar workers in the United States and Cuba. The most famous was Luisa Capetillo, who not only mobilized workers in Puerto Rico but also wrote articles for a variety of progressive Spanish-language publications, authored books and essays on workers’ and women’s rights, and carried the FLT’s vision of social change to New York City, Ybor City, Key West, and Havana. During her sojourn in southern Florida in 1913– 1914, Capetillo must have felt right at home. She was hired as a reader by workers at an Ybor City factory, and a local printer published a volume of her essays. But more important than these personal triumphs was the culture she shared with the area’s Latin workers. Embracing a mutualist ethos and anarcho-syndicalist principles of organization, Cuban and Italian workers in Ybor City, West Tampa, and Key West organized food and clothing cooperatives, established day nurseries, and supported mutual-aid societies. These societies built substantial clubhouses that included cafés, theaters, ballrooms, lecture halls, and libraries, and they also managed health care programs. For a small monthly fee, they provided medical care, including
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Cinema Images, Contemporary midwives, as well as death and burial benefits. Several operated cemeteries for their members; two opened hospitals. In all, these organizations provided critical support for women and their families during personal and community crises, including strikes. Although first- and second-generation immigrants from across the class spectrum joined the mutual-aid societies, cigar workers formed a significant share of the membership. Whereas the unions brought together white Cuban, Afro-Cuban, and Italian working women and men on behalf of class issues, the mutual-aid societies brought together professionals, small shopkeepers, artisans, cigar workers, and housewives from the city’s various ethnic and racial groups. Within the ethnic clubs women generally organized separate comités de las damas (women’s committees) to raise funds, provide emergency relief, and improve medical facilities. The first was founded by members of la Unión Martí-Maceo, the Afro-Cuban club; women in el Centro Español, el Centro Asturiano, el Círculo Cubano, and l’Unione Italiana soon followed suit. Although men most often viewed the clubs as gathering places for food, drink, relaxation, and entertainment, women generally emphasized the material benefits they offered. Within their own committees, moreover, women honed leadership skills and gained increased authority. Cigar worker Dolores Patiño Río, who was active in el Centro Asturiano, recalled that in 1925 the women’s committee wanted to hold a dance to aid hurricane victims in Cuba. The men opposed the decision, but the women “had it anyway, and it was a success.” By the middle of the depression the unions were shattered and large numbers of workers were unemployed. However, women cigar workers in southern Florida, Puerto Rico, and Cuba maintained their commitment to collective action. They were especially active in donating money, ambulances, and other forms of material support to aid the Republicans and their allies in the Spanish civil war. In Ybor City women workers also carried on earlier political traditions by raising money for the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund, attending Highlander Folk School to learn organizing techniques, and protesting various forms of discrimination in the implementation of New Deal programs. For many Cuban and Puerto Rican women, in their homelands and in the United States, cigar work provided steady employment, relatively decent wages, and an introduction to a range of political and social issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in unions, women cigar workers also contributed to the Puerto Rican and Cuban independence movements, the establishment of mutual-aid societies, and the maintenance of Caribbean cultural traditions. As the hand-rolled cigar industry declined in the 1930s and 1940s, it was primarily Cuban and
Puerto Rican women who made the transition to machine work, thereby maintaining their economic role in the family and their political role in the larger community. See also Labor Unions; Tabaqueros’ Unions SOURCES: Azize, Yamila. 1985. La mujer en la lucha. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural; Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Patiño Río, Dolores. Interviews by Nancy A. Hewitt, September 4, 1985, and April 7, 1986, Special Collections, University of South Florida Library, Tampa, Florida; Stubbs, Jean. 1985. Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study of Cuban Labour History, 1860– 1958. Cambridge Latin American Studies 51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Valero-Lago, Ana. 1997. “ ‘No pasarán!’: The Spanish Civil War’s Impact on Tampa’s Latin Community, 1936–1939.” Tampa Bay History 19 (Fall–Winter): 5–35. Nancy A. Hewitt
CINEMA IMAGES, CONTEMPORARY Latinas have worked in the film industry since the early days of Hollywood. The first Latina leading ladies of the silent screen included actresses like Beatríz Michelin and Myrtle González. Images of Latinas in the early years of filmmaking were blurred by movie and social codes. Because the Latino population was small and the majority of Mexican descent, films predominantly related stories focusing on them. Films with Mexican characters before the 1920s commonly had titles like The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), Tony the Greaser (1911), Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914), and The Girl and the Greaser (1915). Movies depicted Mexicans as nonwhite villains, and sexual or romantic relationships between Anglos and Mexicans were taboo. In the 1920s Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez were the most significant Mexican actresses in Hollywood. Dolores Del Río portrayed European peasants in her early work; later she played sophisticated ingénues. The opposite occurred for Vélez, whose image evolved into the stereotypical Hollywood “Mexican Spitfire” and “Hot Tamale.” About this time Lupita Tovar’s career took another route. While she did not obtain as great a reputation as did Del Rio and Vélez, she appeared in numerous Hollywood Spanish-language films. She was cast as the lead in the Spanish version of Rupert Julian’s The Cat Creeps (1927). La voluntad del muerto did so well in Mexico that Universal cast her in the Spanish version of Dracula. In the 1930s Hollywood bombarded both the U.S. and Latin American markets with Latin-themed films like Down Argentine Way (1940) and Weekend in Havana (1941). Probably the most famous Latina to come
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Cinema Images, Contemporary out of this period was the Brazilian Carmen Miranda. Another well-known Latin actress of the 1940s was María Montez, who hailed from the Dominican Republic. Then there was Rita Hayworth, who made the transformation from being an ethnically identifiable Latina to an American “sex goddess.” Hayworth rarely acknowledged her ethnic roots, although she worked as her Spanish father’s dancing partner in Aguascalientes and Tijuana. The 1950s saw a few Latinas make it onto the screen, including Sarita Montiel and Linda Cristal, but the most memorable performance by a Latina of the 1950s was Katy Jurado’s appearance in High Noon (1952), for which she won a Golden Globe. One of the most significant films involving Latinas was released in 1954. Based on actual events, Salt of the Earth detailed the zinc strike of 1950–1952 in Grant County, New Mexico. Playing the lead was Rosaura Revueltas, a Mexican actress. Miners’ families lived in deplorable conditions that ultimately led to the strike. The miners were not successful until the women came to their aid. Not long after its release the film was labeled “communistic” in its message and banned. Originally from Puerto Rico, Rita Moreno signaled the appearance of a new crop of actresses. Awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Anita in West Side Story (1961), Moreno hoped for more serious roles. Instead, she did not work for seven years, rejecting conventional stereotypical roles. Awarded the Emmy, Tony, and Grammy for roles off the screen,
Rita Moreno received an Oscar for her role as Anita in West Side Story. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Moreno serves as an excellent example for aspiring Latinas in the film industry. Besides Moreno, Raquel Welch, the daughter of a Bolivian engineer, has carved out an enduring acting career. Welch’s breakthrough film was One Million Years B.C. (1966). Welch portrayed mostly vamps and vixens, but in 1974 she earned a Golden Globe Best Actress award for her role in The Three Musketeers (1973). In the 1970s and 1980s there were standout performances by such actresses as Rachel Ticotín in The Wanderer (1979) and Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), María Conchita Alonso in Moscow on the Hudson (1984), and Elizabeth Peña as the sultry maid in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). Sonia Braga appeared in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), and Moon over Parador (1988). Rosie Pérez debuted in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress in Fearless (1993). Latinas did better in the 1990s. While the movie industry still failed to reflect national demographics in casting Latinas, the types of roles offered some change. Latinas still contended with non-Latinas portraying them, an issue since the beginning of Hollywood films. Nonetheless, Latina and Latino actors began writing parts for themselves. These films presented the group as other than domestics and vamps and included groundbreaking films like Stand and Deliver (1988), Mi familia (1995), Lone Star (1996), Las luminarias (1999), and Girlfight (2000). Showtime’s Resurrection Blvd. has also given Latinas the opportunity to demonstrate their intelligence and abilities. Jennifer López, currently a top Hollywood box-office star, exemplifies an actress who has benefited from the changes. She played a vamp in U-Turn, a psychologist in The Cell, a wedding coordinator in The Wedding Planner, a police officer in The Money Train, Out of Sight, and Angel Eyes, and a Tejana singer in Selena. These roles do not always identify her as a Latina. The New York–born Puerto Rican has also engaged in a high-profile singing career. Rosana de Soto, Constance Marie, Lupe Ontiveros, Liz Torres, Jaime Sigler, and Evelina Fernández are Latina actresses who can be seen in big-budget films as well as small independent films and television. Salma Hayek has become a major star in recent years. A veteran of theatre and telenovelas in Mexico, she moved to California in the early 1990s and received her first break in Mi vida loca (1993). Desperado (1993), with Antonio Banderas, made her a celebrity. Hayek played the lead and coproduced the film Frida (2002) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress. A 2000 report conducted by the Tomás Rivera Policy
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Cisneros, Sandra Institute for the Screen Actors Guild found that casting directors retain stereotypical images and misconceptions regarding Latinos. Until casting directors and studio executives understand Latino/a ethnoracial and social diversity, Latinas will remain marginal in the industry. See also Media Stereotypes; Movie Stars SOURCES: Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1993. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Garcia Berumen, Frank Javier. 1995. The Chicano/Hispanic Image in American Film. New York: Vantage Press; Noriega, Chon, ed. 1992. Chicanos and Film: Essays on Chicano Representation and Resistance. New York: Garland Publishing; ———. 2000. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Rodríguez, Clara E., ed. 1997. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
and death of members and their families. Some San Antonio members of LULAC also belonged to this important local organization. In 1938 and 1939 the club sent delegates to the convention held by the Cruz Azul Mexicana, a women’s mutual-aid society. The group also helped raise funds for the Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana, a health clinic for the poor on the West Side of the city. Members of Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica met bimonthly on Sundays, but the organization disappeared during the early 1940s. The club represented civic activism by Mexican immigrant women and their enduring Mexican nationalist sentiment in an era in which Mexican Americanization, as exemplified by LULAC, was in full swing. SOURCES: Garcia, Richard A. 1991. Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1919–1941. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica.” In New Handbook of Texas, 4:680–682. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
CÍRCULO CULTURAL ISABEL LA CATÓLICA
CISNEROS, SANDRA (1954–
Originally known as Círculo Social Femenino Mexicano, the Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica was a civic, social, religious, and philanthropic organization in San Antonio, Texas, during the Great Depression. Founded in 1938, this association, composed of middle-class members, sought to uplift the Mexican American community and elevate the status of women of Mexican descent through morality and charity. The civic club helped needy families and promoted Mexican nationalist civic activities. Unlike the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which emphasized Americanization and assimilation, this civic group merged Mexican nationalism with ideas of uplift. Concerned with art and aesthetics, the group organized an exhibit of popular Mexican art at the Witte Museum in 1939, in an era when many U.S. museums ignored Mexican art. It also donated curtains and plants to the Biblioteca Mexicana, a Spanish-language library, where the group held its meetings. Members sponsored fiestas, distributed food and toys, and donated funds to the patriotic celebrations organized by the Mexican consul. Carolina Malpica Munguía, a prominent middleclass activist and the grandmother of the future mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, served as the first president of Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica, and legendary activist María L. de Hernández served as the first board member. Women members were married, usually Mexican citizens between the ages of twentyone and forty-six. This organization operated like a mutualista or mutual-aid society in that in addition to charitable and civic activities, it attended to sickness
“I’m a bell without a clapper. A woman with one foot in this world and one foot in that. A woman straddling both,” explains Chayo in Sandra Cisneros’s story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Like her character, Cisneros’s own experiences reflect a similar sense of fluidity. Transported back and forth between Chicago, where her mother was raised, and Mexico City, where her father’s family still lived, Cisneros grew up viewing life from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. These travels filled her with rich memories that later shaped her writing, but the family’s frequent moves and economic hardships also forced her to deal with feelings of displacement at a young age. For many years Cisneros longed for a permanent home, a dream that was only partially realized in 1966 when her parents succeeded in borrowing enough money for a down payment on a cramped, dilapidated bungalow on Chicago’s North Side. There Cisneros encountered a number of colorful individuals and realized the struggles she shared with many through the effects of poverty. In The House on Mango Street (1984) Cisneros draws on the characterization of several of these people and explores the particular issues that face young Latinas by telling the story through the eyes of a spunky adolescent named Esperanza. Throughout the book’s vignettes Esperanza’s coming-of-age tale is paired with the decisions she must make regarding her own aspirations and the culture’s expectations for women. As the only girl among six male siblings, Cisneros was exposed early on to the precarious position of being female within Latino culture. For example, while
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Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana he did it unintentionally, her father often forgot to include her when he would boast that he had “seven sons.” A mistranslation of the fact that he had seven children (hijos), her father’s linguistic error signaled to Cisneros the need for women to actively seek out their own place. As she comments, within a large family, “You had to be fast and you had to be funny—you had to be a storyteller.” Cisneros credits the opportunity to hone this interest to her mother’s atypical child rearing: “I’m the product of a fierce woman who was brave enough to raise her daughter in a nontraditional way, who fought for my right to be a person of letters. And she did that in a household where she could have certainly trained me to be a housewife, but, instead, she let me go and study during times when perhaps I should have been helping her out.” Cisneros also received encouragement from her father, who doted on her; however, she notes that he mostly saw her furthering her education as a means to find a husband. In 1976 Cisneros graduated from Loyola University and entered the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received an M.F.A. in 1978. It was during graduate school that Cisneros realized that she had more boundaries to traverse. While as an undergraduate she was influenced by such writers as Donald Justice, James Wright, and Mark Strand, she had difficulty developing her own voice. Initially, she entered the program as a poet and attempted to mimic the writing styles of her teachers and classmates. However, unhappy with the results and inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s memoirs, she began experimenting with traditional writing genres. During this time she also nurtured a friendship with Joy Harjo, a Native American and fellow classmate who wrote largely about her southwestern culture and shared Cisneros’s alienation from the workshop’s elitist environment. Motivated by Harjo, Cisneros began to write about her experiences as a Latina—a topic she realized was left out of most mainstream American literary discussions. The combination of these various creative forces ultimately led to The House on Mango Street, a work now in its sixth reprinting that has won the Before Columbus American Book Award and was performed as a play in Chicago at the Edgewater Theater in 1992. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) she continued her literary experimentation by writing a series of inner monologues in which characters describe their own borderland experiences. In addition, Cisneros has authored three poetry collections, Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994), and published a children’s book, Hairs: Pelitos (1994). Cisneros’s work is also widely anthologized, and she has contributed to various periodicals, including Americas Review, Imagine, Contact II, Glam-
our, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Texas Humanist, and Village Voice. Despite her success, critics remain divided regarding Cisneros’s style. Some find that her blend of various genres deviates too far from the standard sensibilities of American fiction. The House on Mango Street, in particular, is criticized for its supposedly simplistic use of children’s speech and themes. Others have also taken issue with her frequent depiction of male violence toward women, claiming that she paints an excessively negative portrayal of Latino culture. There are even those who believe that she is not sufficiently political, a charge Cisneros strongly disputes. Admitting that she is more likely to have to “tone back” her work, she argues that it is not her writing that is subtly political, but rather its approach, which falls outside of traditional protest literature. The disjuncture between these dissenting perspectives and the vast praise she has also garnered suggests that Cisneros’s early split consciousness has followed her into her career. As Cisneros herself comments, “As woman and writer . . . I’m always aware of being on the frontier. Even if I’m writing about Paris or Sarajevo, I’m still writing about it from this border position that I was raised in.” A crosser of many types of borders, Cisneros appears to keep readers most intrigued with her ability to straddle several perspectives at once. See also Literature SOURCES: Chicano Writers, Second Series, ed. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, 77–81. Detroit: Gale Group; Cisneros, Sandra. 1997. “Only Daughter.” In Máscaras, ed. Lucha Corpi, 119–123. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press; McCracken, Ellen. 1989. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: Community-Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, 62–71. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Maythee Rojas
CLÍNICA DE LA BENEFICENCIA MEXICANA During the Great Depression Mexican women established a health clinic for the poor, predominantly Mexican community on the West Side of San Antonio, Texas. Alicia and Ignacio Lozano of La Prensa newspaper, a statewide Spanish-language newspaper, and the Beneficencia Mexicana, a women’s club composed of Mexican immigrant women, joined forces to establish this clinic. Racially segregated and economically marginalized, the Mexican community of San Antonio reportedly had the worst health conditions in the city. In 1930 Ignacio E. Lozano, La Prensa’s editor, raised
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Collazo, Rosa Cortéz more than $27,000 to build this clinic. Numerous Mexican community organizations joined in to make this health clinic a reality. The Finck Cigar Factory Workers, Club Femenino Orquidia, and the Club de Jovenes Católicos donated funds, and grocer Matilde Elizondo purchased medical equipment. Alicia Lozano, Ignacio’s wife, headed Beneficencia Mexicana, a group that proved instrumental in launching and maintaining the clinic that bore its name. This motto of this middleclass women’s club was “charity, order, and efficiency,” and club members’ support of this clinic represented moral uplift in action. Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana was located at 623 South Saba in a Spanish colonial stone building. Clients paid 25 cents for a first visit. This public health clinic was run by a male board of trustees, probably doctors, as well as a board of directors made up entirely of women. Alicia Lozano presided over this board until 1938. That year a serious disagreement over the clinic’s management emerged that resulted in a court settlement. Women took over the entire management. The clinic moved to 207 San Fernando Street during the 1940s, and by 1949 it became known as a prenatal clinic. Unlike the Freeman Clinic and Newark Maternity Hospital in El Paso, in which services to poor Mexican immigrants were provided by Methodist missionaries and largely European American volunteers, Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana represented Latinas organizing for public health in their own community and in an era before government aid was common. SOURCES: Garcia, Richard A. 1991. Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1919–1941. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Clinica de la Beneficencia Mexicana.” In New Handbook of Texas, 2:162–163. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; Woods, Frances Jerome. 1949. “Mexican Ethnic Leadership in San Antonio, Texas.” Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America. Rpt. as Catholic University of America Studies in Sociology 31. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Cynthia E. Orozco
COLLAZO, ROSA CORTÉZ (1904–1988) Puerto Rican patriot Rosa Cortéz Collazo was the daughter of Ramón Cortéz, a one-time merchant marine and native of Ponce, and Juana E. Fernández, a seamstress and sometimes a tobacco worker, a native of Vieques. Rosa was born in Mayagüez, but spent her adolescent years with her father’s family in Ponce after her parents divorced. She graduated from high school in Ponce in 1923 and shortly thereafter completed a six-week nurse’s aide program. Her career in nursing was cut short when she had to deal with her first corpse, a suicide victim. Without work or job
prospects, she moved to New York City in mid-1925, where her father had settled two years earlier. She found a job in a hat factory earning eight dollars a week. These wages enabled her to take a room in her godmother’s cold-water flat at Ninety-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue for two dollars a week and to send another two dollars weekly to her mother in Mayagüez. When jobs disappeared during the depression years, she survived with the help of the Salvation Army, which provided food and inexpensive clothing to the poor of the city. During this period of economic stress she became politically active for the first time. In 1934 she joined the Club Caborrojeño, a Puerto Rican organization in the city that organized protests against landlords and employers who discriminated against Puerto Ricans. Two years later she joined the Club Obrero Español, a militant workers’ group that was attempting to unionize the employees where she worked at the Majestic Specialties Company. Participation in the struggles supported by these two clubs, coupled with news of the 1937 Ponce massacre in which 19 Nationalists were killed and more than 100 were wounded, shaped her political vision and led her to join the Nationalist Party cell in New York and to become active in the Nationalist movement to free Puerto Rico from the United States. During the 1930s she married Justo Mercado, with whom she had two daughters, Iris and Lydia. The marriage to Mercado, however, ended in divorce a few years later, and she brought her mother to New York City to help care for the children. In 1940 she married Oscar Collazo, one of the two Nationalists who on November 1, 1950, attacked Blair House in an attempt to kill President Harry Truman. The attack resulted in the deaths of Oscar’s compatriot Griselio Torresola and of White House guard Leslie Coffelt. Oscar, captured while wounded, was tried and sentenced to death. Following Oscar’s capture, Rosa was arrested on charges of collaboration to depose the government of the United States by violent means. When she could not make bail of $50,000, she was sent to the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan. On December 24 her lawyer, Abraham Unger, had her released after the charges against her were dropped for lack of evidence. Once released, she joined a campaign organized by friends of Oscar to demand that his death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Within months the campaign produced 50,000 signatures and hundreds of letters, many of them from top world figures, asking President Truman to spare Oscar Collazo’s life. In July 1952 President Truman commuted Oscar’s death sentence to life in prison. Rosa remained active with the Nationalist party and in 1954 was again arrested when four Nationalists
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Colón, Miriam
Puerto Rican nationalists Rosa and Iris Collazo seated in the center. Courtesy of the Ruth M. Reynolds Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
from New York launched an attack against the House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. She was again taken to the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan and charged with conspiring with the attackers to overthrow the government of the United States by force. This time she was convicted and sentenced to serve six years in the Federal Correctional Institution for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. She was joined there by Dolores (Lolita) Lebrón, one of four Nationalists convicted of the attack against the U.S. Congress. Except for the general complaint that life in prison was hard, and that she and Lolita found solace in the prison’s chapel, she offered very little information about her time in prison. Released from prison in 1960, she visited her mother in Puerto Rico and Oscar in Leavenworth, Kansas, before returning to her apartment in the Bronx and to the Nationalist Party. Her prison term and her connection to Oscar Collazo made her a minor celebrity among some Latin American revolutionaries. She was quite proud of the fact that she had met Ernesto (Ché) Guevara when he visited the United Nations in the 1960s. In 1968, after more than forty years in New York City, she decided that it was time to return to Puerto Rico. In poor health and tired of the declining quality of life in the Bronx, where she was assaulted at knifepoint by two young drug addicts, she took her grandson Carlos Turner (Lydia’s son) and moved to her mother’s house in Mayagüez until Lydia arrived a year later. Together they purchased a house in Levittown, a suburb of San Juan. Lydia found a job as an art teacher, and Rosa divided her time between caring for her
grandson and collaborating with the independence movement in Puerto Rico. In 1977 Rosa became involved in a campaign that originated in Puerto Rico to free the Nationalists being held in U.S. prisons. Two years later, in September, President Jimmy Carter pardoned them, and Rosa flew to Kansas City to greet Oscar, separated from her for twenty-nine years. She accompanied him through many days of celebration in Chicago and New York. She looked forward to a life with Oscar in Puerto Rico, but the long separation and the pressures placed on Oscar by his newfound status as a hero of the independence movement dissolved the ties between the couple. She remained by Lydia’s side until her death in May 1988. Oscar survived her by another six years. See also Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners SOURCES: Collazo, Rosa. 1993. Memorias de Rosa Collazo. Compiled by Lydia Collazo Cortéz. San Juan: Gráfico; New York Times. 1950. “Assassin’s Kin and Friends Are Rounded Up in Bronx.” November 2, 1, 18; ———. 1950. “Assassin’s Boasts Trapped Suspects.” November 10, 24; ———. 1954. “91 Puerto Ricans Rounded Up Here.” March 9, 1, 7, 21; ———. 1954. “Anti-U.S. Plot Is Laid to 17 Puerto Ricans.” May 27, 1, 14; ———. 1954. “Puerto Ricans in Court.” June 2, 26; ———. 1954. “13 Puerto Ricans Get 6-Year Terms.” October 27, 12. Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim
COLÓN, MIRIAM (1936–
)
Actress Miriam Colón is without a doubt one of the best-known Puerto Rican actresses in America. In an industry known for its quick turnover of talent, her enviably long and distinguished career has earned her the unofficial title of “la Gran Dama” of the theater.
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Colón, Miriam Colón was born on August 20, 1936, in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Her parents, Josefa Quiles and Teodoro Colón, divorced when she was very young, eventually remarried, and started new families. Throughout her early life Colón shuffled between her parents and an array of five half siblings. Her dramatic career began while she was attending junior high school in Old San Juan. She was cast in the lead role in a school production of La azotea (The Roof), a play by Alvarez Quintero, directed by Marcus Colón. This first experience ignited her love for the theater. Impressed by her performance and potential, Marcus introduced Miriam to Leopoldo Santiago, head of the Department of Drama at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). Santiago allowed Miriam to observe and participate in theatrical training classes at UPR even though she was not a student at the school or affiliated with the department in any way. For years, while she was attending high school, she sat in on evening classes at the university. Although she did not gain academic credit for her involvement, the practice she received helped her develop the commitment and presence necessary to succeed on the stage. She was eventually placed in the university’s traveling theater, an experience that proved pivotal in later years. This early exposure to high-level training left an indelible mark on young Colón that set her on a course for eventual stardom. After completing high school she officially entered the theater program at UPR to continue her theatrical studies and hone her talents. Hers was a unique situation. She had already had years of theatrical training and experience at the university and could not be expected to register in basic acting classes. In recognition of her level of achievement and talent, a special scholarship was established for Colón that allowed her to come to the United States and continue her training in New York. She studied for two years at the Dramatic Workshop and Technical Institute on Broadway under the direction of Erwin Piscator. Afterward she auditioned for and was accepted into the Actors’ Studio, where she studied for several more years. A role in the Broadway production of Summer House was the first of several in which she was recognized for her talent. In 1956 she moved to Hollywood to reprise her OffBroadway role in Me, Candido. During her time in California she had the opportunity to act in major shows and films, including two with Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks and The Appaloosa. After seven years on the West Coast she returned to New York City, where she met her first husband, George P. Edgar, a securities analyst, whom she married in 1966. Since the early 1950s Colón has performed countless roles in films, television, and theater that have garnered her national and international acclaim. Among
Actor Miriam Colón, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
these are Almost a Woman (2002), All the Pretty Horses (2000), The Blue Diner (2000), Lone Star (1996), A Life of Sin (1992), The Lightning Incident (1991), The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972), The Outsider (1961), and One-Eyed Jacks (1961). She has received honorary doctorates from Montclair State College, St. Peter’s College, Marymount Manhattan College, and Rutgers University and the Presidential Medal from Brooklyn College, New York. Of all the accomplishments for which Colón can take credit, the one that she is most proud of is founding the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT), formally incorporated in 1967 as a nonprofit organization. Its original intention was to take the theater to the streets and bring it to poor neighborhoods. It has grown to include acting classes in both English and Spanish, signing body movement, improvisations, and a playwrights’ unit. Her inspiration for PRTT was the early training she received in the University of Puerto Rico’s Traveling Theater. Not only has PRTT played an important part in Colón’s professional life, it has also played an equally important role in her personal life. It was at an audition for a PRTT production of The Oxcart that she met Dr. Fred Valle, a plastic surgeon who was auditioning for a part in the play. They eventually married and have made a home in New York. Today Colón is still at the helm of PRTT as its creative director and driving force, providing a protected and nurturing environment for the development of future Latino artists.
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Colón, Rufa Concepción Fernández See also Theater SOURCES: Latina. 1998. “La Gran Dama del Teatro.” June. http://www.latina.com/new/magazine/books/98/story2.ht ml (accessed July 26, 2002); Newlon, Clarke. 1975. Famous Puerto Ricans. New York: Dodd, Mead; TVTome.com. n.d. “Miriam Colón Biographical Information.” http://www.tv tome.com/tvtome/servlet/PersonDetail/personid-8710 (accessed November 2, 2003).
Georgina García
COLÓN, RUFA CONCEPCIÓN FERNÁNDEZ “CONCHA” (1903–1958) Rufa Concepción Fernández, known to her family and friends as Concha, was born in 1903 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her parents were José Fernández and Guadalupe Bernat. According to her steamship cabin ticket, Concha arrived in New York City on January 29, 1925. On December 31 of that year she wed her fiancé, Jesús Colón. Concha Colón lived in Brooklyn with her husband for thirty-two years and died on June 25, 1958, of “natural causes.” Much of what is known about Concha Colón is found in the Jesús Colón Collection housed in the archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York City. The early letters written between Concha and Jesús Colón reflect the struggles of migration and acculturation and the difficulties in maintaining a long-distance relationship. They illustrate Concha Colón’s preparedness for the vicissitudes of daily life in the city. In these letters her fiancé encouraged her to complete her education. In and of itself, a diploma meant little to him; her kindness and character were what he valued. However, he told her that education determined the quality of employment in the city and, therefore, the quality of her life. Concha completed her high school education in Puerto Rico and later listed her occupation as “clerk.” She became politically active alongside her husband. As his secretary, Concha assisted in the founding of various community and grassroots organizations in the fledgling New York Puerto Rican barrio. Through her letters and activism Concha Colón became a link between the home culture of Puerto Rico and the host culture of New York, especially Brooklyn. For Jésus Colón, Concha was a conduit of information, the anchor for his cultural values, family news, and local home events. She eased the struggles of those seeking jobs and a better life in the city during the early decades. Later her kindness and generosity were documented and eulogized by a community that saw Jesús and Concha Colón as community leaders and looked to them for direction and guidance. Jesús Colón wrote an essay titled “My Wife Doesn’t Work” (translated from “Mi mujer no trabaja”) for a
workers’ newsletter titled Oye, Boricua, but it was not published until 1993 in The Way It Was and Other Writings. In this satirical essay Jesús Colón wrote that when men boast, “My wife doesn’t work,” what they really mean is “I don’t want my wife to work outside the home because other women at the office or the factory can spoil her. (These men always emphasize the term mi mujer as if she was a possession.).” Colón wrote that when men get home from work, a few sweet terms of endearment get them their dinner, a can of cold beer, and even their slippers, while women’s work was unending, tireless, and unpaid. He added that someday women would earn their own daily allowance and be part of the working class. By all known accounts, Jesús Colón made sure that his wife, Concha, was his equal partner, and together they helped to raise political consciousness on this and many other issues concerning El Barrio. The world of the Puerto Rican migrant from the 1920s through the 1950s was, in general, characterized by meager wages, inadequate health care, substandard housing conditions, marginal education, and poor sanitation conditions. Yet, at the same time, it was a period of increasing growth in the population of Puerto Ricans seeking better jobs and opportunities. Concha Colón stood alongside her husband and helped develop community leadership through their many organizations and campaigns for unionization. She became the secretary of la Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana, which fostered mutual aid in the collective struggle and solidarity with all Hispanics in New York City. Much like her husband, she
Community organizer Rufa Concepción Fernández “Concha” Colón, 1925. Courtesy of the Jesús Colón Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional believed in the “people’s capacity to achieve revolutionary change.” Concha Colón left no wills or archival papers, but the letters, pictures, poems, and articles she felt important enough to preserve reflect her politics, her concern for her community, and her position as partner and confidante of Jesús Colón. Her daily life and routine tasks were in part contributions to the growth and acculturation of the New York Puerto Rican community. SOURCES: Colón, Jesús. 1993. The Way It Was and Other Writings. Edited by Edna Acosta-Belén and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. Houston: Arte Público Press; ———. Jesús Colón Collection, Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library and Archives, Hunter College, CUNY; Matos Rodríguez, Félix, and Linda C. Delgado, eds. 1998. “Rufa Concepción Fernández: The Role of Gender in the Migration Process.” In Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Linda C. Delgado
COMISIÓN FEMENIL MEXICANA NACIONAL (CFMN) (1970– ) In 1970 women at the Mexican American National Issues Conference in Sacramento, California, convened a workshop. Under the leadership of Francisca Flores and Simmie Romero, both longtime activists in the Mexican American community of Los Angeles, and in response to the male domination of Chicano politics and the noninclusion and racism in the feminist movement, approximately forty women at the workshop founded one of the first Chicana feminist organizations in the nation, the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (National Mexican Women’s Commission). They identified their mission as leadership, dissemination of information, problem solving for Chicanas/Mexicanas, and networking with other women’s organizations and movements. The Comisión provided Chicanas with opportunities for leadership and mentoring. Since Comisión members varied in age from their early twenties through their late sixties, a de facto mentorship program emerged as the older women, many of whom had engaged in political activism during the 1940s and before, guided the younger women in the realms of political strategy and leadership. In 1972 the Comisión Femenil established the Chicana Service Action Center (CSAC), which still operates today. As part of the Comisión Femenil’s vision of economic empowerment for Mexican American women, the Chicana Service Action Center, with startup funds from the U.S. Department of Labor, began to provide job training for women with low incomes and lack of skills. Through strong networking by the founders of the Chicana Service Action Center, the pro-
gram pulled together resources for training women that included the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services, Southern California Edison, and the White House. During the 1970s the Comisión Femenil also opened a battered women’s shelter and two bilingual and bicultural child-care centers (centros de niños), organized a national Chicana conference in Goleta, California, attended the United Nations–sponsored International Women’s Year Tribune in Mexico City in 1975, helped formulate both the Hispanic women’s plank and the minority women’s plank for the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977, participated in the 1975 lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan (a struggle waged to end forced sterilization of Latinas at the University of Southern California–Los Angeles County Medical Center), and established more than twenty chapters nationwide. In 1978 members of the Comisión Femenil attended the National Equal Rights Amendment March in Washington, D.C., and in 1980 several members were present at the United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1982, continuing its community programs, the Comisión Femenil established Casa Victoria, a treatment center for adolescent girls. The Comisión steered a course of engagement with the Chicana community that ventured beyond political rhetoric and produced tangible representations of its vision for Chicanas. Because of its explicit Chicana orientation, its successful community programs, and its establishment of a viable Chicana leadership, the Comisión stands as one of the most important Chicana organizations of the twentieth century. Within the contexts of Chicana/o and women’s history, the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional provides an alternative framework for understanding women’s activism because it reveals a link to pre–Chicano movement politics. Through its physical, emotional, and political community building, the Comisión Femenil went beyond consciousness-raising to provide concrete solutions to the problems many Chicanas faced in labor and political leadership. The Comisión did not arise out of a vacuum. Without the experiences of its founders in political organizing for more than three decades, which entailed originating organizations, networking, building alliances, running electoral campaigns, registering voters, and providing the so-called organizational backbone, the Comisión Femenil itself would never have been founded. Although the political vision, goals, strategies, and structure of the Comisión Femenil resonate with past associations, the organization of the group and its immediate predecessor, the League of Mexican American Women, stands within the context of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The previous
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Communist Party generation, dubbed the “Mexican-American Generation” by historian Mario T. García, was unified under the shared experiences of living through the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war, a political ideology based on a profound and sometimes patriotic belief in democracy, and a hope for social reform. The Comisión is a prime example of what historian Vicki L. Ruiz has identified as one of the foundations of Chicana feminisms: leadership that empowers others. The Comisión Femenil’s founders took to heart ideas about inclusion and self-determination and focused on Mexican American women. By building on the activism of women in the previous generation and effectively negotiating state, local, and national politics to build concrete and lasting institutions serving Latinas, the Comisión Femenil became a viable and powerful organization. See also Chicano Movement; Feminism SOURCES: Chávez, Marisela R. 2004. “Despierten Hermanas y Hermanos: Women, the Chicano Movement, and Chicana Feminisms in California, 1966–1978.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; García, Alma M. 1989. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980.” Gender and Society 3:217–238; García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven: Yale University Press; “History of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana, Nacional, Inc.” Comisión Femenil Mexicana National Archives, California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, University of California, Santa Barbara. http://cemaweb.library.ucsb.edu/ cfmn_history.html (accessed February 17, 2004); Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press. Marisela R. Chávez
COMMUNIST PARTY The complex relations of Latinas and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) are obscured in historical accounts by red-baiting, blacklisting, fear, and historical amnesia. Yet Juan Gómez Quiñones estimates that “perhaps over five hundred” Mexicans belonged to the Communist Party. Many more worked with and supported Communist and progressive organizing that, as many said, “helped the working people.” Latinos were attracted to the CPUSA, founded in 1919, because the group organized the unemployed, supported strikers, and fought for the civil rights of people of color. In short, the CPUSA addressed issues that concerned most working-class Latinos. Abysmal working conditions, racism, political disenfranchisement, discrimination, violence, and segregation also contributed to making Latinos as a group open to working with the CPUSA. Mexicans involved in labor and other struggles in Mexico and across the Southwest had been exposed
to left-wing ideology and harbored little of the staunch anti-Communism of the United States. Some Mexicans had participated in or were affected by the binational and multiracial alliance of the anarchosyndicalist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW and PLM, which organized together across Mexico and the Southwest, provided a model for later cooperation between Mexicans and Euro-American on the left. Mexicans had also been affected by the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. The CPUSA hierarchy, the Comintern, and the Mexican Communist Party, however, did not envision Mexicans in the United States as part of their collective or individual strategies. The CPUSA as a whole ignored Mexicans as a group. The CPUSA seemed oblivious to Mexican organizing, sent non-Spanishspeaking organizers to Mexican areas, at times refused to aid Mexican leftists facing legal action, and shut down its Spanish-language newspaper in 1938. Yet a number of CPUSA organizers, such as Dorothy Ray Healey, Stanley Hancock, and Pat Chambers, worked closely with Mexican leftists in struggles across the United States. Mexican leftists joined the CPUSA and formed Spanish-speaking CP cells and branches of the Young Communist League (YCL). They organized in their own communities and worked with various unions and movements. Communists in the border regions had frequent contact with their counterparts in northern Mexico. Although Mexican Communists are usually obscured in historical accounts, they were critical to the CPUSA’s successes in strikes and organizing, especially in the Southwest. Mexican leftists sought out support from CP allies and sympathizers in strikes, and they formulated strategy and acted as conduits between Euro-American organizers and workers. Texas-born Emma Tenayuca became one of the best-known Latinas in the CPUSA. As a teenager, she supported striking cigar and garment workers in San Antonio, took on the city’s political machine, and in 1935 became secretary of the West Side Unemployed Council. She joined the Workers’ Alliance in 1936 and was appointed to the organization’s National Executive Committee the same year. In 1937 she became a member of the Communist Party. Tenayuca is best known for her leading role in the 1938 strike by 10,000 pecan shellers in San Antonio. She and Homer Brooks, her husband and secretary of the Communist Party in Texas, coauthored the only CP tract on the Nationalist question as it concerned Mexicans. Although she left the Communist Party after the Hitler-Stalin pact, she remained a socialist. She said, “I don’t think that women or any of the minorities will ever be completely and totally free until you have socialism.” Other
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Communities Organized for Public Service women, such as Manuel Solis-Sager of San Antonio, also worked closely with the CPUSA. Guatemalan-born Luisa Moreno worked as an organizer with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) and was principal organizer of el Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples). A year before the organization was established in 1939, she traveled around the country, contacting labor unions and local mutualistas and forming pro-Congreso clubs, which became the base of el Congreso. At the founding convention Mexicans, who represented three-fourths of those present, were joined by Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Spaniards, and other Latin Americans from around the country. The Congreso stressed the unity of all Spanish speakers in the United States, supported labor organizing, defended immigrant workers, and backed Republican Spain. The Congreso also supported progressive New Deal politics against mounting criticism and advocated an end to discrimination in education, employment, and housing. Latinas were a crucial part of the progressive Congreso. Josefina Fierro de Bright helped Moreno organize the Congreso’s meeting and became its first executive secretary. Fierro de Bright was the daughter of an anarchist mother, Josefina Arancibia, who had belonged to the Partido Liberal Mexicano. Fiarro had learned organizing while traveling around to labor camps with her mother as they cooked food for campesinos and explained to them their rights as workers. Women were a priority for the Congreso, which formed a women’s committee and stipulated that women were required to be represented on the executive committee. Approximately 30 percent of the Congreso’s membership was women. The degree to which the Communist Party was involved in el Congreso remains debated among historians. Juan GómezQuiñones and Mario García squarely set the organization within the popular-front strategy of the CP, while George Sánchez downplays the party’s influence in this first civil rights assembly among Latinos, but certainly two of its principal organizers, Fierro de Bright and Moreno, had been party members. Latinas were also an integral part of the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), founded in 1949. ANMA was formed by Mexican members of progressive unions, in particular the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union. ANMA, recognizing the value of women, focused on organizing around families. Women were also prominent within the organization. Ramón Welch, a former local leader in el Congreso and member of the CPUSA, was ANMA’s publicity director. Isabel Gonzáles served as the vice president, Virginia X. Ruiz was the first secretary general, and Florencia
Luna was the first secretary-treasurer. Other women were also active, such as Grace Montañez, Mary Jasso, Amelia Camacho, Virginia Montoya, Carmen Contreras, and Dolores Heredia. ANMA faced an uphill battle as a fledgling civil rights organization with CP members in the cold war era. Again, historians have debated the extent of the direct influence of the Communist Party in ANMA. The relationship between Latinas and the CPUSA remains obscure, but further research will eventually demonstrate the importance of those who supported progressive community and labor organizing and worked in sympathy with the Communist Party. SOURCES: García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. 1994. Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Tenayuca, Emma. 1987. Oral history interview by Jerry Poyo, February 21. http://www.texan cultures.utsa.edu/memories/htms/Tenayuca_transcript (accessed August 10, 2003); Vargas, Zaragosa. 1997. “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement during the Great Depression.” Pacific Historical Review 66 no. 4: 553–580. Devra A. Weber
COMMUNITIES ORGANIZED FOR PUBLIC SERVICE (COPS) (1974– ) For more than thirty years Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), a grassroots organization in San Antonio, Texas, has fundamentally altered the political and physical landscape of the tenth-largest city in the United States. Based on the principles of legendary organizer Saul Alinsky, COPS reflects not only the hopes and dreams of Latinos and African Americans who live in West Side and South Side neighborhoods but also represents their substantial political empowerment. In 1973, with the support of local Roman Catholic parishes, especially parish women, Ernie Cortés Jr. began to organize neighbor by neighbor in San Antonio’s West Side. This grassroots approach drives the infrastructure of COPS, with leadership emerging from these local networks. As in Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), women’s voluntary parish work now became channeled to civic improvement, and indeed, Tejanas have often been elected president of the organization. In 1974 COPS called a public meeting with a city manager at the local high school to address issues of drainage problems and dirt roads in West Side neighborhoods. According to the former mayor of San Antonio and Clinton cabinet member Henry Cisneros, the
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Community Service Organization area was so poor that the Peace Corps trained new recruits there. More than 500 people attended the meeting, and the city manager seemed at a loss in the face of both the numbers of concerned citizens and the thorough research conducted by COPS members. Through the use of demonstrations, political mobilization, research, and negotiation, COPS has significantly improved the material conditions of West Side and South Side neighborhoods. Focusing on municipal issues and boards, members of the twenty-six chapters of COPS ensure that developers, planners, school administrators, city officials, and North Side politicians do not ride roughshod over their communities. They have also been active in local utility and environmental issues and opposed the funneling of more than $1 million of federal urban renewal funds into a suburban country club. COPS also engages in voter registration drives, and while it is committed to nonpartisanship, its members closely monitor the positions taken by local politicians. Tejanas have played key roles during the organization’s three decades. According to former COPS president Beatrice Cortez, “Women have community ties. We knew that to make things happen in the community, you have to talk to people. It was a matter of tapping our networks.” While one political scientist considered COPS’s reliance on “housewives” as an inherent weakness of the organization, other scholars have contextualized women’s leadership in COPS as part of a long history of women’s community organizing in the United States and more particularly as representing a strong tradition of Latina grassroots political action. For its local accomplishments, COPS was recognized in 1995 by a United Nations panel as one of the fifty winners of the We the Peoples: Community Awards, one of nine U.S.-based organizations so honored. On the COPS page linked to the award’s website, its mission is stated frankly and clearly: “COPS is committed to neighbourhood and family values, democratic participation, leadership development, and public accountability of local and state officials.” Unlike other community-based organizations in which leverage seems to rise and ebb, COPS continues to be a respected grassroots confederation with considerable municipal power. As a model for community empowerment, COPS has brought more than $750 million for affordable housing, public works improvements, recreation, and education. Members study the issues, attend city council meetings, write grants, and organize voters around municipal issues. In 2002 the city council considered the development of PGA Village, an almost 3,000-acre project with significant environmental impact and with the creation of a special taxing district where the developers would “collect and
retain all of the property, sales, and hotel-motel taxes for the next fifteen years.” Although council member Julián Castro (the son of Chicano movement activist Rosie Castro) had led an impassioned dissent against the project, the city council approved the development project with only two objections. COPS swung into action, collecting more than 68,000 signatures to put the approval of PGA Village to the voters as a citywide referendum. According to journalist Cecilia Ballí, the developers withdrew the project “and have entered negotiations on a compromise.” In addition to urban renewal, land-use, and environmental issues, COPS is also fundamentally committed to educational initiatives. Members were largely responsible for the passage of a major bond issue for the funding of libraries and literacy centers and lobbied successfully for a community college on San Antonio’s West Side. In partnership with a local business confederation, the Metro Alliance, COPS has initiated a program to provide jobs or college scholarships to highschool students who both maintain good grades and have an almost perfect attendance record. The organization is also concerned with affordable health care and community policing initiatives. Local Catholic parishes continue to be the backbone of the organization, and priests and nuns, such as Sister Consuelo Tovar, have participated fully in the organization. While it is an overstatement to assert that slums no longer exist in San Antonio, COPS has dramatically reconfigured West Side and South Side neighborhoods. As political scientist Joseph Sekul stated, “COPS has taken giant steps toward raising the quality of life in older neighborhoods, some of which may now become places where people can stay if they choose, rather than leave because they must.” Ernie Cortés Jr., the founding organizer, perhaps best summed up its impact on the political education of San Antonio’s Tejano and African American population: “COPS is like a university where people come to learn about public policy, public discourse, and public life.” SOURCES: Ballí, Cecilia. 2002. “Twin Peaks.” Texas Monthly, October 1989; Communities Organized for Public Service, USA. http://www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/desc/ d19.htm (accessed October 6, 2004); Evans, Sara. Born for Liberty: History of Women in America. New York: Free Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
COMMUNITY SERVICE ORGANIZATION (CSO) (1947–1995) Documentation has begun to reveal the involvement of Latinas in various types of labor and political move-
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Community Service Organization ments. Biographies of women such as Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Moreno, Lucia González Parsons, and Dolores Huerta now exist. However, a place where the Latina presence is often less well documented is in grassroots civic and mutual-aid societies. Mutual-aid societies took root in the history of Mexicans in the Southwest from the earliest settlements of the 1600s. They evolved for a variety of reasons. Most important was the building of community, group protection, and self-benefit. In these societies the role of women is often unrecorded. In the Community Service Organization (CSO) in Los Angeles, numerous men were associated with the leadership of the group, but the role of women was also important. Throughout the life of the organization various women emerged in leadership positions as directors of programs, administrators, and program developers. Research on the founding of the Community Service Organization in 1947 has yielded valuable information. Of the thirty individuals listed as founding members, thirteen were women. Life-history interviews document the lives and motivating factors of ten of the women, and one interview focused on the daughter of an original female founder. The CSO earned its place in Los Angeles Mexican American history because it helped elect Edward Roybal, who won the city council seat for the Ninth District in 1949. He was the first Mexican American to hold such a position in seventy-five years. The CSO undertook an unprecedented voter registration and citizenship drive. The voter registration drive proved to be one of the CSO’s most successful projects. In the first three months of the drive the number of registered Mexican Americans in the Ninth Council District increased by 15,000, and seventeen new precincts were created in the Belvedere area alone. It was primarily in membership and voter registration drives that CSO women took the lead. They organized citizenship classes and produced bilingual materials. Opening their homes for meetings (the CSO did not have an office in its beginning days), Lupe Morales, Lucy Rios, Lucille Roybal, María Durán, and other women invited family and neighbors and introduced them to CSO concepts and goals. Meetings were held all over Boyle Heights, in East Los Angeles, and in county areas like Watts, El Monte, Lincoln Heights, and the San Fernando Valley. In two years the CSO developed from a thirty-member core group into a 3,000member civic action group dedicated to “helping people help themselves.” The CSO women were in the vanguard of this movement. Interviews with Marian Graff, Ursula Gutiérrez, Estelle Guzmán, Carmen Méndez, Margarita Durán Méndez, Lupe Morales, Lucy Rios, Lucille Roybal, Mary
Sparkhul, and Henrietta Vellaescusa shed light on who these women of the early (1947 to 1953) CSO movement were. While the Mexican women of this era were often described as poorly educated, unskilled recent immigrants, the founding women of the CSO did not generally fit this image. With the exception of Durán Méndez and Villaescusa, CSO women did not call themselves Chicanas. Most identified as Mexican Americans. In fact, Carmen Méndez joined the CSO as a way to validate her ethnic identity, something she felt that the schools had tried to denigrate. Essentially, CSO women formed part of the generation that first called itself “Mexican American.” They were the antecedents of the Chicana/o baby-boom generation. Of the eleven women who were founding members of the CSO, only two had been born in Mexico. The rest had been born in the United States. Estelle Guzmán specifically stated that her family had been in New Mexico “since day one,” meaning since the days of the first Spanish settlements. Lucille Roybal, the candidate’s wife, called herself a Californio, stating that her mother’s family had been in California when it was still Mexico. Henrietta Villaescusa recalled that she and her father were born in the same house in Tucson, Arizona. Many came of age during the Great Depression or World War II and witnessed the deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s and 1950s, the zootsuit riots, and the Sleepy Lagoon murder case in Los Angeles. In education CSO women also did not follow the path of most Mexican women. Only one did not graduate from high school: Estelle Guzmán received an A.A. degree. Henrietta Villaescusa and Mary Sparkhul became registered nurses, and Villaescusa received a B.A. and an M.A. in public health. Margarita Durán Méndez was one of the first Chicanas to receive a B.A. in political science from UCLA in 1946. In 1950 she earned an M.S.W. from the University of Southern California. Durán Méndez retired in the late 1980s as chief of the Northeast Mental Health District of Los Angeles County. She is credited statewide with developing innovative programs to serve mental health patients, specifically Latinas/os. When the CSO was founded, three of the women were students, only two were housewives, and five were employed full-time in occupations ranging from factory workers to secretaries and salesclerks. As volunteers, the women shaped leadership in various ways. Lucille Roybal recalls, “We learned as we went along.” As members of the organizing committees, the women were guaranteed full rights as members, including voting rights. “I didn’t join the League of United Latin American Citizens [LULAC] because women were brought in only as an auxiliary group.
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Congreso del Pueblo CSO granted us full membership with full voting rights. Also in LULAC you could only speak English. In the CSO Spanish was allowed. In fact, most meetings were bilingual,” said Lucy Rios. The CSO was supported by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, which produced funds for a community organizer, Fred Ross, a secretary, Carmen Méndez, and an office. However, most of the internal fund-raising was handled by Durán Méndez. Margarita Durán Méndez was an important player in the early days of the CSO and a staunch supporter of labor, civil, and women’s rights. Independent and outspoken, Durán Méndez brought financial and in-kind support from the United Steel Workers’ Union, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, the NAACP, and the Jewish community. As a member of the executive committee of the CSO, she ensured that women’s rights and visibility would be protected. CSO women looked to Durán Méndez as a role model and leader. The spirit of organizing and the dramatic leadership by the women of the CSO continued to enhance this important and representative organization. In time the CSO had nineteen chapters throughout California and Arizona. In the 1950s César Chávez and Dolores Huerta joined the CSO through individual chapters in San Jose and Stockton. In the CSO they learned skills in organizing and advocacy that later brought them international recognition as leaders of the United Farm Workers. In Los Angeles in the ensuing years the CSO came to be the representative group for Latinos and Latinas in East Los Angeles. In 1964, under the direction of Flavia Vásquez, the CSO opened a credit union. Margot Benavides started a second CSO credit union in 1968. Ursula Gutiérrez organized community members to act as an advisory group; she served as president of the CSO during the 1960s. In 1971 Margaret Gutiérrez developed and directed the PADRES Program. PADRES (Parents Activated for the Development of Relevant Education) provided after-school programs for first and second graders and their parents. In the 1980s, under the leadership of Rosario Vásquez, the CSO in Los Angeles County became a clearinghouse for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Simultaneously the CSO assisted families with homes in foreclosure through a Department of Housing and Urban Development program. The Los Angeles CSO remained open and functioning under the leadership of Rosario Vásquez until October 1995. SOURCES: Apodaca, M. Linda. 1994. “They Kept the Home Fires Burning: Mexican American Women and Social Change.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine; ——— . 1999. “Mexican American Women and Social Change: The Founding of the CSO in L.A., an Overall History.” Working
Paper Series, University of Arizona, no. 27, January; Gutiérrez, David G. 1998. Walls and Mirrors. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Linda Apodaca
CONGRESO DEL PUEBLO (1956–
)
As Puerto Ricans consolidated a significant presence in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century, hometown clubs emerged as one of this community’s most important forms of organization. Hometown clubs were primarily cultural and social organizations established by Puerto Rican working-class migrants in New York City on the basis of their towns of origin on the island. The earliest, such as the associations for Arecibo, Yauco, Rincón, San Germán, and Cabo Rojo, were founded in the 1930s. In the post– World War II period, as the size of the Puerto Rican population in the city mushroomed from 61,463 in 1940 to 612,574 in 1960, community leaders established additional hometown clubs. For example, in 1958 migrants from the town of Barceloneta organized the Hijos de Barceloneta, while those from the city of Mayagüez founded the Círculo Cívico y Cultural de Mayagüez in 1959. Migrants from the town of Aguada formed the Club Social Aguadeño in 1962. In 1956, under the guidance of the respected community leader Gilberto Gerena Valentín, a pioneer who had lived in El Barrio since 1936 and a human rights commissioner, many hometown clubs banded together to form the Congreso del Pueblo, a selfsupported, voluntary organization that functioned as a conference of hometown clubs. According to Gerena Valentín, who became president of the Congreso, in addition to their role as cultural and social organizations, hometown clubs operated as mutual-aid societies and played an important role in the settlement of Puerto Rican migrants in the city. They helped newcomers with English and those in need with clothing, food, job referrals, and medical assistance. Moreover, existing clubs aided and encouraged the formation of new clubs so as to ensure that all new settlers form Puerto Rico would find an organization representing their town of origin that would welcome and be of help to them. Hometown clubs also played an important role in the political life of the Puerto Rican community in New York. Some became important political centers. The Congreso del Pueblo considered cultural traditions an important force in the political struggle for Puerto Rican civil rights and sought the proliferation and amalgamation of hometown clubs as a vehicle for addressing political and economic issues, as well as the
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Córdova, Lina
Puerto Rican Day Parade, New York City. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
social and cultural problems confronting recent Puerto Rican migrants in cities across the nation. At its height in the 1960s the Congreso del Pueblo comprised some eighty hometown clubs throughout New York City and helped lead campaigns for improved housing and educational and employment opportunities, as well as mass protests against discrimination, racism, and police brutality. The Congreso was also instrumental in the organization of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which was first held in 1959 as a highly visible demonstration of ethnic pride and political unity. SOURCES: Ribes Tovar, Federico. 1970. The Puerto Rican Heritage Encyclopedia: The Puerto Rican in New York. New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers; Valentín, Gilberto Gerena. 2002. Interview by Carlos Sanabria, October. Carlos Sanabria
CÓRDOVA, LINA (1921–
)
Lina Córdova was born in Peña Blanca, New Mexico, a small town about an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, in 1921. She was the eighth of fifteen children, but one of only five who lived past the age of four. Lina Córdova’s father, Jacóbo Martínez, was a sheepherder and worked as a coal miner during the Great Depression. He also farmed wheat, which he took to grind at a mill
north of the town. “I used to love seeing the big piles of wheat,” Córdova recalls. “I used to say, ‘It looks like gold.’ ” Life was tough in the Southwest in those days. Before World War I her father was tending sheep in the Magdalena Mountains. One night bandidos came and blindfolded him before making off with all of his lambs. They took him to Magdalena, twenty miles away, and dropped him off. That meant that he had to walk to his home in Socorro thirty miles away. While he was going there, his feet suffered frostbite. He then had to walk to Albuquerque (another seventy-five miles) to get medical care. “They had to amputate the toes from both feet, and for that reason he did not go to service in World War I,” Córdova recalls. When her father died in 1936, her mother, Fulgenica Martínez, had to support their family. She worked in a sewing factory, which they used to call “the Sewing Project.” To help the family, one of her brothers taught school during the winter and attended a local university during the summer. Córdova attended a public school and was taught by Catholic nuns because there was a shortage of teachers. “I didn’t know a word of English when I went to school,” she said. “With the sisters, you had to learn or else. They were very strict.” In the summer of 1938, when Córdova was fifteen years old, she met her husband. Alfredo Córdova was
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Córdova, Lina very popular because he was the only young person with a car. One summer day, as she was walking with her cousin, they heard a car coming up the road. “Just as we got to a big cottonwood tree by the road, the car pulled up,” Lina Córdova said. She met Alfredo that day but did not see him again until fall, when school resumed. They did not date until she was sixteen, and they were married in May 1940, toward the end of her senior year. Alfredo and Lina Córdova moved to Albuquerque to live with Alfredo’s parents while he searched for a job. He found a position working at a restaurant, serving ice cream and milkshakes for fifteen cents an hour. “It was hard days for us,” she said. “It was the end of the Depression, but it was still hard.” Her first child was stillborn, but in 1941 she gave birth to a baby girl, Naida. In 1942, she had a son, Alfredo Jr. Instead of going to a doctor for the deliveries, she went to a midwife, who charged $25 for a male and $20 for a female. She laughed when recalling that midwives charged more for a male than a female, saying that she did not know why there was a price difference. In 1943 the Córdovas went to San Diego, California, because Alfredo had heard that there were jobs there. He was successful in finding work, and they bought two acres of land, on which they planned to build a house. But just as their new life began, Alfredo was drafted into the army. The family decided to move back to Albuquerque before he reported for duty. Alfredo Córdova paid $150 for a Plymouth, and the same
day they began a three-day journey back to Albuquerque. After Alfredo Córdova left for the war—he fought in combat infantry in France, Germany, and Austria—Lina Córdova and her two children lived with his parents. Her in-laws insisted on taking the tires off the car because they did not believe that women should be driving. Lina Córdova said that that was the way women were treated then, but she has seen the roles of women change drastically. “When I was young, every decision was made by my husband,” she said. Today, she has an equal voice. “I guess he figured sometimes my ideas were better than his,” she said. “So we’d work it out.” Lina Córdova prayed each night for her husband’s safe return from the European battlefields of World War II. “I used to pray every night. Every night I would pray, ‘Please God, bring him home,’ ” Córdova said. “I didn’t care how he (came) home,—without an arm or without a leg—as long as he came home to me and the kids.” While Alfredo Córdova was away, Lina Córdova wrote him two or three times a week. When he wrote back, the letters were sometimes censored, with some passages blacked out. She sent him packages with cans of Vienna sausages and cookies. To make the cookies, she cut back on the rationed sugar used in other things and saved up for her baking. Other items she recalls being rationed included gasoline and nylon stockings. The nylon stockings were seventy-five cents per pair, and each woman was allowed only two pairs if they were available. While her husband was away, Lina Córdova recalled sitting on the front porch writing letters to him. She sometimes saw the faint glow of tiny bicycle headlights approaching. She knew that bicycles delivered telegrams with bad news about wounded or dead soldiers, and she prayed that this bicycle would not be for her, bringing her bad news about Alfredo. “One night they gave me a scare. (The messenger) was looking for an address. My heart sank. Luckily, it was not for me,” she said. Lina Córdova scoured local papers, which ran the names of men returning from the war. One day, she found Alfredo Córdova’s name on such a list, two years after he had left. After his return, the Córdovas had a third child, a daughter they named Dorothy. Recalling her past experiences, Lina Córdova concluded, “God was good to me.” See also World War II
Lina Córdova. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project. University of Texas, Austin.
SOURCES: Córdova, Lina. 2002. Interview by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, Albuquerque Vet Center, November 2; Sayre, Katherine. 2003. “Wife Remembers Sending Cookies, Letters to Her Soldier.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project. University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring). Katherine Sayre
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Corridos
CORRIDOS One of the oldest forms used to record historical data is oral tradition. The Mexican corrido (ballad) is included in this tradition. Corridos or folk songs operate as literary texts by telling a story and providing entertainment. More important, they emerge as social documents that detail the daily life and vast experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diverse issues and emotions explored in corridos (immigration, honor and vengeance, banditry, revolution and hard times, racial tension, gender roles, love, death, and many more) also provide a window into self-perception, personal identity, and class status. The ballad became the main medium of communication and enabled all Mexicans, rich and poor, to actively participate in recording their own history and producing a lasting legacy. The origins of the corrido date back to the romance ballads brought from Spain during the conquest of the New World. Chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo cites several romances in his Historia de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (History of the Conquest of New Spain) (1632). By the mid-nineteenth century the production of corridos shifted to a variety of geographic centers. Increasingly, corridos were produced by the Mexican American population residing in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas soon after the MexicanAmerican War (1846–1848) and depicted cultural conflict with the encroaching Anglo population. The exploits of Mexican American folk heroes and outlaws, such as the Texan Gregorio Cortéz and the Californian Joaquín Murietta, became its ultimate manifestation. Within Mexico proper the production of corridos entered their most creative phase during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), in what has become known as the golden age of the corrido. Prominent individuals, such as revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the soldaderas or Adelitas who fought or followed their men into battle, and battlefield exploits became common themes. Another outpouring of corrido production occurred during the Cristero Civil War (1927– 1929), a peasant revolt defending the Catholic Church against liberal reforms initiated by the Mexican government. It was not until the efforts of César Chávez and the valiant struggles of the United Farm Workers in the 1960s to organize migrant farmworkers in California and throughout the American Southwest that a new explosion of corridos began to deal with protest and socioeconomic exploitation. In the 1970s and 1980s a prominent theme in corridos on both sides of the U.S.Mexico border highlighted the experiences of undocumented workers.
Despite the geographic origin of any specific corrido, the highly migratory nature of Mexicans within Mexico and northward into the United States in the pursuit of economic security ensured the broadest audience possible because corridos either accompanied Mexicans in their travels or inspired them to write new ballads. In particular, these migrations typify the peasant classes of Mexican society from which the corrido has primarily evolved. Mexican peasants remain at the forefront in composing, buying, listening to, and singing corridos. Thus the corrido has developed a strong connection to the tierra (land), agriculture, and hard work and recognizes the labor of tillers of the soil and dedicated wage earners. The formal structure of the corrido is based on a very flexible rhyme scheme that follows a narrative structure that tells a story in the first or third person. This differs from canciones (songs), which tend to follow a more lyrical and sentimental pattern that primarily deals with topics of love, nostalgia, and loss of love. The most popular rhyme schemes are abac, abcb, abba, and abbc, and there are usually four lines to each stanza, but this can also vary. As noted by María Herrera-Sobek in her study of corridos, they have historically yielded six primary formulas and eight secondary ones, not all of which appear in every ballad. The primary formulas are the following: 1. Initial call from the corridista (singer) to his or her public 2. Place, date, and name of the protagonist 3. Formula preceding the protagonist’s arguments 4. Message 5. Protagonist’s farewell 6. Corridista’s farewell The singing of the corrido can be done by males, females, or mixed-gender duets. Women such as Linda Ronstadt from Arizona, Lydia Mendoza from Texas, and Lola Beltrán and Irma Serrano from Mexico have become world-famous corridistas. The protagonist at the center of the ballad may also be male or female, but the patriarchal nature of Mexican society, centered on machismo, an exaggerated notion of masculine authority, has promoted the corrido as a male-dominated genre in both production and perspective. This patriarchal system has produced stereotypical representations of women. The five most common are (1) the Good Mother, who is of utmost importance in the maintenance of the Mexican family, and who readily transforms into the weeping mother when confronted with tragic events such as the death of the male hero; (2) the Terrible Mother, who is depicted as harmful, destructive, and evil and is often the source of the hero’s death; (3) the Mother Goddess, a benevolent, passive,
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Cossio y Cisneros, Evangelina religious figure personified by the overglorification and sincere worship of the Virgen de Guadalupe (Virgin of Guadalupe), the patron saint of Mexico, who reportedly appeared before the Indian peasant Juan Diego in 1531; (4) the Lover, who is simultaneously chaste and obedient, yet erotic and traitorous, as depicted by the legend of La Malinche, the native mistress and interpreter of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521); and (5) the Soldier, operating in various capacities as spies, cooks, nurses, fundraisers, camp followers, and soldaderas (soldiers), yet repeatedly marginalized as love objects and anonymous mujeres (women) and galletas (“cookies”). Each of these models can be labeled an archetype, an unconscious idea or pattern of thought inherited from the ancestors of any regional group and universally found in individual psyches. As women become more involved in writing and producing corridos, the themes will increasingly reflect a more diverse Latina experience. SOURCES: Hernández, Guillermo. 1978. Canciones de La Raza: Songs of the Chicano Experience. Berkeley, CA: El Fuego de Aztlán; Herrera-Sobek, María. 1990. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; ———. 1993. Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Paredes, Americo. 1976. A Texas-Mexican “Cancionero”: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steven Rosales
COSSIO Y CISNEROS, EVANGELINA (1879– ?) The face that in all probability shifted American sympathy toward the Cuban cause in that country’s struggle for independence from Spain (1895) was that of eighteen-year-old Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros. Accused of conspiracy in 1896 for attempting to lure a Spanish military officer into an ambush on the Isle of Pines, Cossio y Cisneros was imprisoned in Havana’s Casa de Recogidas. Her story, emblazoned across the pages of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, magnificently exemplified the genre of yellow journalism and swayed public opinion. Americans, including prominent women like Julia Ward Howe, joined the Journal in mounting a petition for Cossio y Cisneros’s release. While Americans were not eager to enter into armed confrontation over Cuba, support for the Cuban cause was greatly enhanced. Unable to secure her release, Hearst assigned a reporter, Karl Decker, to engineer a spectacular jailbreak to free the young beauty with exclusive coverage by the Journal. Feted triumphantly by her supporters, Cos-
sio y Cisneros arrived safely in the United States in October 1897. Throngs awaited her arrival in New York City, and a few days later President William McKinley welcomed her to the White House. Seldom mentioned in the literature, Cuban exile communities in New York, Key West, and Tampa particularly rejoiced, celebrating the Cossio y Cisneros affair with dances, music, and parades. More than 2,000 people, among them the leading Cuban citizens of Tampa, marked the event with floats and pageantry that interpreted the experience as a Cuban triumph over Spanish tyranny. A women’s club in support of the insurrection was named after Cossio y Cisneros. That Cossio y Cisneros’s freedom was obtained at the hands of an American bore disturbing implications for others who anticipated broader intervention in Cuba in the coming years. After the Cuban-Spanish-American War in 1898, Cossio y Cisneros’, footprints appear to fade into history, and little else is known about her. Almost immediately after the incident newspapers launched accusations of fraud and deception against the Journal, and journalists left no stone unturned in digging out the truth. Was Cossio y Cisneros’s rescue aided by the Spanish military? Was this a hoax, merely a ploy to increase Hearst’s newspaper sales? For more than a century Cossio y Cisneros’s story has read more like a romantic novel than a factual incident and until now has remained unchanged. However, new information supports the validity of the saga. More complicated than previously suspected, the case involved numerous individuals. Cossio y Cisneros’s rescue rested on the collaboration of the senior U.S. diplomat in Havana, Consul General Fitzhugh Lee, who took a personal interest in the case, and a Cuban American banker, a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Carlos Carbonell, who married Cossio y Cisneros in the United States eight months after the incident. Along with Decker, Donnell Rockwell, a clerk on the consulate staff in Havana, and the U.S. consul in Sagua la Grande in central Cuba, Walter Barker, were also involved. Representing the consulate, Rockwell met Cossio y Cisneros on several occasions when he visited American women held at the prison and mentioned her to Karl Decker, who in turned informed Hearst of her plight. Hearst encouraged Decker to attempt a rescue. Decker knew, and probably confided in, Fitzhugh Lee, the highest-ranking American on the island, who also supported the mission. The abominable conditions of the prison were well noted by Lee, whose wife and daughter had visited with Cossio y Cisneros, and at his suggestion she had been removed to slightly better quarters. The rescue plot required all collaborators to enact active roles and was
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Cotera, Martha so fraught with danger that it could not have been known to the Spaniards. According to Lee’s unpublished manuscript, a saw that proved useless and pastries laced with opium to induce sleep among her cellmates were smuggled to Cossio y Cisneros. The jailbreak took place on October 7, 1897. She was hidden for two days in the Havana home of Carlos Carbonell. According to Lee, this was a highly distressing period for Cossio y Cisneros, who vowed that she would kill herself rather than surrender. Cossio y Cisneros’s flight from prison was discovered by the authorities, who mounted a search for her throughout the city. Cossio y Cisneros was disguised as a boy smoking an unlit cigar and with the help of ship’s captain Frank Stevens was smuggled on board the Seneca, bound for New York City. She remained hidden in a stateroom until they were well at sea. It appeared that she had friends on board, because the diplomat, Walter Barker, had also booked passage on the Seneca. His presence on board was crucial to the plot in the event that the ship’s voyage was halted by the Spaniards. On June 10, 1898, less than a year after her arrival, Cossio y Cisneros married Carlos Carbonell in Baltimore, Maryland. She settled in the United States for several years after her daring flight to freedom. When the United States entered the war on the side of Cuba in 1898, Fitzhugh Lee was commissioned to lead the U.S. Seventh Army Corps. Carbonell served under him with the rank of lieutenant. Like many other Americans, Lee was interested in investing in the country once the conflict ended. Carbonell was instrumental in
Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros on board the Seneca bound for New York after a spectacular jailbreak from prison in Cuba, 1897. Photograph from Under Three Flags in Cuba by George Musgrave. Courtesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
exploring financial options for Lee. Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros entered the pages of history as a symbol of courage, bravery, and Cubanidad. See also Cuban-Spanish-American War SOURCES: Campbell, W. Joseph. 2004. “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros.” Online paper, June 29. www.academic2.american. edu/%7Ewjc/wjc2/wjc2.html (accessed June 24, 2005); Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
COTERA, MARTHA (1938–
)
Martha (Valdez Martínez) Cotera was born into a middle class family in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico. Cotera spent a great deal of time with her grandparents, Don Miguel Valdez Martínez and Doña Romanita Martínez de Valdez Martínez. Her grandfather taught her to read the Bible when she was just four years old. Five years later Cotera immigrated to El Paso, Texas, with her mother, Santagracia (Catano) Valdez Martínez, her stepfather, and her older sister and enrolled in the first grade. Within a year, however, her stepfather died, and Cotera’s middleclass lifestyle vanished because her mother had to find work in the garment industry. Despite her family’s change in social status, Cotera remained in school and maintained a proud record of perfect attendance through elementary school and to seventh grade. These early experiences influenced her decision to become an advocate for education. Throughout her childhood she acted as her mother’s interpreter, a role that served as the foundation of her activism for the rights of Chicanos, Chicanas, and the poor. In an interview she recalled a situation in junior high school where she learned how to negotiate the politics of the educational system. Her best friend, who was Irish Catholic, taught her “how to use the PTA [Parent-Teacher Association]; how to have a good relation with the principal; how to speak up; how to defend myself; how to defend others; and if everything else failed, how to be downright nasty.” After that she discovered that she could help other Mexicanos who were having difficulties in school. Cotera graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1962 with a degree in English and later earned her master’s degree in education from the Antioch Graduate School of Education, where she and her husband worked as volunteer faculty. In 1959 she met Juan Cotera, and they married in 1963. They moved to Austin, Texas, where she translated manuscripts for
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Crawford, Mercedes Margarita Martínez the Memorial Museum at the University of Texas at Austin Archives and worked as a department head at the Texas State University in San Marcos. In 1964 Cotera began her career as a political activist for the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations and had her first child, María. Her political career continued with activism supporting the farmworkers movement and the upholsterers’ union and protesting issues surrounding police brutality. In 1964 she helped found Texans for Educational Advancement of Mexican Americans (TEAMS), whose members were primarily teachers and which in December 1969 sent members to Crystal City to help tutor students who had participated in the walkouts there. At that time Crystal City students were demanding bilingual education, participation in federal programs, such as a lunch program, better physical plant conditions, Chicano counselors, scholarships, the right to bring whatever literature they wanted into the schools, and an end to racist practices in the selection of cheerleaders. In the late 1960s Cotera became an active member of Texas’s first Chicano political party, La Raza Unida, as a strong advocate of Chicana rights. She was a leader in the Chicana conferences. In 1972 she ran for office in the Twenty-third Congressional District on the La Raza Unida ticket and garnered 23 percent of the vote. During this time she had her second child, Juan Javier. Seven years later Cotera summarized the philosophy that drove her political activity on behalf of Chicanas: “It is important that the cultural evolution resulting from the Civil Rights Movement, our participation in the Women’s Movement, and the emergence of women as heads of families shall be incorporated into the ideological fabric of our intellectual expression.” Cotera’s groundbreaking works include Diosa y hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the U.S., The Chicana Feminist, and Multicultural Women’s Sourcebook: Materials Guide for Use in Women Studies and Bilingual/Multicultural Programs. Throughout her life she has played a pivotal role in the community, forming community organizations across race, class, and gender lines. Martha Cotera has been described as a Chicana feminist pioneer and a mentor to women of all ages, as is evident in her community work and in her publishing. In a follow-up report after the 1977 International Women’s Year, “Chicanas Change Course of Texas IWY,” an unidentified participant wrote, “Through all this, Mexico City to present, remember the name Martha Cotera; the energy, anger, stamina. If anyone deserves an award for the one who put it together, kept it together, encouraged the disillusioned—give it to her.” She has never ceased organizing Chicanas and in the 1980s started the Mexican American Profes-
sional Business Women’s Association. In 1998 the Indigenous Women’s Network selected Cotera as the recipient of the Rebozo Award for Development of Cultural and Traditional Arts, and she was awarded the 1999 Women of Significance Award given by the Lone Star Girl Scout Council. See also Feminism; La Raza Unida Party SOURCES: Cotera, Martha. 1964. Papers. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; ——— . 1973. “La Mujer Mejicana: Mexicano Feminism.” Magazin 1, no. 9; ——— . 1976. Diosa y hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the U.S. Austin, TX: Information Systems Development; ———. 1977. The Chicana Feminist. Austin, TX: Information Systems Development; ——— . 1995. Interview by Mary Ann Villarreal, June. Mary Ann Villarreal
CRAWFORD, MERCEDES MARGARITA MARTÍNEZ (1940– ) Known as “Ms. Marci” to her students, Mercedes Margarita Martínez Crawford taught adult basic education in the Nebraska state prisons for twenty-seven years. An instructor for the Corrections Division at Southeast Community College (SCC) in Lincoln and Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, she helped hundreds of incarcerated men earn their high-school diplomas and associate’s degrees. With a matter-of-fact attitude she ardently promoted the reformative goals of prison schools and described her job as a mission “working for changes in men so we don’t have to support them forever in an institution.” While her students ranged in age from teenagers to senior citizens, came from varying backgrounds, and possessed different skill levels, Crawford rarely found a student unable to learn and strove to find new ways to encourage their personal and educational development. She taught core subjects, including reading, math, science, grammar, Spanish, English as a second language (ESL), and General Educational Development (GED). In 1990 Crawford won the SCC Burlington Northern Faculty Achievement Award for excellence in teaching. With funding from the Nebraska Department of Education she designed and implemented the first elective science course offered in a Nebraska correctional institution. She copublished the results of the course, which became part of SCC’s adult basic studies curriculum, in the Journal of Correctional Education. Crawford described her passion for teaching, compassion for humanity, and willingness to embrace hard work as qualities she learned from her mother, Mercedes Rodríguez Martínez, and from her hometown community in Laredo, Texas. When Crawford was six,
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Cruz, Celia
Nebraska educator Mercedes Margarita Martínez Crawford. Courtesy of Natasha Crawford.
her father, a master carpenter, died in a bicycle accident. Her mother subsequently converted their custom home into a neighborhood grocery store called El Tendajito. Crawford, along with her older siblings María Beatriz and Uvaldo Jr., began working in the family enterprise, which they operated for the next decade. At fifteen she joined the high-school Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) and clerked for Richter’s, Laredo’s largest department store. When she graduated from Martin High School in 1958, the family moved to San Antonio. Crawford attended San Antonio Community College, Laredo Junior College, and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Although she received a scholarship to attend Our Lady of the Lake University, she declined the offer to support her mother and her brother, who was attending Texas A&I University in Kingsville. She worked briefly for the Atomic Energy Commission in San Antonio until its offices closed in the early 1960s. Returning to Laredo, she resumed her job at Richter’s and devoted her spare time to neighborhood activities at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, where she met her husband Weston Crawford, a Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) volunteer from Nebraska. Together they established a bilingual newspaper and a recreational youth program. In 1969 they relocated to Lincoln and served as houseparents for the Nebraska Center for Children and Youth. Among the few Mexican Americans living in Lincoln in the early 1970s, Crawford found a rare opportunity teaching migrant youth in the federally funded High School Equivalency Program (HEP) administered by the University of Nebraska and the Nebraska Human Resources Research Foundation. Local philan-
thropists associated with HEP lauded Crawford’s bilingual teaching abilities and encouraged her to create programs for Lincoln’s Mexican immigrant population. In 1974, with support from the Lincoln Foundation, she directed Lincoln’s first prekindergarten for Spanishspeaking youth, called Learning Enhancement for Mexican American Children (LEMAC). LEMAC acclimated children to school through Spanish-language retention. In 1975 the Nebraska Department of Corrections hired Crawford to assess the possibility of creating educational programs for Spanish-speaking inmates and subsequently hired her to teach bilingual GED courses at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. During this time Crawford also taught evening GED classes for SCC. When SCC contracted with the state to operate its prison education programs in 1976, she joined the faculty of the new SCC Corrections Division. She taught at the penitentiary and the minimum-security Lincoln Correctional Center until she retired in 2002. Throughout her career she served on the boards of director for the Lincoln Foundation, Women in Community Services, and the Nebraska Office of Community Development. She held memberships in the GI Forum and the Legion of Mary. She continues to teach Spanish privately and works part-time as data collector for the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She has a son, Thomas, and a daughter, Natasha. SOURCES: Crawford, Mercedes Margarita Martínez. 2001. Interview by Laura K. Muñoz, January 1; Dirkx, John M., and Mercedes Crawford. 1993. “Teaching Reading through Teaching Science: Development and Evaluation of an Experimental Curriculum for Correctional ABE Programs.” Journal of Correctional Education 44, no. 4 (December): 172–176; Marlette, Marj. 1981. “Education of Inmates Is Teacher’s Reward.” Lincoln Star (Nebraska), November 1. Natasha Mercedes Crawford
CRUZ, CELIA (1924–2003) Cuban singer Celia Cruz is one of the most legendary figures in the history of Afro-Cuban music, salsa music, and Latin music internationally. Epithets such as the Queen of Salsa, la Guarachera de Oriente, and la Reina Rumba reflect the central role that she played as a representative and icon of Cuban music for more than half a century. Her legendary status is based not only on her fame as a vocalist and sonera (improviser), but also on the longevity of her career, which spanned fifty years or more. While Celia Cruz never identified the year of her birth, historians and music critics have traced the beginnings of her singing career to the 1930s, when she entered amateur singing contests common in radio stations at the time. Born in the working-class neighborhood of Santos Suárez in Ha-
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Cruz, Celia vana, Cuba, during a decade of economic need that also affected the island, Cruz won prizes such as food baskets and other edibles that helped feed her family. She was later hired as a singer by radio stations and theaters. She joined a group of dancers called Las Mulatas de Fuego, in which she performed as their lead singer. They toured the Caribbean and Mexico in 1948. Her most important role as the embodiment and voice of Afro-Cuban music was cemented when she was hired by the orchestra la Sonora Matancera in 1950. Highly popular in the entertainment venues of Havana, Cruz and la Sonora also toured throughout Latin America, where Cruz had the opportunity to share the stage with other great figures in the entertainment world, such as Matilde Díaz and Toña la Negra. After touring Mexico for a year and a half, Cruz and some members of la Sonora arrived in the United States as exiles. In 1962 she married Pedro Knight in New York, where she began a very important career within the Latin music industry. A seasoned performer with Tito Puente and later with Johnny Pacheco under the Fania label, Celia Cruz put her own Cuban stamp on the diverse and multiple musical forms that salsa music constituted. It has been said that she brought the Sonora Matancera style into the U.S. Latin music scene. For Celia Cruz, the term salsa was a commercial term used to market Cuban music internationally. She did not differentiate between Cuban music and New York or Nuyorican salsa, partly because she herself imbued the New York scene with her own “Cuban accent,” as she said. Cruz likewise interpreted many Latin American folkloric songs in her performances, thus revitalizing old musical traditions and catering to
Salsa sensation Celia Cruz (center) in New York, 1957. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
a larger, Latin American audience that could relate to those canonical and folkloric melodies. Indeed, Celia Cruz’s vast and diverse repertoires, the ease with which she could perform numerous pieces without rehearsing, and her “musical genius” also led to her immense popularity. Because of these talents, Celia Cruz truly performed for and related to her audiences. She maintained the flexibility, after decades in the entertainment business, to gratify local audiences and to offer them a repertoire with which they could identify. In the 1980s Celia Cruz extended her fame as she traveled internationally and made incursions into Hollywood and the U.S. entertainment industry. She created a truly global market where she performed not only for communities of Cubans and Caribbean and Latin Americans, but also for African Americans in the United States. Her appearances in Europe, in Japan, and at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, for instance, reflected the versatility of her music and the very diverse audiences that found pleasure in her voice and interpretations. She spanned national boundaries, as well as generational ones. One of the most unusual aspects of Celia Cruz is that from the beginning of her singing career she maintained significant control over her repertoire, her dress, and her artistic identity. Because of this high degree of autonomy, Cruz was able to perform songs that have had a tremendous impact on the history of salsa music and of Latin music in general. Some of her most popular hits, such as “Quimbara,” “Toro Mata,” “Que le den candela,” “Burundanga,” and “Usted abusó,” were personally selected by her for production. Her dresses and unique shoes were selected by her in order to construct a serious and respectful professional aura on stage while simultaneously embodying a Caribbeanstyle brilliance and flashiness. According to critic Raúl Fernández, Celia Cruz represented “art and autonomy.” Under the management of RMM Records and Ralph Mercado during the 1990s, Celia Cruz extended her artistic work to include acting in soap operas and guest-star appearances in Hollywood films. She also produced musical videos, including the obviously feminist song “Que le den candela,” an alert to men against domestic violence and infidelity. Celia stated that she would love to record unpublished boleros, a musical genre that she did not incorporate as part of her repertoire. Celia Cruz donated a traditional Cuban rumba dress, a blonde wig, and a pair of her stage shoes to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian. Her contributions to Latin music are now an official part of U.S. history. She died of a brain tumor at her New Jersey home on July 16, 2003. She served as a role model for women salsa singers, such as La India
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Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party and Albita, both of whom have publicly honored Cruz for her contributions and musical talent. She was not only a female pioneer in a male-dominated musical industry, but also a legend by virtue of her powerful voice, her improvisatory talent, her vitality, and her charisma. See also Salsa SOURCES: Aparicio, Frances R. 1999. “The Blackness of Sugar: Celia Cruz and the Performance of (Trans)Nationalism.” Cultural Studies. 13:2:223–236; Arce, Rose. 2003. “Latin Music icon Celia Cruz dies.” July 17. CNN.com. www.cnn.com/2003/ SHOWBIZ/Music/07/16/cruz.obit/index.html (accessed June 25, 2005); Fernández, Raúl. 1997. “La mulata de fuego: arte y autonoomía de Celia Cruz.” In Mujer 4 (August–September): 36–41; Sabournin, Tony. 1986. “Celia Cruz.” In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music Vol 1, eds. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan. Frances R. Aparicio
CUBAN AND PUERTO RICAN REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (1892–1898) Considered the “Apostle of Cuban Independence,” José Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano, PRC) in New York City in April 1892 and presided over it until his death in 1895. Sections of the PRC simultaneously appeared in Cuba and Puerto Rico and in cities with significant concentrations of Cuban exiles, including New Orleans, Louisiana, and Ybor City, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Florida. Intent on seizing the independence of Cuba from Spanish colonial control, the PRC also had a secondary agenda, to liberate Puerto Rico. The New York section of the PRC included a Puerto Rican branch of the organization. Among the leaders of the Puerto Rican PRC section were expatriates living in the city at that time, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Dr. José Julio Henna, Sotero Figueroa, and Robert H. Todd. The official order for the Cuban uprising under the command of Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Máximo Gómez was signed in New York City on January 29, 1895. Until then mobilization toward war was the PRC’s primary objective. During the conflict, however, the PRC intensified its efforts. This required engendering broad support in the United States and throughout the Caribbean for the Cuban cause—Cuba Libre! The supporters of Antillean independence, among whom women played a major role, organized hundreds of clubs with the express purpose of raising funds, buying arms and weapons, securing medical supplies, maintaining morale, sewing uniforms, and recruiting Anglo allies. Sympathizers with the Cuban cause in Haiti and the Dominican Republic aided the insurgents, and Martí personally visited Cuban communities throughout the United States on numerous occasions, speak-
ing at mass rallies, in cigar factories, and in meeting halls to stimulate patriotism and commitment. Las Obreras de la Independencia was organized in Tampa in 1892 in response to the PRC’s call to arms. Under the leadership of women like schoolteacher Adelaide de Rivero and club president Dorotea Ruiz, members included many of the wives, widows, relatives, and daughters of veterans of the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878). They performed a variety of patriotic deeds for the revolution, contributed money to the PRC, and supported its newspaper, Patria. They hosted meetings, bazaars, dinners, festivals, concerts, and dances. The PRC recognized the work of women organizers, inviting them to speak at mass rallies and extolling their actions in the pages of Patria. Women’s organizations soon served a dual function as the sacrifices and heroics of insurgent women during actual warfare raised consciousness about the role of women overall. Powerful images evoked by patriots like businesswoman Paulina Pedroso, the early independence supporter Carolina Rodríguez, the founder of a Spanish-language school, Adelaide de Rivero, and Ana Merchan, also identified with the Ten Years’ War, went well beyond the limitations of helpmate and supporter envisioned by the PRC. Historian Nancy A. Hewitt identified at least fortysix clubs, of which fifteen women’s, six mixed-sex, and four youth organizations were affiliated with the PRC. Once war was declared, clubs proliferated, among them las Patriotas, las Discípulas de Martí, Gonzalo de Quesada, and 24 de Febrero. Cigar workers donated two to five dollars from their weekly salary, and women sold their jewelry, silverware, and furniture for the war effort. Like their white counterparts, Afro-Cubans were heavily involved in revolutionary activities. Paulina Pedroso operated a boardinghouse for cigar workers in Ybor City and made her home Martí’s base in the city. A natural organizer, Pedroso and her husband, Ruperto, who headed a group of pro-independence Afro-Cubanos, donated their wages to the cause, cementing one of Martí’s principles that the war was to be equally waged by blacks and whites. In New York City la Liga Antillana exemplified a racially integrated women’s group composed predominantly of women who worked in, or were connected to, the cigar industry. Its mission was to support the liberation efforts through diverse fund-raising activities. Other political and social organizations that appeared in support of Cuba Libre! were las Hijas de Cuba, headed by Angela R. de Quesada and Carmen Matillas; Mercedes de Varona, under the leadership of Inocencia M. de Figueroa and Emma Betancourt; and las Hijas de la Libertad, led by Natividad R. de Gallo and Gertrudis Casano. As was the case in Florida,
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Cuban Independence Women’s Clubs many of the women involved in organizational activity were related to men active in the revolution. In February 1898 the United States entered the war against Spain. In less than a year the United States occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and parts of the Philippine Islands. The PRC ceased to exist after that. See also Cuban-Spanish-American War; Ten Years’ War SOURCES: Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Pérez, Louis A. 1999. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
CUBAN INDEPENDENCE WOMEN’S CLUBS In the aftermath of the Pact of Zanjón of 1878 that ended the Ten Years’ War with the defeat of the Cuban insurgents and the emigration of many of them to the United States, the president of the Cuban Revolutionary Committee, Calixto García, signed a document that formally invited Cuban women to participate in Cuba Libre. An ardent separatist who himself had taken the path of exile to New York City, García gave credit to the direct participation of many women in the insurrection. Praising their capacity to adjust from the life of plantation mistresses to the nomadic life of the insurgents, he addressed women with glowing praise for their sacrifices for la patria. García called on the women to help “clean our patria from the Spaniard epidemics.” Making New York the center for a new insurrection in the name of freedom and sacrifice for the patria, the newly founded Cuban Revolutionary Committee (CRC) was honored to invite Cuban and sympathetic foreign women to contribute to the cause of Cuba Libre by founding secret patriotic organizations, such as Hijas de la Libertad. These women were to raise funds for the coming uprising, devise new forms of propaganda, and attract sympathizers to the cause. All these clubs, together with those already founded in other American cities and abroad, were dependent on the central organization of the CRC. Only the CRC knew the real activities of these secret clubs, whose members had to accept very strict bylaws. In the following decade Cuban exiles in New York and other American cities founded several hundred men’s and women’s clubs that became the basis of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), the most advanced form of political organization devised by José Martí.
Some clubs of Cuban women in New York dated as far back as 1869, when Emilia Casanova de Villaverde founded the Liga de las Hijas de Cuba. But women’s clubs flourished after 1892, the year of the founding of the PRC, and numbered eighty by 1898. These organizations, like their male counterparts, belonged within the democratic process of party building. When the PRC was founded in 1892, the Mercedes de Varona was the only woman’s club in New York. However, the number of clubs swelled after Martí’s death. Most club leaders, both in New York and in Florida, were the wives, widows, sisters, mothers, or daughters of male leaders of the PRC. The names of women’s clubs showed this relationship: Hijas de . . . , Hermanas de . . . , and so on. In other words, in the public arena, as in the private, the status of Cuban women was secondary to that of men. Naming a club after a revolutionary female figure was not the rule, although an exception was made for Mercedes de Varona, the young heroine of the Ten Years’ War. In general, women’s clubs were named after a male public figure: a martyr, a hero, or someone who was still living, like José Martí, whose devotion among Cuban women certainly preceded his death. Martí wrote in Patria that the primary role of women’s organizations was the promotion of civic awareness among Cuban and Puerto Rican women, yet no woman served on the editorial board of Patria or held an important office in the party. Until 1895 women’s club activities were largely for purposes of PRC propaganda and raising funds for the insurrection in the islands. After 1895 most women’s clubs provided services for widows, orphans, and war prisoners and developed autonomous and creative forms of fund-raising, including picnics and staging theatrical events. Because women’s clubs held lesser importance than men’s, and their public involvement was limited due to existing social conventions and family duties, even the leadership of a woman’s club was under the supervision of a male figure. In fact, a woman’s club would elect the husband, the father, or the brother of one of the leading ladies as its representative to the PRC. During the late nineteenth century, despite such constraints on their visible political leadership, women, both in Cuba and in the United States, had their left domestic circles to enter public life for the cause of independence. See also Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party; Ten Years’ War SOURCE: Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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Alessandra Lorini
Cuban Women’s Club
CUBAN WOMEN’S CLUB (1968–
)
On October 10, 1968, a group of Miami Cuban women, inspired by the success of the Lyceum Lawn Tennis Club of Havana, Cuba, in offering a vast program of social assistance and cultural and educational activities geared to women, founded the Cuban Women’s Club. This club was meant to become a vehicle to orient exiled Cuban women, and women in general, to adjust to the new society in the United States. Another equally important objective was to denounce the oppression, terror, and lack of civil liberties in Castro’s Cuba. The charter officers were Dr. Lilia Vieta, Dr. Elvira Dopico, Carmelina Guanche, Julieta O’Farrill, Migñon Pérez, Inés Segura Bustamante, Ofelia Tabares, Elena de Arcos, and Dr. Marta de Castro. The goals that the founders set for themselves and other club members were thoroughly achieved. Throughout its existence the Cuban Women’s Club has greatly contributed to the welfare and cultural enhancement of women in southern Florida by sponsoring workshops, lecture series, and all types of educational and social activities geared to meet the needs of women in that area. It has also funded numerous scholarships for deserving women according to the club’s criteria. In 1976, on the initiative of one of the founding members of the Club, Mercy Díaz Miranda, the Floridana Award was instituted. Each year this award is granted to women who have demonstrated leadership in their profession or in community service. The Floridana became a coveted and prestigious award in the Miami-Dade community. The roster of prestigious recipients reflects the great achievements of Hispanic women in southern Florida and, in the process, the history of Latinas in general. In 1978 Lourdes Aguila, the founder of Liga contra el Cancer in southern Florida, received the award. The new Liga contra el Cancer collected millions of dollars for the treatment of cancer as
the original Liga had done in the former Cuban republic. Dr. Elvira Dopico, a highly respected educator and community leader, also received the award that same year. In 1979 Sonia Díaz and Marta del Pino, founders of Ballet Concerto, a prestigious ballet school and company, were the joint recipients. Olimpia Rosado, an accomplished linguist, was honored in 1980. Five years later Pili de la Rosa, accomplished artist and founder of the Compañía Grateli, which promotes and produces ballet, musicals, and theatrical performances, received the award. The following year the award honored the educator Dr. Mercedes García Tuduri. Lydia Cabrera, the great Cuban ethnographer, and Pautita Grau Aguero, one of the initiators of the program that brought thousands of unaccompanied minors fleeing from Communism to the United States, were the honorees of 1990. The Cuban guarachera Celia Cruz and the renowned bolero singer Olga Guillot received the Floridana in 1991, along with Dr. Moravia Capo, a civic activist in the Cuban municipalities in exile. The following year the honoree was Leticia Callava, who for many years was the news anchor of Telemundo and later Univision. Clara María del Valle received this award in 1993. Del Valle is a good example of the type of woman who has earned the Floridana Award. She has dedicated most of her life as a volunteer assisting in social services programs and charitable causes. First in Colombia and then in Panama she worked closely with Catholic Charities in establishing vocational schools for at-risk youths and a home for the aged. In the 1980s del Valle assisted Cuban refugees in Panama through the Cuban American National Foundation’s (CANF) Exodus program. Later she supervised that program in several other countries where Cubans sought refuge. Exodus successfully reunited more than 10,000 Cubans with their loved ones in the United States through a privately funded program. Del Valle joined the CANF Board of Directors in 1988. The CANF is an indepen-
Cuban Women’s Round Table at Koubek Center, Miami. From left to right: Rosita Abella, Josefina Inclán, Minita Cantero, Marta de Castro, and Josefina Kouri. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
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Cuban-Spanish-American War dent not-for-profit organization founded in 1981 by exiled Cubans for the purpose of gathering and disseminating data concerning the economic, political, and social welfare of the Cuban people, both on the island and in diaspora. The foundation supports programs to promote respect for human freedom, democratic values, and the pursuit of prosperity with dignity and justice for all. Del Valle directs a CANF human rights project, the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. Other women who have similarly served their communities have earned the coveted Floridana. These include Annie Betancourt, a civic leader elected to the Florida legislature; Zenaida Bacardi Argamasilla, a leader in the municipality of Santiago de Cuba; Elena Díaz Versón, philanthropist and activist; and Sylvia Oriondo, founder of Madres y Mujeres Anti-Represión (Mothers and Wives Against Repression) (MAR), a nonprofit organization whose goals are to promote democratic values and to waken the international community to the reality of the Cuban people under a totalitarian system. For more than ten years, Sylvia Oriondo was a director of the United Way and the Salvation Army and served as the chair of the board for the Little Havana Activity Center, which provides social services and meals to the elderly. Through the Cuban Women’s Club and other organizations, women seek to make difference in their communities, both in the United States and in Cuba. SOURCES: Rodríguez, Luis David. 2001. “Extraordinario jubileo de plata de los Premios Floridana.” Diario de las Americas, October 14; Rovirosa, Dolores F. 1988. Cuban Women’s Club Directorio. Miami. Mercedes Cros Sandoval
CUBAN-SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898) The conflict that eventually erupted between the United States and Spain in the spring of 1898 originated in the economics and politics of the early nineteenth century. In the years before the U.S. Civil War the slave-owning plantation interests of the Southern states and their political representatives in the U.S. Congress had articulated an interest in purchasing Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain and incorporating these islands into the Union as “slave states.” However, even after the defeat of the Southern Confederacy in 1865, interest in Spain’s Caribbean possessions continued, and even increased, because of a growing fear that the United States would become a second- or third-rate power in the competitive global environment of the late-nineteenth-century Europeandominated imperialism. Corporate investors in the
United States were already heavily involved in the Cuban sugar and tobacco sectors. At the same time other corporate interests wanted to establish trading networks with Latin America, the Caribbean, and eastern Asia, especially China. Alfred Thayer Mahan, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, called for strengthening the armed forces and the establishment of strategically located naval bases to protect the new trade routes in the Caribbean and the Pacific. There was talk of building a canal across Panama or Nicaragua to facilitate the trade with eastern Asia. By the mid-1890s rebellions in Cuba and the Philippines were providing an excuse for possible U.S. military intervention on the side of advocates for independence from Spain. The war in Cuba, initiated by José Martí and his followers in New York, was a follow-up to the earlier conflicts that had taken place on that island between 1868 and 1880. As would be expected, Cuban women played an active role in the conflict, along with their counterparts in the movement for independence in Puerto Rico. In the years before the war of the 1890s, Cuban and Puerto Rican women, such as Emilia Casanova de Villaverde and Lola Rodríguez de Tió, created or participated in organizations that raised money and generated support for the independence movements. These organizations included la Liga Antillana, Las dos Antillanas, Hijas de Cuba, and Hijas de la Libertad, among others. Cuban and Puerto Rican women also functioned as nurses, combat soldiers, spies, couriers, and informal diplomats during the war itself. Antolina Agripino, Casimira Aquilino, Fermina Candelario, and Fabiana Buenaventura were some of the many Cuban women who served as combat soldiers in the Cuban war for independence. Cuban women were also used in a manipulative way by the propagandists for U.S. intervention in the Cuban conflict. Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros, an attractive young Cuban woman imprisoned by the Spaniards on the Isle of Pines, was used by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst as a sensationalized symbol of the “atrocities” committed by the Spaniards in Cuba. But it was the explosion on the battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor in February 1898, which killed hundreds of U.S. sailors, that served as the catalyst for intervention and the war against Spain. As it turned out, the Spaniards were woefully unprepared to fight a war against both the United States and the rebels in Cuba and the Philippines. Elements of the U.S. Army quickly joined Cuban rebels to defeat the Spanish military forces in eastern Cuba in late June and early July 1898. The United States also landed another force in the southwestern part of Puerto Rico and easily defeated elements of the Spanish army on that is-
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Cuero, Delfina
Scene from the rooftops of Havana during the flight of the exiles. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
land in late July and early August. However, the fate of the Spanish military forces in both the Caribbean and the Pacific was sealed by the destruction of the Spanish naval forces at Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, and later off the coast of southeastern Cuba near Santiago on July 3, 1898. With their land forces cut off from reinforcements and supplies in Europe, the Spaniards sued for peace. At a truce that was signed on August 12, 1898, the Spaniards agreed to cede both Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United States and to surrender their military forces on both those islands for eventual repatriation to Spain. They also agreed to negotiations that were to take place in Paris later that year to settle the conflict in a formal manner. These negotiations resulted in a peace treaty between the two governments and the surrender of the Philippines and the Pacific island of Guam to the United States in December 1898. See also Cuban Independence Women’s Clubs; Ten Years’ War; Treaty of Paris SOURCES: “Focus/En foco 1898–1998, Part I.” 1998. CENTRO: Journal of Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Hunter College, CUNY) 10:1–2; Jones, Jacqueline, Peter Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyler May, and Vicki L. Ruiz. 2003. Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States. New York: Longman; Library of Congress. “The Spanish American War.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898 (accessed June 25, 2005); Williams, William Appleman. 1962. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Dell. Gabriel Haslip-Viera
CUERO, DELFINA (C. 1900–1972) Although not a Latina in a literal sense, Delfina Cuero represents a Native American foremother to contemporary Mexican American women and her life brings into sharp relief the lives of native peoples whose lands and cultures straddle both sides of the political border separating Mexico and the United States. Delfina Cuero was a Kumeyaay Native woman. The Kumeyaay territory covers much of today’s San Diego County in California and extends into northern Baja California in Mexico. The traditional lands of the Kumeyaay straddle the current international border of the United States and Mexico. The Kumeyaay people are also known by the Spanish term Diegueño. This word refers to the mission at San Diego established in 1769. In the unratified Treaty of Santa Ysabel (1852) the United States continued to use the term Diegueño. Some anthropologists also use the terms Tipai and Ipai to refer to the Kumeyaay. In the 1950s Florence Shipek interviewed many elders who confirmed that the term “Kumeyaay” remained more preferred as the general term the tribe favors. Delfina Cuero was born around 1900 to parents Vincente Cuero and Cidilda Quaha in Xamca (Jamacha) in southern California. Her family faced many challenges. When she was a young girl, rapid change caused upheaval in the Kumeyaay homeland because of the increasing numbers of nonnatives entering the San Diego region. Extended growth of farms, houses, businesses, and other developments pressured many of
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Cuero, Delfina Cuero’s people to move out of the San Diego–Mission Valley. Although the Kumeyaay people traditionally moved with the seasons for food gathering, white expansion depleted many native food resources and forced them to move into other areas. Delfina Cuero chronicled the displacement of herself and her people through a collaborative book with Florence Connolly Shipek titled Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography, an Account of Her Last Years, and Her Ethnobotanic Contributions. According to this account, Cuero’s father worked for ranchers around the El Cajón and Jamul areas who gave him food and at times old clothes for his labor. The family did not live in a house but rather camped near her father’s work. Forced farther south by people invading Kumeyaay lands, as well as seeking new places to live and work, her family was initially unaware of the political border between the United States and Mexico. Her grandparents crossed the border first, and later Cuero and her parents joined them. In the late 1800s, according to the book, the federal government established reservations in the San Diego area. However, Cuero explained that while they were aware of the reservations, it was traditional to remain with one’s family group, even if this meant living off-reservation. Delfina Cuero spent much of her life gathering food and materials in her native homelands. She traveled to the ocean and fished, in addition to gathering shellfish, abalone, and other items along the shoreline. She also went into the mountains to collect staple foods of many native peoples, acorns and pine nuts. Cuero grew up native, hearing traditional stories of her people, speaking the Kumeyaay language, and playing with other children, her relatives. She learned much
about ethnobotany, as well as traditional crafts such as basket making. After a while Cuero’s parents separated. Her father left and never returned. Cuero’s mother urged her to marry so that there would be a man to hunt for them. As was common in Kumeyaay tradition, a man asked her family for her hand in marriage. Sebastian Osun was respected in the village, and Cuero’s family suggested that she accept his offer of marriage. After marriage they had children. Osun died when her oldest child was about eleven years of age. After his death, as was customary, they burned everything, including their grass house. The family prayed and spiritually cleansed themselves. Cuero and her children went through many difficult times and were often hungry even though they worked diligently. Delfina Cuero remains an important example of life experiences of a Kumeyaay woman during her time period. Her story is told from her perspective. She faced border issues while attempting to return to the land of her birth. Many records had been destroyed in fires, and the political border between the two larger nations divided her people. Her autobiography illuminates some of the historical and cultural reasons for the displacement. In addition, Delfina Cuero offers a wealth of information on ethnobotany in her homelands. She presents an in-depth knowledge of plants, foods, and lifeways of the Kumeyaay people. SOURCES: Cuero, Delfina, and Florence Connelly Shipek. 1991. Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography, an Account of Her Last Years, and Her Ethnobotanic Contributions. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press; Shipek, Florence Connelly. 1987. Pushed into the Rocks: Southern California Indian Land Tenure, 1769–1986. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Annette L. Reed
D q DAVIS, GRACE MONTAÑEZ (1926–
)
Born on November 24, 1926, in Los Angeles, Grace Montañez grew up in Lincoln Heights and attended Albion Street School, Sacred Heart High School, Immaculate Heart College, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Before entering college she worked in a soap factory and for a time became the factory’s manager. In 1952 she married Raymond C. Davis and three years later graduated from UCLA with a master of science degree in microbiology. Her early life mirrors many themes in Mexican American history. Although she recalls the hardships of the Great Depression, she has many happy memories of family trips to the Los Angeles River and to the outlying orange groves and sheep ranches in then rural southern California. Remembering the deportation and repatriation campaigns of the 1930s, she tells stories of waking up to find neighbors gone, because immigration authorities had picked them up the previous night. The family had other fears as well. One of her two brothers had tuberculosis and lived away from the family for four years. He eventually recovered and as a young man wore a zoot suit. During World War II he served as a paratrooper and fought at Normandy, but like many other Latino veterans, when he came home, he had trouble finding a job. Her mother introduced her to community activism and took the young Grace with her to help their neighbors. Davis witnessed police brutality and remembers going with mothers of the neighborhood to interpret for them in the courts. “Our community was experiencing a lot of discrimination from the police and from immigration, we had no recourse. . . . I remember going to the coroner’s office to identify bodies with the mothers.” The bodies she saw had “all these bruises.” “It looked,” she said, “as if they’d been choked . . . hung.” Her mother was actively involved in the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee that worked tirelessly to free a group of young men unjustly tried and convicted of murder. Davis graduated from Immaculate Heart College and entered UCLA in 1949. There she became politi-
cally active. The university opened new perspectives for her as McCarthyism and cold war hysteria surrounded her. “This was an awakening for me.” During this time she met Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois. In the early 1950s she became involved with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a community selfhelp and civil rights organization. As a member of the CSO from 1954 to 1960, she taught citizen and voter registration classes that reached thousands of residents. She was actively involved in Edward Roybal’s campaigns for political office from his first race for the Los Angeles City Council to his successful election and reelections to the U.S. Congress. “CSO was able to get 50,000 to 60,000 people registered when the organization had a registration campaign.” “Then of course, we followed up by getting out the vote. The unions provided transportation, provided food. We walked all over the place and had car caravans and everything else.” “It was a very positive influence on the whole community. CSO was a family oriented organization. The women always came. They were housewives . . . you didn’t have school teachers and stuff like that then.” She planned community canvassing in her living room with her three children playing at her feet. “Women played an active role in the organization from its very beginning. We licked stamps, ran . . . headquarters and answered phones during political campaigns. We made the food and sold it.” One of the original founding members of the Mexican American Political Association, Davis served on the Democratic Party Minority Committee of Los Angeles. In 1965 Congressman George E. Brown asked her to work as one of his field representatives. In this post she was part of a team that helped implement in Los Angeles the antipoverty or Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson. Davis also helped plan Julian Nava’s campaign for the Los Angeles Board of Education. She was also a member of the Federal Executive Board, an organization that consisted of the heads of every federal agency in southern California. An active member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Committee, she worked
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De Acosta, Aida with Senator Alan Cranston in the Democratic Party’s Californians for Liberal Representation, belonged to the statewide Democratic Committee, and supported Thomas Bradley in his first unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 1969. Bradley, successful in his second campaign in 1973, became the first and to date only African American mayor of Los Angeles. He appointed Grace Davis as the director of the city’s Human Resources Department, a position especially created to address public resources to the city’s social needs. At that time no Latinos or Chicanos held seats on either the city council or the board of supervisors. The Mexican community of the city of Los Angeles was effectively without any governmental representation. In 1975 Bradley selected Grace Montañez Davis as his deputy mayor. She was well aware of her position as the highest-ranking Latina in city government. “I was their representative.” “That was very obvious to me. I took that very seriously. I thought of it as a great responsibility.” In this post Davis developed the city’s Department of Aging and established a Department of Justice, an Office of Volunteers, and an Office for Youth. Her responsibilities included meetings with the mayor and the twenty-six heads of the city departments; she wrote the agendas and acted as chair for these meetings. She oversaw the Department of Community Development and represented the mayor on the Grants Committee. She worked for and closely with the homeless and with the Salvation Army and the Red Cross helped in the creation of Los Angeles’ first Homeless Camp. Davis was a constant defender of immigrant rights
Grace Montañez Davis was appointed Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles in 1975. Courtesy of Grace Montañez Davis.
and served as an advocate of several organizations, like One Stop Immigration. She was also a founding mother of the important Los Angeles–based Chicana feminist organization Comisión Femenil Mexicana and campaigned for her Comisión compañera Gloria Molina in her first state assembly campaign. She retired in 1990; Mayor Bradley remained in office until 1993. Today Grace M. Davis lives in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles. She has three children and two grandchildren. See also Community Service Organization; Politics, Party SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo F. 1998. Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. New York: Verso; Davis, Grace Montañez. 1994. Oral history interview by Philip Castruita; Soneshein, Raphael J. 1993. Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Philip C. Castruita
DE ACOSTA, AIDA (1884–1962) Even before Wilbur and Orville Wright’s epochal flight in December 1903, Aida de Acosta became, possibly, the first woman to pilot a motorized airship. In the early days of aviation humankind conquered the skies in balloons, dirigibles, and gliders. The first dirigibles— consisting of little more than a gas-filled bladder, a gondola or basket in which the passenger(s) rode, a motor, and a propeller—allowed people to go aloft in controlled flight at the end of the nineteenth century. Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, who developed both dirigibles and aircraft, gained international fame for his flying exhibitions in France. Born in Elberton, New Jersey, on July 28, 1884, Aida de Acosta grew up in New York City, the daughter of a prominent immigrant family. Her Cuban-born father was reared in Spain and then subsequently returned to Cuba to help drive out the Spanish during the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. A daughter of privilege, Acosta became fascinated with Santos-Dumont’s airship while traveling in Paris in the summer of 1903. After striking up a friendship with the Brazilian airman, she convinced Santos-Dumont to allow her to pilot his dirigible “IX.” Because the basket was so small, she would have to fly solo. After three lessons, on June 29, 1903, Acosta become the first woman to pilot a powered aircraft, nearly six months before the Wright brothers’ flights at Kitty Hawk. Santos-Dumont’s “handy little runabout” traveled at about fifteen miles per hour, and he tracked the dirigible while riding a bicycle. The flight lasted “considerably over a half mile.” Unfortunately, Acosta’s parents made SantosDumont promise never to reveal the identity of their
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De Acosta, Mercedes daughter as the pilot of the dirigible because they were mortified by the publicity surrounding the flight. They believed that a woman’s name should appear in newspapers only at the time of her birth, upon her marriage, and at her death. Furthermore, Santos-Dumont did not name Acosta in his book My Airships. The story of Acosta’s flight surfaced some thirty years later at a dinner party in New York City when a young U.S. Navy officer explained to his hostess why he wanted to fly dirigibles. Acosta, the hostess, explained that she too had flown a dirigible and understood his interest. At the time she was married to Colonel Henry Breckinridge. Her two marriages, the first to Oren Root and the second to Colonel Breckinridge, both ended in divorce. Oren Root was the nephew of Elihu Root, who had been secretary of war for President William McKinley and secretary of state for President Theodore Roosevelt. Colonel Breckinridge had been an assistant War Department secretary, a battalion commander during World War I, a friend of Charles Lindbergh, and an Olympic fencer. During World War I de Acosta sold $2 million worth of liberty bonds. After the war she traveled to Europe to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. She was also interested in the arts. A story from a book about filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, most famous for his Nanook of the North, credited “Mrs. Ada de Costa Root [sic] and Colonel Henry Breckenridge” as being moving forces behind Flaherty’s 1927 documentary about Manhattan, Twenty-Four-Dollar Island. In 1935 New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia named Acosta chair of a newly formed art committee to “stimulate the artistic life and expression of the city.” Afflicted with glaucoma, Acosta helped countless others with sight problems. She led a multimillion-dollar campaign to help establish the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In her sixties she served as the first director of the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration, a position she held from 1945 until she retired in 1955. Aida de Acosta, socialite, philanthropist, and first woman pilot, died in Bedford, New York, on May 26, 1962. SOURCES: De Acosta, Mercedes. 1960. Here Lies the Heart. New York: Reynal; Donovan, Frank. 1962. The Early Eagles. New York: Dodd, Mead; New York Times. 1962. “Mrs. Aida Breckinridge Dies; Former Director of Eye Bank.” May 29; Santos-Dumont, Alberto. 1973. My Airships. Reprint ed. New York: Dover Publications. Bruce Ashcroft
DE ACOSTA, MERCEDES (1893–1968) Mercedes de Acosta was born in New York City on March 1, 1893. The youngest of eight children, she became a substitute for her mother’s desire for a son and
grew up believing herself to be a boy. Even after the age of seven, when she learned the “truth” about her sex, she insisted on living between genders. The child of an aristocratic Cuban family transplanted to Fifth Avenue in New York City, Acosta saw herself as the unique product of three separate worlds, Spanish, Cuban, and American. Her father fought for independence from Spain and narrowly escaped execution in Cuba by immigrating to New York. Her mother, orphaned at an early age, arrived in New York, at least in Acosta’s memory, as an independent and fearless woman. Acosta, a second-generation immigrant aware of her Spanish bloodlines, believed that they limited her social adaptability. She reinvented herself as an independent Latina lesbian in ways that seemed to fall through the cracks of turn-of-thecentury U.S. society. An important figure in the café society of the late 1930s, Acosta influenced a generation of public figures who challenged sexual politics, refused conformity with sexual norms, and saw themselves as their own unique invention. She was a poet, novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, and set and costume designer, which made her well known within New York theater circles, European literary circles, and the Hollywood movie colony. These circles also included luminaries like Auguste Rodin, Edith Wharton, Igor Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Pablo Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Krishnamurti. Nonetheless, Acosta is perhaps most commonly remembered for the affairs she is believed to have had with several noted celebrities, including Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. As a lesbian icon, Acosta wore her difference “on her sleeve.” She wore pants, cloaks, pointed shoes with a gold buckle, and an old-fashioned tricorner hat. Her black hair was usually slicked straight back. She dressed in all black or all white and owned several versions of the same item. Acosta “looked Spanish,” and her “ordinary butchness” set long-standing trends in lesbian iconography. Her offstage “cross-dressing” also influenced female actresses like Pola Negri, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich to wear pants on (and off) stage. If Acosta’s role in American cultural history was transformative, her professional contributions have often been overlooked. Only two of her plays were ever produced, Jehanne d’Arc (1922), which starred Eva Le Gallienne, and Jacob Slovak (1923). In 1934 she adapted Jehanne d’Arc for Garbo and the Hollywood screen, but it was never filmed. Acosta was known for her convictions, which included not only devotion to vegetarianism and the guidance of gurus, but also professional integrity. In 1932, for example, she was fired for refusing to write a historically inaccurate scene for the film Rasputin and the Empress.
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De Aragón, Uva After Acosta published her memoir in 1960, Here Lies the Heart, she found herself increasingly isolated in her small Manhattan apartment, located at 315 East Sixty-eighth Street. Many of her former lovers resented the book’s exposure, particularly after the repressive period experienced in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. During this time Acosta sold off her jewelry to pay medical bills. She died in 1968. Her life and work were portrayed in the theater, in Odalys Nanin’s Garbo’s Cuban Lover (2001), MACHA Theatre Company of Los Angeles, and in the film Here Lies the Heart (2001). See also Literature SOURCES: Cooper, Ilene. 1994. “Loving Garbo.” Booklist 90 (May 1): 1562; De Acosta, Mercedes. 1960. Here Lies the Heart. New York: Reynal; Kaye, Lori. 2001. “Garbo’s Girlfriend.” Advocate 64 (October 23): 64; Vickers, Hugo. 1994. Loving Garbo: The Story of Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, and Mercedes de Acosta. New York: Random House; White, Patricia. 2001. “Black and White: Mercedes de Acosta’s Glorious Enthusiasms.” Camera Obscura 45:226–265. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
DE ARAGÓN, UVA (1944–
)
As a Cuban American writer, educator, and cultural leader, Uva de Aragón is committed to making a difference in the Hispanic and wider American community. She has dedicated her life to writing and emphasizes that “writing is a vocation for me and I always dreamed of becoming a writer.” Born in Cuba in 1944, the same year as the AfroCuban poet Nancy Morejón, she wrote her first story at the age of nine when her father died. This preliminary novel was a guajira version of the Cinderella fairy tale and marked the beginning of her exploration of feminist theory in her work. She was able to accomplish this at this early age because of the literary background in which she had been raised. Her grandfather, father, and stepfather had all been prominent literary figures in Cuba, and they all played a role in the formative years of the young writer. In 1959, at the age of fifteen, Uva de Aragón emigrated with her family to the United States. She adapted to the new environment, language, and culture and for the next five years experimented with writing in English. Finally she returned to writing in Spanish and in 1972 wrote Eternidad, her first book in her adopted homeland. Since that time she has produced a number of literary works in a variety of genres: poetry, short stories, essays, theater, and the novel. Her books include Memoria del silencio (2002), El caimán ante el espejo: Un ensayo de interpretación de lo cubano (1994), and Alfonso Hernández Cáta: Un escritor cubano, salamantino, y universal (1996). One of her plays and sev-
eral of her short stories have been translated into English and appear in anthologies such as Cuba: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2002) and The Voice of the Turtle: An Anthology of Cuban American Stories (1997). The recurrent themes of displacement, nostalgia and longing for the homeland, the immigrant experience, and a sincere concern for the fate of Cubans in Cuba appear in all of Aragón’s works. Her literary production reflects the experience of life in exile and the realities of the Cuban diaspora in the United States. The feminist ideology is also expressed in her works, and she believes that it is a “marvellous, well deserved and important achievement” that more women writers have been recognized and included in the Latin American canon. Among the writers who have influenced Aragón’s work are José Martí, Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, the writers of the Latin American Boom, and Edgar Allan Poe. Over the years her literary work has evolved from that of spontaneous expression to the expression of a more confident literary aesthetic. She has received many awards and honors for her achievement and contribution in the fields of education and literature in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Uva de Aragón identifies herself “as a voice of my time, a Cuban American, Hispanic American, and Latina.” Through her dedication to the creation of literary works she serves and contributes to the community and future generations. She expresses her pro-
Author Uva de Aragón, 2003. Courtesy of Uva de Aragón.
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De Arteaga, Genoveva found commitment to literary expression with the conclusion that “my greatest anguish is to not have all the time needed to create all the books that I still have within.” Uva de Aragón is associate director of the Cuban Research Institute and associate editor of Cuban Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of Miami. SOURCES: De Aragón, Uva. 2003. Interview by Wendy McBurney-Coombs, October 24; Uva de Aragón online. http://www.uvadearagon.com (accessed October 6, 2004). Wendy McBurney-Coombs
DE ARTEAGA, GENOVEVA (1898–1991) Puerto Rico is widely recognized as the birthplace of great popular musicians and important popular music traditions. Classical music has also played a role in the island’s cultural history, and Puerto Rico has had and continues to have its share of world-renowned classical artists. Genoveva de Arteaga was one of these artists. An Argentine newspaper article dated October 22, 1944, and titled “The Work of Genoveva de Arteaga” describes her as “sensational!” and goes on to say, “For years we have known and admired Dalmau, but we had only heard Genoveva de Arteaga accompany admirably. We had no idea what a great pianist she is! Last night she gave an impeccable virtuoso performance. . . . the audience gave her a resounding ovation and she had to play an encore for which she received long applause.” These comments are significant because for much of her musical career Genoveva de Arteaga was best known as the talented piano accompanist of her famous violinist husband, Andrés S. Dalmau. Yet from all the evidence in her papers and in the biographical book Latinoamerica en dos mil conciertos by Hernándo Merchand it is obvious that she was a gifted musician who deserved star billing. Although Arteaga’s artistic career began and ended in New York City, she was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the youngest of five children and the only daughter of prominent musicians Julio C. de Arteaga and Nicolasa Torruella. Between 1909 and 1913 she attended the Colegio Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce. In 1907 she began musical studies in the Academia de Arteaga, a music school founded by her father, who was an acclaimed pianist and composer. She trained there until 1920 and in 1921 received a scholarship from the New York College of Music and moved to New York. Arteaga graduated from the New York College of Music in 1922 and stayed on as an instructor for four years. In the meantime she performed publicly at
Carnegie Hall and other New York venues. In 1923 she married Eduardo Fort, with whom she had her only child, Rodolfo. By 1927 she was back in Puerto Rico, where, in addition to performing, she taught at Santurce High School. In 1929 she founded the Chopin Music Academy, which gradually was transformed into the prestigious San Juan Conservatory of Music. She served as its president until 1937. The 1930s were specially active and creative years for Arteaga, who was engaged in organizing and producing numerous musical events, as well as giving concerts. She performed, for example, with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra as a soloist, produced concerts at the San Juan Conservatory, and produced and directed Puccini’s opera La Bohème and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana at the San Juan Municipal Theater. During those years she was also gaining prominence as an important interpreter of the works of Bach. Music was not her only interest. Arteaga was also active in cultural and political organizations such as the First Assembly of Puerto Rican Women of the Red Cross and was a supporter of nationalist causes. A woman of strong opinions, she wrote articles for such publications as Ambito, Poliedro, El Mundo, La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico, and Curso de música, among others. The arrival of the Argentine violinist Andrés S. Dalmau in Puerto Rico changed Arteaga’s life dramatically. She became his accompanist, and after giving several concerts together in Puerto Rico and New York, they left in 1936 for a prolonged tour throughout Latin America and parts of Europe. Theirs was both a professional and romantic partnership. They were married in Venezuela in 1948. Arteaga’s son was left behind with relatives in Puerto Rico and later continued to live apart from her in New York. In 1950 Arteaga and Dalmau returned to Puerto Rico after fifteen years of travels. Once again she gave solo performances, including an acclaimed organ concert in the Cathedral of San Juan. Dalmau died in 1955, and Arteaga took up residence close to her family in New York, where she remained until her death in 1991. In New York she dedicated herself mainly to teaching young people and preparing them for musical careers. Her papers bear testimony to her great love of teaching. In 1956 she was named faculty member, judge, and adjudicator of the National Guild of Piano Teachers. She was also a member of the American Guild of Organists and the Choral Conductors’ Guild. An active member of the New York community, she frequently offered free concerts in schools and churches and worked with organizations such as the New York Folkloric Festival, the Baroque Music Society, the Liga cívica y cultural de Mujeres Puertorriqueñas, and la
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De Avila, Dolores C.
Genoveva de Arteaga playing the organ. Courtesy of the Genoveva de Arteaga Papers. Centro Archives. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Asociación de Cultura Hispánica Puertorriqueña. She contributed columns to such newspapers as El Tiempo and El Diario and founded two magazines: Euterpe, dedicated to music, and Voz Femenina, dedicated to women. In 1970 she performed in Carnegie Hall at a concert celebrating fifty years as a music artist. Genoveva de Arteaga was a highly accomplished pianist, organist, and composer. She was also a daring woman who took a nontraditional path, deciding that her fulfillment as an artist and her dedication to her musical career came above all else. As Merchand states, “she lived not by, but for music.” SOURCES: De Arteaga, Genoveva. 1913–1991. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; La gran encyclopedia de Puerto Rico. 1976. Vol. 7, Música. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico en la Mano y La Gran Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico, Inc.; Merchand, Hernándo. 1974. Latinoamerica en dos mil conciertos. New York: Unida Printing. Nelida Pérez
DE AVILA, DOLORES C. (1946–
)
Dolores De Avila was the innovative principal of Ysleta Elementary School, in El Paso, Texas, nationally known for its extensive parental engagement efforts. De Avila is committed to lifelong education and to
sharing her expertise on education with students, teachers, and parents. She does this within the Alliance School structure, an organized grassroots approach to empowering parental leaders to join with teachers to strengthen students’ education and improve educational policies. De Avila describes her own parents as her “key teachers in terms of who I am today.” Although their educational levels were modest by today’s standards, their intelligence and love of learning made them role models for their daughter Dolores. Her mother, for example, read a great deal and worked the crossword puzzles daily. Her father helped raise her awareness about social justice issues. They visited orphanages and supported church collections for the poor. Both parents were actively involved in their church. At the community level her parents struggled along with their neighbors to include residential income diversity within their neighborhood. Her parents, De Avila recalled, taught her the importance of sharing and giving. De Avila earned a B.S. in education from the University of Texas at El Paso and an M.Ed. from Stephen F. Austin University. De Avila shares much in terms of power, voice, and leadership opportunities with parents and other community residents. In the early 1980s, just after the El Paso Inter-religious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO) was established, De Avila became involved in community affairs through her church. EPISO is affiliated with the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a Saul Alinsky type of community organization that unites the unorganized to use power and engage with local and state decision makers to press government to become accountable to all the people. In El Paso EPISO’s faith-based organizing draws on the strengths of its 50,000-person base, largely from Catholic churches, to address the following issues. Initially, in the 1980s, EPISO focused attention on water and sewer problems in colonias, unplanned settlements outside the city boundaries. In the 1990s EPISO prioritized both workforce training for living wages and changing campus cultures to induce parentteacher collaboration to prepare and place students on pathways toward higher education, better job opportunities, and decent wages. During the 1990s EPISO worked with approximately 10 percent (or ten to twenty campuses, depending on the year) of El Paso’s schools, most of them near the historically neglected U.S.-Mexico border, with more than 95 percent Latino/Latina student populations. Ysleta Elementary School has been a strong Alliance School since EPISO’s strategy began. De Avila, a forceful and self-reflective leader, opened the school to parent leaders. Together with parents, campus leaders improved the school and its surroundings. In the first of
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De Burgos, Julia several victories, parents who were concerned about traffic safety used their collective power to get traffic lights installed, a seemingly simple, but challenging feat in impoverished communities with relatively unresponsive local governments. Parents organized with parents and residents of other neighborhoods to press for Ysleta Elementary School remodeling and later for laptops for student and parental use. The school is now an attractive and hospitable site for students and parental involvement. Many parents participate in school activities, from volunteering to attending classes and expressing themselves in school decisionmaking processes. Some of the parents, mostly mothers, rethink their own situations and make lifechanging decisions to acquire GEDs or attend higher educational institutions. Ysleta Elementary School has become famous as a result of its successes as an Alliance School under De Avila’s leadership. Education researcher and former Rice University professor Dennis Shirley featured the story of Ysleta Elementary School as one of four Texas success cases in his 1997 book Community Organizing and Urban School Reform. Also in 1997 the Washington, D.C., Center for Law and Education highlighted Ysleta Elementary School in its Urgent Message: Families Crucial to Educational Reform. Ysleta Elementary School is also in partnership with the University of Texas at El Paso in its teacher-training programs. De Avila has attended leadership institutes at the Seattlebased Institute for Educational Inquiry and at the University of Texas at El Paso. De Avila, married and the mother of two grown sons, pursues her leadership with parents to share the importance of educational achievement, accountability systems, and parental advocacy and also to strengthen education both with their own children and at various levels of government. Her early introduction to community advocacy within the church successfully bridges both charity and justice. Dolores De Avila retired from the Yselta Independent School District in 2003, but not from issues of educational equity as she and her husband remain active members of EPISO.
Puerto Rican women’s and political liberation struggles. Julia Constanza Burgos García was born in the rural community of Carolina, Puerto Rico. The oldest child in a family of thirteen siblings, Julia was light skinned since her mother was of mulatto origin and her father was a white Puerto Rican of German descent. During her formative years the family experienced the poverty shared by many other large rural families on the island, and Burgos witnessed the loss of six siblings. From her early years of schooling she was a dedicated student, and after she graduated from high school, her academic abilities garnered a scholarship for her to enroll at the University of Puerto Rico in 1931. After receiving a normal degree she became an elementary-school teacher. The 1930s were a decade of political turmoil and social destitution in Puerto Rico. Just before the island began to experience the effects of the Great Depression, it was hit by a devastating hurricane. Poverty, malnutrition, and desolation dominated the Puerto Rican landscape. These conditions, along with the
See also Education SOURCES: Lewis, Anne Chambers. 1997. Urgent Message: Families Crucial to School Reform. Washington, DC: Center for Law and Education; Shirley, Dennis. 1997. Community Organizing for Urban School Reform. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kathleen Staudt
DE BURGOS, JULIA (1914–1953) Known for her feminist, revolutionary, and sensual poetry, Julia de Burgos has become a cultural icon for
Julia de Burgos poster advertising a poetry reading at the Longwood Casino, New York, 1940. Courtesy of the Pura Belpré Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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De la Cruz, Jessie López failed policies created during three decades of U.S. occupation in Puerto Rico, became the target of a revitalized nationalist movement. All of these circumstances contributed to shaping Burgos’s social and political consciousness. She joined the Nationalist Party in 1936 and shortly thereafter gave the passionate speech “La mujer ante el dolor de la patria” (Women Facing the Pain of the Nation), trying to rally women to the independence struggle. She also joined a committee to free nationalist political prisoners. At the time she was a scriptwriter for a children’s radio program sponsored by the island’s Department of Education and was fired as a result of her political activities. During these years of political activism Burgos also began to publish her poems in newspapers and literary journals. It did not take long before her first three collections of poetry, Poemas exactos a mi misma (Exact Poems to Myself) (1937), Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows) (1938), and Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth) (1939), appeared under the pen name Julia de Burgos. The poet’s personal life was quite unconventional for a Puerto Rican woman living during those years. She had married in 1934, but the marriage ended in divorce three years later. After this experience she was known for her behavior as a free spirit. Her involvement in Puerto Rico’s literary and nationalist political circles produced many friendships and a rumored love affair with Luis Lloréns Torres, one of the island’s most prominent writers. A few years later she began a relationship with a Dominican doctor and moved with him to Havana, Cuba. After the relationship ended in 1942, she left Cuba and moved to New York City, where she had lived for a few months in early 1940. In New York Julia de Burgos wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Pueblos hispanos (Hispanic Peoples) (1943–1944), founded by Puerto Rican nationalist poet and former political prisoner Juan Antonio Corretjer. She left New York for Washington, D.C., in 1944 when she married musician Armando Marín. They returned to New York two years later, and the marriage dissolved shortly thereafter. Until 1953, the year of her death, the poet’s life of turbulent and short-lived love affairs was complicated by acute health and alcohol problems that sent her to the hospital on several occasions. The last time she was hospitalized, she wrote her famous poem “Farewell from Welfare Island,” written in English. This poem foreshadows her approaching death. Soon thereafter she collapsed on a Harlem street, and her unidentified body was buried in a common plot at New York’s Potter’s Field for several weeks until her friends and relatives located her remains and sent them to Puerto Rico. Before she was buried in her hometown’s cemetery, her casket was displayed at the Ateneo Puer-
torriqueño (Puerto Rican Athenaeum), where she was honored by many prominent writers and public figures. Another collection of her poems, El mar y tú (The Sea and You) (1954) was published posthumously and includes many of the poems she wrote during the years she lived in New York. Almost half a century after her death, Julia de Burgos’s poetry remains a powerful source of inspiration to readers and writers alike. Her poems speak to the poor and dispossessed, to people of color, to those who fight for Puerto Rican independence, and to women who love passionately, defy stifling social conventions, and forge their own lives. The soul of this feminist free poetic spirit is best captured in the verses of her composition Yo misma fui mi ruta (I Forged My Own Path): I wanted to be like men wanted me to be: an attempt at life; a game of hide and seek with my being. But I was made of nows.
See also Literature SOURCES: Agüeros, Jack, ed. 1997. Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; Solá, María, ed. 1986. Julia de Burgos: Yo misma fui mi ruta. San Juan: Ediciones Huracán. Edna Acosta-Belén
DE LA CRUZ, JESSIE LÓPEZ (1919–
)
“It doesn’t take courage. All it takes is standing up for what you believe in.” This outlook has served as the guiding principle for Jessie López de la Cruz in her lifelong quest to improve the conditions of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers. Born in Anaheim, California, in 1919, de la Cruz was abandoned by her father when she was nine and lost her mother to cancer a few years later. She resided with her grandparents and was reared by her grandmother after her grandfather’s death in 1930. “As far back as I can remember as a child,” she recalled, “I’ve done farm work.” Her extended family joined the stream of migrant workers who traveled up and down the state hoeing beets, picking prunes, apricots, and grapes, harvesting vegetables, and chopping cotton during the Great Depression in California. Moving from job to job, Jessie de la Cruz was in and out of school and only received a sixth-grade education. The family settled in Parlier, a small town not far from Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley. She married her farmworker husband, Arnold de la Cruz, in 1938 at the age of nineteen. Very soon in their relationship she challenged the traditional expectation that wives defer to husbands. “I’d been trained as a
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De la Cruz, Jessie López child that the woman just walked behind the husband and kept quiet, no matter what the husband does. But in work I’ve been equal to men since I was a child, working alongside men, doing the same hard work and earning the same wages.” At her insistence the couple developed a more equal division of labor based on mutual respect and sharing. The de la Cruzes had six children born between 1939 and 1947. When Jessie’s sister died, the family adopted her daughter, Susan. The family struggled to make a living, endured poor living conditions in migrant labor camps, and faced illness and injury. She lost a baby daughter to malnutrition, lack of adequate sanitation, and inferior health care. In her early forties, she found her life dramatically changed when farm labor organizers visited her home. One was a man named César Chávez. Having struggled all her life, she was immediately receptive to their objectives to obtain higher wages, adequate housing, improved working conditions, educational opportunities, and ethnic dignity. A beneficiary of the spirit of reform and social justice unleashed by the civil rights movement, she joined the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers union) in 1965. Two years later she became a union organizer. She experienced a great sense of pride as the first woman field representative in the Fresno area, but her job was not always easy. “It was very hard being a woman organizer,” she remembered. “Many of our people my age and older were raised with the old customs in Mexico.” Holding fast to her beliefs and always outspoken, she persisted in hosting meetings at her home and in visiting and speaking at workers’ houses. By providing services to union members, such as translating, writing letters, filling out forms, and advocating for their rights before various government agencies, she wore down initial resistance and earned the loyalty of workers. Because of her seemingly boundless energy, enthusiasm, and organizing skills, Jessie de la Cruz was tapped to participate in collective bargaining talks with the Christian Brothers Winery. “I want you to learn this,” union cofounder Dolores Huerta told her, “because eventually you might have to take over the negotiating of the contracts.” This experience proved valuable when she served on the ranch committee (equivalent to a union local) and helped enforce contracts and pursued worker grievances against the company. Workers took to the picket lines to enhance their bargaining power at their own ranches, as well as to further the union’s leverage with the industry at large. De la Cruz was always at the forefront of these efforts to encourage coworkers, and women in particular, to ignore growers’ intimidation and to become active in
pressuring agribusiness to improve conditions in the fields and to recognize the union as the bargaining agent. When the union turned its strategy to the boycott, she again urged them to take part. Union members, led by de la Cruz, visited supermarkets in the area to plead with consumers not to purchase grapes, wines, lettuce, and other crops. As the union became more established in the area, she assumed the responsibility for running the local union hiring hall. This innovation eliminated the abuses of labor contractors who often took advantage of workers, charging them exorbitant prices for transportation to jobs, as well as for housing, work tools, food, and clothing. The hiring hall also operated on the basis of seniority. Those who had worked with the union the longest received the first call when jobs became available. The union served as a significant catalyst for her involvement in the affairs of the community. Her visibility, eloquence, and confidence made her a valuable community advocate and resource. She was appointed to a variety of boards and organizations, including the Fresno County Economic Opportunity Commission, the Central California Action Associates (a community education project in which she taught English to farmworkers), and the state’s Commission on the Status of Women. She became active in school board and city council meetings and pushed for bilingual education. Her political activism reached a special highlight for her when she served as a delegate to the Democratic Party National Convention in 1972. Always industrious, Jessie de la Cruz achieved a family dream in 1977 when the de la Cruzes, together with other farmworker families, purchased farmland outside of Fresno and established a cooperative. The venture was a success, and she went on speaking tours to talk about family farming, cooperative landownership, and the struggle of farm laborers. That same year she returned to school. Currently, de la Cruz lives in a retirement community in Fresno. Although her husband died in 1990, she continues to derive joy from her children and grandchildren. She also volunteers for the UFW and participated in its convention in 2000. She is the recipient of many awards, including recognition from the League of Mexican American Women. Her life has been an inspiration for union and community members alike. Since 1980 she has served as a symbol of the grassroots origins of the UFW and provided a lesson in individual courage and determination for a generation of college students who have read her noteworthy oral history. Her life has demonstrated how one individual overcame abject poverty and limited education to make a difference. “[N]o matter who I talk to I always talk about the union because that’s the best thing that
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De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés ever happened to farm workers.” Her remarks serve as a testament to the transformative power of the UFW to accomplish social and individual change. “It gives me great pride to know that I had something to do with it— that I was involved, that I was organizing people.” See also Labor Unions; United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: Cantarow, Ellen, ed. 1980. “Jessie de la Cruz: The Battle for Farmworkers’ Rights.” In Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press; O’Farrell, Brigid, and Joyce Kornbluh, eds. 1996. Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Rose, Margaret Eleanor. 1988. “Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union, 1950 to 1980.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles; Soto, Gary. 2002. Jessie de la Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. New York: Persea Books. Margaret Eleanor Rose
DE LA CRUZ, SOR JUANA INÉS (1648–1695) The most famous writer of colonial Latin America, known in her own times as the Tenth Muse, was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She was born in San Miguel de Nepantla, near Amecameca, Puebla, Mexico, as the out-of-wedlock daughter of Isabel Ramírez y Vargas and Pedro Manuel de Asuaje. Isabel, who remained illiterate throughout her life, had three daughters with Asuaje and three other children—two daughters and one son—with Diego Ruiz Lozano. She did not marry either of them. Therefore, her children were considered “natural children” (hijos naturales) born of two single parents, as opposed to illegitimate, those born from adulterous relationships of a married parent. Juana was baptized as a “daughter of the Church.” This humble and unorthodox birth was not uncommon in colonial Mexico, even among people of Spanish descent, as Sor Juana was. Her family had some social status as medium-size landowners. Her birth took place either in 1648 or in 1651; the date remains unclear due to the disappearance of the parochial birth record book. Historians are currently accepting 1648 as her birth date. Two major sources provide almost all the surviving biographical information about Sor Juana: a letter addressed to the bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández Santa Cruz (La respuesta), and a biography inserted in the 1700 edition of her works by Diego Calleja, S.J. Sor Juana described herself as a child with a precocious desire for learning. She pressured her mother to allow her to join her older sister’s lessons with the local teacher for girls and, having learned to read and write at an early age, continued to teach herself a variety of
subjects in the library of her maternal grandfather. Her dream to attend the university—which was closed to women—dressed as a man was never fulfilled, but her mother sent her to the home of a well-married maternal aunt in Mexico City. Her uncommon erudition allowed her to be introduced to the viceregal court. There she remained for several years as a protégée of Vicereine Leonor Carreto, the marchioness of Mancera, whose husband was viceroy between 1664 and 1673. During the short period of time she stayed at the court, she established her name as a poet of wondrous knowledge, which was once tested in a baroque examination by forty scholars. Despite her apparent success in court, in 1667 she took the decision to enter a convent. Her first choice was the Convent of Santa Teresa, of the spartan Carmelite order. Her choice to become a nun has been much debated. In the seventeenth century a beautiful and wise woman of obscure birth had few other choices. Her own explanation points to her lack of desire for a marriage that would deprive her of her unbounded desire for freedom and for studying. Nonetheless, she could not adjust to the Carmelite discipline and left after three months on grounds of ill health. Her decision to take the veil was firm, however, and in February 1669 she professed in the Convent of San Jerónimo, of the Hieronimite order, adopting the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She lived there for the next twenty-six years. As a nun, she was orthodox in her faith but unusual in her dedication to writing and maintaining good relations with erudite men and members of the viceregal court. She wrote little for her first twelve years in the convent, probably as a result of the influence of her confessor, Antonio Núñez, S.J. The arrival of Viceroy Marquis of Laguna in 1680 and his wife María Luisa Manrique, countess of Paredes, marked the beginning of a special relationship between Sor Juana and the viceregal couple. During the six years of their stay in Mexico Sor Juana wrote copiously and was read widely, although she was never published. The countess nurtured a special friendship with Sor Juana, and before her departure for Spain she collected all of her writings and succeeded in publishing them in 1689 under the title Inundación Castálida. A second revised edition was issued in 1690. This work earned Sor Juana universal acclamation in the Iberian Peninsula and some parts of the New World. Her writing received both praise and criticism from male members of the church. Her mentor, the Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda, a much-admired preacher and religious writer, felt betrayed by Sor Juana’s inclination to mundane writing. Their relationship was abruptly cut short. In a recently found letter that most critics accept as authentic, Sor Juana bitterly de-
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De la Garza, Beatríz nounced his intransigence, asserting her own freedom to write. Her intellectual exchanges with men of letters included one with the bishop of Puebla, Father Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, at whose request she wrote a critique of the theological statements of a wellknown Portuguese Jesuit, Father Antonio Vieira. Some historians argue that the object of her critique was Núñez de Miranda and his theological outlook. This work was published by the bishop without Sor Juana’s permission under the title Carta Atenagórica. While Fernández de Santa Cruz was behind the publication, he did not support Sor Juana’s ideas or stance. He answered the nun’s points with his own critique of her writings and lifestyle under the female pseudonym of Sor Filotea de la Cruz. The bishop urged Sor Juana to abandon her mundane interests and return to the higher objectives of her religion with her pen and her faith. As a response to the bishop’s critique, Sor Juana wrote a lengthy autobiographical letter that has become known as La respuesta (The Response) to Sor Filotea. It was a fiery defense of her faith and a defense of the right of women to think and write, invoking biblical examples and female saints who had authority within the church and a voice of their own. This letter—not published until 1700—circulated at the time in manuscript form and caused a stormy controversy among ecclesiastics and laypersons. Unfortunately for Sor Juana, this exchange took place after 1691, under the episcopacy of the strict and reputedly misogynist archbishop of Mexico, Father Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas. Under pressure from the latter and a potential confrontation with the Inquisition due to the nature of the arguments she had expounded in her Carta Atenagórica, Sor Juana made a public renunciation of her writing in 1694, sold her books, and reconsecrated herself as a nun, signing the pledge with her own blood. In 1695, during an epidemic in San Jerónimo, she contracted the plague and died on April 15, 1695. For centuries it was believed that she had not written a single word between 1693 and 1695, especially after her official renunciation. A recently discovered inventory of her possessions at her death describes more than 200 books and several bundles of writings, unfortunately now lost. Sor Juana continued to write in the shelter of her cell but kept her work away from worldly publicity. During the eighteenth century the memory of her writings and fame began to fade, and it was not until the early twentieth century that philologists and literary critics began to recover and extol her work. Today she is a national icon, and her image is printed on the Mexican ten-peso bill. Her works have been extensively analyzed and given universal acclamation. Her copious production includes two lay plays and sev-
eral religious plays (autos sacramentales), numerous religious poems, religious songs for religious feasts (villancicos), lay and love poetry, and a long philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge in verse, titled Primero sueño. She felt intensely and personally her identity as a woman of the New World, a separate entity from Spain. In regard to the evangelization of the indigenous peoples, she appreciated their history but as a Catholic nun praised the blessings of Christianity. Her poetic writings are baroque, complex, and densely worded, with numerous allegories and metaphors, but the subtlety and finesse of her writing is without rival in Latin American literature. See also Feminism; Nuns, Colonial SOURCES: Arenal, Electa, and Amanda Powell. 1994. The Answer/La respuesta. New York: Feminist Press; BénassyBerling, Marie-Cécile. 1982. Humanisme et religion chez Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La femme et la culture au XVIII siécle. Paris: Sorbonne; De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. 1982. A Woman of Genius. The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Salisbury, CT: Lime Rock Press; ———. 1985. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Poemas. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press; ———. 1988. Sor Juana Anthology. Trans. Alan Trueblood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Paz, Octavio. 1988. Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Sabat de Rivers, Georgina. 1998. En busca de Sor Juana. Mexico: UNAM. Asunción Lavrin
DE LA GARZA, BEATRÍZ (1943–
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A writer, scholar, attorney, former elected official, and a Renaissance woman from the Texas-Mexico border, Beatríz de la Garza was born in Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Mexico, also known as Old Revilla. She uses Old Revilla as the setting for several of her works, including the novel Pillars of Gold and Silver and the short story of the same name in The Candy Vendor’s Boy and Other Stories. As a result of the flooding and destruction of her hometown by the Falcon International Reservoir in the early 1950s, Beatríz moved with her family to Laredo, Texas, where she grew up. Enrolled in school in Laredo without knowing English, she began writing short tales and poetry in Spanish. When she learned English, she also began to write in this language. In high school she entered the shortstory contest and twice won honorable mention awards for her writing in consecutive years from the teen magazine Seventeen. She received a scholarship from the Caller-Times of Corpus Christi, Texas, to attend the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied journalism and creative writing. At the University of Texas she won the undergraduate short-story contest in her senior year and had
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De León, Patricia de la Garza versities in the Austin area. She has taught courses in Spanish language and literature and Basic Legal Principles for Legal Assistants at her alma mater, the University of Texas, Austin, Austin Community College, and Texas State University (formerly Southwest Texas State University) in San Marcos, Texas. De la Garza has been active in civic affairs and in 1988 was elected to her first term on the Austin Independent School District (AISD) Board. She served on the AISD School Board from 1988 to 1994, a total of three terms. During her final term (1992–1994) she served as board president, which made her the first Mexican American woman (and Latina) ever to hold this elected position in the history of the state capital’s public school district. SOURCES: de la Garza, Beatríz. 1994. The Candy Vendor’s Boy and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Público Press; ———. 1997. Pillars of Gold and Silver. Houston: Piñata Books. ———. 2003. A Law for the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands. Austin: University of Texas Press; ———. 2004. Personal Communication with Roberto Calderón. September 13. Roberto R. Calderón Writer and attorney Beatríz de la Garza. Courtesy of Beatríz de la Garza.
her short stories published in the student magazine, Corral. Her first collection of short stories, The Candy Vendor’s Boy and Other Stories, received a star review from Publisher’s Weekly that commented that “[t]he author shows a remarkably polished craft for a first time writer, imbuing her characters with rare emotional resonance.” The Candy Vendor’s Boy and Other Stories was selected by the New York Public Library for its list “1996 Books for the Teen Age.” Pillars of Gold and Silver, a novel for young adults, was published in the fall of 1997. Booklist said of Pillars of Gold and Silver, “De la Garza weaves a story of sunlight and moonlight, memory and affection, and the crossing of two cultures.” Her latest book, A Law for the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands, the true story of a double killing that took place in southern Texas in 1912, was published in the fall of 2003. A Law for the Lion exemplifies regional history at its best and represents a signal contribution to the field of Chicano history. Beatríz de la Garza received four degrees from the University of Texas beginning with a bachelor’s with honors. She earned a master’s degree and then a doctorate in Spanish literature. Not yet finished with her formal education, she went on to earn a J.D. from the University of Texas’ School of Law. She writes and practices law in Austin, Texas, where she has lived for more than twenty-five years. Her love of letters has led to visiting professorships at various colleges and uni-
DE LEÓN, PATRICIA DE LA GARZA (C. 177?–1850) Patricia de la Garza was born in Soto la Marina, Tamaulipas, Mexico, the daughter of ranching parents, and married thirty-year-old Martín de León, a muleteer and militia captain, in 1795. The couple is known for their establishment of the settlement of Victoria, Texas. Following their marriage, they settled in Burgos, Nuevo Santander, where Martín completed his enlistment, and where their first two children were born, Fernando in 1798 and María Candelaria in 1800. The following year the young couple applied for Martín’s captain’s grant of land and used Patricia’s sizable dowry of almost 10,000 pesos to establish the Santa Margarita Ranch on the Nueces River in southern Texas, known today as San Patricio. Through revolts, revolution, and invasions, Patricia gave birth to eight more children in Texas: José Silvestre in 1802, María Guadalupe in 1804, Felix in 1806, Agapito in 1808, María de Jesús in 1810, Refugia in 1812, Agustina in 1814, and the last child, Francisca, in 1816. Patricia wanted her children to be well educated, and, according to the 1811 census, she and Martín hired a tutor to teach their growing family to read and write. She also asked her children not to carry guns, a difficult request in frontier Texas, since “only bandits and reprobates were armed.” They created close ties to neighbors who became godparents and in-laws. The family established a second ranch on the Aransas River in 1818, next door to their new inlaws, the Aldrete family.
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Del Castillo, Adelaida Rebecca After Mexican independence in 1821, Martín de León applied to the Provincial Deputation of San Antonio de Béxar for permission to grant lands to colonists, much as Stephen F. Austin was doing. In 1824 Martín and Patricia were given approval to settle forty-one families on the banks of the Guadalupe River and to found the town of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Victoria, subsequently shortened to Victoria. Their own sons and daughters were first among the families to be granted the large ranches of 4,545 acres. Within the first five years of the Victoria colony Doña Patricia married off six of her ten children to fellow colonists or to settlers in San Antonio or nearby Goliad. Martín de León died of cholera in 1834, leaving Patricia as the matriarch of the family. Among the new immigrants were Placido Benavides, teacher and militia captain for Victoria, and José María Jesús Carbajal, educated in the United States and surveyor for the colony. The two young men became Patricia’s sons-inlaw and influential members of the colony’s government. They also created a split in the family by siding with the Anglo rebels in the Texas Revolution. Fernando, her eldest son, joined Carbajal and Benavides against his brothers, who remained on their ranches out of the fight. Patricia did her best to care for and protect her son when he was jailed, first by Mexican troops and then by the Anglos. In June 1836, fearing for the safety of her family in the new Republic of Texas, Patricia gathered her relatives and moved to New Orleans. She sold the family ranch and invested the money in mortgages in land in Opelousas, Louisiana. Fernando, who had acquired land titles from many of the families who had left Texas, lost close to 50,000 acres through the unscrupulous actions of his enemies. Patricia, however, under the protection of John Linn, later senator from Victoria, retained possession of her property in town, although most of the household possessions were lost. The family remained in Louisiana with Benavides relatives and then moved to Soto la Marina in Mexico. When Texas at last gained statehood in 1845, Patricia returned to Victoria. She encouraged her sons and daughters to fight, and win, court cases to regain the family ranch lands. As matriarch of the de León family, Patricia de León lived comfortably from mortgages on land in Victoria and Louisiana. She loaned money to her sons and daughters and cared for her grandchildren, several of whom had been left orphaned. She also financed José María Jesús Carbajal in his attempt to found the Republic of the Rio Grande. When she died in 1850, Patricia had divided her land and cattle among her three widowed daughters and deeded her property on the town square to the Catholic Church for the construction of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Victoria, Texas. Her greatest
legacy, however, has been the thousands of de León descendants who live in southern Texas today. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Barrera, Manuel. 1992. Then the Gringos Came: The Story of Martín de León and the Texas Revolution. Laredo, TX: Barrera Publications; Castillo Crimm, A. C. 2004. De León: A Tejano Family History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Hammett, A.B.J. 1971. The Empresario: Don Martín de León, the Richest Man in Texas. Kerrville, TX: Braswell Printing Co. Carolina Castillo Crimm
DEL CASTILLO, ADELAIDA REBECCA (1950– ) Born in Los Angeles of Mexican parents, Adelaida R. Del Castillo grew up in the Maravilla Housing Project of East Los Angeles. By the time she was seventeen, she had joined a local theater group, El Teatro Chicano, trained with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, and become politically active in the Chicano movement. While she was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was arrested during a protest against then Governor Ronald Reagan’s proposed cuts to bilingual education. As an active member of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and then el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), she joined Ana Nieto Gómez and other early Chicana feminists in the publication of the short-lived journal Encuentro Femenil. Her seminal article on La Malinche (“Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective”) was first published in Encuentro Femenil and then reprinted in 1977 as part of the first anthology of Chicana writings, Essays on la Mujer, edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martínez Cruz. Historian Vicki L. Ruiz, in assessing the importance of this article to Chicana feminism, notes that given the symbolism of La Malinche as a race traitor, “one of the first tasks Chicana feminists faced was that of revising the image of La Malinche.” Ruiz praises Del Castillo’s “path-breaking article” for providing “a new perspective by considering Malinche’s captivity, her age, and most important her conversion to Christianity.” “What emerges from Del Castillo’s account,” Ruiz further adds, “is a gifted young linguist who lived on the margins and made decisions within the borders of her world.” In 1975 Del Castillo participated actively in CASA (el Centro de Acción Autónoma–Hermandad General de Trabajadores) and served as part of the collective that published the newspaper Sin Fronteras. Like other members of CASA, Del Castillo articulated a passionate belief in the ideal of working-class solidarity between Mexicanos and Chicanos—“Somos un pueblo
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Del Prado, Pura sin fronteras” (We are one people without borders). As she notes in her introduction to her groundbreaking anthology Between Borders, “the relation between the history of women in Mexico to that of Mexican women in the United States is one between a people who share a similar historical, cultural, linguistic, demographic, and at one time, a similar geographic experience.” In addition to her work with CASA and the cogent articles she wrote on Chicana feminism, Del Castillo earned a B.A. in linguistics at UCLA in 1977. She then entered the graduate program at UCLA in social anthropology, where she received her M.A. in 1981 and her Ph.D. in 1991. In 1980, while still a graduate student, she coedited with Magdalena Mora the benchmark anthology Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present, a collection of articles that documents and appraises “Mexican women’s participation in the struggle against national oppression, class exploitation, and sexism.” Delineating the interconnected and concurrent nature of gender and class struggles, her essay “Mexican Women in Organization” evaluates the earlier efforts and difficulties faced by Chicana feminists in organizing as women during the Chicano movement, as well as the sexist practices that they encountered within one particular Chicano/Mexicano leftist group in Los Angeles. Del Castillo’s essay “Sterilization: An Overview” is also one of the earliest Chicana commentaries on state violence against Latina women’s bodies as manifested in forced sterilization practices. An associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, Del Castillo has taught there since 1990. Always the transnational scholar, in her more recent scholarship she has focused on Mexican gender spaces, and in Displacing Gender Identity: The Negotiation of Gendered Behavior in Mexico City’s Domestic Space (forthcoming) she examines the economic survival strategies of women in Mexico City who work as ficheras (dance hall girls) in the entertainment sex industry, and who, through financial empowerment, are able to renegotiate their domestic arrangements and relations with male partners. At the forefront of feminist issues during the Chicana/Chicano movement, Adelaida R. Del Castillo is a distinguished teacher, a pioneering researcher, an international lecturer, and a writer.
the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosaura Sánchez
DEL PRADO, PURA (1931–1996) Pura Del Prado, a talented Cuban American writer, was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1931. She began her literary career at the age of nine with the publication of her first short story in the children’s section of a Cuban national magazine. As an adult in Cuba, she was a teacher and a writer. She graduated from the Escuela Normal of Santiago de Cuba and also studied journalism at the University of Havana. Del Prado held a number of leadership positions in both literary and educational associations in Cuba. In 1951 she was president of the literary club La Avellaneda and was assistant director and writer for the magazine Hosanna in Santiago de Cuba. Throughout that time in her life she developed a firm commitment to her literary vocation, but left Cuba in 1958 before the Castro regime was established. She traveled widely in the United States and Europe and settled in the United States for a number of years until her death in 1996. Having published her early works, De codos en el arcoiris, Canto a Martí, Los sábados y Juan, and El río con sed, in Cuba, she continued her literary production in the United States with a number of publications in Spanish. These included Color de oricha, Otoño enamorado, and En la otra orilla. Her literary talent was most apparent in the area of poetry. As colleague Rosanna Hull stated in the Miami Herald, 1996, “Su talento natural para la poesia era simplemente deslumbrante y digo ‘natural’ porque aparecía de la forma más generosa y espontanea no solo en sus versos, sino en cualquier apunte, en cualquier dedicatoria que estampara en sus libros.” (“Her natural talents in poetry were simply brilliant and I say ‘natural’ because her poetry
See also Chicano Movement SOURCES: Del Castillo, Adelaida R. 1977. “Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective.” In Essays on La Mujer, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martínez Cruz. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Center Publications; ——— . 1990. Between Borders: Essays on Mexiana/Chicana History. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press; ——— . 2002. E-mail correspondence with Rosaura Sánchez, July 29; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of
Pura Del Prado and Uva de Aragón in Maryland, 1974. Courtesy of Uva de Aragón.
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Del Río, Dolores was appealing and spontaneous, not only in her verses but everywhere, in whatever dedication she printed in her books.”) Pura Del Prado is considered a Cuban poet because her poetry expressed a great exaltation of the homeland. In her poetry she was able to articulate the feelings and the spirit of the Cuban community in exile. Her verses make use of rich Cuban idioms and imagery that therefore express a strong connection with the Cuban homeland and traditions. In turn, the verses of Del Prado also reflect on the present experiences and life conditions of Cubans in their adopted homeland. They seem to protest against the loss of the freedom to inhabit the land of their birth, and also against the separation of the Cuban people. In the poem Por qué se van? one can see many examples of these characteristics. Another poem written by Del Prado became very popular in exile and was made into a song by the Cuban trovador Pedro Tamayo. The verses of this song can frequently be heard on radio stations in Miami: “Aquí no, que va. . . . , El día que yo me muera, se va a morir Cuba un poco, porque mi espiritu loco, tiene zumo de palmera.” (“The day I die, Cuba will also die a little because my crazy spirit bears the essence of the palm trees.”) These poems became very popular in exile because they captured the spirit of the Cuban community in the United States in a lyrical and meaningful way. They have contributed to the preservation of the Cuban past and to the history and the heritage of Cuban Americans. SOURCES: Correa, Armando. 1996. “Pura Del Prado, poeta y escritora cubana a los 64 Años.” El Nuevo Herald, October 18, 4A; Laurencio, Angel Apracio, ed. 1970. Cinco Poetisas Cubanas, 1935–1969. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Wendy McBurney-Coombs
DEL RÍO, DOLORES (1905–1983) Dolores Del Río was born Lolita Dolores Asúnsolo Martínez y López Negrete in Durango, Mexico. Her family fled her home to Mexico City in 1910. Raised in an upper-class Mexican family, at the age of fifteen she married Jaime Martínez Del Río, the son of a wealthy Mexican family. They spent their honeymoon in Europe, traveling for two years, before settling in Mexico City. In 1925, while on his honeymoon, the director Edwin Carewe met the Del Ríos. Taken in by her beauty, Carewe inquired if Dolores would be interested in making movies. With Jaime’s consent, the couple traveled to Hollywood. The film What Price Glory? (1926) made Del Río a star. Under Carewe’s guidance Del Río made Resurrection (1927), The Loves of Carmen (1927), and Evangeline (1929). In these roles she mainly portrayed European peasant women.
After divorcing Jaime Del Río in 1928, Del Río married Cedric Gibbons, head art director for MGM studios in the 1930s. No longer under Carewe’s tutelage, Del Río made the transition to more exotic and sophisticated roles. The Girl from the Rio (1932), Bird of Paradise (1932), and Flying down to Rio (1933) are her most memorable films from this period. At the same time she and Gibbons stood out as one of the best-known couples in Hollywood. Unfortunately, by the late 1930s Del Río’s career and her marriage were on the decline. She divorced Cedric Gibbons in 1941. Already in a relationship with Orson Welles, Del Río hoped that the film Journey into Fear (1943) would help revive her career. It did not, and her relationship with Welles fell apart. Leaving Hollywood, Del Río returned to Mexico. She explained her reasons to a Variety reporter: “I didn’t want to be a star anymore, I wanted to be an actress and with all those gowns they put on me, all of those millions of feathers, I couldn’t be. I chose instead the chance to be a pioneer in the movie industry of my country, an exciting new challenge.” Choosing her own directors, scripts, and camera crews, she entered into a new generation of filmmaking in Mexico. Her films during this period included Flor Silvestre (1943), María Candelaria (1944), La malquerida (1949), and La cucaracha (1960). In her debut film in Mexico, Del Río worked with director Emilio Fernández, cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, and leading man Pedro Armenadáriz. Their film, Flor Silvestre, landed Del Río an Ariel Award (equivalent to an Oscar). She won three more Ariels for the films Las abadonadas (1944), Doña Perfecta (1950), and El niño and la niebla (1953). Years later Hollywood invited Del Río to appear in another film, but she continued to work in Mexico, as well as Spain and Argentina. Del Río and Henry Fonda starred in director John Ford’s The Fugitive, filmed in Mexico in 1947. In 1954, the same year that Salt of the Earth was blacklisted, Del Río attempted to return to Hollywood to make the film Broken Lance with Spencer Tracy, but was denied a visa. Katy Jurado took the role and won an Oscar nomination for her performance. It was not until 1960 that Del Río returned to Hollywood to film Flaming Star with Elvis Presley. She starred in Cheyenne Autumn (1964) as “Spanish Woman” with Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland, and Richard Widmark. Del Río married producer Lewis A. Riley in 1959. Her later years were spent on the stage and doing charity work. Del Río appeared with Anthony Quinn and Katy Jurado in her last film, The Children of Sánchez, in 1977. She died in 1983 in Santa Monica, California. Dolores Del Río’s transformation from poor waif roles to sophisticated ingénues demonstrated her act-
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Del Valle, Carmen ing capabilities. Unfortunately, Hollywood did not permit her to be anything but the “other.” Whether Del Río represented “nationness,” as Ana M. López argues, or selected images that best suited her at the appropriate times, she instinctively chose roles that merged her thespian abilities and physical attributes. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: De Witt, Bodeen. 1967. “Dolores Del Río Was the First Mexican of Family to Act in Hollywood.” Film in Review 18 (March): 266–283; Hershfield, Joanne. 2000. The Invention of Dolores Del Río. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; López, Ana M. 1991. “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism.” In Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and American Cinema. ed. Lester D. Friedman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; RodríquezEstrada, Alicia I. 1997. “Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez: Images on and off the Screen, 1925–1944.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, 475–492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
The Hispanic Women’s League in Buffalo, New York. Standing from left to right: Juanita Negrón, Lillian Orsini, Susan González, and Blanca Rodríguez. Sitting from left to right: Margarita Santiago, Carmen Del Valle, and Rosa Avilés. Courtesy of Blanca Rodríguez.
DEL VALLE, CARMEN (1949–1995) Family therapist and activist Carmen del Valle, originally from the town of Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, came to live in the area of Lackawanna, New York, in 1952 at the age of five with her mother and thirteen brothers and sisters. Like many other Puerto Rican families who migrated to the northeastern corridor of the United States, they were casualties of the commonwealth government’s economic strategy for industrialization called Operation Bootstrap. Doña María del Valle, Carmen’s mother, worked in the garment industry and by herself raised her thirteen children in the town of Lackawanna. Carmen’s life is a testimony to the success of her mother’s struggles. Del Valle had a sense of pride in her cultural heritage as well as a strong belief in women’s ability to contribute to the betterment of the Hispanic community in Buffalo. She believed in the role of education and women’s solidarity as instrumental elements to transform the social conditions facing Hispanic women and their families in the United States. She was a passionate advocate in Buffalo’s West Side, the heart of the Puerto Rican community, on issues of education, women’s health, and violence against women and in the promotion of programs strengthening Puerto Rican identity and cultural pride. It was her strong leadership that led her to be a cofounder of the Hispanic Women’s League/la Liga de Mujeres Hispanas and the Hispanic Network of Health and Human Services. To this day these groups remain active and well recognized by the community of western New York.
Del Valle, like many other Hispanic women, had to manage her academic career while working and raising two daughters. In 1975 she received a bachelor of science degree with a concentration in social work, and four years later she earned a master’s degree in social work from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She was a recipient of the Outstanding Student Award from the School of Social Work. She then joined the Child and Family Services of Buffalo, where she had completed her fieldwork as a graduate student. She became the first Hispanic woman in Buffalo to obtain certification as a social worker. She worked for this agency for twelve years and during that time became the first Hispanic woman to be the director of the West Side Services Office. In 1994 del Valle and her staff received an award from the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy in New York State for their work toward cultural diversity in family therapy. In 1979, the year she earned her master’s degree, Del Valle founded the Hispanic Professional Women’s League with the help of a small group of Hispanic women, María Rosa-Rey, Sara Norat, Lillian Orsini, and Carmen Faccio. Reminiscing about the origins of the league’s work in her speech as outgoing president in 1989, she recalled: “In 1979, a group of Hispanic women, mainly educators and social workers, responded to an editorial opposing bilingual education. The need for an organization to address issues in the Hispanic community from a women’s perspective be-
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Delgado, Jane L. came apparent and the Hispanic Professional Women’s League was born. That year a group of Hispanic women (who) were educators and social workers banded together to oppose an attack on bilingual education. We recognized that the needs of the Hispanic Community went beyond that one event, so we decided to build an ongoing organization which could address issues in our community from a women’s perspective.” In 1983 the group changed its name to the Hispanic Women’s League, recognizing the excluding connotations and class difference established by the word “Professional.” Del Valle also helped develop and establish the league’s scholarship program to help Hispanic women pursue higher education. In 1990 Del Valle assumed the position of trainer for the Center for Human Services in charge of educating future social workers at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. She became one of the first Hispanic women leaders in the Buffalo area, and her legacy is still alive among Hispanic women, community advocates, and health professionals of western New York. Recognizing her legacy of service, on January 19, 1996, the Children’s Hospital of Buffalo named its Women’s and Children’s West Side Health Center in her memory. In 1998 Carmen Del Valle became one of the two Hispanic women included in the Western New York Women’s Hall of Fame, an entity created in order to recognize women who worked to enrich their communities either in the public spotlight or in private. In March 2001 her name became part of the Bricks for Buffalo Women’s Walkway to be located in the Niagara Frontier Transit Authority’s Terminal across the HSBC Arena. In community politics Del Valle was also one of the first women to confront Hispanic male leaders’ limited views on women’s roles and political participation. “She confronted our Hispanic men with their Machismo,” recounts her mother. Her commitment to Puerto Ricans in the island also led her to organize a community-wide campaign for victims of the 1986 mudslide. A plaque in the West Side community clinic honors her legacy with these words: Her actions were those of peace making and bridge building. Her leadership expressed itself in constant joyous discovery of others’ strengths. Her skills as a therapist brought families closer to each other and to the community networks which she recognized to be the source of her own strength. She was our sister, her spirit will be felt here when we support each other’s small efforts and when we take united action. Particularly, then she will be with us smiling.
Carmen Del Valle passed away in 1995 from malignant cancer. Her memory still is a source of strength for women of the Hispanic Women’s League. Her life struggles and actions are part of the history of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic women in Buffalo, New York. SOURCES: Buffalo General Hospital. 2004. “Kaleida Health Dedicates Del Valle Health Center.” June 18. http://bgh.kaleidahealth.org/news/news_display.asp?artID= 39 (accessed June 27, 2005); Del Valle, María. 2001. Oral history interview by Janine Santiago, August 19; “Health Center Honors Late Hispanic Leader.” 1996. Buffalo News, January 19; Rodríguez, Blanca. 2001. Oral history interview by Janine Santiago, August 25; Text on plaque honoring her memory at the Carmen Del Valle West Side Health Center. “Women’s Hall of Fame to Honor Inductees.” 1998. Buffalo News, September 28. Janine Santiago
DELGADO, JANE L. (1953–
)
Jane L. Delgado was born in Havana on June 17, 1953. Two years later she immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, with her mother and sister. She attended local public schools while her mother worked in several factories. Because she spoke little English, her teachers placed her among slow learners in English classes, but recognized her academic strengths and advanced her to the top of her grade in math classes. By third grade Delgado was at the top of her grade in all subjects. In fifth grade, sensing Delgado’s innate ability to listen to and help her classmates, her teacher suggested that she become a psychologist. Delgado skipped eighth grade, took honor classes in high school, increased her course load, graduated from high school in the eleventh grade, and when she was sixteen enrolled in college at the State University of New York, New Paltz. She entered her first professional job in 1973 as an assistant to the editor of the Children’s Television Workshop. There, handing out payroll checks one Friday afternoon, she let colleagues know about her interest in child development and inquired if she could be considered for another position. By Monday Delgado was interviewed for the position of children’s talent coordinator for Sesame Street. In 1975 Delgado left Sesame Street to attend graduate school on a full-time basis. She received a master’s in psychology from New York University that same year and in 1979 began a cross-national longitudinal study on child language development. She also accepted a position with the Immediate Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Believing that social problems require both personal and institutional change, she completed a second master’s degree in urban
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Demography and policy sciences at the W. Averell Harriman School of Urban and Policy Sciences and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1981. By the time she left DHHS in 1985, she had become a key researcher on the “Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Black and Minority Health.” Delgado’s family support and her personal and educational experiences taught her that “health,” particularly among Latinos, requires the integration of body, mind, and spirit. She maintains this philosophy as a practicing psychologist and president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health (the Alliance). Formerly known as the National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Service Organizations (COSSMHO), the Alliance remains the largest and oldest organization of Latino community-based health providers. Delgado has directed the Alliance’s growth. She made environmental health a major program effort by 1988 and initiated the first technology program for community-based organizations in 1991. She has also published ¡Salud! A Latina’s Guide to Total Health (1997). This first health book for Latinas is now in its second printing. Delgado writes a column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She serves as chairperson of the National Health Council and is on the board of directors for the Patient Safety Institute, the Health Care Quality Alliance, and Hispanics and Philanthropy. She is on the honorary board of the Alaska Native Heritage Center and is a trustee for the Foundation for Child Development, the Kresge Foundation and the SUNY New Paltz Foundation and a member of the Carter Center’s Task Force Foundation for Child Development, the National Advisory Council for Mrs. Rosalyn Carter’s Task Force on Mental Health, and the EPA’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee. She is an advisor to the American Academy of Family Physicians and the March of Dimes. Delgado’s work helps everyone. Ladies Home Journal named her one of seven “Women to Watch . . . unsung heroines who are forging ahead to improve our health,” and Hispanic Business listed her as one of the 100 “Most Influential Hispanics” in 1988. She was awarded the Community Leadership Award in 1996 from the Puerto Rican Family Insitute, the Dr. Harvey Wiley Award in 1995, the Carter-Bumpers Award in 1995, and Las Primeras Award in 1994 from the Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA). While Delgado works well over sixty-five hours per week, she has a healthy family life. Her husband, Mark, and her daughter, Elizabeth, not only support her, but also see Delgado’s work as their own. Together they try to move “humanness forward” and promote cooperation among people and cultures.
SOURCES: AuthorTracker. “Jane L. Delgado.” http:// www.authortracker.com/author.asp?a=authorid&b=2428 (accessed July 22, 2004); Delgado, Jane L. 2004. Interview by Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, April 27; LDI (the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics). “Jane L. Delgado.” http://www .upenn.edu/ldi/delgado.html (accessed July 22, 2004). Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
DEMOGRAPHY Demographers often use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to identify changes in the population of the United States, including Latinos and Latinas. The first official counting of the U.S. population, which took place in 1790, fulfilled the constitutional mandate to apportion political representation and to collect taxes. However, there was no explicit manner of collecting information about any Latino ethnicity in the decennial census until 1930, when Mexican was included as an option in the question about race. Since 1930 there have been dramatic changes in the collection of federal data about the Latino population, including using linguistic criteria and Spanish surname to identify Latinos. Current federal standards call for self-identification by Hispanic descent, national origin, and race. The federal government defines a Hispanic as a “person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture regardless of race.” The U.S. Census Bureau commonly refers to this group as Hispanic, but others prefer to use the term Latino to signify Hispanic men and women and Latina to refer to Hispanic women only. According to the 2000 census, Latinos are concentrated in particular areas of the United States. The largest concentrations of Latino men and women are in the West and South, with 43.5 percent and 32.8 percent of all Latinos, respectively, living in those regions. Much lower proportions of the total Latino population live in the American Northeast and Midwest: 15.9 percent and 8.9 percent, respectively. Latinas have similar geographic patterns: 43.5 percent in the West, 32.6 percent in the South, 15.4 percent in the Northeast, and 8.5 percent in the Midwest (see table 1). They are most likely to live in California (31.2 percent), Texas (19.1 percent), New York (8.5 percent), and Florida (7.8 percent). Like Latinas, Asian women, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NHPI) women, and American Indian or Alaskan Native (AIAN) women also prefer the West (49.4 percent, 76.6 percent, and 48.2 percent, respectively). However, the regional distribution of Latinas is quite different from those of Caucasian and African American women. Indeed, non-Hispanic white women are more equally distributed across regions of
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Table 1 Regional Distribution of Women by Race and Hispanic Origin, 2000
Midwest Northeast South West
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
NonHispanic White
African American
8.5% 15.4% 32.6% 43.5%
26.9% 20.5% 33.9% 18.7%
18.8% 17.9% 55.0% 8.4%
Asian
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander
American Indian or Alaskan Native
11.5% 20.3% 18.8% 49.4%
5.6% 5.3% 12.5% 76.6%
16.1% 6.5% 29.2% 48.2%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census 2000 SF1, Tables P12 b, c, d, e, h, i.
the United States, but tend to prefer the South (33.9 percent). African American women are also concentrated in the South (55.0 percent), though significant proportions live in the Midwest and Northeast. As was true for the total Latino population in the United States in 2000, the majority of Latinas are of Mexican origin. Indeed, the March 2000 Current Population Survey (CPS), another census data source, indicates that approximately 64.6 percent of Latinas are Mexican. Significant proportions of Latinas are Puerto Rican (9.1 percent), Cuban (4.1 percent), Central and South American (15.4 percent), and of other Hispanic origins (6.7 percent). Census 2000 data about the total Latino population suggest that the largest Central and South American groups in the United States are Colombians, Dominicans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans. The age, marital status, and household composition of Latinas are also noteworthy. Latinas are a young population: the median age of Latinas is 26.3 years. The majority of Latinas over fifteen years old in 2000, 54.3 percent, are married. Far fewer are never married (31.4 percent), widowed (5.6 percent), or divorced (8.7 percent). Further, Latinas living in family households in 2000 tend to be members of married-couple households with at least one child (67.4 percent). Female-
headed households are the next most prominent type of Latino family households (32.4 percent). Latinas have higher fertility than women of other racial and ethnic groups. A 2002 National Vital Statistics Report documents that in 2000 the fertility rate of Latinas was 105.9, compared to 58.5 for non-Hispanic white women and 73.7 for non-Hispanic black women. There is significant variation in the fertility rate of Latinas. For example, Cuban women have fertility rates that are even lower than those of non-Hispanic white women, 57.3, while Mexican women have the highest fertility rates of all Latinas, 115.1. Table 2 presents the number of children ever born for Latinas, non-Hispanic white women, African American women, and Asian and Pacific Islander women. At every age Latinas have significantly more children, with the exception of African American women fifteen to twenty-four years old. The educational attainment of Latinas and other women is also important, given the relationship between education, occupation, income, health, and other factors. In general, Latinas have the lowest levels of education of all women (see table 3). For example, 27.2 percent of Latinas have less than a ninth-grade education, compared with 4.6 percent of non-Hispanic white women, 7.7 percent of African American
Table 2 Children Born per 1,000 Women by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin, June 2000
Women 15 to 24 years old Women 25 to 34 years old Women 35 to 44 years old
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
Non-Hispanic White
African American
Asian and Pacific Islander
535 1,724 2,351
270 1,183 1,798
529 1,589 1,937
214 868 1,684
Source: Bachu and Martin O’Connell (2001), Table 3.
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Table 3 Educational Attainment for the Female Population 25 Years Old and Over by Race, 2000
Less than 9th grade 9th to 12th grade, no diploma High-school graduate (includes equivalency) Some college, no degree Associate’s degree Bachelor’s degree Graduate or professional degree
Asian
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander
American Indian or Alaskan Native
7.7% 19.0% 28.4%
12.9% 9.3% 17.1%
7.7% 13.9% 34.6%
10.8% 17.5% 28.3%
23.4% 6.3% 10.0% 5.2%
13.4% 7.0% 27.2% 13.2%
23.5% 7.3% 9.3% 3.8%
24.7% 7.2% 7.8% 3.8%
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
Non-Hispanic White
African American
27.2% 18.7% 22.4%
4.6% 10.0% 31.4%
16.2% 4.7% 7.0% 3.7%
22.2% 7.1% 16.3% 8.5%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census 2000 SF3, Tables P148 b, c, d, e, h, i.
women, 12.9 percent of Asian women, 7.7 percent of NHPI women, and 10.8 percent of AIAN women. Moreover, Latinas are significantly less likely to have bachelor’s degrees (7.0 percent) than women of nonHispanic white (16.3 percent), African American (10.0 percent), Asian (27.2 percent) or NHPI (9.3 percent) origins. In sum, with only a few exceptions, Latinas are significantly less educated than non-Latinas. Latinas vary with respect to education level by national origin. As shown in table 4 and verified by analyses of sampling variability, Mexican-origin women have significantly lower levels of educational attainment than other Latinas. For example, approximately 32.2 percent of Mexican women have less than a ninth-grade education, compared with 16.9 percent of Puerto Rican women, 20.0 percent of Cuban women,
23.5 percent of Central and South American women, and 16.4 percent of other Hispanic women. This variation between Mexican women and other Latinas is also present and statistically significant at the highest levels of education. However, other analyses document that there are no statistically significant differences between the educational attainment of Puerto Rican women and women of other Hispanic origins and between Cuban women and their Central and South American counterparts. Therefore, variation by national origin in educational attainment among Latinas is primarily present between Mexican women and non-Mexican Latinas. Census 2000 data (not shown) indicate that Latinas have lower labor-force participation than women of other racial and ethnic groups. For example, 47.2 per-
Table 4 Educational Attainment by Hispanic Origin, Female Population 25 Years Old and Over, 2000
Less than 9th grade 9th to 12th grade, no diploma High-school graduate (includes equivalency) Some college or associate’s degree Bachelor’s degree Advanced degree
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
Cuban
Central and South American
Other Hispanic Women
16.9% 17.7% 29.3%
20.0% 9.2% 33.6%
23.5% 13.0% 28.8%
16.4% 14.0% 32.5%
23.8% 7.8% 4.5%
15.5% 12.3% 9.5%
17.4% 11.8% 5.4%
25.2% 8.0% 4.0%
Mexican
Puerto Rican
27.4% 15.1% 27.6%
32.2% 16.0% 25.7%
19.4% 7.3% 3.3%
18.9% 5.3% 1.8%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, March 2000 Current Population Survey, Table 7.3. Note: Percentages are rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent; therefore, the percentages in a distribution do not always add to exactly 100 percent.
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Table 5 Major Occupation Groups of the Employed Civilian Female Population 16 Years and Over, March 2000
Managerial and professional Technical, sales, and administrative support Service occupations Precision production, craft, and repair Operators, fabricators, and laborers Farming, forestry, and fishing
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
Non-Hispanic White
African American
Asian and Pacific Islander
17.8% 38.0% 25.9% 3.3% 13.1% 1.9%
34.6% 41.3% 15.4% 2.1% 5.4% 1.3%
25.2% 38.0% 25.8% 2.0% 9.0% 0.1%
38.7% 32.4% 17.7% 2.7% 8.1% 0.4%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, March 2000 CPS, Table 10.3, Table 11.
cent of Latinas were employed in the civilian labor force in 2000, significantly lower than their nonHispanic white (55.3 percent), African American (52.8 percent), Asian (53.3 percent), NHPI (53.8 percent), and AIAN (50.0 percent) peers. In addition, there is significant variation in the labor-force participation of Latinas by national origin. Approximately 50.3 percent of Mexican women, 55.5 percent of Puerto Rican women, 47.2 percent of Cuban women, 57.4 percent of Central and South American women, and 57.9 percent of other Hispanic women were employed in the civilian workforce in 2000. Statistical analyses confirm that Latinas differ in their labor-force participation rates. For example, Central and South American women are significantly more likely to be employed than their Cuban and Puerto Rican counterparts. The types of occupations in which Latinas are employed are important, because there can be significant differences in income, job stability, and employee benefits by occupation. In general, Latinas in the civilian labor force tend to be concentrated in three primary occupational groups: managerial and professional occupations (17.8 percent), technical, sales, and administrative support occupations (38.0 percent), and service occupations (25.9 percent) (see table 5). However, Latinas are less likely to be employed in managerial and professional occupations but more likely to work in precision production, as operators, and in agricultural occupations than non-Hispanic white, African American, and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) women. Approximately 38 percent of Latinas and African American women are employed in technical, sales, and administrative support, and these groups have similar rates of employment in service occupations (25.9 percent and 25.8 percent, respectively). NonHispanic white women and API women are far less likely to hold such positions (15.4 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively).
Latinas differ in occupation by national origin (see table 6). For example, Puerto Rican women are significantly more likely to be employed in professional specialty (11.2 percent) or administrative support (29.9 percent) occupations than Central and South American women (8.0 percent and 18.6 percent). Further, some Latinas are more likely to be associated with particular occupations than their other Latina peers. For instance, significantly higher percentages of Mexican women work in farming (2.8 percent) than nonMexican Latinas. Similarly, Central and South American women are more likely to be working as service workers in private households (9.4 percent) than their other Latina counterparts. Thus there is significant heterogeneity in the occupations in which Latinas are employed. According to 2000 census data, the median earnings of Latinas in 1999 who worked full-time, yearround were $21,634. Latinas earn the lowest annual incomes of nearly all racial and ethnic groups (see table 7). For instance, approximately 43.8 percent of all Latinas earned less than $19,999 in 1999, a significantly higher percentage than women of non-Hispanic white (25.1 percent), African American (32.0 percent), Asian (32.4 percent), or NHPI (30.3 percent) origins. The differences in earnings between Latinas and AIAN women are not statistically significant. As is true with education and occupation, the annual incomes of Latinas vary by national origin. For example, 55.8 percent of Mexican women working fulltime and year-round earned less than $19,999 in 1999 (see table 8). Analyses of sampling variability, not shown here, indicate that significantly higher proportions of Mexican women earn less than $19,999 compared with their Puerto Rican (40.9 percent) and other Hispanic (42.5 percent) counterparts. Variation also exists for Latinas at the highest incomes. For example, Central and South American women (8.6 percent) are
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Table 6 Detailed Occupation of the Employed Civilian Latina Population 16 Years and Over by Hispanic Origin, March 2000 Hispanic Origin (of any race) Executive, administrators, and managerial Professional specialty Technical and related support Sales Administrative support, including clerical Precision production, craft, and repair Machine operators, assemblers, and inspectors Transportation and material moving Handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers Service workers, private household Service workers, except private household Farming, forestry, and fishing
Cuban
Central and South American
Other Hispanic
8.7% 11.2% 3.4% 13.2% 29.9% 2.6% 7.8%
12.1% 13.7% 2.6% 15.1% 27.5% 1.3% 8.4%
8.0% 9.4% 2.4% 10.8% 18.6% 2.9% 10.0%
9.8% 13.8% 3.1% 12.3% 25.3% 1.6% 7.2%
0.7% 2.8%
0.0% 2.6%
0.0% 2.6%
0.9% 3.1%
1.1% 2.2%
3.3% 22.4% 2.8%
0.9% 19.6% 0.1%
2.9% 13.9% 0.0%
9.4% 23.6% 0.8%
2.0% 21.3% 0.6%
Mexican
Puerto Rican
9.0% 8.9% 3.0% 11.6% 23.4% 3.3% 9.6%
9.0% 7.7% 3.1% 11.2% 23.3% 4.0% 10.2%
0.7% 2.8% 4.1% 21.9% 1.9%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, March 2000 CPS, Table 10.6.
more likely to earn more than $50,000 compared with Mexican women (4.1 percent), a difference that is statistically significant. Variation in income by national origin for Latinas may reflect heterogeneity in educational attainment and other characteristics not explored here, such as nativity. In conclusion, the 2000 demographic data for Latina and other women presented here point to at least two important findings. First, statistical analyses of 2000 census and 2000 CPS data document that for many demographic characteristics, Latinas vary significantly from other women in the United States. Unfortunately, the results indicate that Latinas fare worse than other women on a variety of dimensions.
For example, Latinas tend to have the lowest educational attainments and incomes of all women. These trends indicate that improving the economic mobility of Latinas is critical. Second, the analyses confirm that there is significant heterogeneity in the demography of Latinas, which underscores the value of disaggregating Latinas by national origin. Further, substantial research has documented variation among Latinas by nativity. Thus it would also be important to compare these demographic characteristics for U.S.- and foreign-born Latinas. In sum, these findings highlight the need for further study of how women in the United States, especially Latinas, differ by race and national origin.
Table 7 Earnings for Females 16 Years and Over Who Worked Full-Time, Year-Round in 1999
Under $19,999 $20,000 to $29,999 $30,000 to $39,999 $40,000 to $49,999 Over $50,000
Hispanic Origin (of any race)
Non-Hispanic White
African American
43.8% 27.4% 14.6% 6.5% 7.8%
25.1% 28.6% 19.8% 10.9% 15.6%
32.0% 30.4% 18.1% 8.9% 10.6%
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census 2000 SF3, Tables PCT73 b, c, d, e, h, i.
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Asian
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander
American Indian or Alaskan Native
32.4% 23.6% 18.0% 11.8% 23.2%
30.3% 32.4% 18.9% 8.4% 10.0%
38.9% 30.6% 15.6% 7.0% 7.9%
Deportations during the Great Depression
Table 8 Earnings of Full-Time Year-Round Female Workers 15 Years and Over by Hispanic Origin, 1999
Under $19,999 $20,000 to $24,999 $25,000 to $34,999 $35,000 to $49,999 Over $50,000
Hispanic Origin (of any race) 51.7% 14.1% 16.7% 11.5% 5.9%
Mexican
Puerto Rican
55.8% 13.6% 15.7% 10.7% 4.1%
40.9% 15.0% 22.7% 13.7% 7.6%
SOURCES: Bachu, Amara, and Martin O’Connell. 2001. Fertility of American Women: June 2000. Current Population Reports, P20-543RV. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p20-543rv.pdf (accessed February 19, 2003); Guzmán, Betsy. 2001. The Hispanic Population: Census 2000 Brief. U.S. Bureau of the Census. May. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-3.pdf (accessed February 19, 2003); Therrien, Melissa, and Roberto R. Ramirez. 2000. The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2000. Current Population Reports, P20-535. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census. June 2003. The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2002. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. ———. (2001). 2000 Census of Population and Housing. Summary File 1 (SF1), 100-Percent Data and Summary File 3 (SF3), 5-Percent Data. http://fact finder.census.gov/ (accessed February 19, 2003). Eileen Diaz McConnell
DEPORTATIONS DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION On Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2003, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer became the first national television news program to present a dark and tragic chapter of American history—the unconstitutional deportation and repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans—to the American public. A survivor of this horrific experience was María Ofelia Acosta, who testified to the viewers how her parents, legal residents of the United States, and their American-born children were rounded up for deportation to Mexico. “I could have gone to school . . . my sisters and brothers. I could have had a better life,” she lamented. Still, Acosta is convinced that recent legal action on behalf of the survivors for reparations will never remedy the injustice. “No money can pay for that.” She wants only that the American public recognize this wrong. Along with Acosta, thousands of other women experienced unconstitutional deportation and coerced emigration
Cuban
Central and South American
Other Hispanic
40.3% 11.8% 20.2% 16.3% 11.4%
51.5% 14.2% 14.1% 11.6% 8.6%
42.5% 18.4% 20.0% 11.2% 8.0%
wherein federal, state, and local authorities captured between 1 and 2 million persons for forced expulsion to Mexico. Even before the deportation campaigns Mexican and Mexican American women were battling the economic crisis of the Great Depression at home and in the workplace. In many Mexican families women were responsible for handling family finances. Vera Gody remembered that her mother “took care of the money, largely because her father had no time to make decisions. . . . He was either working or looking for work.” Jesusita Solis recalled, “We were accustomed to my handling the household budget.” Many women also worked outside the home in agriculture, canneries, and garment factories. As unemployment spread and more families confronted the pressures of deportation and repatriation, Mexican and Mexican American women were often in charge of preparing for the trip to Mexico. They organized and packed household items. As Emilia Castañeda observed, “A man, well he . . . just packs up his sleeping bag and throws it over his back and that’s good enough for him. Now a woman, she’ll think about whether she wants her sewing machine, her bed, and her dishes.” Women bravely traveled alone without spouses. Adela S. Delgado and her three young daughters drove an old, jam-packed Dodge automobile from Pueblo, Colorado, to Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua. Delgado’s experience was not an isolated case. The San Diego Consulate reported in 1932 that 27 out of 100 repatriation cases consisted of women traveling alone to Mexico. Expulsion from the United States formed only part of the tragic experience of repatriation for Mexican and Mexican American women; adjusting to life in Mexico was another traumatic episode. Many Mexican nationals were returning after a ten-, twenty-, or thirty-year residence in the United States. They encountered a new and different Mexico. U.S.-born women and girls
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Deportations during the Great Depression
The repatriation of Mexican men, women, and children from Los Angeles, March 9, 1932. Courtesy of the Security Pacific Historical Collection. Los Angeles Public Library.
found themselves in a foreign country with a different culture and language. It was not their home. At best, Mexico was only an ancestral home. For women repatriates, living in Mexico was regarded as a struggle against poverty and despair, according to survivors Emilia Castañeda and María Ofelia Acosta. It was not the “Mexico, lindo y querido” (Beautiful and Beloved Mexico) celebrated in song and folklore. One reason for adjustment difficulties was that Mexico itself was undergoing the Great Depression. Employment opportunities for the Mexican working class were limited. It therefore was not surprising that Mexican workers disdained repatriates as unfair competition. Some upper- and middle-class Mexican families, however, welcomed young repatriate women who could be hired inexpensively as English-language tutors for their children. With few jobs available, most repatriates resorted to living with relatives, who often despised them as additional and unwanted burdens. Living conditions were deplorable and crowded, especially for women and girls, who were regarded as responsible for maintaining the home. One woman remembered that as a young girl, “We just had a bedroom for all of us [the entire family].” Another survivor recalled that “We used to have to sleep outdoors. . . . If it rained we couldn’t go into the house.” Further conflict occurred because many women repatriates were used to American household appliances and conveniences, such as washing machines, sewing machines, and gas stoves. This created tension between repatriate women and
their Mexican and other relatives who favored the traditional ways of doing housework. Outside the home women encountered little freedom of movement and expression. Many women had either grown accustomed to the more liberal ways of American society or had difficulty conforming to a more conservative Mexican lifestyle. They were frequently criticized for their American dress and appearance, including bobbed hair, nail polish, lipstick, and other cosmetics. “The people didn’t like the way I dressed. . . . They didn’t like for us to wear lipstick, rouge, or anything,” Teresa Martínez recalled. Mexican modesty required that mothers and daughters not appear to be loose women. Language emerged as a particularly sensitive issue because children frequently lacked Spanish fluency and had difficulties communicating. Carmen Martínez recalled that she “spoke very little Spanish in the United States and learned to read and write in Spanish in Mexico.” Moreover, schools in the United States frequently disciplined children who spoke Spanish. “The school teachers used to tell us that we shouldn’t be speaking Spanish. We used to get scolded and told that we shouldn’t speak Spanish but that we had to speak English,” Emilia Castañeda said of her school experience in Los Angeles. Some repatriate women and girls therefore endured name-calling that criticized them as pochas, tejanas, or even gringas. Many women repatriates maintained their American identity and dreamed of returning to the country of their birth. Teresa Martínez recalled: “I would always
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DiMartino, Rita say, oh what if I could go back to my country again. . . . I always had intentions of going back home.” At the beginning of World War II the need for workers encouraged some repatriation survivors to return to the United States. Emilia Castañeda, for example, remembered her trip on a “crowded train coming back to the United States. . . . There was no place to sit down since servicemen came first.” The servicemen regarded Castañeda as a “novelty” and were “surprised” that she could speak English. Yet she never forgot “the fact that I was an American citizen.” Some seventy years after the repatriation drives, women survivors are still defending their American citizenship and identity by lobbying local, state, and federal authorities for recognition of the deportation injustice. With the support of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund they also have played key roles in filing the lawsuit Emilia Castañeda v. the State of California, County of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Though filed on July 15, 2003, the suit has since been withdrawn to avoid an unfavorable ruling given that previous legislation that would have extended the statute of limitations failed. Two years later, a similar bill was passed by members of the California Senate and is being considered in the California Assembly. If this bill is approved and signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, MALDEF intends to re-file the law suit. Whatever the legislative and legal outcome, the courage and strength of women repatriation survivors remain unquestioned. SOURCES: Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. 1995. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Carreras de Velasco, Mercedes. 1974. Los Mexicanos que devolvió la crisis, 1929–1932. México, D.F.: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores; Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. 1994. Mexican Workers and the American Dream: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Hoffman, Abraham. 1974. Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929– 1939. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Sánchez, George. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Francisco Balderrama
DIMARTINO, RITA (1937–
)
Rita DiMartino, a prominent Latina in business and politics, was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on March 7, 1937, and was raised there. Her parents, Juan Dendariarena and Frances Cruz Dendariarena, migrated to New York City from Puerto Rico in the early years of the
Great Depression. Like many others who migrated in that era, they arrived with the aspiration of economic stability. Juan worked for the Fisher Company in New York as a machinist in 1927. Frances arrived in New York City in 1932 on the ship Coamo and worked for some time at the Emerson Company in New Jersey. After marriage Frances became a homemaker for her family. When her husband passed away, she was left to raise six girls on her own. Serving as a role model to her daughters, she spent her time teaching Bible school to children, played the piano at church, and was the church organist. Frances made it a priority to ensure that her daughters were instilled with strong work ethics, the value of education, and respect for the church. This influence has followed DiMartino throughout her life and has contributed to her successes, ambition, and prominence today. Rita DiMartino graduated from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, New York. Shortly thereafter, in 1957, she married and started a family. While she was raising her three children, Vickie Ann, Anthony, and Celeste, she continued to work and became politically active. While she was employed as a legal secretary and assistant to the party chairman of the Republican Party, her interest in politics grew. DiMartino’s responsibilities included administrative duties, inspecting the voting polls during campaigns, and serving as a translator. Her involvement encouraged her to begin her own Spanish American Republican Club. Early in her life she recognized that the best way to help people in all areas was by becoming involved in politics. A good role model for her children, as her mother had been for her, DiMartino returned to school to further her education. Although this meant sacrificing time spent with her family, DiMartino still managed to create a balance that enabled her to be the positive role model her children needed. Despite many obstacles, in 1974 DiMartino earned an associate’s degree at Richmond College. Currently she holds a bachelor of arts from the College of Staten Island, a master’s in political administration from Long Island University (C. W. Post), and an honorary doctorate of civil law from Dowling College. In addition, she completed courses at the Harvard Business School and at the University of California at Berkeley in leadership and executive management programs. When DiMartino graduated from college, her involvement in politics made it easier for her to find a job that took her out of the secretarial slot. She was placed into a senior business consultantship position at the New York State Department of Commerce’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise. She worked there for some time before taking time off to work with Perry Duryea on a gubernatorial campaign in 1978 despite the risk to her job; if her candidate lost, she too would
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Dimas, Beatrice Escadero need to look for a new job. Perry Duryea was not successful and lost the election; DiMartino was faced with seeking new employment. In 1979 DiMartino was hired at AT&T in public relations, where she worked for the next twenty-five years. Once again drawing upon persistence and dedication, she climbed the ranks at AT&T and was promoted to the Government Affairs division and eventually to vice president of congressional relations. In this role DiMartino developed fruitful relations with the administration, the U.S. Congress, and state governments. She consistently met with members of Congress and advocated for AT&T’s interests. Maintaining an interest in Hispanic affairs, she served as a resource for the company, providing leadership and counseling. In 1982 she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as an ambassador to the UNICEF Executive Board. As the U.S. representative, DiMartino helped increase financial support and the program’s agenda in areas of child health, nutrition, water supply, sanitation, and education. Presently DiMartino serves on numerous boards and councils representing the voice of Latinos worldwide, including the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY), the Hispanic Council on Foreign Relations, the Cuban American National Council, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Ana G. Méndez University System, the William J. Fulbright Scholarship, and the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. She is also a delegate to the
Inter-American Commission of Children and the InterAmerican Commission of Women. An active participant on these boards, DiMartino is serving her Latino/a community and setting an example. Rita DiMartino’s accomplishments continue to mold the history of Latinas all over the world. Continuously setting new goals for herself, she has made an impact, and future achievements may include lobbying for an ambassadorship in Latin America or becoming the Treasurer of the United States. She advises anyone looking to follow in her footsteps to never get discouraged, to set goals, and always to remember to lend a helping hand to others. These are the qualities that enabled her to succeed and are the true qualities of a leader. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: College of Station Island (CSI) News and Media. 2003. “Island Republican to join CUNY Board of Trustees.” June 8. http://www.csinews.net/IntheNews/061 803dimartino.html (accessed August 30, 2004); DiMartino, Rita. 2003. Oral history interview by Jorivette Quintana. December 15; DiMartino, Rita. 2003. Résumé, biography, and political profile; Organization of American States, 2002. “United States Appoints New Chief Delegate to OAS Women’s Commission.” February 21. http://www.oas.org/OASpage/press_ releases/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-035/02 (accessed August 30, 2004). Jorivette Quintana
DIMAS, BEATRICE ESCADERO (1923– )
Prominent Latina businesswoman and politician Rita DiMartino, 2004. Photograph by and courtesy of Jorivette Quintand.
Raised under a strict father on border farms on the outskirts of El Paso and Clint, Texas, young Beatrice Escadero hardly had time for social events. But as fate would have it, on February 14, 1942, her father allowed her to attend a fiesta at the small San Antonio Church in El Paso. Most of her friends, as well as soldiers from nearby Fort Bliss, were in attendance. She must have looked stunning to catch the attention of a soldier whose country was in the middle of the greatest war the world had ever seen, World War II. Although he did not exactly ask the girl in the fitted pink dress to be his Valentine, Alfred Dimas did have plans for the two of them. “He said, ‘See that girl in the pink dress and the beautiful legs? I’m going to marry her,’ ” recalled Escadero Dimas about her husband. “And he did.” Beatrice and her friends agreed that young Alfred looked handsome in his uniform, but she does not remember what caught her eye. “But I know that I liked him,” she said. After a few months of dating, closely monitored by her father, the two were wed on July 22, 1942, although her mother did not want her to marry. “My mother said it wasn’t going to work out because he was in the service,” Escadero Dimas said. “But here I am, married 61 years to the man!”
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Dimas, Beatrice Escadero
Alfred and Beatrice Dimas, circa 1940s. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
Alfred Dimas had enlisted in the cavalry at Fort Bliss, but shortly after the marriage he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia. There he became a paratrooper and later was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland. After arriving at Fort Meade, he sent for his wife, who had been living with her in-laws. The young girl from El Paso traveled across the country by herself to be with the man she loved. While the experience was traumatic, she said, it was necessary. “You don’t say this is bad, this is wrong,” Escadero Dimas said. “You just don’t.” It was in Maryland that the young couple found out they were going to have a child. After giving birth to a baby boy in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by Alfred Dimas’s family, Escadero Dimas returned to Fort Meade. For a small woman like Escadero Dimas, traveling across the country with a baby by railroad was a difficult task. Soon she began to travel with other women and mothers to and from the fort. Together they made the experience easier for one another to handle. But greater hardships lay ahead. While he was jumping out of an airplane, Alfred Dimas’s parachute malfunctioned, and the harsh landing left him permanently disabled. Because of the injury, he never went overseas to fight against the Axis powers. After the accident Alfred Dimas was confined to a
resort that had been turned into a military hospital in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. He was released from the army on October 31, 1945, and had the choice to go to Florida or Arizona. He picked the latter in order to be with his family. Times were difficult after the war for the Dimas family. “We didn’t have a home to live,” Escadero Dimas said. “It was bad for us—the veterans and the wives. There are a lot of agencies nowadays, but we didn’t have that. We called the City of Phoenix, and three months after that they called back and said they still didn’t have anything for us.” They were thankful, she said, that her in-laws were building a home and allowed them to live in it, though it was not complete. “Luckily for us, (my husband) was highly intelligent and got a job,” Escadero Dimas recalls. “But it was very sad for us.” Her husband was able to acquire a loan from the Veterans Administration in 1950, and the couple built a house of their own in Phoenix. Escadero Dimas had been through hard times before. During the depression her family had to sell their land and livestock to survive. She and her eight brothers and sisters were forced to quit school and help out in the cotton fields of Clint. Through the tiny radio her parents owned, she learned about the stifling effects of the Great Depression. “I could hear the news. Everybody was perishing; everybody had to move.” From that point on, Beatrice Dimas was determined to go back to school. After she and her husband settled in Arizona, Alfred Dimas attended school on the GI Bill and learned the art of leather crafting. Beatrice Dimas, like many women of the time, stayed home to take care of the house and children. However, in the 1970s her determination won out, and she decided to finish her education. After receiving her GED in 1973, she enrolled in Glendale Community College. In 1985 she received her associate’s degree with a major in Spanish and a minor in psychology. For her, graduation was very fulfilling. “I was going to go back and finish my studies and my education,” said Beatrice Dimas, “because I loved school.” Today, she says, she loves her husband even more, and they still learn many things from each other. “I have never fallen out of love with that fellow,” Beatrice Dimas remarks. Alfred Dimas has been a hardworking person who has provided their family with a beautiful life. Recently the couple was honored at their granddaughter’s wedding. The day marked their sixtieth anniversary. Beatrice Dimas attributes their long life together to overcoming each other’s differences and remaining in love. See also World War II SOURCES: Alexander, Jonathan. 2003. “Love Helped Wife Endure Hardships.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Lati-
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Domestic Violence nas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring); Dimas, Beatrice. 2003. Interview by Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, Vets Center, Phoenix, Arizona, January 4.
Jonathan Alexander
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Intimate partner violence (IPV) has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. It is estimated that 30 to 40 percent of non-Hispanic American women have suffered violence in their intimate relationships. Among Latinas of diverse national origins, estimates range from 50 to 60 percent. These figures refer to heterosexual relationships. Accurate data on the extent of IPV among Anglo gays and lesbians are scarce and for Latina lesbians nonexistent. The legal definition of IPV includes the use of physical violence, sexual violence or coercion, and emotional or psychological abuse against a partner or spouse. In addition, when violence is present in intimate associations, a number of relational dynamics occur that are considered abusive as well. Among these are control of finances, thus limiting women’s access to money; restriction of freedom and isolation such that women are not allowed to have friends, visits, or family contact; and threats and intimidation intended to control women’s behavior through fear. At the core of IPV is one partner’s use of power tactics in order to control the other. IPV is a cycle that occurs when pent-up frustration and stress are not managed or released in appropriate ways and explode in an act of violence toward an intimate partner. Generally, after the first few incidents the aggressor asks forgiveness and expresses shame and remorse. This may be followed by a honeymoon phase during which the couple believes that it will never happen again. However, violence is likely to recur. The cycle is repetitive and episodic. The victims of violence come to live in fear, experience hypervigilance, and try to anticipate the aggressor’s mood and predict when the next assault will come. Over time the cycle is likely to escalate, with a commensurate increase in fear, distancing, and psychological distress among the family members. Being a victim of IPV engenders feelings of shame, guilt, and culpability. Secrecy may surround the situation, further increasing the isolation of those who suffer it and rendering them more vulnerable to continuing assaults. Unless outside intervention occurs, the cycle is not likely to end on its own. A number of etiological explanations can be found in the literature for the occurrence of IPV among heterosexual couples. Psychological theories grounded in psychodynamic notions posit that at the root of male violence against women is fear of women and depen-
dency needs that are masked through tactics to attain power and control. These theories also suggest that women do not leave abusive relationships because of their own psychological dependency needs, low selfesteem, and the “secondary gains” (positive sequelae of being a victim) obtained in abusive relationships. Feminists counter that such theories designate women’s behavior as pathological and excuse male violence. Furthermore, feminist writers argue that males commit violence against women because they can. Until the 1990s IPV was not a crime. In fact, patriarchal notions of male superiority entitled men to rule over their households and “discipline” women and children. Feminists argue that the patriarchal system has legitimized violence against women. British common law, which is the basis of American jurisprudence, included the “rule of thumb.” This meant that a man could hit his wife and children with a stick as long as it was no thicker than his thumb. Feminists argue that violence against women will not cease until the patriarchal system is replaced by one in which gender equity and respect toward women and children are the norm. Other psychologists, informed by learning and behavioral theories, argue that all violence is learned; thus men learn to be violent toward women through social conditioning that allows violence and promotes it through media and from models of violent behaviors by important men in their life. Individuals who have grown up in families where violent or aggressive tactics were used to resolve conflict learn to emulate those behaviors. Since violence is learned, it can be unlearned. In fact, these theories provide the foundation for most treatment programs for men who batter. Family systems theorists propose that IPV can be explained in terms of relationship dynamics, family rules and roles, and learned intergenerational patterns. Families with rigid sex roles, strict adherence to traditional values, hierarchical patterns of communication, and aggressive family members run the risk of members behaving violently toward one another. Moreover, system theories view intimate partner violence as dyadic; that is, it must be understood not just as men behaving violently, but also as a series of transactions between intimates in a relationship that culminate in violence. The danger in this analysis is ultimately blaming women for the violence that they suffer. Family theorists argue, however, that intimate partner violence is a very complex situation that must be understood in terms of the individual psychology of the partners, the family environment, organization, and structure, and the larger social context within which families form and function. Intergenerational family theorists expand the lens of analysis to look at how issues in the birth family precipitate violence in subsequent generations. Likewise,
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Domestic Violence family disruptions, traumas, or significant losses can influence dysfunctional patterns of relating in subsequent generations. More recently, other theories have challenged both individual and family theorists to consider the influence of injustice, racism, classism, and the impact of migration on the development of IPV. Flores-Ortiz, among others, suggests that in the case of Latinos and other people of color, the violence of men must be understood in terms of the men’s own experience of exploitation and the psychological sequelae of their victimization. Furthermore, specific cultural and family dynamics are viewed as characteristic of Latino families with a problem of violence. Latino cultures emphasize interdependence, respect, loyalty, and sacrifice as a way to maintain harmony in family relationships. Families with a violence problem are families out of balance; the adults, particularly the men, transform these idealized cultural values into dictas: women should be passive and selfsacrificing, children must obey unquestioningly. If the man feels that he has been disrespected, he feels entitled to use violence “to correct” and discipline the woman or child. Within a larger context of racial oppression men of color often aggress against their loved ones as a way to vent their pent-up rage and frustration, sometimes not realizing that they are replicating the violence they suffer at work and in society in their homes. In these families communication suffers; the men are feared and avoided, the women may become depressed or anxious, and the children will learn violent ways of behaving and may use alcohol or other drugs to cope. In Latino families with problems of violence alcohol abuse often is a contributing factor. A number of studies have found that in at least 50 percent of the cases of IPV among Latinas, the men had been drinking prior to or during the assault. Alcohol disinhibits aggression, and the men subsequently may feel remorse but blame the alcohol for their loss of control rather than be accountable for their violence. Women also may blame the substance and not hold the man accountable for his actions. Latina feminists argue that certain Latino cultural factors, in particular, ideals of loyalty, sacrifice for the family, and the gendered expectation that women take care of the emotional needs of men, make it difficult for Latinas to leave abusive relationships. However, few studies have examined how Latinas explain or understand IPV or how violence affects their intimate relationships. Several studies have recently examined how Mexican-origin women on both sides of the border understand IPV and their perceptions of the severity, as well as the prevalence, of IPV in their lives. Peek, McArthur, and Castro (2002) did not find differences
between Mexican and Anglo women in terms of which events were considered severe; however, Mexican women rated most events as less severe than Anglos. In both countries physical violence was perceived as the most severe type of violence, followed by sexual and then emotional violence. Flores-Ortiz, Valdez Curiel, and Andrade Palos’s (2002) study of women from Mexico City and rural Jalisco found that the women did not focus on type of abuse but rather severity of abuse. Specifically, the women did not consider one form of abuse more serious than another but rather categorized it in terms of severity. The most severe forms of abuse included losing consciousness after being struck, partner seeking medical attention after a fight, destroying partner’s property, striking partner with an object that could cause harm, insults that attack self-esteem, sexual coercion utilizing physical force, using weapon (gun, knife) against partner, and pushing or shoving the partner against a wall. Moreover, women who experienced violence in their intimate relationships feared their partners, yet wanted to remain connected to them, perhaps hoping that in time the men would cease their violence. Likewise, women who experienced violence held very traditional cultural views that privileged men over women. These studies underscore the importance of exploring the role of cultural values in the etiology of IPV. Latinas who suffer violence in their intimate relationships rarely leave their partners. Several factors may account for this. Often they lack the economic resources to move out on their own, particularly if they have children. Latinas have less education than other women in the United States and consequently are overrepresented in unskilled jobs. For immigrant Latinas, those who have limited English proficiency, or those who are undocumented, fear of detection and deportation and limited Spanish-language services may impede leaving the batterer. Latinas, like most women, underreport instances of IPV. There are many reasons for this. Cultural values may inhibit reporting, because the woman may feel disloyal to the family. Many Latinas understand the discrimination and racism Latino men experience on a daily basis, feel compassion for them, and may not want to subject them to a legal system that likely will punish the men more severely because of their ethnicity. Thus Latinas may feel that they must protect the men even at the expense of their own safety. In addition, reporting violence often leads to an escalation of the abuse. Most homicides related to IPV occur after the woman has left the batterer. The shame, isolation, and fear that women in violent relationships experience also serve as potent barriers to
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Domestic Workers reporting. Moreover, many women do not disclose the abuse because no one asks, even when the abuse results in physical injuries. Recent efforts at training medical staff to inquire about, assess, and report IPV are promising, since battered Latinas have reported that few medical staff inquired about the cause of their injuries when they sought medical attention. Heterosexual Latinas experience IPV at high rates, yet few seek social services or leave their batterers. There are complex reasons that impede women from leaving abusive relationships, including gender and cultural scripts that promote loyalty and dependence on men and the family. Moreover, barriers to seeking help and reporting must be reduced in order to assist women who live in fear, isolation, and despair. Ultimately IPV must be understood contextually if it is to be treated successfully and eradicated. See also Marianismo and Machismo SOURCES: Carillo, Ricardo, and Jerry Tello. 1998. Family Violence and Men of Color: Healing the Wounded Male Spirit. New York: Springer Publishing; Flores-Ortiz, Yvette. 1993. “La mujer y la violencia: A Culturally Based Model for the Understanding and Treatment of Domestic Violence.” In Chicana Critical Issues, ed. Norma Alarcón, Rafaela Castro, Emma Pérez, Beatríz Pesquera, Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, and Patricia Zavella. Berkeley: Third Woman Press; ———.1997. “Fostering Accountability: A Reconstructive Dialogue with a Couple with a Problem of Violence.” In 101 More Interventions in Family Therapy, ed. Thorana Strever Nelson and Terry S. Trepper. New York: Haworth Press; Flores-Ortiz, Yvette, E. Valdez Curiel, and Patricia Andrade Palos. 2002. “Conflict Resolution among Mexicans in Jalisco and Mexico City.” Research report to UCMEXUS_CONACYT, University of California; Straus, Murray A. and Richard Gelles. 1989. Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers; Walker, Lenore E. 1979. The Battered Woman. New York: Harper and Row. Yvette G. Flores-Ortiz
DOMESTIC WORKERS Domestic work operates as an unregulated field structured by loose, verbal agreements, where rules, rates of pay, pay stubs, and time off are rarely addressed. Since agreements between employers and domestic workers are largely based on oral, unwritten contracts, and domestic work is frequently perceived as an extension of female duties, many employers do not identify themselves as such and fail to draft contracts delineating explicit rules. Thus the boundaries between work and free time often remain blurred, and this places domésticas in precarious, abusive situations in which they experience discrimination, isolation, exploitation, and limited power.
Working to meet standards of cleanliness while attending to child-care duties, domestic workers routinely perform multiple jobs for the price of one. In exchange for around $250 a week, live-in domésticas confess to toiling for as long as twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and even during holidays. Sleeping in small beds in storage rooms or in cold garages, some domésticas rise before 7:00 A.M. on Saturdays to begin outdoor work. Domestic workers’ duties involve varied and diverse tasks such as changing household linens, emptying and washing refrigerators, dredging and emptying beach sand from bathtubs and showers, knocking down spiderwebs, washing and vacuuming cars, fishing leaves from swimming pools, scouring fishponds, polishing outdoor metal lamps, and using trash bags to collect gutter debris. Some domestic workers are expected to help employers prepare materials for work, such as cutting and laminating shapes for kindergarten classes, and to take children on outings, often spending their own salary on snacks and treats. Domestic workers clean hamster cages, look after family pets, and clean houses, yards, and family cars. Another common complaint is the demand to work during national holidays. Some domésticas labor during national holidays such as Thanksgiving by cleaning up leftovers, tidying up after their employers’ guests, helping cook and prepare the big feast, and even being loaned off to nearby neighbors’ kitchens, where they are also expected to baby-sit while the guests eat. In extreme abusive cases domésticas complain about performing outrageous duties, such as grooming an employer’s toenails and even giving massages. Domésticas conduct tiring and mind-dulling chores, as well as help raise multiple children. The combination of various duties leads to exhaustion and depression by the end of the week. Complaining of sore backs, weak knees, dry hands, and shortness of breath, domésticas stress a different type of aching related to the humiliation of daily food prohibitions; they clean and restock refrigerators and cupboards while always keeping in mind that refrigerated items and gourmet goods are for family consumption only. Domésticas complain of living an invisible existence, excluded from family meals, cleaning without disturbing, blending into the background, and then stepping out into a world where officially they do not exist. Driven north mostly from Central and Latin America by war, poverty, or simply the hope for a better future, they pay high prices to be smuggled into the country by coyotes, or they make the dangerous trip up north as solas. In the United States domésticas often work in gated communities, where they feel sequestered in beautiful but constricting homes, and where they raise
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Dominican American National Roundtable other people’s children while neighbors and extended family look after their own. Because of their vulnerable immigrant status, some live-in domésticas find themselves working under quasi-slave conditions. This setup seems to be more prevalent among those domésticas who are recruited abroad and agree to work for wealthy couples in the United States for an extended period of time. Questioned about their motivation for leaving their countries, many confess that they are influenced by salaries quoted in dollar amounts, representing earnings impossible to match at home. Another motivating factor stems from the sense of safety domestics feel when they are protected by the prospective employers’ ethnic, racial, or religious milieu. Unfortunately, many domésticas courted and recruited abroad have found themselves toiling in sweatshops where they are treated as indentured servants, are forced to labor without wages, and have their passports locked up and their mail screened and withheld. By the time they realize that they have accepted a contractless agreement, and that they lack the financial means to return home, overwhelming feelings of isolation and boredom emerge. Immigrant women lured into domestic positions are easily misled about what their work will entail, how they will be treated, and how much they will get paid. In most abusive cases few domésticas knew where to seek help, and many believe that they have no rights to contest unfair and cruel treatment. In some cases domésticas experience the freedom to leave the workplace and attend classes at local community colleges. The classroom setup has proven extremely helpful and encouraging not only in improving English skills, but, most important, in providing a forum to congregate, forge social ties, and develop supportive communities. The classroom setup offers a space to build friendships and to discuss and compare working environments and pay. For domésticas, to gather at centers is a crucial step toward improving their working conditions, negotiating wages, and learning about workers’ rights. Not all domésticas experience abuse and isolation. Despite the multiple challenges and duties of domestic workers, many make time and find spaces to foster community ties and create social spheres for conversation, laughter, and the promotion of solidarity. For the domésticas who take bus line 576, “the nanny express,” to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Pacific Palisades, the trip represents much more than a ride. This particular bus line, created in 1968 to cut across Los Angeles to get domestic workers to their jobs in the quickest time possible, has developed camaraderie and friendship among longtime riders. The daily bus ride presents an
opportunity to smile, laugh, and celebrate each other’s lives. What keep them stepping on board, sometimes for thirty years, are the dreams that they are creating better lives for their children and grandchildren. This mostly female world offers a place to gossip, pool resources for needy friends, and celebrate birthdays aboard the bus. When the “nanny express” strikes, domésticas experience financial difficulties, since they are forced to stay at their employers’ homes overnight, often without extra pay. Informing domésticas at bus stops and parks about workers’ rights, an organization known as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA) advises on negotiating raises and asserting workers’ needs. Organized immigrant networks such as CHIRLA offer an invaluable array of resources that include English-language classes, legal awareness, and community empowerment. The value of having a place where immigrants can congregate and discuss their particular situations has proven extremely crucial. Whether attending local community college classes or gathering at bus stops, on board bus 576, at a park, or at CHIRLA meetings, domésticas are talking and learning how to keep their jobs while also asserting their rights as workers. SOURCES: Baxter, Kevin. 1997. “The Sunday Profile: Domestic Policy: She Scrubs Floors, Cleans Bathrooms, and Cares for Three Young Girls, All for $200 A Week.” Los Angeles Times, August 31; Gold, Matea. 1997. “Labor Center Seeks to Offer More Than Jobs.” Los Angeles Times, December 15; Healy, Melissa. 1999. “Caring for Our Children: Giving Mary Poppins a Run for Her Money.” Los Angeles Times, July 25; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press; Morrison, Patt. 1995. “Perimeters: A Sweatshop of a Different Sort.” Los Angeles Times, August 30; O’Connor, Anne-Marie. 2000. “A Tough Balancing Act Made More Precarious: For the Nannies Who Care for the Children of LA’s Privileged, the Loss of Bus Service Can Be a Disaster.” Los Angeles Times, September 28; ———. 2001. “Study Offers Complex Portrait of Domestic Workers.” Los Angeles Times, April 11. Soledad Vidal
DOMINICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL ROUNDTABLE (DANR) The Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR) is an advocacy organization created to serve the interests of the Dominican community living in the United States and Puerto Rico. As the first and only national lobbying organization for Dominican Americans, it addresses specific issues on behalf of Dominican Americans in areas concerning immigration, education, civil
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Dueto Carmen y Laura rights, health and aging, economic development, housing, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The organization seeks to empower the Dominican community by offering programs of voter registration drives, leadership institutes, internships, and policy forums. The DANR emerged in 1997 during a meeting in Miami of about 200 Dominican American leaders from different parts of the United States to discuss numerous issues related to Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico. This initial meeting was organized and hosted by a few concerned entities, including the Dominican American National Foundation of South Florida, then under the leadership of Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo. In 1998, at a subsequent meeting held in New York City, Dominican community leaders formed a national interim steering committee charged with developing the structure and agenda of what was to become the Dominican American National Roundtable. A year later the steering committee elected the first board of directors, its officers, and the first president. Since its founding the organization has been active in sponsoring a number of educational programs and advocacy activities. In 2000 DANR was incorporated and set up in Washington, D.C., giving Dominicans a means to provide input on national issues and a way to undo negative stereotypes. The headquarters was opened with the appointment of José Bello, the first and current executive director. In 2002 DANR established the Dominican American Voter Registration Project and has been successful ever since in registering thousands of voters. The Dominican Internship Program, centered in Washington, coordinates summer internship positions for Dominican students seeking professional opportunities. Students are placed in congressional offices, federal agencies, and national or international organizations. The Dominican Leadership Institute serves as a development center that prepares current and upcoming Dominican leaders, especially women, to acquire the necessary organizational skills. In January 2003 Congressman Lincoln DiazBalart of Florida recognized DANR on its fifth anniversary for its contributions to the Dominican American community. DANR also organizes business conferences; the most recent was held as the Dominican American Business Legislative Meeting (2003), where Dominican business leaders met with elected officials to discuss certain policy issues. In the same year DANR organized the first U.S. congressional delegation visit of ten members to the Dominican Republic to meet with the president and other elected officials. As of 2005, DANR has held eight national conferences in such cities as Miami, Providence, New York, and Washington. At the 2003 national conference, held in Atlantic City, the membership discussed important
timely issues: education of youths and underfunded schools, struggles of small businesses, and personal economic struggles and financial independence. In 2004 the national conference held in New York City turned to international issues. Addressing both the merits and drawbacks of free trade, this DANR conference focused on the importance of including the Dominican Republic as a negotiating partner in the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). As noted on its website, the Dominican American National Roundtable is a non-partisan organization dedicated to including “the different voices of all people of Dominican origin in the United States” and to safeguard “for U.S. Dominicans the full exercise of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States of America.” SOURCES: Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR). http://www.danr.org (accessed June 29, 2005); McCoy, Kevin. 1998. “Dominicans Organizing to Raise Their Voice, Flex Political Muscle.” New York Daily News, July 15, 22. José A. Díaz
DUETO CARMEN Y LAURA Carmen y Laura was one of the most popular and successful female Tejana duets in the years after World War II. The two Hernández sisters were born in Kingsville and grew up singing together for their own enjoyment. Carmen was born on October 16, 1921, and Laura was born in 1926. Among the four other children in the family, their brother Lupe was the only one who also displayed musical talent, and he later played the saxophone in some of Carmen y Laura’s recordings. Carmen Hernández married Armando Marroquin of Alice, Texas, in 1936. The shortage of shellac during World War II limited the production of phonograph records. This hurt Armando Marroquin’s business when he had trouble filling the nickelodeons with the Tejano music that was popular with his clientele. He decided to buy recording equipment, and Carmen became his first recording artist. In their kitchen she recorded the new company’s first song, accompanied by Reynaldo Barrera, a blind guitarist. The records were pressed without a label. When Carmen’s sister Laura returned from school in Mexico, Armando Marroquin began to have their records pressed by 4-Star Records in Los Angeles. Although it was expensive, Carmen believes that “it paid off, because we would send the recording and they would send us back 100 or 200 [records] and we would sell them for more and we started making a profit from that.” Soon her husband and Paco Betancourt, a distributor for RCA and Columbia Records of San Benito, formed a partnership and started Ideal Records. Ideal’s first recordings were of
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Durazo, María Elena Carmen y Laura, accompanied by Narciso Martínez, in the kitchen. They did not stay in the kitchen for long since Carmen could no longer take the mess or all the people who were curious about what was going on at her house. She told her husband, “Take everything outside . . . go to the garage.” She recalled, “It was a novelty. Everyone wanted to see what we were doing in the kitchen. If it would rain . . . my house was a mess. They would see music and cars and all of that . . . they wanted to see what was going on.” After their first big hit, “Se me fui mi amor,” they continued making records with all types of accompaniments, including the conjunto accordion of Narciso Martínez and the orquesta of Beto Villa. Some of their other songs include “No tengo la culpa yo,” “Sos palomas al bolar,” and “Solo pero contento.” The sisters continued to be the most popular act on the Ideal label and toured extensively, often performing with dance bands signed to Ideal, such as those of Beto Villa and Pedro Bugarín. To promote Ideal records, they toured throughout the 1950s to cities in California such as Fresno, Los Angeles, and Oakland and also made appearances in Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Kansas City. Carmen y Laura also made personal appearances at record shops to autograph records, but at no time did they see it as their show. Rather, they promoted the Ideal label, which recorded other artists besides themselves. Today both women live in Alice, Texas. Unfortunately Laura’s health prevents her from participating in extensive activities outside of her home. Carmen, on the other hand, appeared at the summer festivities when she and her sister were inducted into the Tejano Hall of Fame. But she is busiest with La Villita, a popular southern Texas dance hall, which she has owned since the 1950s. SOURCES: Marroquin, Carmen. 1988. Interview by Clay Shorkey, March 19; ———. 2000. Interview by Mary Ann Villarreal and Deborah Vargas, July 7; Vargas, Deborah Rose Ramos. 2003. “Las tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz; Villarreal, Mary Ann. 2003. “Cantantes y Cantineras: Mexican American Communities and the Mapping of Public Space.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University. Mary Ann Villarreal
DURAZO, MARÍA ELENA (1953–
)
María Elena Durazo is the president of Local 11 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union in Los Angeles. This union local, whose members are predominantly low-wage Latina and Latino immigrant workers, represents the cutting edge of the new social movement unionism, and Durazo has emerged as a key leader in this revived labor movement.
Born in 1953 in Madera, California, Durazo was the seventh of eleven children. Her father came to the United States as a bracero, and the entire family picked crops from California to Oregon. Although she generally considers her childhood to have been a happy one, the death of a younger brother remains a searing memory. He died because of a lack of accessible health care, and this profound lesson in inequality contributed greatly to her commitment to social justice. When she was a teenager, one of her older brothers began attending college at California State University, Fresno. This would have a significant impact on Durazo in two ways: first, her brother became involved in the Chicano student movement, which exposed Durazo to the beliefs and goals of movement organizing, and second, he helped prepare her for college and guided her through the application process. As a result, she received a scholarship to St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. At St. Mary’s she helped create a Chicano studies program and became involved with el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), an organization that focused on immigrant and workers’ rights. In her words: “The thing that clicked for me from the very beginning, my parents being immigrants, was the class analysis. All they did was cross the border, they were still workers, and they were really getting screwed. [Although] they’re Mexican and I’m Mexican, there was the bottom line of class.” Shortly after graduating from college Durazo married and had her first child, Mario. The marriage eventually disintegrated, and she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked at various odd jobs and continued her affiliation with CASA. She later remarried and had another son Michael. In 1977 she took a pivotal trip to Mexico City with a group of organizers from the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). Impressed with the ILGWU’s focus on immigrant workers, she joined the union as an organizer shortly thereafter. She worked for the union until 1981, when she left to attend the People’s College of Law while working parttime at Levy and Goldman, a labor-law firm. At that time, Levy and Goldman represented Local 11, and she began to do legal work for the union. Eventually she was asked to assist with a strike, and this subsequently led to a permanent position as an organizer with Local 11. During the mid-1980s, however, Local 11 suffered huge membership losses. As Durazo explained, “It became obvious that this union had far more potential than what it was doing. There was a lot of racism. No respect for the members. No inclusion of the members as far as negotiations, no inclusion of the members to build leadership. The union would refuse to translate the meetings into Spanish. Even as a business union it wasn’t responding to the members. It was like a lovehate relationship.”
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Durazo, María Elena Durazo decided to run for president. The election, held in March 1987, was plagued by numerous irregularities that caused the International to place the local in trusteeship for eighteen months. In 1989, after having worked closely with the International, Durazo ran for president and won. Durazo’s victory and subsequent efforts to transform the local have proven significant for both the union and the larger labor movement. Local 11’s emphasis on Latina/o organizing and promoting worker leadership and community alliances reflects a radical departure from traditional union culture, as well as a new direction on the part of the AFLCIO. Because service unions are composed increasingly of women, immigrants, and people of color, who have often been excluded from mainstream labor organizations, they have become the driving force in the push to create a new labor movement, and Local 11, under the leadership of Durazo, has been at the forefront of this effort. As historian Vicki L. Ruiz succinctly stated, “With drive and conviction, Durazo leads a union that cannot be ignored.” Workers seek a living wage and social justice, and although they have been hard hit by the tragedy of September 11 (layoffs have become commonplace because tourism has dramatically declined in
southern California), the union continues to be a national model for Latino grassroots empowerment. The revitalized labor movement in southern California, however, has been shaken by the sudden loss of Miguel Contreras, the charismatic leader of the politically powerful Los County Federation of Labor. On May 6, 2005, Contreras, María Elena Durazo’s husband of eleven years, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two. At his funeral, his widow, her union colleagues, and thousands of workers vowed to honor his legacy. In a 1992 interview, María Elena Durazo eloquently stated, “I hope people will see unions as a tool for change and I hope we in the unions can respond to the challenge.” See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Durazo, María Elena. 2000. Interview by Laura Pulido, Los Angeles, CA, February 24; Milkman, Ruth, and Kent Wong, eds. 2000. Voices from the Frontlines: Organizing Immigrant Workers in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education; Morin, Monte, and Carla Hall. 2005. “Laborers, Leaders Mourn ‘the Real Miguel Contreras.’ ” Los Angeles Times, May 13, B1; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press; Sipchen, Bob. 1997. “Labor of Love.” Los Angeles Times, March 9, E1, E8.
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Laura Pulido
E q ECHAVESTE, MARÍA (1954–
)
In 1992, when presidential candidate Bill Clinton named a political unknown to head his Latino outreach effort, Hispanic political veterans were skeptical. Who was María Echaveste, this Stanford-educated, Mexican American Jewish woman from New York, and how would she connect to the increasingly powerful Hispanic political community? By all accounts she was smart, organized, methodical, and inclusive, and, as she has acknowledged, she had the good sense to pick a winning candidate. By the end of the Clinton presidency in 2001, María Echaveste was well known in political circles. She had helped lead the Latino community in a second Clinton presidential election and had risen to the highest White House position of any Hispanic woman in history. Refugio and María Echaveste, María’s parents, came to the United States from Mexico with their seven children. They worked as migrant farmworkers in Texas during María’s early years and then moved to California, where they earned a living in the central and coastal valleys picking cotton, strawberries, grapes, tomatoes, and carrots. Echaveste was a bright student who loved to read. She worked hard and earned a scholarship to Stanford University, where she majored in anthropology. After a brief stint in the nation’s capital, she earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. From there she went to New York City, became a corporate attorney, and married Stanley Schlein, a Jewish attorney from the Bronx. She also served for several years on the New York City Board of Elections. Although she was raised Catholic, Echaveste had fallen away from the religion. She converted to Judaism, which she says she found more “life-affirming.” The marriage to Schlein ended during her White House tenure. After Clinton’s election in 1992 Echaveste went to work on the presidential transition. Her first appointment (1993–1997) in the new administration was as wage and hour administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor. Echaveste was a strong defender of workers’ rights and took on critical responsibilities that included
overseeing minimum-wage laws, child labor laws, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. In 1996 her antisweatshop campaign titled “No Sweat” received an Innovations in Government Award from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Ford Foundation. In 1997, at the start of President Clinton’s second term, Echaveste moved to the White House and became assistant to the president and director of public liaison. In this high-profile and very public position Echaveste assumed charge of conducting outreach to politically significant constituency groups, including women, minorities, and issue groups. As one of her many projects, she led the presidential initiative on race relations. In 1998 Echaveste was promoted to assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff, becoming what some have called the most influential Latina in the administration. She was a strong, practical, and serious deputy chief of staff. In this new position she had, and used, the opportunity to influence much of the president’s agenda. She chaired the White House Interagency Immigration Working Group, tackling an issue about which she felt strongly. At a March 2000 conference on migration she noted, “Whether it’s the flow of legal or illegal migrants, or the issue of the treatment of migrants once they’ve arrived, or the importance of the remittances that are sent from migrants to their home countries, these are issues that are no longer relegated to the lower levels of government . . . they are at the very top of the list.” Continuing, she said, “The thing that most excites me about the issue . . . is that in so many ways it represents the best of the human spirit—that desire to try to do better, to go someplace else, to provide a better future.” Echaveste, the daughter of migrants, eldest of seven, was provided a better future. She earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1976 and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. An attorney, she has worked for law firms in Los Angeles and New York. She is married to Christopher Edley, the dean of the School of Law (Boalt Hall) at the University of California, Berkeley, and they have one son. Since
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Education leaving the Clinton administration, Echaveste is the co-founder of a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. called Nueva Vista and appears with regularity on the PBS show “To The Contrary.” She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Dart, Bob. 1999. “From Migrant Worker, She Rose to Key White House Role.” Cox News Service, Washington, DC. www.coxnews.com (accessed December 12, 2001); Millbank, Dana. 1998. “White House Watch: The Deputy.” New Republic, July 20. www.thenewrepublic.com (accessed December 11, 2001); Nueva Vista Group. “Personnel Profiles: María Echaveste.” www.nuevavistagroup.com/bio_echaveste .html (accessed June 29, 2005); Ross, Alex. 2000. “Maria Echaveste: A View from the Top.” Horizon (magazine of the Enterprise Foundation). http://horizonmag.com/6/maria-escha veste.asap (accessed December 8, 2001). Bettie Baca
EDUCATION “We always tell our children they are Americans,” affirmed Felicitas Méndez in what is perhaps the most important school segregation case in Mexican American and Latino history. Méndez v. Westminster (1946), a lawsuit against four school districts in Orange County, California, was brought by a group of parents, Gonzalo Méndez, William Guzmán, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada, and Lorenzo Ramírez assisted by the League of United Latin American Citizens. Méndez had attempted to enroll his children into the Main Street School, which he had attended as a child, but due to residential boundary redistricting, the children were sent instead to the Mexican elementary school. The parents essentially protested de facto segregation, the separation of their children, based on ethnicity and limited English proficiencies, into separate “Mexican schools,” often substandard and understaffed. Judge Paul McCormick ruled in favor of the parents. He contended that the segregation of the Mexican youngsters was a clear denial of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. On appeal, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court upheld Judge McCormick’s ruling, and the Orange County school districts moved toward desegregation. The case set precedent for judicial decisions in Texas and Arizona and garnered support from various civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, with Thurgood Marshall coauthoring the NAACP’s amicus curiae brief. Méndez has several concrete connections with Brown v. Board of Education, such as the use of social science research. Furthermore, the case signals the high value placed on education by Latinos in the United States. Latinos have always prized education
but have not always had access or opportunity. They have participated as involved parents, teachers, and reformers, fought for access, confronted discrimination, and contributed to the creation of new fields of knowledge. Educational opportunities increased for Latinas during the late nineteenth century in concert with social and economic transformations of the period. The Tempe Normal School in Arizona, exemplary of southwestern teaching institutions, graduated more than sixty Mexican American teachers between 1885 and 1936. Most came from middle-class families who supported women’s education, but some, like María Urquides, enrolled against the wishes of their parents. Many taught an Americanization curriculum in segregated Mexican schools, and a handful became teachers of Spanish at the secondary level. Cuban middle-class families customarily sent their daughters to the United States for an education. Aurelia Castillo de González observed that “as in ‘every civilized country’ North American women are ‘formed by physical and intellectual education that creates possibilities for an infinite number of lucrative occupations.’ ” Impressed with the freedom and intellectual alternatives available to women in the United States, Castillo de González advocated for the education of women in her native country. Julia Martínez completed secondary school in Baltimore and received a doctorate in pedagogy in Havana. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teaching opened the way for Latinas to work outside of the home in a respectable setting that did not threaten traditional gender roles. For many women, teaching offered a broadening of the private sphere. Most of the earliest feminists, journalists, writers, politicians, and community organizers came from the ranks of teachers. Before she became a noted newspaperwoman and feminist, Jovita Idar was a teacher. Her friend and colleague Leonor Villegas de Magñón opened a school in her home when she found herself stranded on the U.S. side of the border. Labor organizer and feminist poet Sara Estela Ramírez received a graduate degree from the Ateneo Fuentes in Mexico and taught Spanish in Laredo, Texas. In New Mexico former suffragist Adelina Otero Warren created a school curriculum that incorporated Hispano customs and traditions. The Puerto Rican Pilar Barbosa de Rosario became the first woman to teach at the University of Puerto Rico. She received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Clark University in the early 1920s. Amelia Agostini de del Río moved to New York in 1918 after working as a teacher in Puerto Rican schools. She worked her way through Vassar College, received a master’s degree from Columbia University, and was appointed
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Education
Luisa Flin, at her Arizona school graduation, August 1905. Courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society Library, Tucson, Arizona.
to the faculty of Barnard College in her field of Spanish. Camila Henríquez Ureña, the only daughter of the revered poet Salomé Ureña (who had founded the first schools for girls in the Dominican Republic), earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 1918. She became a professor of literature, with prestigious appointments at Vassar and Middlebury Colleges. The majority of Latina educators were not professors, but elementary educators who taught in remote, rural one-room schoolhouses in the U.S. Southwest and Puerto Rico. Many never married because they made their students the center of their lives. Often relegated to schools with limited resources and administrative neglect, they became the innovative problem solvers who took responsibility for the minutest details of their positions. Amelia Margarita Maldonado, a pioneer in bilingual education, began to teach in 1919 in Arizona. Aware that her students did not get enough to eat during the depression, Maldonado “used the school kitchen to bake corn muffins, boil a pot of beans, and prepare hot chocolate” for her hungry pupils. Before
Maldonado retired after forty years in the classroom, countless others replicated her experiences, and some penned memoirs about their experiences in country schools. The Puerto Rican community activist Antonia Pantoja recalled leaving the mountain school where she taught in the early 1940s to return home on the weekend “with my arms full of gardenias, pineapples, and oranges. . . . ‘Maestra, regresará el domingo?’ ” She would respond, “Si, volveré!” Born and raised in poverty, Pantoja hungered for an education and went on to create the venues and institutions to instruct the children of the barrios. For the most part, Latina and Euro-American teachers served Mexican American communities in the Southwest that were overwhelmingly poor. Between 1910 and 1930 more than 1 million Mexicans crossed the border to escape the ravages of the revolution. Lured also by the promise of jobs in agriculture and industry, Mexican immigrants determined to make a better life for themselves, created new barrios in el norte, or settled into existing communities throughout the Southwest and Midwest. Within twenty years Mexican Americans were outnumbered by Mexican immigrants at least two to one, and their colonias or communities became immigrant enclaves. In urban areas like Los Angeles, residential and educational segregation based on restrictive real-estate covenants and segregated schools increased dramatically between 1920 and 1950. Teacher expectations were frequently low with regard to the education of Mexican children. Assumed to bring diseases such as lice infestations, impetigo, and tuberculosis into the classroom, students were also thought to lack the ambition to move ahead in life or the requisite intelligence to be successful. The curriculum prioritized vocational learning because teachers and school administrators believed that Mexican students had few aspirations and fewer abilities beyond farm and domestic work. In addition to civics, the primary component of Americanization was English-language instruction, and children were forbidden to speak Spanish. Educator Sonia Nieto remembers, “We spoke Spanish at home, even though teachers pleaded with my parents to stop doing so.” In an eagerness to replace Spanish with English, schools delivered the message that the Spanish language was worthless, even shameful, and was to be discarded as soon as possible. To compound the situation, children of migrant families who moved according to the seasons attended school sporadically because they were needed to work with the family in the fields. Some school districts denied admission to migrant children; others placed migrant children in segregated classrooms because of their limited English capabilities or poor attendance.
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Education
Primary-school graduation, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Concurrently, Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, particularly New York, faced a similar situation. Puerto Rican students, like their Mexican American counterparts, were expected to navigate a sink-or-swim system when it came to English-language instruction. By the 1950s and 1960s the enormous increase in the city’s Puerto Rican population alarmed school officials, who resuscitated old methods for teaching non-English speakers. These incoming students were placed one or two years behind their age-appropriate grade or in classes for “slow or retarded learners.” Some educators preferred to pair the new student with a proficient English speaker in a buddy system. Nonetheless, countless Mexican American and Puerto Rican children could not understand the language of instruction. Many parents, teachers, and community leaders understood the long-range implications of inadequate instruction and called for dramatic school reform. By the mid-twentieth century some Latinos advocated for bilingual education, which they believed was the most viable tool for achieving equal education and opportunity. In regions with large concentrations of Latinos, such as California and New York, steps toward some form of bilingual instruction were already under way. As early as 1948 María Urquides initiated the first bilingual program in Arizona. In the same year Ana Marcial Peñaranda began to work as a bilingual teacher in Public School 25 in the South Bronx. Coteries of Latina teachers, often bilingual and experienced professionals, were well positioned to pioneer the new field. For twenty years bilingual teachers mobilized for recognition of the field, organized professional groups, devel-
oped materials and methodology, and lobbied for federal protection of language-minority students. With passage of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, the education of language-minority students began to improve. However, it took the Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols (1974) to guarantee equal opportunity and safeguard the civil rights of non-English-speaking children in American schools. Lau v. Nichols, a case brought to the Supreme Court on behalf of Asian American students in San Francisco, argued that unequal educational opportunities violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The case became the major precedent on the educational rights of language-minority students. The ASPIRA Consent Decree was an agreement between ASPIRA and the New York City Board of Education to provide equal educational opportunity and transitional bilingual programs for Spanish-speaking students in city schools. The consent decree established the model for numerous states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, to negotiate consent decrees. The ASPIRA Consent Decree was not limited to Spanish speakers, but provided for the education of all language-minority students, including Haitians, Russians, Italians, and Chinese speakers, who resided in the city. During the 1960s and 1970s, as part of global student movements, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and other Latino youths mobilized against continuing problems of discrimination, especially in educational representation. For example, in March 1968 more than 10,000 Mexican American youngsters (calling themselves “Chicanos”) in East Los Angeles staged the
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Education
United Bronx Parents, Inc., circa 1970s. Courtesy of the Records of the United Bronx Parents, Inc. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
largest student walkout in the history of the United States. They demanded a revised curriculum that according to one participant, Vickie Castro, covered a listing of demands “from better food all the way to . . . we want to go to college.” Castro helped organize the East Los Angeles “blowouts,” which she called a “massive display of discontent with the education system.” In calling for educational excellence and greater access, high-school and college students demanded curricular reforms in the public schools and universities, urging the creation of history and culture courses that related to their own experiences—Chicano studies in the Southwest and Puerto Rican studies in the Northeast. They also demanded the hiring of Latino teachers and school administrators. Furthermore, students protested substandard education in poorly equipped schools and the tracking system that funneled them into domestic work, clerical jobs, or industrial employment. Students mobilized to create militant campus organizations connected to their barrio communities. Latino students and teachers figured prominently in fighting for the establishment of Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Chicano/a, Hispanic American, and Cuban studies departments and programs. These proliferated in the Southwest, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast. Committed to social and political transformations based on a philosophical framework that prioritized the union of learning and practice, departments and programs pledged accountability to their communities and became the venues for increasing student enrollment and faculty representation in academic institutions. Their mission further emphasized
the use of innovative methodology and research designed to promote solutions to community problems. Community service and a relevant curriculum remain common themes in ethnic studies. Returning to one’s community with an education served as the informal credo for student activists of color in the late 1960s and early 1970s and still resonates today. Experiential education became an essential component of an ethnic studies curriculum, and internships with community-based organizations allowed young people to serve as links between themselves, the academy, and the community. Latinas have made their mark throughout the academy, and some have assumed positions of university leadership. For example, Isaura Santiago Santiago and Dolores Fernández have served as presidents of Hostos College. Marta Casals Istomin is president of the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, Elsa Gómez is president of Kean College in New Jersey, and Millie García is president of Berkeley College in New York City. Juliet V. García is president of the University of Texas at Brownsville, Blandina Cárdenas is president of the University of Texas, Pan American, and France Córdova is chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, the first Latina University of California chancellor. For the majority of Latinos in the United States, however, educational equity remains an unrealized promise and a critical political and social issue. SOURCES: Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Navarro, Marysa, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. 1999. Women in Latin America and the Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Pérez,
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El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española Louis A. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol
EL CONGRESO DE PUEBLOS DE HABLAN ESPAÑOLA (1939) Held in Los Angeles on April 28–30, 1939, el Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Spanish-Speaking Peoples’ Congress) was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States. From 1,000 to 1,500 delegates representing more than 100 organizations attended this historic meeting. Although the majority of these men and women hailed from California and the Southwest, some had traveled from as far away as Montana, Illinois, New York, and Florida. They gathered to address issues of jobs, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights. Over the course of three days they drafted a comprehensive platform. Bridging differences in generation and ethnic background, they called for an end to segregation in public facilities, housing, education, and employment and endorsed the rights of immigrants to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation. Advocating for the rights of immigrants was a courageous course, given that a few short years earlier, an estimated onethird of the Mexican population in the United States had been deported or repatriated even though the majority (an estimated 60 percent) were native-born American citizens. Equally important, the delegates encouraged immigrants to become U.S. citizens and to preserve their cultural traditions. In a gesture that foreshadowed the nationalist student movements of the 1960s, they called upon universities to create departments in Latino studies. Veteran labor leader Luisa Moreno spearheaded the national conference. At first she attempted to organize a planning meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but received little support. In Los Angeles she met a coterie of civil rights activists who shared her vision of a national conference rooted in community networks. Working in tandem with Josefina Fierro, Eduardo Quevedo, and Bert Corona, Moreno drew upon her contacts with Latino labor unions, mutual-aid societies, and other grassroots groups in order to ensure a truly national assembly. Even before the April meeting occurred, the Los Angeles team, led by Josefina Fierro, had organized a local chapter. In February 1939 Congreso members had lobbied local government officials for affordable housing. Indeed, public housing remained an important agenda item for southern California branches. Despite the promise of the national conference, local
chapters failed to develop outside of southern California, but these local California branches continued for several years to take on significant community issues. Members also were attuned to the circumstances of working-class Latinas. Historian Mario García brought to light the following resolution passed by the second California convention in December 1939: Whereas: The Mexican woman, who for centuries had suffered oppression, has the responsibility for raising her children and for caring for the home, and even that of earning a livelihood for herself and her family . . . suffers a double discrimination as a woman and as a Mexican. Be It Resolved: That the Congress carry out a program of . . . education of the Mexican woman . . . that it [a Women’s Committee] support and work for women’s equality, so that she may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civil liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and of American democracy.
These California chapters did not survive the cold war era. Almost from the beginning conservative politicians branded the organization “subversive” and claimed that it was controlled by the Communist Party. As a civil rights group that prided itself on inclusion, Congreso members welcomed individuals from various leftist and liberal political persuasions, from Communists to New Deal liberals. Many of the causes associated with el Congreso later resonated in the voices of Latino student activists of the 1960s—educational equity, affordable housing, immigrant rights, women’s rights, and Latino studies. SOURCES: García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Gutiérrez, David G. 1995. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity in the Southwest, 1910–1986. Berkeley: University of California Press; Molina, Natalia. 2001. “Contested Bodies and Cultures: The Politics of Public Health and Race within Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese Communities in Los Angeles, 1879–1939.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan; Sánchez, George J. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
EL MONTE BERRY STRIKE On June 1, 1933, 1,500 Mexican berry pickers went out on strike in the fields surrounding El Monte, California. Organized initially by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), the workers demanded a pay increase because some earned as little as nine cents per hour. Jesusita Torres remembered
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El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán that she picked berries for less than one penny per basket. Her employers were not European American farmers, but Japanese leaseholders. Within the social structure of El Monte, both groups were minorities and were subject to segregation. Less than a thirty-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles, El Monte was a small town with a population of fewer than 10,000 residents. European Americans made up 75 percent of the locals, Mexicans 20 percent, and the Japanese 5 percent. Despite its rural hometown feel, it was demarcated by race in neighborhoods, schools, and commercialized leisure. The children of Japanese farmers and Mexican farmworkers attended the same segregated grammar school, and at the local cinema Japanese and Mexicans were relegated to the same side of the aisle, away from European American patrons. While they shared these same segregated spaces, the worker-employer relationship significantly influenced the nature of their interactions. In Torres’s words, “They [the Japanese farmers] would work in the field, but you knew they were the boss.” Early in the strike Mexican workers were caught between two rival unions—the CAWIU and la Confederación de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros del Estado de California (CUCOM), a union supported by the Mexican consul. While the strikers received hefty donations from politicians in Mexico, the Japanese consul tried to broker a settlement in order to avoid negative publicity for the farmers. This international intervention in a U.S. labor action seemed unprecedented. Furthermore, the strikers themselves appealed to the U.S. federal government to step in to mediate the dispute. Both farmers and strikers relied on their community networks. The residents of El Monte’s Hick’s Camp barrio rallied around the strikers. For example, Sadie Castro “used to cook rice and beans and take it to the people who were striking.” Barrio merchants also donated food. Perhaps in a dilemma because of rising rents charged by European American landowners and the demands for higher wages among their workers, Japanese farmers relied on family and friends throughout Los Angeles to pitch in and pick the highly perishable berries. Furthermore, in an attempt to garner local support, they opened their fields to the general public, charging people a penny per box for “pick-your-own” berries. A month into the strike a settlement was reached that resulted in significant wage increases. The U.S. and California Departments of Labor, the Mexican and Japanese consuls, and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce all had a hand in brokering this agreement. After Pearl Harbor the El Monte Japanese growers and their families were forced to abandon their homes and their land when they were ordered into internment camps. The berry fields would never be the same. As Jesusita Torres remembered, “After they were taken to
the concentration camps, the fields were not good.” The El Monte berry strike reveals that the struggle for a living wage in California fields extends beyond a onedimensional notion of poor workers against rich growers and can reflect a more complicated picture of California agriculture. SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo. 1981. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row; López, Ronald L. 1970. “The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933.” Aztlán 1 (Spring): 101–114; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
EL MOVIMIENTO ESTUDIANTIL CHICANO DE AZTLÁN (MECHA) (1969– ) The 1960s, a period of tremendous turmoil and activism within the Mexican communities of the United States, ushered in the Chicano movement. The movement itself was not a homogeneous endeavor, but rather a collection of simultaneous crusades that included the United Farm Workers struggles led by César Chávez, a highly vocal anti–Vietnam War movement, and rising student expectations at the high-school and university levels. Student activism probed poor educational attainment and opportunities, the tracking system, de facto segregation, and limited Latino representation among the faculty and curricula of institutions of higher learning. In March 1968, over 10,000 dissatisfied students at five area high schools in East Los Angeles walked out of their classrooms. Known as the “East Los Angeles blow-outs,” these protests galvanized Mexican American students throughout California, the Southwest, and even the Midwest. The “blowouts” signified the tumultuous collective environment that led to the foundation of El Movimiento Estudantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). In April 1969 MEChA was established at a three-day conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sponsored by the Chicano Coordinating Committee on Higher Education. Attended by approximately 100 delegates consisting of students, instructors, administrators, and community activists, this convention drafted the Plan de Santa Barbara, an educational reform program that called for the establishment of Chicano studies programs in high schools and universities and a student organization, MEChA, intended to unite all other student groups under the banner of cultural nationalism and political and community activism. It drew inspiration from the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference held in Denver, Colorado, where 1,500 participants unveiled the El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a call
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El Paso Laundry Strike for an autonomous Chicano homeland comprising the territories ceded to the United States by Mexico following the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). “Mechistas” sought to promote cultural awareness and hermandad—brotherhood and spiritual unity for the entire community. By distancing themselves from mainstream American values and Spanish antecedents, this group favored indigenismo, or indigenous ancestry, the glorification of the motherland (Mexico), and Aztlán, the mythical origins of their heritage. Mechistas further attempted to connect university campuses to inner-city barrios to establish a mutually beneficial relationship that promoted advancement for the entire Chicano community. Issues such as police brutality, discrimination in hiring and renting practices, and teaching the fundamentals of La Causa (the Cause) to high-school and junior-high-school students were also some of their objectives. Almost immediately MEChA suffered from serious internal divisions that led to a diminished status by 1973. Many original leaders left college, while the nationalist emphasis compelled socialist-influenced students who favored the commonality of class interests to leave the organization. Chicanas, generally relegated to stereotypical clerical and administrative jobs in the organization and frustrated by a reluctance to deal with feminist issues, also left. Today MEChA remains a loose federation of chapters scattered throughout various campuses in the American Southwest. It is primarily concerned with the recruitment and retention of Chicano college students. See also Chicano Movement SOURCES: Gonzáles, Manuel G. 1999. Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. 1989. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso; Vargas, Zaragosa, ed. 1999. Major Problems in Mexican American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Steven Rosales
EL PASO LAUNDRY STRIKE In the first decades of the twentieth century ethnic Mexican women constituted a significant portion of the labor pool in the border city of El Paso, Texas. The 1920 U.S. census revealed that more than half of El Paso’s female working population was of Mexican origin, and the majority of those women labored as domestics or as laundresses in private homes or in one of the city’s various laundries. Historian Mario T. García notes that Mexicanas—both residents of El Paso and women who crossed the border daily from Ciudad Juárez—easily constituted anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of the workforces at local laundries. However, Mexican laun-
dresses found that despite experience or longevity, they earned only about half what their Euro-American co-workers earned. Racial assumptions about Mexicans’ ability to subsist on less pay, the perceived inexperience of Mexican workers, and the nearly constant supply of workers from across the border functioned to keep wages low. While Mexicanas earned between $4 and $6 per week in the laundries, Euro-American workers in the same plants were paid more than double that amount. Moreover, Mexicana laundresses in El Paso made less than half what laundry workers in other major Texas cities earned at the time for the same work. In October 1919 hundreds of ethnic Mexican women who toiled as laundresses in El Paso walked off their jobs, demanding an end to a dual wage system, as well as union recognition. With the assistance of local and state organizers from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), several El Paso Mexicana laundresses formed the Laundry Workers’ Union at the Acme Laundry, one of the city’s largest firms. After the company refused to recognize the union and fired two of its organizers, nearly 200 Mexicana laundresses went on strike against the company. Bolstered by financial and moral support from workers at other area laundries, the Central Labor Union and other AFL locals, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and Mexican and Mexican American mutualaid organizations, nearly 600 workers and sympathy strikers went on strike against the city’s laundries. Women played a vital role in the strike, even going so far as to block the international bridges to prevent strikebreakers from Mexico from crossing into El Paso. However, male leaders, including C. N. Idar, brother of Tejana activist and journalist Jovita Idar, directed the strike and represented the laundresses in all negotiations with laundry owners. Despite the wide range of support garnered by the laundry workers, the union’s efforts were ultimately hampered by its exclusion of Mexican nationals. The AFL maintained a strong anti-immigrant policy (membership in its unions was restricted to U.S. citizens) that created a cleavage between Mexican American and Mexican workers and proved to be a fatal flaw for the Laundry Workers’ Union. In a border setting employers easily replaced striking workers not only with American workers, but also with a vast supply of Mexican workers from Ciudad Juárez who were willing to work despite the poor conditions and low pay, and were thus able to keep their laundries running. Although ultimately thwarted by the very nature of the border economy it hoped to alter, the 1919 El Paso laundry workers’ strike became what García calls “one of the earliest displays of ethnic solidarity among Mexican female workers in the United States.”
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Entrepreneurs The strike continued through the end of 1919, but the strikers were never able to attain their demands, and many of the women lost their jobs permanently. Yet despite the ultimate loss, the 1919 laundry strike stands as a symbol of the determination of Mexicanas to improve their lives and working conditions. The example set forth by these women served as a galvanizing force for future union efforts in El Paso and the U.S. Southwest. SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; García, Mario T. 1980. “The Chicana in American History: The Mexican Women of El Paso, 1880– 1920—A Case Study.” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May): 315–337; ——— . 1981. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Leyva, Yolanda. Chávez 1995. “ ‘Faithful hard-working Mexican hands’: Mexicana Workers during the Great Depression.” Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 5:63–77. Monica Perales
EL RESCATE (1981–
)
El Rescate was founded in 1981 by Santana Chirino Amaya Refugee Committee members, along with the Southern California Ecumenical Council. From 1980 to 1987 between 1 and 1.5 million people in El Salvador were driven from their homeland as a result of the civil war and the persecution of military death squads. An estimated one-tenth of El Salvador’s population fled. In response to the high influx of immigrants fleeing political persecution, El Rescate was the first U.S. agency to provide legal and social services to these refugees. The Los Angeles-based organization opened Clínica Monseñor Romero, which offered free health and medical attention. In 1987 El Refugio, a transitional housing shelter for refugees, was opened. El Rescate incorporated legal services in addition to social services. In 1984 El Rescate launched the Children’s Advocacy Project and assisted in the prevention of family disunification and the separation of children that often occurred when families were detained by immigration officials. El Rescate also assisted people affected by the 1986 earthquake in El Salvador. The organization raised $55,000 for the purchase of food, medical supplies, and construction materials to help the thousands left homeless and injured by the earthquake. Through the 1980s El Rescate aided war-torn communities in El Salvador, in addition to serving refugees in the United States. In 1989 the organization led the Caravan of Material Aid— a campaign that brought $3 million of necessary supplies to more than ten war-torn communities. Among its many accomplishments, El Rescate has been instrumental in reversing discriminatory immi-
gration policies and advocating passage of just legislation. In 1991, to secure political refugee status for Salvadoreños, the agency initiated its Temporary Protected Status Campaign and registered more than 60,000 individuals for permanent residency. El Rescate also played a key role in gaining residency for immigrants after the settlement of the American Baptist Churches v. Thornburg case. American churches— mostly Baptist—began the sanctuary movement during the 1980s. This movement garnered support from Washington to Texas and began in light of the restrictive and discriminatory immigration policies that denied asylum to political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. Religious leaders in the Southwest responded to this situation by offering immigrants sanctuary in churches. U.S. government officials targeted these churches for breaking federal laws and harboring undocumented immigrants. The American Baptist Churches fought the indictments. El Rescate submitted more than 7,000 applications. In response to continued political turmoil in Central America, El Rescate adamantly advocated for the passage of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), which allowed for the consideration of refugee cases under less restrictive rules. When NACARA underwent changes in 2003, El Rescate was instrumental in getting clauses included that made it easier for some Salvadoreños and Guatemaltecos to become legal residents. El Rescate continues to serve Central American communities. It provides legal representation and advice in political asylum cases. Policy analysis and recommendations are central to El Rescate’s efforts in maintaining fair immigration and naturalization legislation. It also provides community outreach orientation to individuals and families new to the United States and Los Angeles. SOURCES: Crittenden, Ann. 1988. Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and Law in Collision. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson; El Rescate Website. www.elrescate.org (accessed June 29, 2005); Golden, Renny, and Michael McConnel. 1986. Sanctuary: The New Underground Railroad. New York: Orbis Books; Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
ENTREPRENEURS The development of increased business ownership among Latinas is significant, given their past history of limited socioeconomic opportunities. A brief demographic profile of the Latino population will provide a better understanding of the recent increase of Latina entrepreneurs.
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Entrepreneurs With the general exception of the Cuban American population, Latino communities continue to experience socioeconomic barriers within U.S. society. For example, in 2000 only 55 percent of the total Hispanic population had completed four years of high school, in comparison with 88 percent of the total EuroAmerican population. Similarly, only 11 percent of the total Hispanic population had completed four years of college or more, in comparison with 28 percent of the total Euro-American population. Interestingly, there is only a 1 percent difference between Latino males and females for each of these two educational statistics. Historically, they have always had higher rates of unemployment and poverty in comparison with the total population. The median family income for Hispanics is 58 percent of that of the total Euro-American population. A comparison of occupational distributions indicates that although a limited trend in upward mobility can be seen among Latinos, especially among Cuban Americans, Latinos are concentrated in the lower middle and lower rungs of the occupational ladder,
Cary de León, president of the Latin Business and Professional Women’s Club, 1988. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
while Latinas are concentrated largely in the lower clerical and service categories. An understanding of trends among Latina business owners requires an understanding of the impact of ethnicity and gender on rates of entrepreneurship. Between 1987 and 1992 business ownership among Latinas increased by 114.2 percent. Despite this dramatic growth, Latina-owned businesses accounted for only a small percentage of the total number of minorityowned businesses in 1987 (9.5 percent) and 1992 (12.5 percent). The 1997 Economic Survey also shows that sales/receipts taken in by Latina businesses increased by 297 percent. In 1987 Latina businesses took in about $4 million in sales, but by 1992 the amount of sales/receipts had increased to $17 million. The 1997 Economic Census Survey of MinorityOwned Businesses Enterprises reports that these firms grew four times faster than the national average between 1992 and 1997. Rapidly expanding Latinoowned businesses totaled about 1.2 million firms in 1997 and employed more than 1 million people. Mexican Americans own about four out of ten of these firms. Latino businesses are concentrated geographically; about 73 percent of all Latino businesses are located in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. These businesses are also concentrated by ethnic group. The majority of Mexican American businesses are located in California and Texas. About 70 percent of Cuban American firms are in Florida, and more than half of Puerto Rican–owned businesses are in New York, Florida, and New Jersey. The 1997 Economic Census Survey also shows that Latino and Latina businesses are concentrated within five metropolitan areas: (1) Los Angeles–Long Beach, (2) Miami, (3) New York, (4) Houston, and (5) San Antonio. Wholesale businesses account for the largest number of firms run by Latinos, followed by manufacturers and retailers. Women-owned businesses, like minority- and Hispanic-owned businesses, have also been growing at significant rates since 1992. The number of womenowned businesses increased 16 percent from 1992 to 1997, compared with only a 6 percent growth rate for all U.S. firms. Women-owned firms are geographically concentrated in four states: California, New York, Texas, and Florida. These four states account for 33 percent of all women-owned firms. California has the largest percentage of businesses owned by women. The Census Survey of Women-Owned Business Enterprises (1997, 1) points out that “a short drive on Interstate 5 in southern California will take you through three of the 10 counties with the largest number of firms owned by women—Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego.” More than seven of every ten women-owned firms were in services or retail trade industries such as bookstores and jewelry stores.
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Entrepreneurs entists and journalists have focused on the reasons women start their own businesses and the problems they encounter once they establish their firms. Interviews with Latina entrepreneurs reveal common reasons for their decision to set themselves up as business owners. Latinas, like other women business owners, express strong feelings about being “their own boss,” but more important, they see business ownership as a means to increase the family income. Latina entrepreneurs express their goal as one of providing a better life for their children, usually by providing the financial means to a good education. Although they realize that they will be working longer hours once they start their own businesses, Latina entrepreneurs, most of whom had worked in the paid labor force for many years, stress that they work for their children. As Socorro Ramírez, a beauty-shop owner, said, “I work for my daughter’s future.” She wanted to own her own beauty shop because this would bring in more money for her family and for her children.
California restaurateur María Elena Avila and her mother, Margarita Avila. Courtesy of María Elena Avila.
The usual categories found in most census reports and economic surveys make it difficult to study Latina entrepreneurs. The data provided by the 1997 Economic Census Survey of Minority-Owned Businesses and Women-Owned Businesses represent the most valuable source for the study of business ownership, but data on ethnicity and gender are not always included. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Economic Census is currently revising its data collection to fill this gap in the study of business ownership by women of color such as Latina entrepreneurs. The 1997 Economic Census Survey of Minority-Owned Businesses provides its usual summary table that compares business ownership by minority groups. The data reveal that Latinos have the largest percentage (39.5) of all minorityowned firms. Asian/Pacific Islanders own 30 percent; blacks, 27.1 percent. American Indian and Alaska Natives have the smallest percentage of the total with 6.5 percent. This report now contains data for minorityowned firms by gender and includes information on black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women entrepreneurs. These data show that Latina-owned firms account for a little more than a quarter (28.1 percent) of the total number of Hispanic-owned firms. In comparison, black women own 38 percent of all black-owned firms, the group with the largest percentage of womenowned businesses. According to a report issued in 2001 by the U.S. Census Bureau, Latina entrepreneurs represent the fastest-growing sector of new business owners. Social science research on Latina entrepreneurs has added a human dimension to the quantitative demographic profiles provided by census reports. Social sci-
I wanted to be successful for the sake of my children. I wanted them to have a better life. I wanted my daughters to get an education. I thought to myself, if I’m successful with such a limited education then my daughters will achieve more since they are getting a good education. They will better themselves by getting some career or profession. I see my business as a way to provide my children with more opportunities. I wanted to earn more money so they could go to private school. This is what kept me going during hard times.
The sentiments expressed by this Latina beautyshop owner are not atypical. Other Latina entrepreneurs identified business ownership as a step toward upward mobility for their children as a result of their ability to use their business profits to pay for better schooling. A key theme among Latina entrepreneurs, in contrast to Euro-American women entrepreneurs, is that they do not want their children to become business owners. Latina entrepreneurs with businesses in the services sector are most likely to want their children to become some kind of professional rather than follow their examples as business owners. Interviews in such magazines as Hispanic Business and Latina, however, are reporting a reversal in this trend. Latina entrepreneurs who own businesses outside the traditional service sector state that they encourage their children, particularly their daughters, to start their own businesses. As Latina entrepreneurs continue to establish businesses outside the service sector, the practice of supporting an entrepreneurial tradition among their children promises to increase. Latina entrepreneurs continue to face many obsta-
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Environment and the Border cles shaped by the impact of ethnicity, gender, and social class. Start-up money for business ownership is one of the most basic problems for any entrepreneur, but this issue is particularly difficult for Latinas. Many turn first to their families for loans and then attempt to secure bank loans. With the slow but steady growth of a Latino middle class, it is estimated that the children of the middle class will have access to more financial resources that can be used for business ventures. A growing trend seen among Latina business owners involves partnerships with Latinos or men from other ethnic backgrounds. The Census Bureau has only recently included a category of “equally male/female owned” in its reports on minority businesses. In 1997 these “equally owned” business firms constituted 16 percent of all Latino businesses. Since 1997, studies of Hispanic businesses have focused on Hispanic women-owned businesses. More than one-third (35 percent of all Hispanic-owned firms are owned by women. Hispanic women-owned companies employ 18.5 percent of the workers in all Hispanic-owned firms and generate $44.4 billion in nationwide sales. Hispanic women control 39 percent of the 1.4 million companies owned by minority women in the United States, generating nearly $147 billion in sales. Hispanic women own four in ten minority women-owned firms. Between 1987 and 1996, the number of Hispanic women-owned businesses grew by 206 percent, compared with 47 percent of all businesses. Between 1997 and 2004, the number of Hispanic women-owned businesses grew by 206 percent, compared with 47 percent of all businesses. During this same seven-year period, the number of firms owned by Hispanic women increased by about 64 percent to 553,618 and their combined revenue climbed to more than 62 percent or $44.4 billion. The five states with the largest number of Hispanic women-owned firms were California (17 percent), Texas (18 percent), Florida (16 percent), New York (14 percent) and Arizona (13 percent). Latina entrepreneurs also face the problem of gender and ethnic discrimination in the workplace. Discrimination against Latina entrepreneurs can occur at different levels, ranging from business ownership in service industries to high-tech companies. As one Latina entrepreneur who owned her own public relations firm stated, “I have had friends of mine—men— who have their own agencies tell me that they have referred prospective clients to me but then they tell them they don’t want a woman handling their accounts.” Latina entrepreneurs in the service sector related similar stories of clients who make disparaging remarks. In sum, they are not immune to the everyday occurrences of prejudice that Latinos and Latinas continue to confront in other occupations.
Latina entrepreneurs represent a growing sector of Latino business owners, women business owners, and minority business owners. Their firms are getting larger, hiring more employees, bringing in larger revenues, and concentrating outside the service sector. They have begun to draw national attention, but more studies, interviews, and oral histories are needed in order to document this important group of Latinas whose strength and contribution to U.S. society will increase in the years to come. SOURCES: García, Alma M. 1995. “I Work for My Daughter’s Future: Mexican American Women and the Development of Entrepreneurship.” California History, October, 262–279; Limón, Anthony. 2005. “Raising the Bar: Hispanics benefit as law firms bid to reflect diversified clientele.” Hispanic Business, June, 104–106; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001. Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises: Hispanic-Owned Businesses, 1997. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; — —— . 1997. Economic Census: Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; ——— . 1997. Economic Census Survey of Women-Owned Business Enterprises. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Alma M. García
ENVIRONMENT AND THE BORDER The U.S./Mexican border has emerged as one of the most significant sites in the ever-evolving geography of the United States and Mexico. In many ways la frontera represents a microcosm of the larger processes and shifts that are transforming both countries. As the border region becomes increasingly integrated through industrialization, urbanization, and flows of capital, labor, and commodities (both legal and extralegal), environmental degradation has become an increasingly severe problem. While the challenges are immense, there is also a growing movement to protect the border environment and its communities that features significant participation and leadership on the part of Chicanas and Mexicanas, especially at the grassroots level. Transecting 2,000 miles of semiarid and desert environment, the U.S./Mexican border is one of the few that joins a third- and a first-world country. This economic inequality shapes and informs many aspects of the border, including its environmental problems. La frontera was established in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought to a close the Mexican-American War and resulted in Mexico surrendering about one-third of its northern territory to the United States. In 1853 the Gadsden Purchase, encompassing what is now southeastern Arizona, completed the contemporary border configuration. The border skirts four states in the southwestern United States,
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Environment and the Border Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and six along the Mexican side, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas. When the border was initially drawn, the border region was sparsely populated by indigenous nations with deep roots in the region, such as the Yaqui and Tohono O’ohdam, both of which had adapted to the extreme aridity of the border environment by practicing such strategies as seasonal migration and flood irrigation. Although the border is punctuated by two major north/south mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre Oriental and Occidental, both of which are sites of great ecological diversity, the majority of the border is characterized by minimal precipitation, which renders much of the region a desert. The significance of aridity cannot be overstated. Not only does water availability set the upper limit of human activities, but attempts to overcome those limits require massive water transfers and exploitation of groundwater reserves, both of which have major ecological consequences. In addition, aridity causes the border to be a fragile environment. Essentially, the scarcity of water intensifies ecological damage, because plants, soils, and animals cannot readily restore themselves. As a result, the environmental challenges facing the border are of great concern. The urban and industrial development of the border did not begin in earnest until the early twentieth century with the Mexican Revolution. Although a number of border skirmishes occurred, the major impact on the border was the large numbers of northbound immigrants who sought to escape the war. The refugees and immigrants of this period transformed the region because many settled along the northern edge of the Mexican border and helped create a whole series of urban settlements, known as border towns. In addition, at roughly the same time the southwestern United States experienced its own metamorphosis as corporations and entrepreneurs sought to develop railroads, agriculture, and mining, all heavily reliant upon Mexican labor. Despite this early growth, the border remained home to relatively few people, and its urban development was limited to a series of twin border towns, until the 1960s. In 1964 the Bracero Program (a formal guest-worker scheme) was terminated, and the Mexican and U.S. governments created the Border Industrialization Program (BIP). The purpose of the BIP, whose factories were known as maquilas, was to help ameliorate the unemployment associated with the cessation of the Bracero Program, to facilitate Mexican industrialization, and to provide low-wage labor to U.S. corporations. The United States offered tax incentives to manufacturers who relocated their assembly activities along Mexico’s northern border. Not surprisingly, mil-
lions of Mexicans were drawn to the border’s new opportunities, and this population growth, in turn, provided the basis for widespread urbanization and development. More recently the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has continued this growth trajectory. The current population of the U.S./Mexican border is approximately 12 million and is expected to double by 2020. As a result, the border has not only become the fastest-growing region in Mexico, but also has some of the most severe urban and environmental problems. In addition to phenomenal population growth, these problems have been exacerbated by limited infrastructure capacity, weak environmental regulations, and the economic logic of global inequality. The environmental problems of the U.S./Mexican border are almost legendary and have incited great concern along both sides. One observer has described the situation in the following way: “Lack of adequate housing, exposure of workers to dangerous toxic substances, and contamination of drinking water with industrial pollutants have turned the Mexican side of the border into an environmental wasteland and industrial slum.” The fact that the Mexican side of the border is more ecologically devastated than the U.S. side does not imply that the latter is a better ecological steward, but rather reflects the geography of uneven economic and political power so that the majority of ecological devastation is concentrated on the less powerful side. Despite this very real difference, however, it must be recalled that the border is composed of two political units that share a single ecological home. The environmental problems associated with the industrialization of the border (both manufacturing and agriculture) are extremely severe. Both sides of the region are plagued by industrial emissions and agricultural runoff, which affect the air, water, plant and animal life, and, of course, humans. The use of hazardous substances directly affects workers, adjacent neighborhoods, and communities that share contaminated air and water resources, sometimes with tragic consequences. For instance, in just over a one-year period in the 1990s, fifteen cases of anencephaly (babies born without a brain) were documented in the BrownsvilleMatamoras area. Although many attribute these birth defects to pollution, local leaders claimed that they were due to either malnutrition or a genetic predisposition among Mexicans. Another example of border contamination is the New River, which runs through Mexicali and Calexico, labeled as “the most hazardous waterway in all of North America.” While estimates of the cost to clean up the border range from $5.5 billion to $18 billion, in 1993 the U.S. Congress allocated only $240 million, while Mexico budgeted $460 million over a three-year period—clearly an insufficient level of resources in both cases.
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Environment and the Border Although pollution is severe on both sides of the border, it is worse in Mexico because of less stringent regulation, weaker enforcement, and greater industrial and urban growth. Once again, this problem must be seen in light of the geographic proximity and economic inequality between the United States and Mexico. As a poor country, Mexico has historically argued that it can ill afford to impose strict environmental regulations on industries, which provide much-needed jobs. At the same time the weaker regulatory environment has provided a haven to some U.S. polluters who consider U.S. regulations to be too burdensome. For example, a large percentage of southern California’s furniture industry relocated to Mexico in the wake of the imposition of new air-quality regulations. In Mexico manufacturers can take advantage of both low-wage labor and less expensive production techniques. During the BIP program the La Paz Agreement required that all hazardous materials imported by the maquilas be returned to the country of origin. A 1989 study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency, however, found that approximately 1 percent of maquilas were in strict compliance. In addition to these regulated forms of pollution, there exists a serious problem with illegal pollution. As hazardous materials and toxic waste have become more tightly regulated in the United States, more than a few firms and handlers have sought to dispose of waste in Mexico, essentially using an impoverished area as a dumping ground. Investigators have found barrels and containers of hazardous waste stored in the backyards of unsuspecting Mexicans and in warehouses, industrial districts, and rural areas. Neither U.S. nor Mexican officials have a grasp of the full dimensions of the problem, nor do they have the resources to stop it. Another source of environmental concern involves the intensification of large-scale commercial agriculture along the border. Although the border has long supported agricultural activity, most of it was sustainable insofar as it did not deplete local water supplies or rely upon the importation of resources. During the last few decades, particularly after NAFTA, agriculture along the border has undergone significant intensification, with great environmental consequences. The most noteworthy problem is water consumption. The development of major irrigation projects on both sides of the border, including water transfers and greater utilization of groundwater reserves, has not only allowed more intensive production, but has opened up millions of new acres for cultivation. For example, along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, 95 percent of the native habitat has been transformed by agricultural development. In addition, border agriculture is extremely energy depen-
dent. Mechanization, fertilizers, and pesticides are all fossil fuel based, which has implications for both the global consumption of these resources and the quality of life for local residents. In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in an effort to integrate the economies of the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Many environmentalists were opposed to NAFTA because of the potentially adverse environmental impacts, while advocates argued that the economic development of Mexico was the only way to enable it to have the resources to protect its environment. There is little doubt as to the growth—the region now has an economic output of $150 billion, and trade between the United States and Mexico increased from $80 billion to $200 billion between 1994 and 2003. However, it remains less certain how this economic juggernaut will affect the border environment and the millions of people who rely upon it. In addition to the hazards of industrial and agricultural pollution, the rapid urbanization of the border has led to a different set of environmental challenges. Both Mexican and U.S. towns were ill prepared to accommodate the large number of new residents that came to the region, beginning in the 1970s. As a result, thousands of colonias have sprung up along both sides of the border. The U.S. General Accounting Office has defined a colonia as “an unincorporated subdivision along the U.S./Mexican border in which one or more of the following conditions exist: substandard housing, inadequate roads and drainage, and substandard or no water and sewer facilities.” In some cases large numbers of people build homes for themselves as squatters, while at other times they buy land from a developer. In addition, while some municipalities offer utility services to colonias, many others do not, forcing residents to devise alternative strategies. The end result is a settlement pattern that exists at the margins of regulated urban development. Although colonias do provide housing and community to those in need, they are also associated with some very serious health and environmental problems, in particular, a lack of potable water. One study found, for example, that only 64 percent of residents of Nogales, Sonora, had access to potable water. Access to clean water is considered a cornerstone of both human and environmental health, and without it, people, particularly children, suffer from numerous health problems, especially intestinal disorders. It is the lack of such basic resources as potable water that produces the high infant mortality rates associated with the border region. In addition to problems related to environmental health, there are numerous other environmental concerns. For instance, rapid population growth has con-
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Environment and the Border tributed to deforestation as people collect wood for fuel and building materials; it has intensified the depletion of groundwater sources; and a severe air-pollution problem has developed due to auto emissions and open fires. Although environmental degradation is overwhelming, it should also be pointed out that the poverty of many border dwellers also encourages the complete use of goods and materials. The United States, as the largest producer of trash in the world, provides a whole variety of items that resourceful Mexicans and Mexican Americans recycle into such things as homes, household goods, transportation, and toys. In discussing the U.S./Mexican border it is important to keep in mind one of the purposes of an international border: to regulate the flow of people and commodities. The United States and Mexico are becoming increasingly integrated in their economies, culture, and demographics. For instance, almost 300,000 Mexican workers legally cross the border on a daily or weekly basis to work in the United States. In 1999 there were more than 4.2 million truck crossings. The contradictory nature of the border has led to a situation whereby policy makers acknowledge that it is impossible to stop the flow of border crossers, yet spectacular efforts have been made not only to channel the flow of immigrants, but also to create the illusion of efficacy. As a result of substantial public sentiment against Latino immigrants, the United States has embarked on a tremendous buildup of military infrastructure along the border. This can be seen in a dramatic increase in expenditures: Between 1993 and 1997 the budget for INS enforcement along the U.S./Mexican border doubled from $400 to $800 million. The INS has invested in the installation of massive walls, sometimes consisting of multiple layers; the placement of extraordinarily bright lights to “keep them out”; frequent flights by aircraft; and nearly a tripling of personnel. While the public supports “protecting our borders,” such initiatives have had negative consequences for local flora and fauna. It should be obvious that the U.S./Mexican border is a human-made political line, not one that plants and animals comprehend, but one that they are affected by in a multitude of ways. For instance, many species rely on local migrations in order to reproduce, but are blocked by doing so because of the international border, as well as roads. In addition, the bright lights of the border have been linked to stress on particular species, which are then unable to reproduce, while in other cases the lights have made some snakes more vulnerable to predators. For human beings, the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper, a policy initiative centered on the buildup of the border, has pushed immigrants into more isolated, remote, and inhospitable areas. As a result, almost 2,000 per-
sons have died trying to cross the border. As can be seen, there are many ways in which the human, animal, and plant ecology of the border has been dramatically transformed. During the last two decades, fortunately, there has been growing attention to the border environment from constituencies on both sides. NAFTA, in particular, focused attention on the region because many became concerned with the possibility of the further deterioration of the environment. With the adoption of NAFTA, the La Paz Agreement was essentially replaced by the Border XXI Program, which establishes nine technical working groups centered on key issues: natural resources, water, air, hazardous and solid waste, contingency planning and emergency response, environmental information resources, pollution prevention, environmental health, and cooperative enforcement and compliance. In addition, three new institutions were chartered: the Border Environment Cooperation Commission, the North American Development Bank, and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. While these organizations have begun important work along the border, it is still too early to assess their efficacy, but their bi-national nature and emphasis on sustainability are promising. The Border XXI Program has been replaced by the Border 2012 Program, which emphasized bottom-up strategies and regional approaches. In addition, growing activism has emerged among border residents, particularly on the U.S. side, where government policy encourages the growth of nongovernmental organizations. Examples include Arizona’s Border Ecology Project, New Mexico’s Interhemispheric Resource Center, and the Texas Center for Policy Studies. Finally, there has been an increase in more grassroots initiatives, many of which, building on an environmental justice model, seek to connect environmental and economic justice concerns. Such organizations include the California Environmental Health Coalition, which succeeded in banning the pesticide methyl bromide in poor Latino neighborhoods in San Diego, the Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice (SNEEJ), and La Red Fronteriza de Salud y Ambiente. These latter groups garner their strength from their bilateral nature and refusal to allow the state or polluters to pit Mexican and U.S. communities against each other in their struggle for social and environmental justice. SOURCES: Lewis, Sanford, Marco Kaltofen, and Gregory Ormsby. 1991. Border Trouble: Rivers in Peril. Boston: National Toxics Campaign; Liverman, Diana, Robert Varady, Octavio Chávez, and Roberto Sánchez. 2000. “Environmental Issues along the United States–Mexico Border: Drivers of Change and the Response of Citizens and Institutions.” Annual Review of Energy Environments 24: 607–643; Nabhan, Gary. 1996. “Cryp-
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Escajeda, Josefina tic Cacti on the Borderline.” In The Late Great Mexican Border, ed. Bobby Byrd and Susannah M. Byrd, 122–138. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press; Peña, Devon. 1997. The Terror of the Machine. Austin: University of Texas; Pulido, Laura. 1994. “Restructuring and the Contraction and Expansion of Environmental Rights in the United States.” Environment and Planning A 26:915–936.
Laura Pulido
ESCAJEDA, JOSEFINA (1893–1981) Josefina Escajeda was one of the first Mexican American woman folklorists in the twentieth century. Like Tejanas Jovita González Mireles and Fermina Guerra, she published Mexican American folklore during the 1930s and collaborated with prominent European American folklorists. She belonged to a longtime Tejano family in El Paso County and herself was a pioneer of Fabens, Texas. As a young woman, she taught school in nearby Clint, Texas, but as was expected for women of her day, when she married, she left the schoolhouse. Her husband was J. M. “Joe” Escajeda, a local farmer who had a daughter from a previous marriage whom Josefina raised. During the Great Depression she developed a reputation as a talented folklorist of West Texas as she published a number of essays. In 1935 she wrote the following stories: “The Witch of Cenecu,” “Doña Carolina Learns a Lesson,” “La casa de la labor,” “Agapito Brings a Treat,” and “A Hanged Man Sends Rain.” All of these were included in Puro Mexicano, a collection of folktales edited by the legendary University of Texas professor J. Frank Dobie. Two years later Charles L. Sonnichsen, another well-known folklorist, used her stories in his “Mexican Spooks from El Paso,” published in Straight Texas, a collection edited by J. Frank Dobie and Mody C. Boatright. Escajeda lived all her life in El Paso County and was well known in the small Lower Valley communities of Fabens, Clint, and San Elizario. She lived a fairly quiet life whose activities revolved around her church, where she played the organ. Escajeda organized fundraisers in order to preserve Our Lady at Mount Carmel Catholic Church, one of the old missions in the El Paso area. It remains a mystery why she stopped collecting and writing folktales. She died in 1981. Josefina Escajeda was a pioneering Tejana folklorist who has yet to receive more scholarly study. SOURCES: Dobie, J. Frank, ed. 1935. Puro Mexicano. Austin: Texas Folklore Society; El Paso Times. 1981. March 11; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Josefina Escajeda.” In New Handbook of Texas, 2: 887. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
ESCALONA, BEATRÍZ (“LA CHATA NOLOESCA”) (1903–1979) “La Chata Noloesca” was the most renowned comic actress in Spanish-language vaudeville in the United States; her comic persona of la peladita reigned supreme for more than four decades. Born in San Antonio, Texas, on August 20, 1903, Beatríz Escalona was raised by her widowed mother, the proprietor of a boardinghouse facing the Union Pacific Railroad station, where the young Beatríz sold food and coffee to train passengers. At age thirteen she began working in the box office of the Teatro Zaragosa and at seventeen as an usherette in San Antonio’s premier theater, the Teatro Nacional. Here she met her future husband, José Areu, and joined up with his family’s troupe, in which she was trained as an actress, song and dance girl, and comedienne. Escalona made her stage debut at the Teatro Colón in El Paso in 1920. The Areus, of Spanish-Cuban roots, were one of the most important theatrical families on the Spanishlanguage vaudeville and zarzuela (Spanish operetta) circuits in the Southwest. During the entire 1920s the Areus, including Beatríz “Noloesca” (her stage name), toured Mexico and the Southwest, especially spending a great deal of time in Los Angeles. By 1930 Beatríz, now known as “La Chata Noloesca,” the name of the comic underdog character (peladita) she had developed, had separated from her husband and formed her own vaudeville company, Atracciones Noloesca. Escalona, who had started out as a beautiful song and dance girl, had originally gotten into comedy after becoming too overweight to make it as a chorine. Her peladita was destined to become the most famous and beloved comic character on Hispanic stages from Los Angeles to New York. Escalona’s peladita “La Chata” was a streetwise fast talker in the tradition of Mexican comediennes such as Emilia Trujillo, Lupe Rivas Cacho, and Delia Magaña. Dressed in a costume that, at times, was that of a housemaid and, at other times, was made to look like that of a naughty child, she developed a picaresque style that allowed her character to survive and ironically get the upper hand at all times. Her comedy was topical, often relating to current events and locales, and incorporated working-class language and humor, including Spanish-English code switching. In 1936, at the height of the depression, Escalona formed a new vaudeville company made up predominantly of women, most of whom had been raised in San Antonio. In 1938, in order to survive, the troupe, now called the Compañía Mexicana, hit the road for points east and north, where other Hispanic populations were still growing and in possession of enough resources to support live theater. Escalona’s novel idea was to bring to Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others dis-
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Escobar, Carmen Bernal pioneered Spanish-language variety on television in San Antonio with her Las Tandas de la Chata (La Chata’s Shows). On her seventy-second birthday in 1975, Escalona was honored with a gala theatrical tribute, and Mexico’s National Association of Actors awarded her the diploma of honor; she thus became one of the few non-Mexico-born actors to receive such an honor. Beatríz Escalona died on April 4, 1979. See also Theater SOURCES: Arrizón, Alicia. 1999. Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; ———, and Lillian Manzor, eds. 2000. Latinas on State. Berkeley: Third Woman Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1984. Hispanic Theater in the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press; ——— . 1989. Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now. Houston: Arte Público Press; ——— . 1990. Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press; Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. 1989. “La Chata Noloesca: Figura del Donaire.” in Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, ed. Nicolás Kanellos. Houston: Arte Público Press. Nicolás Kanellos
ESCOBAR, CARMEN BERNAL (1911–
Beatríz Escalona as “La Chata Noloesca” in a comic sketch. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
tinctively Mexican variety acts. There was one problem that at times led to embarrassment: the women had been raised in San Antonio, and some of them did not speak Spanish very well. Escalona was always trying to teach them Spanish or transform their Tex-Mex dialect into standard Spanish. They were really Americans attempting to represent Mexico in their art. By the 1940s not only was language becoming hybridization, but also hybrid characters, such as the pachuco, who represented the emergence of Mexican American culture began to appear in Escalona’s sketches and song and dance routines. In 1938 Escalona’s company began a long string of successes in Tampa, Miami, and Cuba. In 1941 the company took Chicago Latino communities by storm and eventually made its way to New York City, where it stayed for nine years. “La Chata Noloesca” and her Compañía Mexicana played the Teatro Hispano, Teatro Puerto Rico, Teatro Triboro, the Fifty-third Street Theater, and radio and television. Escalona, besides being an important company manager, was able to introduce other San Antonio and Texas talent to New York. In the 1950s, once again residing in San Antonio, Escalona worked with a radio-drama group, acting in half-hour segments of Espuelas de Plata (Silver Spurs), and later
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Carmen Bernal Escobar’s life is emblematic of twentieth-century Mexican immigrant women’s experiences in the United States. She combined traditional Mexican and Catholic values with American workingclass progressivism to fashion a life that included marriage, motherhood, and labor activism. Carmen Bernal was born in the city of Durango in north central Mexico on either January 22 or 24, 1911. Her family had been part of Durango’s middle class, but her father’s death, shortly before her birth, and the ravages of the Mexican Revolution left the family impoverished. Conditions in Mexico meant that Bernal never received more than a fourth-grade education. The family barely survived on her mother’s occasional work as a governess and through the scavenging and odd jobs of her older brother and sister. The desperate economic situation in Mexico forced first her brother and sister and later, in 1925, Bernal and her mother to immigrate to Los Angeles. At the age of fourteen she began to work as a live-in domestic and subsequently in various light industries. In her late teens she did seasonal work in canneries, the industry in which she would later make her mark as a union activist. Throughout her teenage and young adult years Bernal attempted to integrate herself into American society. While she gave her earnings from her various jobs to her mother to support the family, even in the dark years of the Great Depression she earned enough to buy makeup and the latest fashions. She strove to
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Espaillat, Rhina P. learn to speak, read, and write English and to engage in those aspects of American life that did not conflict with her obligations as the youngest daughter of a Catholic Mexican family. In 1935 Carmen Bernal married Steve Escobar, a furniture worker who had been born and raised in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas. In 1923 he fled racist and restricted opportunities in western Texas in hopes of a better life in Los Angeles. There he became a highly skilled craftsman in furniture finishing, a trade in which he worked for the rest of his life. By the time they married, Steve and Carmen had steady employment, Steve with a high-end furniture factory, and Carmen with the California Sanitary Canning Company (Cal San). Carmen took time off to give birth to her first child, Alfred, in 1937. When she returned to work, she became involved in union activity. Carmen prospered at Cal San and was in a position to bring several members of her immediate and extended family into cannery employment. Nevertheless, she chafed under the cannery’s paternalistic, racist, and generally exploitative conditions. These same conditions forged a sense of solidarity among the Mexicans, as well as the Russian Jewish women operatives. In the meantime Steve became a leader in organizational efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) United Furniture Workers of America and brought home his experiences in the labor militancy of that and other leftist unions. The combination of pro-union sentiment in the home, the exploitative nature of the workplace, and the solidarity among the women workers soon disposed Carmen to join Dorothy Healy, the future leader of the Communist Party in the United States and an organizer for the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), in organizing efforts at Cal San. Within weeks an overwhelming majority of the women joined the union, and when Cal San’s owners refused to negotiate, the workers walked out on strike on August 31, 1939. Taking opportune advantage of the leftist union’s democratic ideology, Carmen Escobar and other Mexican workers quickly assumed leadership positions in the strike. Escobar, for example, became chair of the secondary boycott committee that pressured retailers and consumers to avoid Cal San products. She also organized the union’s float in the annual Los Angeles Labor Day parade. Finally, she was among the strikers who took their children to picket the homes of Cal San’s owners in the hope of embarrassing them into settling the strike. Faced with the solidarity of the workers and the pressures of the secondary boycott, Cal San finally agreed to a settlement that included union recognition, a closed shop, and improved pay and working conditions.
Winning the strike thrust Escobar into a leadership position within her local. She became head shop steward for women, a member of the union’s negotiating team in subsequent contract talks, and the CIO representative to the state of California’s Wage and Hour Board. She remained active with Cal San until it relocated to northern California after the end of World War II. The union experience was a transformative one for Carmen and Steve Escobar. The leadership positions engendered skills, confidence, and a sense of optimism that they carried with them the rest of their lives. They passed those traits on to their children, all of whom became successful professionals. While at the time she did not recognize the Communist influence embedded in the union, in later years Carmen Escobar spoke excitedly about her days with UCAPAWA and the significance of her activities for herself and her family. After Cal San left Los Angeles, Escobar stopped working to have another son, Edward, in 1946 and a daughter, Rebecca, in 1952. When Rebecca started school in the late 1950s, Escobar returned to work, this time in the retail industry. In 1960, inspired by the presidential campaign of fellow Catholic John Kennedy, Escobar studied for citizenship and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. At the age of sixty-five she left retail and for several years worked as a teacher’s aide in the emerging bilingual education programs in local elementary schools. Retiring in her early seventies, she became a voracious reader, primarily of historical biographies. Her husband died in 1984, but Carmen Escobar continues to live in southern California. See also California Sanitary Canning Company Strike; United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA) SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ———. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in the Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Edward J. Escobar
ESPAILLAT, RHINA P. (1932–
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Dominican writer, Rhina P. Espaillat moved to the United States with her family in 1939 at the age of seven. She lived in New York in her early adult life, where she taught public school for several years. A resident of Newburyport, Massachusetts, Espaillat began to write poetry in her mature years. However, as David Robert indicates, “Espaillat has emerged, late in her life, as a poet of sublime formal skill and an increasingly wide readership.” Espaillat writes poetry in both Spanish and English,
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Espinosa-Mora, Deborah although primarily in English. Her poetry has been published widely in literary magazines, including Poetry and Sparrow. It has also been included in a number of important anthologies, such as A Formal Feeling Comes and The Muse Strikes Back. She is a kind and gentle presence, and her demeanor and old-world courtesy define the persona of a poet whose collections of poetry have received significant acclaim. She has four poetry collections in print: Lapsing to Grace (1992), Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, Rehearsing Absence (2001), winner of the Richard Wilbur Prize, and The Shadow I Dress, the 2003 Stanzas Prize winner. She has also published a bilingual chapbook, Mundo y palabra/The World and the Word (2001). She has received the Howard Nemerov Award, the Sparrow Sonnet Prize, and recognitions from the Poetry Society of America. See also Literature SOURCES: Cocco De Filippis, Daisy. 2000. Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History. New York: Alcance; David Robert Books. “Winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize.” www.davidrobertbooks.com/espaillat.html (accessed October 7, 2004). Daisy Cocco De Filippis
ESPINOSA-MORA, DEBORAH (1951–
)
Deborah Espinosa has journeyed from a childhood of racial exclusion to work as a Chicana activist and now as a major community historian and cultural preservationist. Espinosa grew up in the small towns of western Colorado. Her father, Gilbert Mora-Durán, who had attended school until about the ninth grade, worked as a section foreman on the D&RGW Railroad in Colorado for thirty-three years. He died from cancer shortly after Deborah turned twelve. Although her mother, Calletana Mora-Adargo, had never received more than a third-grade education, she worked at various jobs to support her family—as a housekeeper and cook in private homes and hotels and as a lunchroom manager. Because they had obtained only a limited education, her parents highly valued education for all of their children. The three boys and four girls of the Mora family all received their high-school diplomas. All of the boys and Espinosa also attained a college degree. Living in small-town Colorado as working-class Chicanos, Espinosa’s family experienced much discrimination. “We were always aware of our class distinction,” notes Espinosa. Speaking Spanish also marked the Espinosas as different and, to Anglos, as inferior. Her parents “were that first generation who felt the pressure to learn English” and who were stigmatized for speaking Spanish. A priest once refused to
hear her grandmother’s confessions in Spanish. Espinosa admits feeling ashamed of speaking Spanish when she was a child. “At a very young age, I don’t know why, but I would cringe when my mother spoke Spanish on the street.” She adds, “There was that subtle awareness of, ‘oh, we’re different.’ ” Other Mexican families suffered other types of discrimination as well. Espinosa’s in-laws, also from Colorado, remembered that Mexicans were required to sit in the back of theaters. Espinosa vividly recalls, “I remember shopping with a girlfriend . . . and we were accused of shoplifting. The woman took us into the dressing room and literally felt underneath our clothes, checked our bodies, and then another woman came in and said, ‘Oh, there’s been a mistake. We found the blouses.’ . . . We just left because we were scared and terribly embarrassed, even though we knew we were treated very poorly.” In her parochial elementary school Espinosa often felt isolated because she was one of only two Mexican children. Once she started attending public school, she found support among other Chicano students. However, expectations were low. “There was this underlying feeling of ‘you don’t really fit, and we don’t really care.’ ” Espinosa started college at Mesa College in Grand Junction in 1969, but dropped out. There was a “wall of exclusion that a lot of Chicanos feel.” Soon Espinosa was unwilling to look past such exclusion. At age nineteen she met Juan Espinosa, a newly radicalized Vietnam veteran on his way back to college in Grand Junction. In 1971 they married and headed for Boulder, where both eventually attended the University of Colorado and became major participants in the emerging Chicano student movement. Juan Espinosa started El Diario, a Chicano student newspaper, and became one of the cochairs of United Mexican American Students (UMAS). Together Juan and Deborah Espinosa became involved in many of the major events of the Chicano movement that they covered for El Diario—César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, the organizing of La Raza Unida Party in Texas, and Corky Gonzáles’s Crusade for Justice in nearby Denver. As Deborah Espinosa observes, “We weren’t just students at C.U. Boulder, but we were experiencing, and tasting, and seeing a lot.” On campus Deborah Espinosa and other Chicano activists challenged the lack of coverage of Chicano subjects in the university’s curriculum and protested overt discrimination. UMAS, now 300 to 400 strong, occupied campus buildings. Unfortunately, violence engulfed the Chicano student movement in Colorado. During the three-week takeover of an administrative building six Chicano student activists died in two car bombings. Although the police accused the victims of setting the bombs themselves, many activists continue
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Esquivel, Gregoria to believe that the police were implicated in the deaths. The cases have never been solved. After Juan Espinosa graduated from the University of Colorado, the Espinosas went to Mexico to study for six months. When they returned to their home state, they chose to settle in Pueblo, a small industrial city with a large Chicano population, and there they have reared their four daughters. Juan initiated another alternative newspaper, and Deborah returned to college at the University of Southern Colorado. After Deborah graduated in 1975 with degrees in history and Chicano studies, she became a volunteer with Hope Alive, a neighborhood organization, and with El Pueblo Museum. In 1988 Espinosa became the director of El Pueblo Museum for the Colorado Historical Society. When she first started, the museum operated out of an old airplane hangar. Through her guidance and passion El Pueblo moved downtown to a more visible and historic location. She became involved in city planning and the renovation of Pueblo’s historic downtown, including the construction of a new museum and an archaeological excavation of El Pueblo Fort. The museum has sponsored exhibits on the Texas-Mexican system of ranching, Jewish, Italian, and Mormon communities, and other major aspects of southern Colorado history. Cognizant of the many myths regarding indigenous people and Latinos, she plans to continue to promote Native American and Latino history. SOURCES: Mora-Espinosa, Deborah. 1998. “Teresita Sandoval: Woman in Between.” In La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado, ed. Vincent C. Baca, 3–20. Denver: Colorado Historical Society; ———. 2001. Interview by Margaret D. Jacobs, April 23; Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. 1989. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. New York: Verso; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press; Vigil, Ernesto. 1998. “Rodolfo Gonzáles and the Advent of the Crusade for Justice.” In La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado, ed. Vincent C. Baca, 155–202. Denver: Colorado Historical Society. Margaret D. Jacobs
ESQUIVEL, GREGORIA (1931–
)
As a child, Gregoria Esquivel understood the importance of a good education. After her mother died and her father moved away to work, Esquivel was raised by her grandparents in Lockhart, Texas, about twenty-five miles southeast of Austin. “My grandfather used to say if you’re going to get anywhere, you need to go to school and you need to get your education. I know it was hard. A lot of people did finally continue, but some of their parents just didn’t have the necessary things to get them to school, and a lot of the time they had to go to work. They had to quit school to go to work.”
Although many at the time were unable to continue their education because of financial problems, Gregoria Esquivel attended school while her family lived off food ration stamps. Her family learned to adapt to changes that World War II brought. Esquivel’s education proved helpful because she met new people, began learning English, and could act as a translator for her grandparents. “My grandparents only spoke Spanish, but when I was maybe 6, 7, an AfricanAmerican family lived next door to us and that’s how I started picking up some English. When you went to school, you were not allowed to speak Spanish. What I learned from my neighbors helped in a year or two.” Esquivel’s family regularly listened to the radio to obtain news about the war overseas. Often the broadcast was in English, and Esquivel translated the war news for her grandparents. Esquivel felt sorry for her grandmother, who saw three of her four sons drafted during World War II. Her grandmother lived in constant fear of getting bad news from the front lines. She remembers that the draft impacted nearly every family with a son in her community. Like her family, some families had more than one person taken into the military. During the war Gregoria Esquivel and other Mexican Americans experienced segregation in public places such as schools and even in movie theaters. But she also felt that the war helped make her feel that she was on an equal footing with her Anglo neighbors. “At the time, (segregation) didn’t bother me,” she said. “I felt like that’s the way it was supposed to be. But then I started seeing that maybe we can go (where only whites were allowed). I came to Austin; that’s when I saw that everything here was not (segregated). Here in Austin you could do things. It felt good.” After moving to Austin, Gregoria Esquivel completed high school and took care of children for a local family while still helping her grandparents. Later she took courses at Austin Community College, aspiring to be a social worker. Esquivel believed that the war brought about positive changes for Latinos. “I did notice that when the soldiers came back from World War II, there was a lot of education in the families, like they were inspired while they were in the military when they came back. They talked about their GI Bills, and they were all into education and into a better living environment.” On March 29, 1952, Gregoria married Harry Esquivel, and they had five children. Because of her family commitments, Gregoria Esquivel could not continue college classes, but she enjoyed the challenges that college provided. “(School was) just a lot of studying and a lot of hard work and writing papers,” Esquivel said. “But I enjoy that and I like that. I like to sit in class.” With the knowledge that she gained from her
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Esquivel, Yolanda Almaraz classes, Esquivel worked hard, graduated from Brackenridge Hospital School of Vocational Nursing in 1955, and became a licensed vocational nurse. In March 1986 the nursing department honored Esquivel as the Best of Brackenridge. She demonstrated useful skills of bedside nursing for new nurses and was recognized for exemplary care of her patients. Esquivel advises that today’s generation should set goals and educate themselves to do what they love to do. “Go to school and just work hard at that; then I feel that you can be anybody you can be,” she said. “If you have an education, people will respect you. That has a lot to do with it. Go to school as much as you can and educate yourself.” See also World War II SOURCES: Esquivel, Gregoria. 2002. Interview by Laura Herrera, at Austin, TX, November 11; Slaughenhoupt, Lori. 2003. “Wounded Soldiers Inspired Girl to Become Nurse.” In Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring). Lori Slaughenhoupt
ESQUIVEL, YOLANDA ALMARAZ (1951– ) Born in Donna, Texas, on April 10, 1951, Yolanda Almaraz was raised by a single mother and grandmother. She experienced constant migration and instability early in her life as they looked for agricultural jobs throughout the Southwest. She witnessed corporal punishment and discrimination in school and remembers, “This little boy, just because he turned [away], [the teacher] just hit him so hard across the face. It shocked me and scared him so much. After that, I couldn’t read and it seemed like I couldn’t write.” Although she recovered her abilities in another school in Edinburg, Texas, her new teacher’s attitudes lowered Yolanda’s confidence: “I was really happy in a different school because I had another teacher. I [gave] her my [math] paper. . . . she took it, tore it up, and said, ‘you couldn’t have been in my daughter’s [class] room.’ I was hurt . . . and I felt like there was no hope.” At age fourteen Esquivel and her family moved to Coachella Valley, California, for work in the fields. She graduated from Coachella High School in 1969 and was accepted to California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). Emma Lundquist, a local highschool counselor, advocated for financial assistance for Esquivel and her friends Socorro Gómez and Amalia Hernández under the new federal affirmative action program. Although Esquivel and Gómez pursued ambitions to become teachers, the two chose different paths in college. While Gómez became active
in the Chicano student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), Esquivel worked at a Sears department store, maintaining interest, but distance from the movement. In 1973 both women earned B.A. degrees and teaching credentials from CSUSB and returned to the Coachella Valley to teach: Gómez at Mecca Elementary School in Mecca, California, and Esquivel at Dateland Middle School in Coachella. “That was my goal,” Esquivel remembered. “I had always wanted to be a teacher since I was in the first grade.” “But,” she added, “then reality set in.” In Coachella Esquivel witnessed a veteran teacher, Jane Coffey, physically assault a Mexican boy and girl on two separate occasions. When Esquivel confronted Coffey, Coffey struck her in the chest, asking, “Who do you think you are?” Although the incident occurred in the presence of students, the school principal denied that the assault happened and refused Esquivel her right to file a complaint. Additionally, the school district angered parents by suppressing two charges of molestation against another teacher, Don Cochran. In response, Esquivel, Gómez, two sympathetic Dateland Middle School teachers, Roman Koenig and Charles Márquez, and Gómez’s sister Dora organized with parents to address problems in the district. They formed the group Community Committee for Alternatives in Education (CCAE) to defend Mexican children against abuse in the school and to advocate for bilingual education. Parent George Esquivel went on Spanish-language radio to encourage parents to boycott the school in protest of the district’s cover-up of Coffey’s and Cochran’s misconduct. The following day, April 8, 1976, students from Dateland Middle School
Educator and reformer Yolanda Esquivel with then California governor Jerry Brown. Courtesy of Matt García.
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Estefan, Gloria and Coachella Valley High School walked out of class and marched several miles through the valley, evoking the strategies of Chicano students at Garfield, Roosevelt, and Lincoln High Schools in East Los Angeles in 1968. As the children spontaneously left the buildings, Esquivel, Koenig, and Márquez joined the march. The Coachella Valley Unified School District reassigned Esquivel, Gómez, Roman Koenig, Charles Márquez, and Don Cochran to nonteaching duties while district and union officials sorted out responsibility for the walkouts. Although Coffey was initially absolved of any wrongdoing, upon investigation, the district encouraged her to retire rather than face certification revocation. Superintendent Eugene Tucker also resigned. “When he resigned,” Gómez remembers, “he called us all in, all four of us . . . and he said, ‘up until now, I have afforded the four of you due process, but I’m leaving and you’re gonna be left to the rednecks. God help you.’ ” According to Gómez, “He was right.” The district pursued revocation of their teaching certification, including Cochran’s, and the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) refused them financial or legal support. Eventually the state AFT reversed the local’s decision and hired accomplished labor lawyer Abraham Levi to defend them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contributed attorney Juan Rodríguez’s assistance, and Governor Jerry Brown visited with Esquivel, Gómez, and Coachella Valley Mexican American leaders and publicly campaigned on their behalf. In the end, all retained their credentials, but the events took their toll. Márquez went to East Los Angeles, never to return, while Koenig engaged in binge drug use and went into deep depression. On February 1, 1980, he committed suicide after murdering his wife, daughter, and family dog. Reassigned to a different school in Coachella, Gómez was never allowed to return to Thermal, Oasis, or Mecca schools. Esquivel moved away from the Coachella Valley after months of public persecution by the local newspaper and school officials. She married local radio station manager and personality Gilberto Esquivel, and together they moved to Indio, California, where they began a family. Although circumstances forced Esquivel to leave Coachella, she believes that their movement improved life for Mexican people in the valley. Soon after the walkouts the Coachella Valley Unified School District begrudgingly implemented bilingual education in response to parent demand and the Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols in 1974. Today Esquivel is the mother of three children and program supervisor for mostly Latino students learning English in Riverside, California. She does not regret her actions. “It changed my life,” she remarked. “I never saw myself before as being involved in a movement,
though I believed in César Chávez and I supported him. But before that, I had never seen myself that way. So, it changed me, because I became aware that our people have suffered. . . . I am [no longer] the one who stood there watching [child abuse]. . . . I am not helpless anymore.” See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: Esquivel, Yolanda. 2004. Oral history interview by Matt García, April 2; John Nicholas Brown Center and The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University. “Educating Change: Latina Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity.” www.brown.edu/Re search/Coachella/index.html (accessed July 7, 2005). Matt García
ESTEFAN, GLORIA (1957–
)
Gloria Estefan is widely credited with helping infuse Latin American music into the U.S. mainstream. In addition to her international popularity as a singer and performer, she is regarded as the most successful crossover performer in Latin music history. She was born Gloria Fajardo in Havana, Cuba, on September 1, 1957. Estefan’s father, José Manuel Fajardo, was a security officer for Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. After Batista’s overthrow by Fidel Castro, the family immigrated to Miami, Florida, when Gloria was not yet two years old. In the United States her mother, Gloria Fajardo, worked and advanced her education. The young Gloria cared for her ailing father, who had developed multiple sclerosis following exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, where he had served in the U.S. Army. A quiet, shy girl, Gloria found solace and escape by retreating to her room, teaching herself to play guitar, writing songs, and singing along to Top 40 tunes. Estefan remembers that “music was the one bright spot in my life.” A serious student, she attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School in Miami and graduated with honors in 1975. When Emilio Estefan’s band, the Miami Latin Boys, played at a wedding reception attended by Gloria, she was asked to sing with the band. After receiving a standing ovation, she was invited by Estefan to join the band. The band was renamed the Miami Sound Machine, and Gloria made her official debut in the fall of 1975. She sang with the band on evenings and weekends while attending the University of Miami. Estefan and Fajardo began dating in 1976. Two years later she graduated with a B.A. in psychology. After college she joined the Miami Sound Machine full-time and married Emilio Estefan. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the band released a few bilingual albums with both North American and
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Esteves, Sandra María Latin American pop tunes. The band, with Estefan as lead singer, won widespread popularity and acclaim throughout Latin America but remained relatively unknown in the United States. Its idea to record “crossover” music was rejected by its recording company, CBS Records. However, with the release of “Dr. Beat” in English the band received exposure not only in its local community, but also via pop stations throughout the country and, later, Europe. Its subsequent tune, “Conga,” was rejected by CBS executives who said that it was “too Latin for the Americans and too American for the Latins.” In November 1985 “Conga” was the first song in recording history to be on four different Billboard charts simultaneously: dance, pop, Latin, and African American. As the group’s popularity increased, Estefan received more attention and the group’s record company opted to focus on its lead vocalist. In 1987 the group’s name was officially changed to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine. The next album released, Let It Loose, which included songs written by Estefan, remained on the charts for more than two years and sold 4 million copies worldwide. In 1988 Estefan earned the American Music Award for best songwriter, and the band won the Best Pop/Rock Group of the Year. In 1989 Estefan launched a solo career with Cuts Both Ways. CBS Records presented Estefan the Crystal Globe Award in 1990 for selling more than 5 million copies outside the United States. That same year she earned the Crossover Artist of the Year at the Lo Nuestro Latin Music Awards. While she was on tour in 1990, tragedy struck when she was involved in a bus accident en route to Syracuse, New York. Estefan suffered a broken vertebra. After successful surgery and therapy she returned to her musical career in 1991 with the symbolically titled Into the Light. Her single from that album, “Coming out of the Dark,” marked her emergence from months of therapy and was an international hit. On a humanitarian level Estefan was instrumental in organizing relief centers and raising funds for the victims of Hurricane Andrew and in antidrug education, AIDS research, and water safety, among other causes. She also has provided support for cancer and spinal-cord patients, the homeless, and educational scholarships for disadvantaged students. For her compassion and educational and charitable efforts she has been awarded the Humanitarian of the Year award by the B’nai B’rith Society, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the Hispanic Heritage Award. She garnered recognition from the Alexis de Tocqueville Society and an honorary doctorate from her alma mater. In 1992 President George H. Bush appointed Estefan as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Forty-seventh General Assembly of the United Nations. In 1993 she was honored
for her contributions to Latinos at the Casita Maria Settlement House in New York. In addition to her international fame, Estefan is a bilingual songwriter whose range includes soulful ballads as well as upbeat dance tunes. Her albums Mi tierra (1993), Abriendo puertas (1995), and Alma caribeña (2000) are noteworthy for their Spanish lyrics and traditional Latin American melodies. She received two Grammy Awards for Mi tierra and Abriendo puertas. In 1999 she made her acting debut in Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep, a story about a kindhearted Harlem music teacher. In 2000 Estefan was voted the Hispanic Woman of the Century by Vista magazine readers. SOURCES: DeStefano, Anthony M. 1997. Gloria Estefan: The Pop Superstar from Tragedy to Triumph. New York: Signet Books; Gale Group Online. 2000. “Celebrating Hispanic Heritage: Gloria Estefan.” www.gale.com/free_resources/chh/ bio/estefan_g.htm (accessed July 6, 2005); Gonzáles, Doreen. 1998. Gloria Estefan: Singer and Entertainer. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers; Novas, Himilce. 1995. The Hispanic 100. New York: Carol Publishing Group. Bárbara C. Cruz
ESTEVES, SANDRA MARÍA (1948–
)
The exceptional female voice among the Nuyorican poets of the 1970s, Sandra María Esteves was born in the Bronx, New York, of a Dominican mother and a Puerto Rican father who separated before she was born. Raised by an overprotective, single, workingclass mother, Esteves was sent at age five to a Catholic boarding school in New York’s Lower East Side. There she spent her weekdays in a secluded, disciplined, English-speaking environment that contrasted sharply with the gregarious, Spanish-speaking weekend world she shared with her mother and paternal aunt and cousins in the Bronx. To add to what she has referred to as the “triple life” of her youth, Esteves spent her summers with her godmother, a maid on a Connecticut farm estate, where she experienced the life of a “nature child.” After high school Esteves sporadically attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and received a B.F.A. in 1978 with a major in fine arts, creative writing, and communications. In the 1960s and 1970s Esteves began to identify with the ethnic- and racial-consciousness movements taking place around her; in the Puerto Rican barrios the members of the Young Lords, like the African American Black Panthers, were organizing efforts for social and political change. Nuyoricans were also discovering their poetic voices, distinct from those of the island-educated poets who had come before and continued to arrive in those years. Sandra María Esteves began to read her poems in public along with other Nuyorican writers. Her first collection, Yerba Buena,
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Esteves, Sandra María was published in 1980, followed by Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour (1980) and Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990). Her ethnic awareness expanded in later years to encompass the struggles of Native Americans, African Americans, and Chicanos, and her approach also became more woman centered. A general theme of Esteves’s poetry is the search for harmony and for reconciliation of her Afro-Caribbean roots with her experiences in the United States. Her poetry is strongly oral, best appreciated when heard, particularly since Esteves’s performance of her art is a vital element of its appeal: body movement, rhythm, and voice modulation combine to expand the aesthetic and intellectual impact of her words. Esteves’s creativity also extends to the visual arts. In the 1970s she was in contact with the Taller Boricua collective, Puerto Rican visual artists born and raised in New York. Esteves has worked as a literary artist with the Cultural Council Foundation of the CETA Artistic Project (1978–1980) and the New York Shakespeare Festival (1985) and served as executive artistic director of the African Caribbean Poetry Theater from 1983 to 1988, a company that staged plays, poetry readings, and similar literary events: “The company was predominantly Latino and African American, but there were also Anglo Americans and Asian Americans. It was called the African Caribbean Poetry Theater because I felt that name was an affirmation of who we are, and after years of growing up in denial of ourselves and in low self-esteem, we wanted to turn the tide around.”
Esteves has claimed that the catalysts that produced her the transition from visual to literary artist were, in the first place, a gift of an electric typewriter, followed by a course with a Japanese sculptor and teacher at Pratt Institute who taught students how to create visual art that could exist in the mind of an individual reading a description from the written page, thus helping her understand that words are accompanied by numerous associations of color, texture, sound, and feeling that in combination produce a graphic: “A visual poem became a live process of storytelling with a series of simple images leading to a focused statement.” Finally, a community poetry reading in Harlem where all types of persons read their creations—nontraditional, free-form verses—that spoke to the issues close to their lives moved her to attempt the process for herself. “Later that night, my first eight poems were born, and I embarked on a new journey in my creativity.” See also Literature SOURCES: Esteves, Sandra María. 1989. “Open Letter to Eliana (Testimonio).” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading, ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta. Sternbach; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; Hernández, Carmen Dolores. 1997. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, CT: Praeger; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1989. Biographical Directory of Hispanic Literature in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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Margarite Fernández Olmos
F q FAMILY Discussions of Latinas in the family need to reflect upon a special set of social and cultural circumstances. First, Latinas entered into social science discourse well after the discussion of men had been established. Second, in an analysis of Latinas and the family one must take into account subgroups with different historical experiences. Latinas include Mexican Americans (clearly the largest group), Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and, more recently, Dominicans and Central and South Americans. Third, the study of women in the family reveals important class differences, as well as significant differences between rural and urban Latinas. Fourth, recent immigrants to the United States often differ in their familial arrangements from Latinas who have lived in the country for a long period of time. When interpreting women in the familial setting, one should also be aware that early studies of Mexican American communities still influence the way in which social scientists write about the relationships between men and women. Taking the Anglo culture as a standard for evaluating patterns regarding women as wives and mothers, William Madsen and Arthur Rubel, in their studies of two small communities in southern Texas, defined Mexican American women as passive, and they generally neglected the activities in which women were most active. Social scientists are still being called on to critically evaluate the early stereotypes that have come be accepted as fact as a result of these influential research studies. Not only did Madsen and Rubel focus on small communities at a time when Mexican Americans were increasingly becoming urbanized, but their research efforts were carried out prior to the second feminist movement. The study of Latinas and other women in a variety of cultural settings has shown that women as wives have been considerably more proactive and creative, especially in the private or domestic sphere, than earlier research reports have suggested. Historical research has filled in significant gaps in knowledge of the place of Latinas in the family. Richard Griswold del Castillo, in his book La Familia, has
taken the lead in this type of scholarship, though he gives only limited attention to the roles played by women. Vicki L. Ruiz has, more than any other historical researcher, done the most to correct the historical record with respect to the role of Latinas within the community. Maxine Baca Zinn was a pioneer in the realm of research on contemporary family practices, for she presented data that refute the assumption that Latinas have played a passive role in the family. Her writings on Latinas in the family were followed by the field research of Patricia Zavella, who studied the impact of working wives on familial arrangements and emphasized the role of employment and social networks in changing family relationships (an issue considered later). The research carried out by Norma Williams has clarified the understanding of Latinas in the familial setting in at least two respects. She is one of the few social scientists who have studied the role of life-cycle rituals among Mexican Americans and how these have changed over time. Through interviews with elderly Mexican Americans in Texas she was able to reconstruct traditional patterns regarding rituals associated with birth, marriage, and death. These life-cycle rituals functioned to bring together members of the extended family. Through participation in these rituals common understandings began to emerge. The older Mexican Americans who were interviewed emphasized that women were the leaders in activities associated with rituals involving, for example, mutual grieving at funerals and sharing of happiness at marriage rites, which helped forge deep emotional bonds among extended kin. Today, women in both the working class and the professional and business class still take the lead in organizing life-cycle rituals. However, these have declined significantly as a basis for integrating members of the extended family. The only rituals that continue to be of some importance are those involving funerals, though the funeral patterns themselves have undergone significant changes. For instance, they have lost much of their traditional religious significance. In the
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Family
Wedding photo of Marcario and Guadalupe Hernández, Santa Paula, California, 1928. Courtesy of Esteban and Elia Hernández.
funerals that Williams attended there has been a good deal of visiting among kin who rarely see one another. It is also important to observe that younger women, as well as men, have little knowledge or understanding of the traditional practices associated with birth, marriage, and death. This loss of social memory is indicative of the rapidity of social and cultural change in recent decades in one aspect of family life among Mexican Americans.
Helen and Willie Guzmán on a Bronx rooftop, circa 1930. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
Williams also examined decision-making patterns within the working class in Austin and Corpus Christi, Texas, with additional data being collected from the Kingsville region as well. The main objective of Williams’s research was to describe and analyze changing patterns with respect to decision-making and role-making patterns within the family by husbands and wives. In the process she compared rolemaking patterns among married couples in the business and professional class with those in the working class. Women in both groups, far from being passive, have been highly active in making decisions regarding family matters, though women in the professional/ business class have had considerably more input than working-class wives. Williams also documents how married women are seeking to remake their roles. In the face of obstacles posed by traditional male dominance in the family and traditional social expectations within the community, wives in both the professional/business group and the working class are aware of their efforts to modify their relationships with their husbands. In the professional and business class there are four main types of role making on the part of the wives. A few women are reluctantly dependent upon their husbands, and a few are quite independent, but most of the women engage in role-making patterns that lie between these two extremes. In most cases either the wives are semi-
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Family independent but family oriented, or they are semiindependent and career oriented. Role making by working-class wives differs from that in the professional and business class. The role making of the former mainly involves establishing a personal identity apart from that of their husbands. This is an identity that wives in the professional and business class typically take for granted. Yet this social identity seems to be a necessary step if wives are to achieve greater equality with their husbands. Professional and business women have been able to develop this personal identity because of their greater education and their extensive social networks. At the same time one must not underestimate the role-making activities among working-class women. The significance of these is effectively documented by Denise Segura and Beatríz Pesquera in their quite detailed and informative case studies of working-class women. These case studies also reveal the many complex facets of modern life (including divorce) that some Latinas experience. Moreover, along with other scholars, Segura and Pesquera take note of how discrimination in the larger community is an important factor in shaping the lives of Latina wives and mothers. It is possible to elaborate more fully on the role of family among Latinas by looking closely at the research that has been carried out, especially on working-class women, regarding the impact on the family of their employment outside the home. Patricia Zavella has emphasized the centrality of social networks in the lives of the cannery women she studied in the Santa Clara Valley of California. The social networks that these women developed are a crucial source of social and cultural capital that has enabled them to reshape their relationships with their husbands.
Zavella’s original research effort loomed large in informing the research she carried out with Louise Lamphere and others in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These authors acknowledge the complexities that arise in comparing Mexican American and Anglo women once the matter of family is introduced. One of their major findings is that the similarities and differences with respect to familial arrangements are best accounted for not by ethnicity or cultural background but by the relative importance of the woman as a provider in the family setting. Women who play secondary roles as providers in a family tend to be semitraditional: they are more traditional than women who are providers. At the same time these researchers emphasize the contradictions or tensions between family and work, a common theme in the sociological literature on the family. In this situation they found that husbands typically are more willing to take over child care than to assume household tasks—the result being that wives have to work a second shift. It should be emphasized, however, that Lamphere and her coauthors Patricia Zavella and Felipe Gonzáles (with Peter Evans) do not regard class and ethnicity as irrelevant. Rather, they contend that Mexican American and Anglo women have converged because both groups have responded in similar ways to changes in their industrial-urban environment. The family can be viewed from still another perspective. Vicki Ruiz’s widely read work From out of the Shadows has taken the lead in emphasizing that Latinas have been active in the public sphere beyond the arena of work. Historically, it would appear that women were most active in the church. In more recent decades, Latinas as mothers have been assuming leadership roles in community activities. According to Segura and Pesquera, a number of working-class women
Garment workers and their families during a vacation trip sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, 1957. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Family have developed a rather high degree of political consciousness. In addition, Latinas who are wives and mothers are assuming leadership roles in a variety of grassroots organizations, and they are becoming increasingly active in the more formal political arena as well. These women also experience tensions and contradictions between their role as mothers and their activities in the political sphere, with its multilayered demands on its participants. Systematic in-depth research that focuses on Latinas as mothers seems to be lacking, but one can piece together data from a wide range of scholars who have discussed motherhood as a by-product of other research. As might be expected, mothers rather than fathers play a central role in socializing their children in areas from language learning to making one’s way in the larger society. Mothers also appear to be more involved than fathers in the governance of the schools attended by their children. This pattern conforms to Williams’s own rather extensive observations. However, less educated mothers lack the specialized social knowledge about the organizational structure of the schools that the more educated Latinas have often taken for granted. Because of the latter’s social knowledge they can exert greater influence on members of the school system. A discussion of wives as mothers should also briefly consider Latina grandmothers. Elisa Facio, in her Understanding Older Chicanas, provides some useful guidelines for future investigations. She studied women in what she terms the Chicano-Mexican community who had limited education and were poor. They were financially dependent on Supplemental Social Security income and Medicaid. Facio reports that the grandmothers she studied were in the process of redefining grandmotherhood. Some were developing networks with other elderly women quite apart from
their family connections, and their roles in the family were undergoing change with respect to such matters as caregiving. Her data strongly suggest that the grandmothers were reshaping their roles as a result of major changes in the larger society. The research on the poor elderly brings up another important matter. Many of the in-depth studies of Latinas in the family have focused on working-class and professional groups, but many Latinas drop out of school and are characterized by a high birth rate (relative to women in the United States as a whole). Elva Trevino Hart has written a moving autobiographical account of a poor Mexican American family whose members at one time were migrant workers. The author grew up in Pearsall, Texas, a small community between San Antonio and Laredo. As a young girl, she traveled with her family to work in the beet fields of Minnesota. Now she is a nationally acclaimed writer. Her stories about her life as a poor Mexican American are not only riveting but also revealing. For her (and for most Latinos and Mexican Americans), education has been the ticket out of the barrio. She attended the University of Texas at Austin and later received her M.A. degree in computer science at Stanford, after which she worked for a number of years as an executive at IBM. But her autobiography is about more than herself. Her stories provide a vivid glimpse into the daily life of her parents and her five siblings. She is able to describe her family’s struggles with poverty without making them seem to be victims. The author documents the patriarchal nature of family life among the poor in contrast to the working class and the professional/business group. However, her family is rather atypical among the poor in that her father, not her mother, was the one who insisted that the children acquire a high-school education. She tells how members of her family created a life for themselves despite the
The Gómez family in Kansas City, Missouri. Courtesy of Lara Medina.
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Farah Strike discrimination they experienced from Anglos that limited their opportunities at work, in school, and in the community. Family ties were maintained despite their struggles for basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter. Because of the efforts of her parents and older siblings she was able to acquire the social capital (networks) and cultural capital (social knowledge) that permitted her to leave Pearsall in order to attend universities. Both of her parents worked extremely hard, and the children were expected to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The life of poor Latinas is a very difficult one. One should not assume that changing patterns among Latinas in families have resulted from assimilation. Social scientists still tend to assume that Latinas are changing because they are seeking to emulate Anglo women. But the data indicate that the patterns of family life among Latinas and among Anglos are becoming more similar because both groups are responding to the processes of industrialization and urbanization. Latinas in families are not emulating Anglos but are adjusting, often by creating new roles for themselves, to social and cultural changes in the broader society. See also Aging SOURCES: Facio, Elisa. 1996. Understanding Older Chicanas. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; Griswold del Castillo, Richard. 1984. La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press; Lamphere, Louise, Patricia Zavella, and Felipe Gonzáles, with Peter Evans. 1993. Sunbelt Working Mothers: Reconciling Family and Factory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Madsen, William. 1964. Mexican Americans of South Texas. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston; Rubel, Arthur. 1966. Across the Tracks: Mexican-Americans in a Texas City. Austin: University of Texas Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Segura, Denise A., and Beatríz Pesquera. 1999. “Chicana Political Consciousness: Renegotiating Culture, Class, and Gender with Oppositional Practices.” Aztlán 24:9–32; Treviño Hart, Elva. 1999. Barefoot Heart. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press; Williams, Norma. 1990. The Mexican American Family: Tradition and Change. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall; Zavella, Patricia. 1987. Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Norma Williams
FARAH STRIKE (1972–1974) From May 1972 until March 1974, 4,000 employees of Farah Manufacturing at plants located in El Paso, San Antonio, Victoria, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, walked off their jobs over wages, pension benefits, unrealistic production quotas, and union recognition. Eighty-five percent of the strikers were women, the
overwhelming majority of whom were Mexican American. As an example of their grievances, some workers had a daily quota of sewing 3,000 belts onto pairs of slacks. This meant sewing six belts per minute. The 1972 walkout was not the culmination of an overnight organizing drive by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), but the result of a campaign that started in 1969. Farah Manufacturing was the largest private employer in El Paso, a city that had a reputation as an antiunion, minimum-wage town. When picketing began outside the plants, security guards intimidated the strikers with unmuzzled police dogs, and the local police arrested approximately 900 people for breaking an 1880 antipicketing ordinance. The ordinance was declared unconstitutional, and Willie Farah was admonished to “call off” the dogs. The National Labor Relations Board charged Farah with unfair practices with regard to intimidation and harassment. To many in El Paso, Willie Farah and his families were local heroes. From the newspapers to people on the street, the strikers found few supporters, and when El Paso’s Catholic bishop proved sympathetic to the workers’ cause, he was publicly castigated. As one activist reflected, “We thought when we went out on strike that our only enemy was Farah . . . but we found out it was also the press, the police, the businessmen. . . . This strike was not just for union recognition.” Indeed, the author of one letter to the editor proclaimed, “The Farah family has worked hard for what they have and no-one has the moral right to harm them.” Perhaps in response, a union member wrote her own letter, “I say Farah should be grateful to us, the Mexican-American, who from our sweat have [sic] worked hard to make the pants that have built his empire.” Recognizing the hostile local climate, the ACW called for a national boycott of Farah suits and slacks. Supported by unions, college students, celebrities, and liberal politicians, Citizens Committees for Justice for Farah Workers emerged across the country. Like the allies of the United Farm Workers, these committees raised money for the strikers and took turns picketing local department stores that carried Farah products. During “Don’t Buy Farah Day” on December 11, 1972, an estimated 175,000 people held rallies and parades across the country. The workers themselves were visited by such notables as UFW president César Chávez and the Democratic vice-presidential candidate of 1972, Sargent Shriver. The national boycott began to have its effect as sales of Farah pants dipped by more than $20 million. The strike divided friends and families because a little less than half the original workforce had walked out. Elsa Chávez remembered, “But you wouldn’t believe the number of divorces caused by the strike. A lot
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Farmworkers of couples broke up; either the wife was inside and the husband was outside or the other way around.” Financially the strike was a disaster for union members. One woman explained, “A lot of people lost their homes, cars—you name it, they lost it.” Critical of the ACW, one group of women formed their own committee within the union. According to historians Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig, they pushed the union to be more accountable to the strikers, founded the Farah Distress Fund, and designed their own leaflets. Moreover, women brought their children to the line in front of the plants and at local department stores. These boys and girls passed out leaflets outside of stores, because adults were less likely to make abusive comments when they were handed a flyer. Indeed, Julia Aguilar recounted a question asked by her children, “Are we going to the picket line today, mommy?” Children on the line are a common occurrence in the annals of Chicano labor history. The settlement of the Farah strike in March 1974, for many women, came at great personal cost. Few activists enjoyed the benefits because many were fired after a few months, ostensibly for failing to meet inflated production quotas, and union representatives refused to initiate any grievance procedures. Mexican women have not fared well in their affiliation with mainstream labor unions even though they have contributed much of the people power, perseverance, and activism. Yet the Farah strikers had created community with one another and developed confidence in their abilities as they made their claims for social justice. As Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig note, “The Chicanas who comprise the majority of the strikers learned that they could speak and act on their own behalf as women and as workers, lessons they will not forget.” Elsa Chávez is one of these women. She came to realize that she wanted—and could achieve—a college education. I first met Chávez when she was a student in my Chicano history class at the University of Texas, El Paso. Two former strikers had enrolled in the class, a fact I discovered as I lectured on the Farah strike and noticed the two reentry women, both bilingual education majors, sitting in the front row giggling. “Oh, we’re sorry, Dr. Ruiz, but we were there.” I turned the class over to them. SOURCES: Coyle, Laurie, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig. 1980. “Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story.” In Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present, ed. Magdalena Mora and Adelaida Del Castillo, 117–143. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications; Farah Strike Newsclipping Collection. Institute of Oral History, University of Texas, El Paso; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
FARMWORKERS Agriculture is a major industrial and economic sector of the United States and relies heavily on migrant and seasonal farm labor, particularly in California, where agricultural workers grow many of the nation’s laborintensive crops. Migrant and seasonal farmworkers rank among the most underserved and understudied occupational populations in the United States. Like workers in the construction and mining industries, agricultural workers labor in one of the most hazardous occupations in the country. As many as 5 million migrant and seasonal agricultural workers live and work in the United States. They are composed primarily of laborers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, and Central America, as well as Native Americans and African Americans. Three major north-south migrant flows exist in the continental United States. Migrants based in southern California frequently move north to northern California, Oregon, and Washington. Others, working in Texas and Arizona, migrate up the Mississippi Valley to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. The East Coast stretch finds workers moving from southern Florida through Georgia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and New England. California, the largest agricultural producer of vegetables and fruits in the United States, relies heavily on migrant and seasonal farmhands to work the laborintensive crops. Estimated to number between 600,000 and 1.1 million, including dependents, California’s migrant workers constitute a substantial portion of all farm laborers. Many migrant farmworkers and their families live in established migrant communities with strong ties to Mexico. The gross annual household income averages $15,203; however, households consist of an average of 6.8 members living well below officially defined poverty levels. Counties like Fresno and Tulare house the poorest farmworker communities in California, especially during peak harvest times, when workers crowd into substandard and temporary, makeshift homes. Migrant families typically find housing in labor camps provided by their employers. Housing and sanitation conditions are often substandard, lacking water and bathroom facilities. In addition, drinking water and toilet facilities are often not readily available in the fields. Occasionally nonprofit developers obtain start-up funds to build homes for the workers. Monetary contributions are placed into a fund to cover start-up costs charged by private developers. Donations sometimes spur other businesses to make contributions to help solve the housing crisis. While many agree that homeless workers should receive shelter, residents from various neighborhoods reject the possibility of having
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Farmworkers
Migrant farmworker children, Colorado, circa 1968. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department.
farmworker shelters placed within their residential areas. As winter makeshift camps are torn down, farmworkers are left with few options for shelter, and rural communities, shelter supporters, farmworker advocates, and nonprofit developers struggle to find suitable places to build adequate homes. The socioeconomic status of this population contributes to serious health effects that result from the living conditions and occupational hazards of farmwork. Because of the transient nature of the population, language barriers, the seasonal nature of the work, large distances between fields, and lack of legislative protection to ensure decent and fair working conditions, accurate health data on the agricultural labor force remain an area in critical need of study. Occupational health problems include accidents, pesticide-related illnesses, musculoskeletal and softtissue problems, dermatitis, noninfectious respiratory conditions, reproductive health problems, children’s health problems, climate-related illnesses, communicable diseases, urinary tract infections, kidney disorders, and eye and ear problems. In general, health problems such as malnutrition, poor dental health, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, anemia, and mental disorders further complicate the risk of occupation-related diseases among farmworkers and their families.
Occupational accidents in agriculture include fractures and sprains due to falls from ladders or farm equipment, sprains or strains from prolonged stooping, heavy lifting, and carrying, amputations, lacerations, crushed bones and joints from tractors, trucks, or other machinery, pesticide poisoning from direct spraying or mixing, electrical accidents, carbon monoxide poisoning from running equipment in enclosed areas, and drowning in irrigation ditches. Such injuries are commonly underreported because of workers’ fear that missing a workday or reporting an injury could cost them their job. When health complications are reported, they most frequently seem to develop from work injuries and accidents associated with farm equipment. Heavy physical labor contributes to a variety of musculoskeletal problems, including traumatic injuries, soft-tissue disorders, and degenerative joint disease of the hands, knees, and hips. Farmworkers are exposed to many of the risk factors associated with musculoskeletal injury. Occupational factors that contribute to back strain include previous back injury, heavy lifting and carrying, difficult work positions, an excessively rapid work pace, whole-body vibration, and working in cold or hot climates and in the rain. Workers carry heavy bushels and buckets of produce,
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Farmworkers often lifting them above their heads to empty into trucks. Orchard workers wear canvas bags held with straps over their shoulders that they fill with as much as thirty to thirty-five kilograms of fruit as they climb up and down ladders. Farmworkers also spend long hours bent over low-lying crops such as cucumbers, beans, strawberries, and squash. Agriculture has consistently been identified as the major industrial sector with the highest risk of workrelated skin disease outbreaks. Grape pickers, more than citrus or tomato workers, suffer from contact dermatitis and widespread rashes. Agricultural operations can also lead to restrictive lung disease and bronchitis that result from continually inhaling dust and from daily exposure to a multitude of respiratory toxins, fumigants, pesticides, insecticides, and defoliants. Pesticide-related illnesses have been linked to cancer, as well as to reproductive health problems leading to low sperm count and sterility in male workers and inconsistent menstrual cycles, premature births, and involuntary abortions among females. Labor-intensive crops, such as fruits and vegetables, are treated extensively with pesticides, which are absorbed into the body through the skin, by inhalation, and by ingestion. Exposure to pesticides can result in abdominal pain, nausea, dizziness, vomiting, rashes, and chronic health problems leading to fatigue, headaches, sleep disturbances, memory loss, birth defects, sterility, blood disorders, and abnormal liver and kidney functions. Strenuous working conditions, pesticide-related illnesses, and reproductive health concerns have a detrimental effect on farmworkers’ mental health and lead to high levels of anxiety and depression. Feelings of helplessness are compounded by an ineffective social support system, physical isolation, limited access to medical care, discrimination, marginalization, and the sense that there are limited opportunities for change. Expressing feelings of loneliness, workers feel unwelcome in the larger community and confess to living the existence of a “stray vagrant,” unable to forge lasting friendships. “Working like burros,” they experience an existence of “just passing.” Fortunately, farmworker organizations such as the United Farm Workers (UFW) are doing what they can to improve conditions for agricultural laborers and are currently attempting to track down former farmworkers to provide them with retirement pay. According to the UFW, thousands of aging farmworkers are owed millions of dollars in pension funds under the retirement program established in 1975 by union founder César Chávez. The pension fund is valued at nearly $100 million. The UFW estimates that currently more than 700 retired workers are eligible for benefits but do not know about them.
The question of what to do with the migrant farmworkers has become a major contested issue in presidential elections and has stimulated various discussions on the role of legislation, immigration, human rights, and working ethics. In discussions about immigrant labor and the issue of citizenship, presidential candidates reveal that immigrant farmworkers have become an essential, inextricable part of the U.S. labor force. Most presidential candidates claim that there is a pressing need to intervene, oversee, and force employers who hire immigrant and migrant workers to abide by labor laws. While advocates support protective laws and workplace improvements for farmworkers, those against granting citizenship to immigrant laborers argue that migrant workers compete for low-end jobs that displace native-born workers. However, most farmworkers earn less than $6,000 a year. This places them among the most economically deprived groups in the United States. Farm labor has the highest incidence of workplace fatalities in the United States and often employs child labor as part of a system that, on average, keeps farmworkers from furthering their educational levels beyond the sixth grade. Undocumented immigrants are tightly woven into the fabric of the U.S. workforce. Yet legislation alone cannot force those who hire agricultural workers to abide by fair working standards. Conditions for farmworkers will not change until the employers who abuse agricultural workers are prosecuted and fined. Larger efforts need to take place to ensure that farmworkers can become full participants in American society. These include granting the right to gain citizenship, respecting workers’ rights, extending access to health care, and protecting their right to organize. Pesticide-related concerns must be promptly addressed. Greater regulatory oversight is critical, and an in-depth study of farmworker health remains a critical need. Efforts must be made to reduce the risk of chemical exposure and to eliminate dangerous pesticides. Current practices continue to put farmworkers and their families at grave risk of toxic exposure. No government agency at this time is responsible for examining these impacts. California and Washington are the only states with mandatory reporting of pesticiderelated illnesses, but underreporting consistently occurs because many of the migrant and seasonal farmworkers never see a physician. Migrant farmworkers deserve adequate housing, clean water, restroom facilities, fair pay, health coverage, educational opportunities, respect, support, legislative protection, workplace protection, and the right to gain citizenship.
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See also Environment and the Border
Feminism SOURCES: Alvarez, Fred. 2003. “$76,891 Check Crops Up; A Retired Farmworker, 92, Receives a UFW Pension.” Los Angeles Times, December 5, California Metro, pt. 2, p. 1; Gaona, Elena. 2003. “Carlsbad Finds Site for a Temporary Farm Worker Shelter.” San Diego Union-Tribune, December 10, Local, p. B-2; ——— . 2003. “Carlsbad Ponders Homeless Shelter: New Facility Would Serve Farm Workers.” San Diego Union Tribune, December 3, Zone, p. NC-1, NI-3; Hovey, Joseph D., and Cristina G. Magaña, 2002. “Exploring the Mental Health of Mexican Migrant Farm Workers in the Midwest: Psychosocial Predictors of Psychological Distress.” Journal of Psychology. 136 (September): 493–513; Jones, Gregg. 2003. “UFW Seeks Improved Health Care.” Los Angeles Times, April 21, B1; Martin, Philip. 2002. “Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door.” International Migration Review 36, no. 4 (Winter): 1124–1142; Maxwell, Bill. 2003. “Farmworkers Get Another Raw Deal.” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), November 16, Perspective, p. 7D; Saillant, Catherine. 2003. “The Region: Farm Labor Housing Gets Seed Money.” Los Angeles Times, November 18th, California Metro, pt. 2, p. 3. Soledad Vidal
FEMINISM Strands of feminist ideology or incipient feminist ideology can be located at various junctures in the history of Latinas in the United States. Ardent feminists from the dynamic Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo to Adelina Otero Warren, a Hispana from New Mexico who campaigned for women’s suffrage, form integral links in the Latina feminist narrative. Several organizations similarly represent feminism in action, such as New Economics for Women. Do struggles for gender and social justice equal feminist consciousness? As contemporary Latinas know all too well, it depends on whose feminism and whose context. As one women involved in the Farah strike (1972–1974) bluntly stated, “I don’t believe in burning your bra, but I do believe in having our rights.” The quest for civil rights has been a signifying theme running throughout Latino history. A century ago women’s educational and voting rights were openly discussed within Latino communities, and for a short period two sisters, Andrea and Teresa Villarreal published La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman), the first feminist newspaper in Texas. A prominent labor leader in Puerto Rico and Florida, Luisa Capetillo penned Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, como compañera, madre y ser independiente (My Opinion on the Liberties, Rights, and Duties of Woman, as Companion, Mother, and Independent Being). In this 1911 feminist manifesto Capetillo railed against the exploitation of women within the household, the church, and the workplace. Adopting a republican motherhood argument popular among elite and middle-class EuroAmerican women since the American Revolution, she
argued that more literate, articulate women would make better mothers. Capetillo, however, added a radical twist—educated women would be better mothers for future leaders of a workers’ revolt. More than thirty years later community activist María Hernández of Texas defined her own version of Republican motherhood, more in step with traditional interpretations, that “the domestic sphere was maintained to be the foundation of society and mothers the authority figures who molded nations.” Women were not silent partners in early civil rights organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens. Furthermore, Josefina Fierro and Luisa Moreno were the driving forces behind the first national Latino civil rights assembly, el Congreso de Pueblos de Hablañ Española, held in Los Angeles in 1939. While specific women’s issues were not addressed at this historic meeting, during a follow-up local convention that occurred six months later, delegates passed a prescient resolution that the Mexican woman “suffers a double discrimination as a woman and as a Mexican.” Latina trade union activists, while perhaps not political feminists, were certainly attuned to sex discrimination at work. Women members of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), in general, developed a job-oriented feminism; that is, they sought equality with men regarding pay and seniority, and they sought benefits that specifically addressed women’s needs, such as maternity leave and day care. Similarly, the wives of miners profiled in the landmark film Salt of the Earth grew in consciousness as they expressed their own demands for a more egalitarian division of labor within their own homes as the result of their participation on the picket line. The emphasis on working women’s leadership was not limited to Latinos in the Southwest. In New York City Antonia Pantoja, an energetic community organizer from Puerto Rico, began a legacy of building neighborhood political and educational institutions that spanned more than four decades. During the 1950s a Vassar professor, Camila Henríquez Ureña, a Dominican immigrant from a distinguished literary and political family, crafted eloquent feminist motifs in her poems and essays. The bulk of scholarship on Latina feminism has focused on the participation of women in the Chicano student movement, where they demonstrated creative leadership in a myriad of activities, including welfare rights, immigrant services and advocacy, sterilization suits, community organizations, La Raza Unida Party, antiwar protests, campus activism, and literary production. Whether a Brown Beret in Los Angeles or a Young Lord in Philadelphia, Latinas were not always satisfied with the attitudes and behavior of their compañeros, but those who called for a discussion of
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Feminism women’s issues or an end to gender-specific tasks (e.g., typing or cooking) were labeled “women’s libbers” or worse. At the 1969 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference the facilitator of the women’s workshop reported to the general assembly, “It was the consensus of the group that the Chicana woman does not want to be liberated.” Feminist activist Francisca Flores had little tolerance for such self-abnegating statements. “Women must learn to say what they think and feel without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure men that they are not competing with them.” Many Latinas felt caught between two seemingly polar movements—the patriarchy of malecentered, cultural nationalist student groups and the maternalism and condescension of mainstream EuroAmerican feminist organizations. Most Latinas kept their distance from EuroAmerican feminists, preferring instead to organize with their compañeros and to address issues of crucial concern to women, such as sterilization abuse. They also organized a number of conferences, such as la Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza in 1971. This first national Chicana gathering adopted a fairly radical platform for the time, calling for grassroots health care, with Chicanas in charge of providing accessible abortion and birth control. They also pushed for greater educational opportunities, condemned the Catholic Church, and called for companionate marriage and for child care at movement functions. Perhaps as many as half the 600 delegates disagreed with the platform and walked out. Latinas such as the brilliant student activist Magdalena Mora could be found in all aspects of political organizing from La Raza Unida, the Chicano third party, to the leftist Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA). Women also formed their own organizations, such as Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacíonal (CFMN), a Chicana professional group whose community service, legal advocacy, and urban planning initiatives have had a great impact on the lives of Latinas in Los Angeles. Latinas with different political perspectives from CASA to CFM participated in a campaign to end sterilization abuse at a local hospital, one that culminated in a lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan. Latinas also built coalitions with other women of color. Salsa Soul Sisters emerged in New York City as a grassroots organization for Latina and African American lesbians. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa edited the pathbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, the first collective literary work written entirely by women of color. Latina lesbians led the way in building interracial, transnational networks for social change. They articulated a vision that claimed and fused public and private spaces. Though Latino gays and lesbians face
considerable homophobia and harassment, they have refused to be silenced, and their work as activists and artists continues to make a difference in Latino communities throughout the United States. In 1982 Chicana undergraduates, graduate students, and professors gathered at the University of California, Davis, to form Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS). Called together by Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, this small group of women joined together to form a feminist organization with a collective vision and responsibility to Latinas in higher education and in the community. Today MALCS is the largest, most influential Latina academic organization. Latina feminists continue to make their innovative mark in literature and the visual arts. The Cuban American performance artist Ana Mendieta, for example, combined drama, experimentation, earthworks, and photography in exploring themes like women’s relationship to the body, nature, and heritage. Integrating sexual and cultural identities in her work, Mendieta displayed a clear political consciousness that incorporated pre-Hispanic civilizations and fertility icons with Afro-Cuban beliefs. Grassroots activism, especially with regard to accessible health care and women’s reproductive rights, remains an important, though relatively unacknowledged, feminist endeavor. In 1989 Dominican and Puerto Rican women created the Latina Roundtable on Health and Reproductive Rights, which has facilitated collaboration among community health projects and has sought to influence public policy. Self-help workshops, local clinics, community education programs, and public health access are just a few components of wide-ranging activities by Latina health advocates. What makes Latina feminism distinct is that at its root Latina feminism is about collective politics, not personal politics. Regarding leadership, perhaps Tejana activist Rosie Castro expressed it best: “We have practiced a different kind of leadership, a leadership that empowers others, not a hierarchical kind of leadership.” Indeed, in the preface to Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa held out a message of hope: “We are continuing in the direction of honoring others’ ways, of sharing knowledge and personal power through writing (art) and activism, of injecting into our cultures new ways, feminist ways, mestiza ways.” SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. 1990. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation; García, Alma M., ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York:
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Fernández, Mary Joe Oxford University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., 2005. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vicki L. Ruiz
FERNÁNDEZ, BEATRICE “GIGI” (1966– ) Beatrice Fernández, known professionally as Gigi Fernández, is considered among the best doubles tennis players in the world. She was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1966 and grew up to become the first female athlete in the country. Fernández’s athletic abilities emerged very early in her life when she began to play tennis as a child. Although most serious players are attracted to the sport during their teen years, Fernández managed to graduate from high school in Puerto Rico and attended Clemson University in the United States for a while. At the age of seventeen Fernández turned professional and left college to tour the pro circuit. At the age of eighteen Fernández represented Puerto Rico in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, California. But in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Fernández decided to play for the United States. This was not an easy choice to make, but Puerto Rico did not have a doubles tennis category. With Mary Joe Fernández, an equally gifted young tennis player who was born in the Dominican Republic, Gigi Fernández won an Olympic gold medal. In one of her many press interviews she remarked, “And although the Puerto Rican flag didn’t go up at the medal ceremony, I felt very proud to be Puerto Rican.” Throughout the 1980s Fernández’s career flourished. She continued to rank in the World Tennis Association (WTA) among the best tennis players for most of her career. A meeting with Martina Navratilova led to a doubles players’ partnership that proved to be highly successful. For three consecutive years, 1992 to 1994, Fernández and Navratilova won the doubles championship at Wimbledon. In preparation for the Olympics, Fernández moved to Colorado to increase her stamina by training in the high altitude. In 1996 she again brought home the gold, winning the Olympic medal in the doubles competition for the United States. An overview of Fernández’s accomplishments in addition to her two Olympic gold medals includes the following victories. She won the Wimbledon doubles title in 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1997; the French Open doubles title in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997; the U.S. Open doubles title in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1995, and 1996; and the Australian Open doubles title in 1993 and 1994. In 1997, at the age of thirty-three, Fernández retired from the WTA tour, leaving an impressive athletic
legacy in tennis. She enrolled at the University of South Florida, intending to complete the college education she had put on hold in 1983. In an online interview with College Sports, Fernández told of an incident that changed her immediate academic plans. “I was going to school incognito, minding my own business. No one knew that Gigi Fernández was at the university, which was fine with me. I was taking a geography class and a student recognized me.” The student worked with the athletic department and, recognizing Fernández, invited her to donate a tennis racket for a fund-raiser. She did more than that. Fernández made contact with the department, and when the coach decided to retire in 2002, the university asked Fernández to take the position. Delighted about the opportunity to coach an NCAA Division 1 women’s tennis program, Fernández accepted the appointment. Committed to completing the baccalaureate degree with a major in psychology, Fernández was also committed to developing the best team she possibly could. “I still plan to get a degree. It’s just going to take a little longer.” Fernández also understood the pressures on students such as meeting deadlines, exams, and research papers. Fernández established and manages the Gigi Fernández Charitable Foundation, which has contributed more than $500,000 to various Latino and Puerto Rican organizations, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) collegiate committee, and the USTA Sports Science committee. She supports the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Yo Sí Puedo (a say-no-to-drugs program), the Puerto Rico Tennis Association, and the Gigi Fernández Invitational Cup, which also benefits Puerto Rican charities. Fernández coached the Puerto Rico Olympic Team for the 2004 games in Greece. In June 2005 Gigi Fernández resigned from her coaching job at the University of South Florida. However, she left with fond memories of the university where she graduated cum laude with a degree in psychology. SOURCES: CollegeSports.com. Gagliano, Anthony. “There’s no disguising newest South Florida women’s tennis coach.” www.colegesports.com/sports/m-tennis/iwire/071 102aaa.html (accessed May 27, 2003); The Oracle (University of South Florida student newspaper) online. 2005. “Fernandez resigns as tennis coach. June 9. www.usforacle.com/ vnews/display.v/ART/2005/06/13/42ad896769ed1 (accessed July 7, 2005); University of South Florida. “Head Coach Gigi Fernandez.” http://gobulls.usf.edu/Sports/womenstennis/ staff/gigi_fernandez.htm (accessed July 7, 2005). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
FERNÁNDEZ, MARY JOE (1971–
)
Mary Joe Fernández, a two-time Olympic tennis gold medal winner, was born María José Fernández in the Dominican Republic on August 19, 1971. From the age
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Fernández, Rosita of three she demonstrated an interest and ability in tennis when she accompanied her father and her sister to practice sessions. Two years later, at age five, her father signed her up for professional tennis lessons. Her father, José Fernández of Spain, met her mother, Silvia Pino, while visiting relatives in Cuba. The couple left Cuba during the Cuban Revolution and settled in the Dominican Republic for a few months, where both Mary Joe and her sister Mimi were born. When Mary Joe was a few months old, the family relocated permanently to Miami. Fernández’s first significant victory occurred in 1981 when at age ten she won the United States Tennis Association (USTA) Nationals title for players twelve and under. At age thirteen she played her first professional tournament and became the youngest player to win a match at the U.S. Open. By the age of fourteen she had won four singles USTA championships, becoming the first girl in tennis history to win that many consecutive titles. At the start of a promising career, Fernández decided to make her education a priority. Even though she became a professional tennis player, she made it her goal to complete her education, unlike many players who drop out of school to dedicate themselves fulltime to the sport. It was after she completed her highschool education that she turned full-time professional and went on to win her first major championship at the Tokyo Indoors (1990). The major triumph in Fernández’s athletic career came in 1992 when she competed at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. She won a gold medal in the women’s tennis doubles competition with her Puerto Rican partner, Gigi Fernández (no relation), and a bronze medal in the singles competition. In 1996, at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, she won the gold medal in the women’s tennis doubles competition with Gigi Fernández. Throughout her career Mary Joe Fernández has won seven singles titles and eight doubles titles. As an athlete she has excelled in her ground strokes, precise timing, intense concentration, and remarkable footwork and balance. With her fame, Fernández has become a good role model. She uses her celebrity to support worthy causes and is involved in numerous charities. For example, in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew devastated parts of Florida, she was involved in organizing a charity tournament to aid the victims. When she was diagnosed with endometriosis in 1993, she used her own health problem to reach out and help educate other women on the disease. In 2000 Fernández married Tony Godsick, vice president of IMG, a sports management agency. From 1999 to 2002 she became interested in television broadcast work and writing for Tennis Magazine. Currently she
works as a sports analyst on women’s tennis events for ESPN. SOURCES: “Mary Joe Fernández.” 1999. Macmillan Profiles: Latino Americans. New York: Macmillan Library Reference; Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research; Telgen, Diane, and James Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit: Gale Research. José A. Díaz
FERNÁNDEZ, ROSITA (1919–
)
Born in 1919 to Petra and César Fernández in Monterrey, Mexico, Rosita Fernández was part of a family of sixteen children and was educated in Laredo, Texas. When she was nine, Rosita Fernández and her family moved to San Antonio. Soon thereafter she started singing with her mother’s brothers, Sotero, Santiago, and Fernando San Miguel, the Trio San Miguel. They traveled to Robstown and other small towns, performing in carpas, tent theaters with brick walls and a canvas top. Her career advanced rapidly, from singing live to radio and film. At seventeen years of age she was working at KONO radio station in San Antonio for $2.50 a week. In 1936 the Entertainment Committee of the Texas Centennial Exposition chose the Rhumba Kings as its official orchestra, and Fernández was named the featured singer, performing with her sister Bertha. Fernández’s career continued to advance following her marriage to Raul Almaguer on March 21, 1938, and the birth of their two children, Raul Javier and Diana Rosa Orellana. Fernández did not step out of the spotlight. She attributes her success to her husband’s support: “I married him 61 years ago. He’s been my cómo se dice esa canción? (how does that song say it?) the wind behind [beneath] my wings. He’s been my memory; he’s been everything to me.” Fernández’s radio presence increased when she won a contest to be the corporate commercial representative of companies like Fritos and Gephardt Chili. In one contest Gephardt said that it would have to change her name to “Rosita,” because that was the corporate name of its ad celebrity. She responded, “My name is Rosita!” and was happy that she did not have to change her name. Her career eventually led her, in October 1949, to a spot on San Antonio’s first television program, Curtain Time, on WOAI-TV (now Channel 4, KMOL-TV). She took roles in several films, such as The Alamo (1960) with John Wayne, Walt Disney’s Santiago, the Homing Steer (1965), and Jesús Treviño’s Sequin (1980), and NBC-TV’s 300 Miles for Stephanie (1981). She became an institutional icon when she partnered with the Alamo Kiwanis Club in 1957 to create the first Fiesta Noche del Rio production at the Arneson
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Ferré Aguayo, Sor Isolina tion, The University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio; Vargas, Deborah R. 2003. “Rosita Fernández: La Rosa de San Antonio.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 86:2–3: 168–185; Villarreal, Mary Ann. 2003. “Cantantes y Cantineras: Mexican American Communities and the Mapping of Public Space.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University.
Mary Ann Villarreal
FERRÉ AGUAYO, SOR ISOLINA (1914–2000)
The Rosita Bridge dedicated to singer Rosita Fernández. Photograph by Marisol Garza. Courtesy of Mary Ann Villarreal and Marisol Garza.
River Theatre. The money raised went to needy children in the San Antonio area. Fernández retired from performing at the Fiesta Noche del Rio in 1982 but continued to raise money for organizations that benefited children and the Catholic Church. Fernández also played an active role in raising funds for the renovation of Municipal Auditorium and Arneson River Theatre. Fernández has received international recognition and continues to be honored by Latino and music organizations throughout San Antonio. She has performed for the pope, Queen Elizabeth II, and numerous presidents. For her many performances at the home of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson in 1968 gave Fernández the title San Antonio’s First Lady of Song, which was reported in the newspaper and was associated with her over the years. The bridge that spans the San Antonio River at the Arneson River Theatre was named the Rosita Bridge in her honor in 1982. This bridge tells more than the story of the Arneson Theatre or the Fiesta Noche Del Rio. Fernández tells another story of her bridge and its relevance to her past. “My father used to work for the WPA [Works Project Administration] and he would come and let us know about so many things. He thought they were beautiful, all the bridges and the theater . . . so maybe he just happened to put a little rock in my little bridge.” SOURCES: Fernández, Rosita. 2001. Oral history interview by Mary Ann Villarreal, March; Rosita Fernández Collec-
María Isolina Ferré Aguayo, “el Angel de la Playa de Ponce,” was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on September 5, 1914. She was the daughter of Antonio Ferré Bacallao, a Cuban emigrant who amassed a sizable fortune in Puerto Rico in the iron and cement industries, and Mary Aguayo y Casals, daughter of a family of modest means. The couple had six children, among them María Isolina and Luis, who later became the second popularly elected governor of the island of Puerto Rico. At the age of fifteen, on a trip to Cuba, Ferré Aguayo made a decision to forsake her comfortable life in order to work among the poor as a consecrated religious sister. That decision was not revealed to her family until her twenty-first birthday. That same year she entered the Congregation of the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, whose motherhouse at that time was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Congregation of the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, or Trinitarians, was established when Father Thomas Augustine Judge, a member of the Vincentian Fathers of Boston, Massachusetts, and a group of lay catechists founded the congregation to return lapsed Catholics to the fold of the Catholic Church. The Trinitarians’ apostolate included formal education, home visitation, catechism of youths and adults, and other types of social and religious ministry. Puerto Rico was an early mission field for the Trinitarians, who were dedicated to work in the United States but not in foreign lands. María Isolina Ferré Aguayo professed in 1937 and received as her religious name Sister Thomas Marie, honoring both the founder of the congregation, Father Judge, and her mother, Mary, who died when Ferré Aguayo was a young girl. The young sister first worked among the Appalachian poor in Norton, Virginia, later with Portuguese immigrants in Cape Cod, and then in the Trinitarian mission in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. Sent back to the United States in 1957, she completed a baccalaureate degree at St. Joseph’s College for Women, Brooklyn, New York. While attending college, she worked among Puerto Ricans and African Americans in that part of the city. From 1959 to 1962 she joined the faculty of Blessed Trinity College in Philadel-
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Ferré Aguayo, Sor Isolina
Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo. Photo by Tony Zayas. Courtesy of Centros Sor Isolina Ferré.
phia and collaborated with the Instituto de Relaciones Interculturales of the Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Forum, and ASPIRA of America in New York. During these years of teaching and studying she earned a master’s degree in criminology from Fordham University. From 1963 to 1968 she directed the Dr. White Community Center in Brooklyn and was a member of an advisory committee created by Mayor John V. Lindsay to implement the federal War on Poverty. The Second Vatican Council altered church roles and the sisters’ work within the institution. The new theology stressed engagement in the world. Many sisters returned to using their baptismal names, and Sister Thomas Marie went back to Isolina with the religious title Sor preceding it. Her experiences in Brooklyn with troubled youths and the criminal justice system taught her the importance of social work and the need to identify resources within and outside the community. In 1969, together with other religious sisters and a group of lay volunteers, she founded Juventud y Comunidad Alerta, a multiservice project in La Playa de Ponce, one of the poorest and most neglected neighborhoods of the island. The Centro de Orientación y Servicios, which later became Centros Sor Isolina Ferré, was modeled on these successes. Through the center the Trinitarians offered a program of alternative education, gathering supporters to help
in the schooling of young people and work with their families. Workshops on photography, silk screening, ceramics, cosmetology, upholstering, industrial sewing, and gardening became part of the center’s mission. The center targeted the needy, handicapped children, runaways, pregnant young women, and the aged. By 1985 these federally funded programs were extended to other towns of the island. Sor Isolina believed that “God’s glory is in the total fulfillment of God’s people, men and women.” In the eighty-five years of her life Sor Isolina accomplished much on behalf of the poor in Puerto Rico. Most of all, she was able to inspire and help people help themselves by developing their potential and self-esteem. The Taller Tabaiba, Ruta Artesanal de Puerto Rico, for example, trained many artisans and offered them opportunities to be self-sufficient by helping them promote their art through the Internet, catalogs, local exhibitions and artisans’ fairs, sponsorships (intercesores), and educational opportunities related to promotion and sale of their products. By the end of her life Sor Isolina had received numerous awards and seventeen doctorates honoris causa from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico (1974), Marymount College, New York (1975), Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, San Germán (1979), Saint Francis College, Brooklyn (1981), Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey (1982), the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (1984), Universidad Sagrado Corazón, Santurce, Puerto Rico (1984), Bank Street College, New York (1984), Ciencias Médicas de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (1985), Centro Caribeño de Estudios Postgraduados, Santurce, Puerto Rico (1986), Queens College of the City University of New York (1990), Universidad Central del Caribe, Bayamón, Puerto Rico (1991), Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1992), College of the Holy Family, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1992), Saint Joseph’s College, Brooklyn (1994), Escuela de Medicina de Ponce (1994), and Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana (1997). Among her awards are the Life Achievement Award of the Puerto Rican National Coalition, Washington, D.C. (1987), the Cruz Alonso Manso from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico (1987), the Alexis de Tocqueville Award of the United Fund, California (1989), the Humanitarian Award Albert Schweitzer from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (1989), the Roberto Clemente Humanitarian Award from Boricua College, New York (1990), the International Peace Award from the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, and the Andrus Award from the American Association of Retired Persons, San Antonio, Texas (1992). In 1998 she received the Medalla de la Legis-
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Fierro, Josefina latura de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Legislative Medal). The following year President Clinton presented Sor Isolina with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that a civilian can receive from the president of the United States. Sor Isolina’s greatest accomplishment was to work with the poor, especially the poor of her homeland, to help them help themselves to achieve a potential that seemed hidden but that for Sor Isolina was nothing less than “God’s glory.” She died in her native city in the Hospital Santo Asilo de Damas at the age of eightyfive. See also Nuns, Contemporary; Religion SOURCES: “Una luminosa autobiografia dialogada.” 1990. El Nuevo Día, October 21; MedalofFreedom.com. 1999. “Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Sister Isolina Ferré, www.medaloffreedom.com/SisterIsolinaFerre.htm (accessed July 7, 2005); Puerto Rico Herald. 2000. “Puerto Rico Profile: Sr. Isolina Ferre.” January 14. www.puertorico-herald.org/ issues/vol4n02/ProfileFerre-en.shtml (accessed July 7, 2005); “Sor Isolina: Concluye una vida dedicada a los demás.” 2000. El Nuevo Dia. August 3. Ana María Díaz-Stevens
FIERRO, JOSEFINA (1914–1998) Born in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, during the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution, Josefina Fierro was raised in a familial heritage of revolutionary activism. Her father was an officer in General Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s northern revolutionary army, a fact that made him largely absent from her life. She was raised by her mother, who separated from her husband and immigrated to the United States when Josefina was a baby. The language of revolution and social justice was a constant in her young life. Her mother’s family members were followers of Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican anarchist banished from Mexico for promoting radical reforms as part of his Partido Liberal Mexicano, a movement he continued while in exile on the U.S. side of the border. As a “Magonista,” Josefina’s mother taught her daughter to stand up for the underdog, to speak out against injustice, and to treat others with dignity and respect. It was no surprise that Josefina eventually used these qualities as a basis for assuming leadership within the Mexican American community in California when she came of age. After periods of migration that took Fierro, her mother, and her younger brother through southern Arizona and southern California, the three settled in the sleepy San Joaquin Valley agricultural town of Madera. After graduating from the local public high school—an accomplishment attained by few Mexican students of
her generation—Fierro moved from Madera to live with an aunt in Los Angeles. Through her relatives, many of whom were entertainers, Fierro was exposed to Hollywood’s night life. There she met, fell in love with, and soon married screenwriter John Bright, later a member of the famous Hollywood Ten, a group of motion-picture writers and producers blacklisted from the industry because of their alleged Communist Party leanings. Influenced by, and with support from, her husband and other Hollywood notables, Fierro began a campaign in Los Angeles during the mid-1930s to defend the rights of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans against the widespread discrimination and racism on the rise in southern California during the Great Depression. She helped organize, together with the local Mexican consulate office, the Mexican Defense Committee, an organization that staged boycotts against industries that refused to hire Mexicans, confronted the Los Angeles Police Department over cases of brutality, and led protests to the steps of the state capitol against proposed anti-Mexican legislation. Fierro’s successful organizing efforts and her emergence as a key leader in the Los Angeles Mexican community attracted the attention of Latino leaders, especially Luisa Moreno, who were preparing to launch the first-ever national Latino civil rights organization, el Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española. El Congreso was founded in Los Angeles in 1939, and young Fierro was elected national executive secretary, the secondhighest-ranking position in the organization. For the next several years she and her colleagues led a broadbased civil rights movement for Mexican Americans and other Latinos in California and in the Southwest. A fiery orator who could captivate an audience, Fierro
A night on the town for civil rights leader Josefina Fierro and her Hollywood screenwriter husband, John Bright. Courtesy of Mytyl Glomboske.
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Figueroa, Belén traveled throughout California to participate in various demonstrations and activities aimed at bringing down the walls of discrimination against Mexicans in housing, employment, education, and other public places. She played an instrumental role, in addition, on the defense committee of the infamous Sleepy Lagoon case in wartime Los Angeles, a murder trial involving several Mexican American youths accused and sentenced to prison for a crime they did not commit. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee eventually won the release of the defendants from state prison two years after the original convictions. A year later, in June 1943, Fierro almost single-handedly brought an end to the days of rage and physical assault on Mexican Americans in the downtown and in East Los Angeles during the so-called zoot-suit riots. Because the Los Angeles Police Department was unwilling to stop the brutality in the streets against Mexican American youths, Fierro flew to Washington, D.C., with a Mexican consulate official to prevail upon the vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace, to help bring an end to the violence unleashed against her community. Convinced by her graphic, firsthand stories about the beatings of Mexican Americans by servicemen, buttressed by an armful of newspapers she carried with sensational headlines about the riots, Wallace secured a military order that restricted all service personnel to their respective bases until order was restored. As Fierro’s efforts to advocate for Mexican Americans attracted more notice, she was labeled as a “Communist subversive” by the California Committee on Un-American Activities. After her divorce from John Bright she returned to Madera, where she organized on behalf of Henry Wallace’s Independent Progressive Party. In 1948, after being hounded by the FBI and fearing arrest and deportation, she decided to leave the United States and head to Guaymas, the Mexican port city where she lived the rest of her life. Josefina Fierro was one of the most important Mexican American leaders of her generation during the 1930s and 1940s. In an era when organizing on behalf of the rights of Mexicans in the United States was a sacrifice made at enormous personal and professional costs, Josefina Fierro’s work building organizations and advocating for the welfare of Latinos everywhere places her in the company of a select group of pioneering Latina leaders.
University Press; Sánchez, George. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
Albert M. Camarillo
FIGUEROA, BELÉN (1918–1960) Religious activist Belén Figueroa was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the daughter of Guillermo Figueroa and Alejandrina Giraldi. Her life was never one filled with praise for any childhood or preadolescent accomplishment. Her training as a competent homemaker far outweighed any other accomplishments she might achieve. “At the tender age of twelve I became a surrogate mother to my two sisters who were merely three years younger than myself. My mother, Alejandrina Giraldi, had already taught me to cook and housekeep by the time I was eight years old. Following my mother’s death I comforted my sisters by using the stories my mother had told me between house chores and bedtime. . . . I believe that the greatest inheritance I can leave my children is to cherish their childhood by repeating their real life stores and [to] show others how to cope with younger siblings who faced a bleak future without my [a] mother.” Once Figueroa succeeded in carrying out her duties as the eldest sister, she married Antonio Pagán, a horse jockey. In the 1940s she became part of a wave of unsung “heroes” who migrated to the United States. Unlike many of her countrymen, she traveled alone by boarding a freight ship with her two children, Antonio
See also El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española SOURCES: Camarillo, Albert. 1984. Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans. San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser; García, Mario T. 1989. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford
Religious reformer Belén Figueroa. Portrait by Isidro Aybar. Courtesy of Fundación Belén Figueroa, Inc.
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Figueroa Mercado, Loida Jr. and Ariel. Figueroa was also pregnant with a third child, and nine months later her husband followed her to New York’s Spanish Harlem as a stowaway in another freight ship. In 1950 Figueroa faced the most important challenge in her life. With her husband’s support she requested permission to enroll in a three-year Bible Institute Program at the Arca Evangélica Bible Institute on West 100th Street. However, the price for completing the missionary program, attending nightly conferences three times a week, was expulsion from a quasiPentecostal church in her community, a religious organization to which she and her husband belonged. The organization believed that “woman were supposed to stay home and care for the children.” By that time Belén and Antonio had two sons and three daughters. In 1953 Antonio followed her lead and became a religious worker by day while working the night shift in a steel mill to support the family. Together they opened the first storefront church for Hispanics in Niagara Falls, New York. Their efforts met with opposition from the mostly Italian American neighborhood. While peace never meant the absence of strife, the couple nurtured their family and community and discovered that peace from God meant providing the strength and fortitude to weather storms of rejection and opposition. As a nondenominational couple in pastoral work, the Figueroas strove to meet the many needs in that Latino community. It was not unusual for their three daughters to wake up and find family and friends sleeping in their two-bedroom apartment simply because there was need for temporary shelter. The Pagán-Figueroa family braved harsh winters, and with very limited resources they began anew. The Vencedores en Cristo Church was another storefront mission founded by the Figueroas. It became a second home to the Spanish-speaking population in the military who longed for the warmth of traditional Hispanic settings, as well as spiritual leadership, at a time when a handful of families constituted the total Puerto Rican and Latino community of western New York. The Figueroas worked diligently in their ministry and encouraged the parents who attended church meetings to teach their children to maintain their Puerto Rican heritage even while reaching out to embrace all nationalities. In 1957 the family moved to the west side of Buffalo, New York, where they founded the next church in the basement of the family’s first-owned wooden home. By this time Figueroa had saved enough money in her Quaker Oats cereal box for a round-trip ticket to Puerto Rico. She visited her beloved island, which was always referred to as “mi casa,” a homecoming that seemed to be an earthly prelude to her spiritual home. Belén
Figueroa de Pagán believed and preached that there is “no such thing as an untimely death. Every life has a special time and mission to complete.” Her accidental death came about from a faulty indoor heating system on an icy cold day in November 1960, when other families were preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving. With barely enough money to cover the expense of a sealed casket that held the unrecognizable remains of the woman who was called “the facilitator of dreams,” no wake was held. Funds were unavailable for the simplest of grave markers. Yet her fruitful life did not go unnoticed by grateful friends, community, and the God she served. In celebration of her life’s work, the Belén Figueroa Foundation was incorporated in Puerto Rico in 1986. Graphic artist Reyes Meléndez-Rosa donated the artwork and logo used by the organization to honor her memory. More often than not, it takes just one ordinary person with a mission and a vision to inspire and motivate others to excel beyond their expectations. Today, Figueroa’s philosophy of life is kept vibrantly alive through the careers of service that her daughters have chosen. Ahilud, a social worker, serves her community on several boards of trustees and intercedes on behalf of children and youths as a bilingual specialist in a counseling division. Ruth, a registered nurse, is a bilingual health professional for non-English adult patients, and Alicia, a Ph.D., organizes and manages the Belén Figueroa Foundation, provides seminars in education and health. SOURCES: Figueroa, Belén. Papers. Foundation Belén Figueroa, Orlando, Florida; Pagan-Figueroa, Alicia. 2002. Interview by Hector Carrasquillo, June; ———. 2004. El Regreso. Orlando: Foundation Belén Figueroa. Hector Carrasquillo
FIGUEROA MERCADO, LOIDA (1917–1996) Noted historian Loida Figueroa Mercado was a dedicated leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement, a member of the island’s Socialist Party, and the party’s candidate for the mayoralty of the city of Mayagüez. The first woman to become a member of Gran Logia Masónica Gran Oriente de Puerto Rico, Figueroa Mercado was also the recipient of the Cuban Ministry of Culture’s National Medal of Culture. Loida Figueroa Mercado was born on October 6, 1917, in Yauco, Puerto Rico, to Agustín Figueroa, a sugarcane cutter, and Emetria Mercado, a housewife. She was married three times and had four daughters, Eunice, María Antonia, Rebeca, and Avaris. In 1941 she earned the baccalaureate degree and graduated
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Figueroa Mercado, Loida magna cum laude from the Polytechnic Institute, today known as the Universidad Interamericana, in San German, Puerto Rico. In 1952 she had obtained her M.A. from Columbia University, and in 1963 she completed her Ph.D. at the Universidad Central de Madrid, Spain. She was a Yale University Fellow (1975) and visiting professor of history in the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (1974–1977). There she became involved in the student movement of the 1970s. At Brooklyn College, in particular, she walked with the faculty and students as they picketed the administration over the issue of departmental autonomy in choosing a chairperson. Before she became a renowned historian, she was an elementary-school teacher. She taught at Guánica High School in the town of Guánica, Puerto Rico, from 1942 to 1957. Figueroa Mercado was acting principal in 1947 and again in 1955. From 1957 to 1974 she was a professor of history specializing in the history of
Dona Loida para Alcalde, poster for Figueroa Mercado’s campaign for mayor of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Courtesy of the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Puerto Rico at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. A quote from her first publication, Frente al espejo (Before the Mirror) (1945) gives some insight into her developing personality: Te prohíbo en adelante que te rindas O que escondas de las gentes tus valores [sic] Adelante, extermina ese complejo Que tu tienes tú puesto en este mundo! (From here on in, I forbid you to give up Or to hide your values from people Onward, extinguish that complex You have your place in this world!)
Her first literary publications were Acridulces (poems, 1947) and Arenales, a novel published in 1961 (second edition, 1985). She explained that she started her foray into writing the history of Puerto Rico when she was asked to teach a course on the subject and found that there were no textbooks to assign to the students. She began to put together what she thought would be a short history of Puerto Rico. Over time her brief history of Puerto Rico became two volumes, which are now considered classics because of the literary style and the meticulous research she brought to the interpretation of historical data. Part 1 was translated into English in 1971 as History of Puerto Rico from the Beginning to 1892, making her as famous in the United States, especially on the East Coast, as she already was on the island. Although she was a historian, her publications reflect broad interests. Her publications include Acridulces (poems, 1947), the novel Arenales (1961; 2nd edition, 1985), Breve Historia de Puerto Rico (volume 1, 1968; volume 2, 1969), History of Puerto Rico from the Beginning to 1892 (1971), Tres puntos claves: Lares, idioma, soberania (1972), La historiografía de Puerto Rico (1975), El caso de Puerto Rico a nivel internacional (1980), Hostos ensayos inéditos (edited by Emilio Godinez Sosa, 1987), and Biografías de hombres y mujeres ilustres de Puerto Rico (with Vicente Reynal, 1988). Figueroa Mercado was an active member of the Asociación Histórica Puertorriqueña, the Association of Caribbean Historians, the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, the Sociedad de Autores Puertorriqueños, the Club de Puerto Rico, the National Audubon Society, Phi Alpha Theta, and PEN. She died in San Juan in 1996 and was buried in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, but on November 12, 2003, her remains were removed to Yauco, in keeping with her last wishes. Her birthplace was renamed Sector Loida Figueroa Mercado in her honor. See also Education SOURCES: Baéz Fumero, José Juan. 2004. E-mail correspondence with Andrés Pérez y Mena, July 13; Fernández, Ronald, Serafin Méndez, and Gail Cueto, eds. 1998. Puerto
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Flores, Diana Rico: Past and Present. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing; Rayan, Bryan, ed. 1991. Hispanic Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research.
Andrés Pérez y Mena
FLORES, DIANA (1951–
)
Politician Diana Flores was born and raised in Palacios, Texas, a small Gulf coastal town. The fourth of five children in her family, she is today the mother of five children and grandmother of twelve. While raising her children and working full-time, Flores returned to college to finish her degree. She attended El Centro and Mountain View Colleges in Dallas until she had enough credits to transfer to Dallas Baptist University (DBU). She graduated with a 4.0 grade point average and received the baccalaureate degree from Dallas Baptist University in May 1994. Flores has lived in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas since the summer of 1979. While her children were young, she was an active member of the Parent-Teacher Associations in their schools, a Girl Scout volunteer, a Sunday-school teacher, and a youth leader in her church. She has always been active in civic organizations, but her primary emphasis has been, and continues to be, education. Because of this she dedicates herself to efforts that enable greater participation of low-income students and families in educational attainment (high-school and college graduation). She firmly believes that education is the pathway to “become your dream” and therefore helps many young people in their dream-making journey by valuing and using education as the commencement of that passageway. Since 1985 she has been involved in highereducation issues. This led to a position with the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD). There she distinguished herself and was recognized for her contributions and leadership by being selected in 1992 as the DCCCD Employee of the Year from among 2,500 employees. Flores left her employment with DCCCD in 1995 and in 1996 became the first Chicana (and Latina) elected to the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) to represent District 6. Since then she has been reelected and continues to serve in this capacity. Only one other Chicano (Latino) had ever been elected to the DCCCD before Diana Flores; that other person is current Dallas city councilman Steve Salazar. Thus Flores was the second Latina/o elected to this important community college board, and to date, no other Latina/o has been elected to this public body. While Flores was at the DCCCD, she became involved with the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (TACHE). TACHE’s primary goal is to improve the participation of Chicanos/Latinos in
Politician Diana Flores. Courtesy of Diana Flores.
higher education. The “Closing the Gap” project, envisioned by Flores and others on the board to address these issues, seeks to build college enrollments and increase diversity in higher education by 2015. While serving on the board of this organization, she met with college and university administrators, business leaders, and legislators throughout the state to lobby for greater access to a college education for all students. Flores is very proud of several accomplishments since her tenure on the board. First, more students enrolled in the district’s various college campuses between 1996 and 2004. Second, many of these new students have been undocumented individuals whose enrollment has been approved by the state legislature since 1996. Third, more students were receiving full tuition and book scholarships in 2004 than in 1996. Fourth, during this eight-year period the diversity of DCCCD faculty, staff, and students increased. Fifth, these recent achievements notwithstanding, the DCCCD still enjoys one of the lowest tax rates for a community college district in Texas. In short, Flores notes that the number of Latina/o students increased between the spring of 1996 and the spring of 2004 from 6,144 to 12,188 (an increase of 98 percent), and the number of degrees/certificates awarded to Latina/o students during a similar period (1995 to 2003) grew from 258 to 657, an increase of 155 percent. In both instances Latina/o students posted the greatest such increases among students from the various ethnic groups served by and attending the DCCCD. For her efforts on behalf of Latino/a students, Flores received
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Flores, Francisca the Mexican American Democrats’ Adelita Leadership Award in 1994, and was listed in Who’s Who in American Junior College Students, 1991–92. See also Education SOURCES: Dallas County Community College District. “Trustee Diana Flores.” www.dcccd.edu/trustees/flores.htm (accessed October 6, 2004); Flores, Diana. 2004. Personal communication with Roberto R. Calderón, February. Roberto R. Calderón
FLORES, FRANCISCA (1913–1996) Born on December 1913 in San Diego, California, Francisca Flores was a revolutionary, a community organizer and activist, a journalist, an advocate for women’s rights, and a forerunner of Chicana feminism. Diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of fifteen, Flores spent more than a decade isolated in a sanitarium from which she was released at the age of twenty-six. Although she lost a lung, she managed to live a long and productive life. The same year she was admitted into the sanitarium, her older brother died of tuberculosis, a condition common among Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the early part of the twentieth century. The severe and oppressive conditions Mexicans and Mexican Americans like Flores experienced in the Old Town barrio of San Diego left a mark on her and greatly influenced her social and political development. The Mexican Revolution and massive emigration from Mexico to the United States influenced Flores’s youth. She met veterans of the Mexican Revolution at the sanitarium who imparted their political and ideological fervor. Profoundly affected by these interactions, Flores helped form a women’s organization, Hermanas de la Revolución Mexicana. The organization offered women the space to discuss politics and encourage social activism. This was a totally new experience for Flores that helped shape her feminist views. Bill Flores, Flores’s nephew, relates her conversations about Hermanas: “I knew that the men didn’t take us seriously. They only wanted us to make tortillas. They couldn’t accept that we had our own ideas.” Thus began Flores’s long campaign for women’s rights. By the time she was released from the sanitarium, World War II had erupted, and Flores had gained political organizing experience. According to Bill Flores, she was inspired by the Spanish civil war and resistance to Hitler, whom she saw as a terrible enemy of freedom. However, she loved the art of resistance and the artistic revolution of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Pablo Picasso. Her ideological solidarity with Mexico’s independence from the economic and cultural influence of the United
States underlined her belief that Mexican Americans needed to fight on two fronts: one in the United States for equality and another in support of liberty in Mexico. Her love for Mexican history and culture nourished her sense of pride, and she used every project to instill cultural pride in others. Francisca Flores moved to Los Angeles, honed her organizational skills, and engaged in numerous social and political activities. In 1943 she joined the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, a group of progressive California activists that worked toward the release of twelve Mexican American young men wrongly convicted of murder. A year later the 2nd District Court overturned their convictions. During the 1940s she emerged at the forefront of community organizing in Los Angeles and served as a leader of the Asociación Mexico-Americana (ANMA), a left of center civil rights group. Under the scrutinizing glare of the postwar “red scare” era, Flores’s activities in progressive organizations made her a target of McCarthyism. During this period she openly criticized the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and its persecution of labor activists. She arranged for underground screenings of the controversial movie Salt of the Earth about Mexican women’s role in a 1950 miners’ strike in Silver City, New Mexico. Flores also became active in the Democratic Party and eventually helped cofound the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) in 1960. MAPA remains an active organization to this day. As an activist with important information to disseminate, Flores succeeded in reaching a wider audience through her work as a writer and journalist. She served as a writer for both La Luz Magazine and Mas Gráfica and helped edit Carta Editorial and other political periodicals that focused on Latino issues. Of major significance was her role as editor of Regeneración, a magazine modeled after the Flores Magón brothers’ newspaper during the Mexican Revolution. However, throughout the 1970s Flores’s focus on the rights and conditions of women became the centerpiece of Regeneración. Flores continued her unique brand of activism into the civil rights era. In the 1960s she embraced Chicanismo as an identity, but challenged the more sexist aspects of its guiding ideology, cultural nationalism. A lightning rod for her times, she attracted and garnered the support of a critical mass of Chicanas who collectively triggered a social and political campaign for the rights of Chicana and Mexican women. Flores became the founding president of a major organization that reflected her views, the Comisión Feminil Mexicana Nacional. In a 1971 article published in Regeneracion she described the important role of the Comisión, stating that “more Chicanas are fighting for their own identity,
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Florez, Encarnación Villarreal Escobedo and they do not care who does not like it. Women must learn to say what they think and feel and [be] free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure men that they are not competing with them.” Founded by resolution on October 10, 1970, at a National Issues Conference in Sacramento, Comisión Feminil recognized that “the effort and work of Chicana/Mexican women in the Chicano movement is generally obscured because women are not accepted as community leaders, either by the Chicano movement or by the Anglo establishment.” Flores’s most ardent dreams for women were fulfilled in the purpose and scope of the organization, which sought to “direct its efforts to organizing women to assume leadership positions within the Chicano movement and in community life, and: [to] concern itself in promoting programs which specifically lend themselves to help, assist and promote solutions to female type problems and problems confronting the Mexican family.” The following year the organization developed the Chicana Service Action Center, and Flores became its director in 1972. The Chicana Service Action Center was established to provide low-income, unskilled women with job training. The center continues to grow, provides shelter assistance to battered women, and links other Chicana-related resources together. Both the Comisión Feminil Mexicana Nacional and the Chicana Service Action Center have served and represented Chicanas and Mexican women for more than thirty years. Flores continued her activism with Comisión Nacional and the Chicana Service Action Center. She participated in the National Equal Rights Amendment March to Washington, D.C., in 1978 and lobbied for the extension of equal rights to women and for strengthening protections and institutions for Chicanas. She also attended the United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1980, becoming in the process an instrumental force for ushering in the age of Chicana feminism that defied the rigid cultural roles of women as passive and subordinate. She aligned herself with other Chicanas who sought to end sexism, exercise their autonomy, and engage as independent and collective agents of social change in their communities. By the 1990s Flores’s health began to fail, and she passed away on April 27, 1996, at the age of eightytwo. She left an incredible, powerful legacy of a true revolutionary spirit. Bill Flores recalls, “Francisca once told me that she felt that Chicanos could be the bridge for America, the link that closes two critical gaps—the chasm between white and black and the hemispheric rift between North and South America.” He quotes her as stating, “We are the hope for this country. We are
also the hope for America, not just the country, but the hemisphere.” Flores proved to be fearless in the face of injustice and a beacon of light for many women and men who continue to work for social change. In emphasizing the dynamic roles Chicanas and Chicanos have played in this society and the contributions they have made, the memory of Francisca Flores embodies what is best about Chicana/o and Mexican culture. See also Chicano Movement SOURCES: Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional. 1967– 1997. Archives. CEMA California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Special Collections, Donald Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara; Flores, William. 1996. “Francisca Flores.” May 2. 1996. http://www.clnet.sscnet. ucla.edu/research/francisca.html (accessed October 4, 2003); García, Alma, ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; ——— . 2000. “Chicana Civil Rights Organizations.” Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Houghton Mifflin. http://www.college.hmco. com/history/readerscomp/women/html/wh_005100_chi canacivil.htm (accessed October 7, 2004). Naomi H. Quiñonez
FLOREZ, ENCARNACIÓN VILLARREAL ESCOBEDO (1898–1968) Curandera Encarnación Villarreal Escobedo Florez, also known as Chona, was born in Yucatan, Mexico, to Ramón Villareal and Carnuta Escobedo. The family consisted of five sisters and one brother. After Chona’s birth her parents moved to Fresnillo, where Ramón operated a cattle ranch. In many ways the first eight years of her life were idyllic; she often rode horses with her father and enjoyed watching him work with the family’s animals. No one in the family is certain when or how, but it was during these years that she was introduced to the art of curanderismo (healing). The desire to heal and help others through the use of herbs and prayer became a central aspect of Chona’s life and eventually earned her the epithet “la santa entre los santos” (Mormons). Circumstances changed dramatically for the clan in 1906 when Chona witnessed the murder of her father at the hands of Porfirio Díaz’s troops. The soldiers knocked Ramón off his horse and dragged him to his death. Carnuta saved her children by hiding them under straw and manure. After burying Ramón, the siblings helped Carnuta sustain the family by taking in laundry and selling tortillas. Conditions worsened by the early part of the next decade when the family faced the dangers and uncertainties produced by the Mexican Revolution. In 1911, the time she turned fifteen, Chona met and married Reyes Florez. In the midst of this national upheaval the couple found solace in their love and began
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Folk Healing Traditions having children. Unfortunately, economic conditions were abysmal, and Reyes faced great difficulties in providing for his family. Within eight years, Chona gave birth to nine children, including two sets of twins. These unfortunate offspring faced a grim reality of want and disease. Although Chona plied her curandera skills to provide succor for her children, seven of them succumbed to a variety of maladies before the family left Mexico in 1920. With heavy hearts and an immigrant’s hope for economic improvement, the couple took their two remaining children and abandoned their troubled homeland. Like thousands of other Mexicanos, they eventually found their way to El Paso, where Reyes and Chona looked for work among the many enganchistas (labor contractors) that carried on their trade in the city. They found work as betabeleros (beet pickers) and onion pickers in southern Idaho. Chona often recalled the trip north in language common to many Mexicanos who made the trek to el norte: “They put us in a box car with nothing more than a bag of pinole, a piece of baloney and bread.” Ultimately the Florez family migrated to the west side of Salt Lake City when Reyes was hired as a traquero (track worker) with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Other family members supplemented his salary by working in nearby beet fields during the spring and autumn. By the early 1930s Chona had given birth to three more children and confronted the deaths of the last two offspring born in Mexico. The family lived in a boxcar, subdivided into a kitchen and living quarters, provided by the company and located a mere twenty feet from the tracks. Chona fought a never-ending battle to keep the quarters clear of dirt and dust. Although they were very poor, she worked diligently to raise her remaining children with a deep sense of pride in their Mexican heritage, teaching them about Aztec history, culture, and art. In addition to domestic duties, she also rendered a valuable service to west side residents by practicing her healing arts. Apparently Chona’s skills must have been considerable, for her son John recalls that “patients” came from as far away as Texas and Arizona seeking cures and spiritual intercession. A 1973 article from the Utah Historical Quarterly provides a brief overview of Chona’s work. “She combined prayer, ritual, and medicine, denying her power to cure and stating that God merely used her as an instrument of his will. She accepted no money for her services, only an occasional gift to help defray expenses, and she consulted with anyone who needed her services.” Encarnación Florez died on May 2, 1968. During her years in Utah she touched the lives of many sick and troubled individuals. In addition, she worked diligently to instill pride and awareness of Mexico’s history and culture into her children. The story of Chona and oth-
ers like her demonstrates that Latinas, using a variety of skills, rituals, and beliefs, worked to benefit the spiritual and social lives of their families and communities in locales throughout the United States. SOURCES: Benavides, E. Ferol. 1973. “The Saint among the Saints: A Study of Curanderismo in Utah.” Utah Historical Quarterly 41 (Autumn): 373–392; Iber, Jorge. 2000. Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Ulibarri, Richard O. 1989. “Utah’s Unassimilated Minorities.” In Utah’s History, ed. Richard D. Poll, 629– 650. Logan: Utah State University Press; Wright, Lili. 1994. “Latinos: Rich Heritage of Church, Family Nurtures Activist.” Salt Lake Tribune, April 3, A13–A14. Jorge Iber
FOLK HEALING TRADITIONS In Latino and Latina forms of folk medicine it is difficult to divorce these systems from religious or spiritual practices. Two such practices, Santería and Espiritismo, are primarily of Caribbean origin, but are now popularly found in major cities in the United States. They have often been identified within the rubric of folk medical treatments by mental and public health officials. For example, Espiritismo is included in contemporary cultural competency programs that are interested in understanding non-Western healing systems. This entry first provides a historical account of these traditions and then compares them with other Western nonbiomedical forms of healing. Santería as a religion emerged from Cuba as a direct result of the slave trade and is more authentically referred to as la Regla Lucumí or la Regla Ocha. It is commonly described as a syncretic religious practice that developed because Catholic slave masters would not allow slaves to overtly practice their Yoruba-based religion. The worship of the African deities called orichas was considered sacrilegious. In response, slaves drew relations between their orichas and Catholic saints, and Santería as a religious practice was conceived. Those initiated in the religion recognize that the similarities drawn between Catholic saints and orichas served as a means to practice an African-based religion. In recognizing similarities, the priests and priestesses of this religion, who are called santeros and santeras, believe that orichas and saints are not interchangeable. Instead, they simply share particular characteristics. For example, Saint Barbara became associated with Shango (or Chango) because of the principle of force and thunder. Scholar Andrés I. Pérez y Mena does not think that Santería is a product of syncretism. Instead, certain characteristics of a particular oricha became associated with different saints, and the saints merely represent aspects of the orichas. Thus the
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Artistic representation of popular Catholicism. Photograph by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
Symbolizing Catholicism and Santería. Photograph by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
Catholic saints are not exact representations of the orichas. This idea demonstrates that African slaves did not simplify their religion to mirror Catholicism, but instead understood both practices as two different religious ideologies that happened to share similar characteristics. As a survival mechanism, then, slaves were able to maintain the complexity of their religion by masking their belief system under that of Catholicism. Because of this legacy of persecution, Santería holds a tradition of secrecy whereby knowledge is conveyed through tightly knit kinship relations between godchildren (aijados and aijadas) and initiated priests and priestesses who act as godfathers and godmothers (padrinos and madrinas). A basic distinction between Santería and Palo Mayombe, also referred to as Palo Monte, is that the former is a Yoruba-derived religion, while the latter traces its origins to the Congo. Practically speaking, la Regla Lucumí or la Regla Ocha deals with a pantheon of deities, the orichas, while the latter primarily deals with spirits of the dead. Kinship is at the forefront of Santería in that the familial ties that develop as a result of initiation transcend the physical world while also providing the means for social organization within the material world. The primary relationship between godfather
and/or godmother and godchild that develops is based on reciprocity in which the godparent directs the spiritual development of the godchild and the godchild, in turn, provides support in the form of labor or resources. Basically, the knowledge system of the religion is developed through social activity, which can only be maintained through strong social ties. Anthropologist George Brandon believes that Santería developed in Cuba as a full-fledged religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its presence in the United States can be traced to the Cuban Revolution when Cubans sought refuge from Castro’s government. Brandon focuses on the years from 1959 to 1962 as a historically important time period. In the United States the areas where this religion first emerged are predominantly located in the East, especially in New York, New Jersey, and Florida. In essence, this practice provided immigrants to the United States with a social and metaphysical support system that is similar to what it provided the slaves who created it. That like the rationale of Voudou, the ideas and practices of Santería are flexible in that this religious system provides a tangible means of addressing social circumstances, including those associated with health
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Folk Healing Traditions and well-being, especially when facing unanswerable problems in life. If a potential practitioner decides to join the religion, he or she must go through a complex initiation process that begins with a misa espiritual (séance) and culminates in asiento, also referred to as making ocha. The misa espiritual is held to determine the initiate’s destined and corresponding oricha. Once the initiate “receives” the oricha, he or she is bound in service to this deity for life. The asiento is the actual ceremony in which the initiate receives his or her oricha. The process is long, arduous, and complicated and requires a myriad of preparations. Also, the initiation ceremony is costly, with an average price ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 for the weeklong preparations. Divination is an important method by which problems are uncovered or resolved in this religion. As in other non-Western religions, divination reveals causes for misfortune, including illness and death. In this sense divination becomes a form of social analysis that provides salient prescriptions for tangible maladies, including health problems. Because of this, santeros and santeras are highly valorized in the community as agents in diagnosing and resolving problems. Of specific interest in this practice is the gendered aspect present, as exemplified by the roles ascribed to men and women. In particular, women are provided with opportunities for leadership not readily available in other European-derived Christian institutions. The possession experience in which the female body becomes a vehicle for communication with divine entities is one form in which these opportunities are manifested. However, while women may participate in this manner, it is the men who seem to be the leaders of the community. In fact, only men can become high priests, or babalawos. In some instances women are allowed to become babalawos, but only after they have stopped menstruating. Santería has received unwanted attention in the United States because of the controversial practice of animal sacrifice. The case commonly cited as bringing this issue to the forefront of U.S. popular knowledge occurred in Hialeah, Florida. In 1987 the Hialeah City Council in Florida banned animal sacrifice. The case went to the Supreme Court in 1992, and in June 1993 the ruling was in favor of the santeros in that they were allowed to perform animal sacrifice as part of their religious practice. Espiritismo (roughly translated as Spiritism) and Spiritualism are belief systems that have had different historical developments from that of Santería. Spiritism is traced to the teachings of Leon Denizarth Hippolyte Rivail, better known by his pseudonym Allan Kardec. Kardec is the one who opposed the term Spiri-
Elements of Spiritualism. Photograph by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
tualism and introduced the term Spiritism, explaining that it was a general term that could be applied to anyone “who believes that there is in him something more than matter.” Spiritualists formally distinguish themselves from Spiritists by stating that their set of beliefs constitutes a religion, while Spiritism deals with the occult. The Argentinian adherents of Joaquín Trincado agree that Kardec laid the groundwork for Spiritism. However, they believe that Trincado’s approach was more “scientific” and “rational.” Trincado adherents are usually of a higher socioeconomic status in their communities than Kardecists. The major points of Kardec’s doctrine are based on traditional Christian doctrine. The doctrine also reflects such ideals of the nineteenth century as the primacy of the spiritual over the material. This is based on an evolutionary model of progress derived from the Enlightenment where spirits climb through hierarchical ranks, and progress through these ranks is based on individual merit. Thus human effort becomes rewarded in the spiritual realm and consequently is demonstrated through class-based distinctions. This belief system spread and became widely adopted in Latin America. In Brazil Spiritism is socially divided according to class, with the mediums coming from a predominantly upper Anglo and middle class, while the clients tend to be ethnically diverse and poor. Spiritualism, on the other hand, developed in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The doctrines of Spiritualism were popular because of the promise that they would provide a “new moral world” in which social and individual needs could be met. The genesis of this movement is most often traced to the three Fox sisters, who in 1848 heard rapping that was eventually identified as coming from the spirit of a dead peddler. While this is the most common explanation given for the inception of Spiritualism in the United States, other accounts credit André Jackson Davis for having been in communication with spirits in
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Folk Healing Traditions 1843. The goal of nineteenth-century Spiritualism was toward public edification, not toward personal growth. The medicinal value of herbs in association with a type of religious practice also influenced the development of Spiritualism as an alternative religious doctrine. Robert C. Fuller discusses how this developed in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century with the advent of such practices as Thomsonianism (medicinal value of herbs), homeopathy (small herbal dosages of what is causing the ailment are given with the understanding that “like cures like”), hydropathy (water cure), Grahamism (the stomach is the physiological agent for delivering “vital power” in order to overcome disease), Mesmerism (“animal magnetism” as an invisible fluid that permeates the universe must be kept in balance for good health) and Swedenborgianism (a positive bodily health status is the product of harmony among the spiritual, mental, and physical levels). Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism were important influences in the later development of Spiritualism. These examples demonstrate the strong association between notions of health and religiosity in Western folk medical models. Mexican Spiritualism is defined by anthropologist Kaja Finkler as having a relatively separate development from Kardecian Spiritism and from the Spiritualism attributed to the Fox sisters. Finkler defines Mexican Spiritualism as a “dissident religious movement vehemently anti-Catholic, and a nonbiomedical health-care delivery system” and traces it to Roque Rojas in 1861. Finkler acknowledges that most other Latin American countries trace their practice to Allan Kardec, but this was not evident in her research. As with the divinities associated with Santería, those who are associated with Spiritualist practices in Mexico are perceived more as “forces” or “powers” than as personalities. Spiritualist healers in Mexico believe that there are four powers, divinities that are identified as the Father God, the Father Jesus, the Father Elijah, and the Holy Mother. This is in contrast to the larger pantheon of orichas in Santería. There are also spirits who are contacted, both good and bad, and are primarily of deceased humans but can also be such creatures as dwarfs and aliens. The crossing over of entities is most visible in Puerto Rican Spiritualism, where Andrés I. Pérez y Mena posits that religious objects and ideology are drawn from Cuban-based Santería with aspects of French Kardecian Spiritism added. George Brandon refers to the melding of Puerto Rican Spiritualism and Santería as Santerismo. As with Santería, most of the people who practice Spiritism and Latino forms of Spiritualism are women. Women primarily seek assistance because of what is described as failing health. For the most part, they seek
this form of treatment because their maladies have not been alleviated by other means, that is, biomedicine. There is participation by both men and women, but women are usually the mediums because they are supposedly more apt to “receive” a spirit. One possibility for the predominance of male spirits inhabiting female bodies during séances is that this is a form in which women are able to overcome their social condition of powerlessness. In June Macklin’s study, female spirits outnumbered male spirits four to three. This contrasts with other studies where the predominant presence accounted for is that of male spirits. June Macklin believes that the major difference between Kardec’s Spiritism, where the spirit follows a series of incarnations in the pursuit of reaching a topmost rung of the spiritually oriented hierarchical ladder, and American-English Spiritualism, where the soul only has the opportunity of being incarnated once, is this idea of multiple incarnations. Macklin further explains that Kardec’s system was most likely not accepted by the English and by Americans because “the English and Americans did not need the romantic, idealistically based, nationalistic ideology which Kardec synthesized” because both were pursuing material interests. One main difference between the value system of Spiritualism and that of Spiritism is the emphasis that Spiritualism places on individual agency, as opposed to Spiritism’s emphasis on communal wellbeing. This divide is attributed by Macklin to the divergent religious traditions each draws from. Spiritualism, with its Protestant roots, emphasizes the achievement of individual physical well-being, whereas Spiritism, with its predominantly Catholic roots, emphasizes the healing relationship that develops between the medium and the client in the form of public diagnosis. One predominant feature of these religions is how the body is perceived. The body is understood as multifaceted. Thus the physical body that experiences pain as a result of illness is deeply connected to its spiritual counterpart. Also, as the brief account of the historical development of these traditions demonstrates, social circumstances shape the manner in which life is experienced. Health cannot be addressed outside of this context. Santeros, santeras, and espiritistas realize that in order for health to be experienced in terms of the absence of pain, an entire lifestyle must be devoted toward this endeavor. While positive health may be one aspect of a person’s life, it is most definitely a substantial one because an unhealthy life assures personal discord. As a result, Santería and Espiritismo are two Latino forms of identified folk medicine that provide holistic perceptions of life, health, and (bodily) well-being. It is also worth noting that one of the primary reasons cited for why members join these prac-
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Fontañez, Jovita tices is that maladies, including physical ones, have not been successfully addressed through other systems, including the biomedical one. SOURCES: Brandon, George. 1997 [1993]. Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Finkler, Kaja. 1985. Spiritualist Healers in Mexico. South Hadley, MA: Bergen and Garvey; Fuller, Robert C. 1989. Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Macklin, June. 1974. “Belief, Ritual, and Healing: New England Spiritualism and Mexican-American Spiritism Compared.” In Religious Movements in Contemporary America. Ed. Irvine Zaretsky, and Mark P. Leone, 383–417. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Pérez y Mena, Andrés I. 1991. Speaking with the Dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States. New York: AMS Press. Karen V. Holliday
FONTAÑEZ, JOVITA (1942–
)
Boston community activist Jovita Fontañez was born in New York City in 1942, the daughter of a Bermudan mother and a Puerto Rican father. Her family lived in Spanish Harlem, where Fontañez grew up, tagging after one of her paternal aunts, who engaged in political activities in El Barrio. At the age of ten Fontañez moved to Boston, where she has continued to live all her life. Fontañez grew up in the South End and attended the Jeremiah E. Burke High School for girls. Afterward she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Fontañez was married and is the mother of two children, Herminio Nicolas (1962– ) and Melina Tamar (1963– ). Throughout her life Fontañez has been active in numerous community and social service organizations that have served Boston’s and Massachusetts’s broader Latino community. Her community roots and bilingual skills opened the doors for her participation in numerous antipoverty programs developed in Boston in the 1960s. A longtime resident of the South End—Boston’s historical Puerto Rican enclave—she was a member of the Association Pro–Constitutional Rights of the Spanish Speaking (APCROSS) in the 1970s. Her interest in racial issues led her to join PoroAfro, an organization created by young Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans, in the late 1960s to promote Latino and African American coalition building around political and social issues. Its emphasis on racial issues and immediate action placed the group at odds with more senior Puerto Rican community leaders. Fontañez was one of the first Latinos, along with longtime activists Tony Molina and Tony Ortiz, to work for the South End Neighborhood Action Program (SNAP), at the time a predominantly African American orga-
nization. At SNAP Fontañez worked as a social worker in a family service clinic. Fontañez was also involved in the creation and development of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), a community-owned and operated nonprofit organization that managed the Villa Victoria housing complex. IBA was created by the Puerto Rican community to stop gentrification efforts and urban renewal in the South End. During the 1990s Fontañez was the director of Latinas y Niños, a social service organization that helped develop a more comprehensive agency called Casa Esperanza. Latinas y Niños was the first residential treatment center for Latinas recovering from substance abuse in Boston. Fontañez has also been a longtime player in Boston Democratic Party politics. That, combined with her ethnicity and sex, has led Fontañez to compile a long list of “first” accomplishments. She was the first Latino/a and the first woman to be selected as chair of the Election Commission for the city of Boston in 1991. Previously Fontañez had been the first Latina selected as fair housing commissioner and also the second one selected Democratic state committeewoman. In her political career Fontañez had also been the second Latina appointed as Metropolitan District Commission associate commissioner, following Conchita Rodríguez. In all her public appointments Fontañez has protected the interests and concerns of Latinos. Fontañez continues her activism on behalf of the Latino community in Boston. She completed a master’s degree in public policy at Northeastern University in 2003. SOURCE: Boston Globe. 1991. “Hispanic to Head Election Division.” May 28, 67. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
FORNÉS, MARÍA IRENE (1930–
)
The winner of eight Obie Awards for her Off-Broadway dramas, the prolific writer María Irene Fornés ranks among the most productive playwrights and directors on the American stage. One of six daughters, Fornés was born on May 14, 1930, in Havana, Cuba, to Carlos Luis Fornés, a government worker, and Carmen Hismenia Collado. In an educated family Carlos Luis nurtured the intellectual development of his daughters enabling María Irene to receive a good academic foundation even though she attended public school for only the third to the sixth grade. In 1945 Carmen Hismenia, now a young widow, brought her daughters to live in New York City. María Irene, who was just fifteen years of age and spoke only Spanish, decided against returning to school and found employment on a local factory assembly line. A series of jobs that included
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Friendly House, Phoenix doll making, translating, waiting tables, and clerical work supported Fornés and permitted her to study painting at night. She studied with Hans Hoffman at the Provincetown School and left New York for Europe to further her painting career in 1954. She soon discovered that while she lacked the discipline required to paint, the structure of producing art led her to another art form, the composition of plays. It is said that Fornés discovered her true calling by helping her roommate, writer-philosopher Susan Sontag, overcome writer’s block. The result was her first published play, La viuda. In an interview with Rachel Koenig and Kathleen Betsko, Fornés explains, “I started writing late; I was around thirty. I had never thought I would write; as I said, I was an aspiring painter. But once I started writing it was so pleasurable that I couldn’t stop.” In 1961 Fornés received a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship, followed by a second fellowship from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in 1962. Within a year Fornés had written a twocharacter play, Tango Palace, hailed as a critical success. A second hit about prisoners who willingly return to confinement after exposure to a chaotic world, Promenade, was dubbed by critics as “a protest musical for people too sophisticated to protest.” It, too, was a success. Both Promenade and The Successful Life of 3, her fourth play, garnered Fornés a prestigious Obie Award. Fornés’s theatrical achievements attracted attention. She received a Yale University fellowship in 1967 and a University-Tanglewood fellowship in 1968 and produced two more plays, A Vietnamese Wedding (1967) and Dr. Kheal (1968). The latter was produced both in the United States and abroad. Fornés’s work flourished, and soon her productions were seen in numerous venues, including La MaMa, the Judson Poets’ Theatre, the Open Theatre, the New Dramatists, the Actors’ Workshop in San Francisco, and the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis. In a Village Voice interview Fornés commented on her work: “Writing is like your fingerprints. You have no idea what they look like, but wherever you go, you are leaving your mark.” From 1973 to 1979 Fornés was managing director of the New York Theatre Strategy, an experimental theatrical group that she founded with other playwrights. In 1981 she became director of the International Arts Relations (INTAR) Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory. This program provided a resourceful theatrical outlet for Latino playwrights that nurtured their creative talents through workshops and productions. During this period Fornés also found time to work with the board of education in a program titled Theatre for the New City in New York City. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Fornés continued
to write and produce plays. She has received a number of prestigious grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in Literature, and the Lilia Wallace-Readers’ Digest Fund. She was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her awards include the Distinguished Artists Award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Governor’s Award. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Among the forty-one plays written by Fornés, eight have received Obies and she received an Obie for Sustained Achievement in Theater. Her Obie-winning productions include Promenade (1965), Successful Life of Three (1965), Fefu and Her Friends (1977), The Danube (1982), Mud (1983), Sarita (1984), The Conduct of Life (1985), Abingdon Square (1988), and Letters From Cuba (2000). An extraordinary role model, Fornés teaches students at the Padua Hills Festival in southern California, at INTAR, and at Manhattanville College in New York. See also Theater SOURCES: Besko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig. 1987. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books. 1981. MacNicholas, John ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists. Detroit: Gale Research. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
FRIENDLY HOUSE, PHOENIX (1920–
)
At a meeting of the Phoenix Americanization Committee (PAC) on April 11, 1920, Grace Court, principal of Adams School in Phoenix, proposed that the committee secure a permanent space as a “community house” for its Americanization projects in South Phoenix instead of relying on space borrowed from schools and churches to hold its English and citizenship classes. Court was the project’s primary advocate, lining up financial support for the effort not only from the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs but also from the Alianza Hispano Americana, the state’s largest mutualista or self-help organization. By 1922 the Phoenix Americanization Committee had rented a small house, quickly named Friendly House, where Carrie Green, a former public school teacher fluent in Spanish, taught classes. She served as the director of Friendly House from 1922 through 1931, and her work was framed by her belief that “immigrants should be loyal to the United States but should be encouraged to take pride in their native culture as well.” In 1928 the PAC spent $5,250 to purchase a permanent home for the work on South First Street. In 1931 Green resigned for health reasons and was re-
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Fuerza Unida placed by Plácida García Smith, a career educator who had relocated from Colorado in 1928. From the 1920s through the 1950s Friendly House served as a social service agency linking the Mexican American community to the rest of Phoenix. A product of both the Americanization and settlement-house movements, it made a long-term commitment to the employment and education of Mexican American women. During this era, while the project was funded by Euro-American residents of Phoenix and civic organizations, an increasing number of Mexican American men and women held seats on the board and were members of the staff. During the depression a great demand arose for the services of this settlement house, particularly since no social welfare organizations served the Mexican American population of South Phoenix. Friendly House participated in depression relief efforts, particularly in the distribution of food. Between 1929 and 1934 more than 500,000 Mexicans, an estimated one-third of the population, were deported or repatriated to Mexico, even though the majority of those affected were U.S.born children. In a controversial move García Smith and Friendly House supported the repatriation effort and facilitated the relocation of hundreds of Mexican residents of Phoenix. Decades later García Smith revealed in an interview that although she participated in the program, she was anti-repatriation because it was disrespectful and relocated people who had gainful employment. In 1933 Friendly House obtained federal New Deal monies to fund classes in English and citizenship, two classes in high demand within its community since citizenship was necessary to benefit from relief programs. It also obtained funds under the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) to support an orquesta employing local musicians and to partially fund a daycare program. Under García Smith’s leadership and influence Friendly House became an integral part of Phoenix’s social service community. Friendly House emphasized Americanization through classes in civics, English, and homemaking. It also operated a job placement service that provided both temporary and permanent positions to applicants. Most of the clients were Mexican American women and girls who found low-wage employment as domestic workers in Phoenix’s middle- and upper-income homes. Imbued with a maternalism typical of the times among settlement-house workers, Friendly House leaders envisioned these positions as an opportunity for their clients to gain an introduction to American culture while also meeting employment demands and economic needs. Men who sought employment through Friendly House were placed in other low-wage positions in such fields as construction and
groundskeeping. These types of jobs, however, offered little in the way of economic mobility. By the end of the 1930s Friendly House was known for its formal roles in job placement and education, as well as for its more informal role as a community center hosting meetings for many different clubs and mutualistas. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the programs offered by Friendly House expanded according to the interests and concerns of Placida García Smith and other leaders. García Smith became a spokesperson for the Mexican American community in Phoenix. In 1963 another former teacher, Mari Marín, replaced García Smith as director of Friendly House, although García Smith remained involved with the project as an educator. Like other settlement houses that have continued to the present, Friendly House shed the Progressiveera pronouncements and became a community center. Friendly House continues to serve the Spanishspeaking population of Phoenix by offering services in six general areas: adult education and job development, youth services, parenting, immigration, home care, and family counseling. Friendly House also operates the Adam Díaz Early Childhood Development Center, named for Arizona’s first Mexican American city council member, and the Joseph I. Flores Academia del Pueblo, a charter school teaching grades K–3 and 7–8. Funding for some programs derives from the state government and the United Way, but most monies are raised through private donations and such activities as the annual Tamale Dinner, now in its sixty-eighth year. Friendly House has established itself as a lasting place in the community. Salvador Pastraña, director of Youth Services, attributes the success and longevity of Friendly House to its “long history in the community, so people know they can trust us.” See also Americanization Programs SOURCES: Arizona Republic. 2001. “Day Care Tough to Find in Central Phoenix, Many Centers Stretched to Limit.” May 11; Friendly House. http://www.friendlyhouse.org (accessed review October 7, 2004); Titcomb, Mary Ruth. 1984. “Americanization and Mexicans in the Southwest: A History of Phoenix’s Friendly House, 1920–1983.” M.A. thesis, University of Santa Barbara. Eve Carr
FUERZA UNIDA (1990–
)
On January 17, 1990, 1,115 predominantly Latina workers at the South Zarzamora Street Levi Strauss and Company plant in San Antonio, Texas, were informed that the plant was shutting down. With less than twenty-four hours notice, the workers had lost their jobs. The women, some of whom had been with the company for as long as forty years, were shocked
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Fuerza Unida by the news that came despite their record as one of the highest-producing Levi’s factories and the company’s record-earning profits of $272.3 million the year before. Workers at the South Zarzamora plant learned that their plant was the twenty-sixth Levi’s plant closure since 1985 and part of a trend among multinational corporations to transplant production abroad in search of lower labor costs. Levi’s relocated its plants to Costa Rica, where it could pay workers less than $3.80 a day, about half the average wage of San Antonio workers. For the South Zarzamora workers, job stability had remained the saving grace of a job that paid mediocre wages, reneged on promises of bonuses, routinely led to carpal tunnel syndrome and other injuries, and offered only limited retirement benefits. Fomenting the first-ever protest against a plant shutdown by Levi’s, the San Antonio workers met on February 12, 1990. They formed an independent workers organization called Fuerza Unida to demand severance pay and to pressure the Levi’s corporation to improve its policy regarding plant closures. In 1997 Levi Strauss and Company announced eleven more plant closures across the United States, amounting to 6,395 worker layoffs. This time, according to a Levi Strauss spokesman, “because of some of the lessons learned in San Antonio,” the company offered these workers eight months’ notice, three weeks’ pay for each year of service, and eighteen months of health benefits. Empowered by the evidence of its activism, Fuerza Unida continued to demand similar compensation for the San Antonio workers. With the motto “La mujer luchando, el mundo transformando,” roughly translated as “Women in struggle transform the world,” Fuerza Unida broadened its protest to demand attention to sweatshop labor conditions. It waged numerous protests in cities across the Southwest, in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Albany, and New York City, and into Mexico and France. Among its actions were a nationwide boycott against Levi Strauss clothing and the building of alliances with other women’s and worker organizations. Throughout the 1990s its struggle remained tied to the movement against the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and was committed to raising awareness about the negative consequences of economic globalization on labor. “We don’t want free trade,” its members chanted. “We want fair trade.” Fuerza Unida is remarkable for its significant contributions to the growing international consciousness of economic globalization and, in particular, of the deplorable sweatshop conditions rampant within the garment industry. The actions of Fuerza Unida, as well as other social justice movements, catapulted a new antisweatshop movement across college campuses and demanded public awareness to government-business collaboration on trade policy. In addition, Fuerza Unida presents an alternative vision to mainstream labor unions through its linkage of community and labor economic concerns. It contends that the Levi’s plant closure contributed to community decay and asserts that corporate-run plants have a responsibility to the communities in which they function. Key to its vision of community-based labor activism is the training of former garment worker employees as Fuerza Unida organizers. With limited access to economic resources and without formal education, the women of Fuerza Unida have nonetheless managed to sustain their actions through various innovative practices, ranging from the maintenance of a volunteer sewing cooperative to the operation of a food bank to support some of its members. In these ways Fuerza Unida continues to work toward the empowerment of the working-class women of San Antonio. See also Labor Unions SOURCES: American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma (TAO). “The Birth of Fuerza Unida.” http://www.afsc.org/tao/112k03.htm (accessed October 7, 2004); Hollens, Mary. 1993. “Catfish and Commuity: People of Color Organize in and around Unions.” Third Force, June 30, 13; Martínez, Elizabeth. 1998. “Levi’s, Button Your Fly—Your Greed Is Showing!” In De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-colored Century, 82–90. Cambridge, MA: South End Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Julie Cohen
G q GALLEGOS, CARMEN CORNEJO (1926– ) “El que quiere puede” (Those who want to can achieve). These words propelled softball champion and community activist Carmen Gallegos through life. They are her mother’s words. Born to Mexican immigrants from Tepic, Nayarit, Carmen Gallegos was the fourth of five children and the first to be born in the United States. She grew up in Orange, California, keenly aware of discrimination against Mexican Americans in a predominantly Anglo community. “I was sent to a segregated school, far from home with no school buses available. We weren’t allowed in certain theaters, the public swimming pool, and local stores.” Despite the climate of adversity, Gallegos flourished. Home was a happy and secure place with a high value placed on education. With her mother’s words in mind, Gallegos was an honor student, sang in the choir, had a part-time job, and played sports. “Baseball was the popular sport and we women wanted a team of our own.” The Orange Tomboys, composed entirely of Mexican American women, won their league’s championship in 1947. Carmen married Tony E. Gallegos in 1948; the couple had two children. Michael is an economist, and Lori is a lawyer. Tony Gallegos is a former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. Carmen Gallegos received a California teaching certificate and taught English as a second language (ESL) and Spanish for eleven years, from 1971 to 1981, in elementary school and in an adult education program. A supporter of César Chávez, founder of the United Farm Workers union, and his cause, Gallegos was an active participant in the civil rights movement, joining the American GI Forum in 1963, an organization dedicated to the promotion of education and civil rights for Mexican Americans. In addition, she was PTA president, a member of the El Rancho Unified School District’s advisory board, a member of the Sister City Committee of Pico Rivera, a member of the Women’s Democratic Party, and a volunteer at the White House
for the Public Liaison for Hispanic Affairs. In 1974 the Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation honored her as the Hispanic Woman of the Year for community service. Through her untiring commitment to civil rights and community service, Carmen Gallegos serves as an inspiration for other women. Consistent with her Hispanic heritage, she considers her children to be her most important achievement. SOURCES: Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Richard A. Garcia. 1995. César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Johnson, Connie Peterson, and Margie Wright. 1984. The Woman’s Softball Book. New York: Leisure Press; Ramos, Henry A. J. 1998. The American GI Forum: In Pursuit of the Dream, 1948–1983. Houston: Arte Público Press. Lori Gallegos-Hupka
GANADOS DEL VALLE (1983–
)
Ganados del Valle is a community-based economic development organization located in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Ganados represents highly innovative efforts to provide alternative forms of economic development that are environmentally sustainable, offer meaningful opportunities to local residents, and build upon the Hispanic culture of the region. Northern New Mexico is one of the oldest and poorest rural communities in the United States. During the 1960s the region gained visibility when Reies López Tijerina and la Alianza de Mercedes Federales attempted to reclaim communal grant lands lost through EuroAmerican conquest and subsequent capitalist penetration. While la Alianza never achieved its goals, it resonated with locals and tapped into a deep frustration. As a result, many were encouraged to consider alternative forms of landownership and economic arrangements. Although many Hispanos were wedded to a pastoral lifestyle, the growing tourist economy and rising land prices made it prohibitively expensive to acquire the necessary land and/or capital to initiate a successful economic venture. Consequently, the region has suffered from severe out-migration as growing numbers of Euro-Americans have been drawn to the
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Ganados del Valle region. While tourism has brought much-needed money into the area, it has also created a series of lowwage, seasonal jobs that not only are environmentally pernicious, but also do not build upon or cultivate the talents and leadership potential of the local population. Ganados began in 1983 when three local residents, Antonio Manzanares, Gumercindo Salazar, and María Varela, began to discuss the obstacles to building a viable livestock operation. Ranchers Manzanares and Salazar, along with Varela, a community development specialist, soon realized that in addition to limited access to land, the small size of most operations proved a key impediment. Accordingly, the three sought to achieve economies of scale by encouraging local livestock owners to cooperate. In addition to promoting cooperation, Ganados has built a series of integrated businesses that allow money to stay in the community, rather than be spent elsewhere. Ganados describes its mission in the following manner: To demonstrate how . . . land-based rural cultures can secure, use, and protect their ancestral land and water by developing sustainable economies and environments that strengthen the culture. It does this by helping residents form cooperative enterprises that both create jobs and preserve the region’s cultural identity. Ganados’ definition of sustainability is that pastoral cultures and environments depend on each other; one cannot survive without the other.
Ganados del Valle has created a complex of businesses and social and economic programs that serve the community. The heart of the organization, however, remains the livestock, because most of the businesses and related programs center on sheep products. Ganados actively seeks to build and develop local flocks through a variety of initiatives, including assisting its members as they strive to increase their individual flocks, promoting the breeding of the almost extinct Churro, and training members on the most up-to-date livestock management techniques. In addition to actual livestock, additional businesses include Pastores Feed and General Store, Pastores Lamb (marketing high-quality, organically grown meat), Pastores Collection (offering linen and home decorations), and Otra Vuelta (which recycles tires into mats). Perhaps the most successful venture, Tierra Wools produces high-quality woven products. Tierra Wools has recently spun off from Ganados to form an independent worker-owned weaving cooperative. In addition to businesses, Ganados has also developed a series of social and education programs that include establishing a scholarship fund and offering community college courses. Currently more than 150 individuals actively participate in Ganados, and it has become one of the largest employers in the county.
In addition to foundation grants, Ganados has received recognition and awards for its members’ weavings, including an exhibition at the Smithsonian. Central to the success of Ganados has been the development of the rural community. Many locals, especially Hispanas, have been transformed by Ganados. Not only have they learned tangible skills, but the organization has also provided an alternative to outmigration and poverty. According to María Varela, one of “the most heartening success[es] of Ganados was the flowering of the women. Many were shy and passive when they began. I learned not to push, to wait till they were ready. One woman could hardly take her eyes off the floor when we started. Now she’s making speeches. Another said all she could do was crochet, and she became the store manager.” One of the biggest challenges facing Ganados is a lack of summer grazing land. This is an ongoing problem that Ganados must confront every year. In the summer of 1989 Ganados faced its usual crisis, and in order to dramatize their plight, members, along with 2,000 sheep, trespassed onto a wildlife management area (WMA). This act of civil disobedience helped generate alternatives. For instance, Ganados members discovered that a $100,000 donation had been made to the Sierra Club Foundation in 1970 for the express purpose of buying land for a Hispano co-op in the area. An inquiry revealed that the money had never been spent on its intended purpose. The benefactor and the New Mexico attorney general’s office sued the Sierra Club Foundation, and ultimately the foundation chose to settle out of court. In the settlement, Ganados received $900,000—roughly the value of the land if it had been purchased as intended in 1970. Ganados del Valle has become a model for lowincome rural communities across the globe that are struggling to build a viable economic base, preserve their homeland, and develop the skills and talents of the local population. Referring to the customers of Tierra Wools, Tina Ulibarri explained, “You can tell when people come in here they are really impressed with what we do. It is not something from Wal-Mart. It is carefully made here and they will cherish it for the rest of their life.” SOURCES: Jackson, Donald Dale. 1991. “Around Los Ojos, Sheep and Land Are Fighting Words.” Smithsonian 22:37–47; Pulido, Laura. 1996. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Tierra Wools. www.hand weavers.com/abouttw.htm (accessed July 9, 2005); Tierra Wools Newsletter. 2005. “News and Inspirations.” Spring and Summer. www.handweavers.com/newltr%20pub%20file%201_ files/newltr%20pub%20file%201.htm (accessed July 9, 2005).
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Laura Pulido
Gangs
GANGS Juvenile delinquency, especially in the form of gang participation, has been a growing concern in the last several decades. Annual arrest rates for youths have increased between 20 and 40 percent during the 1990s. Within this national increase in delinquency, an unexpected trend of female youth offenders has emerged. Evidence indicates that juvenile arrests of females rose dramatically, between 30 and 80 percent, depending on the offense, from 1984 to 1993. The notable increase in female delinquent behavior has provoked an interest in the participation of women in gangs, a realm of antisocial behavior formerly defined as solely masculine. There is evidence of female participation in gangs as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Anthropologists and sociologists in the 1930s and 1940s made specific reference to Latina, especially Puerto Rican and Mexican American, gang membership in urban areas of the West and East Coasts. These early studies, however, often dismissed female participation in the gang structure, labeling the women as “auxiliaries” to the male gangs or simply reducing the women’s behavioral participation to “sexual delinquency.” These stereotypes about Latinas in gangs have only recently been challenged. Generally, these women have been ignored by the scientific community and have served more as journalistic curiosities than as real social phenomena. In the last decade social scientists have helped flesh out the true nature of the Latina gangsters (la Chola, the homegirl), who currently constitute between 5 to 10 percent of all gang members in the United States. It is believed that approximately 600,000 gang members are found in the continental United States, and about 15 percent are female. Moreover, gangs are no longer urban or coastal phenomena. There are identifiable gangs throughout the Midwest and some rural areas of the United States. Latina gang members tend to have certain attributes in common. First, they tend to be young. The average age of these young women is approximately fifteen years, but the predominant period of active participation ranges from twelve to seventeen years of age. Contrary to popular stereotypes, Latina gangsters tend to hold many traditional values. They hold motherhood as a prominent role in their development, expressing that a child should not be exposed to the “street life” and that a child is a primary motivator to distance oneself from severe risk-taking behavior. Latina homegirls also show a regard for serial monogamy, often ostracizing young women in their groups who may be more promiscuous. As among other oppressed groups, Latina gang membership is often a function of poverty, protection, and lack of education.
Research indicates that one of the most robust factors contributing to gang membership for Latinas is peer relationships. There is a recurring theme in the literature illustrating how young women who have friends, siblings, or other family affiliated with the gang lifestyle adopt similar attributes and behaviors. Additionally, for many young Latinas, especially those who have recently immigrated or are without an integrated social network, the gang provides a venue for meeting friends and creating peer relationships. Furthermore, given the tenets of adolescent development, the gang gives a young Latina a chance for heterosexual contacts. Yet peer pressure is not the only reason for joining gangs. Proximity is also an influential factor in becoming a homegirl. Simply put, these women live in areas that are gang infested. Becoming a gang member is part of joining the larger social network of their ecological reality. For many Latinas, gangs have been part of their lives since birth or early childhood. Therefore, becoming an active participant during, or in some cases before, adolescence is natural to the environment in which they must survive. Unfortunately, many of the young Latinas who are part of gangs come from dysfunctional families. The research indicates that these young women are disproportionately victims of neglect and abuse in their homes. Often the less fortunate and more psychologically distressed homegirls tend to join gangs for survival, seeking a substitute for their own lacking family dynamics. Despite efforts at reparenting themselves through the gang, these homegirls, victims in their own homes, tend to be at higher risk for drug addiction, violence, and other harm. The literature also reveals that many Latinas join the gang structure in order to gain status in their neighborhoods. Joining and belonging to a feared, cohesive group bring some benefits to the individual’s ego. For example, gang membership carries with it some semblance of pride and respect. Others fear the young Latina who dons the cloak of a known gang. She becomes the object of reverence, if not respect or fear. People think twice about giving her a hard time on the street or at school. Such reactions may inspire feelings of importance, personal satisfaction, and selfconfidence in young Latinas who otherwise have very little in their lives to support positive feelings about themselves. Economic needs and opportunities, or lack thereof, are also cited in the literature as contributing factors to Latina gang membership. However, the role of economics is quite complex. In the case of all-female gangs that are autonomous from any male counterpart, the economic gains of drug sales may play a central role in maintaining gang membership. However,
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Gangs the gang generally serves to perpetuate economic survival, not enhancement, for most of its Latina members. That is, gang membership provides for a collective of persons to help in the economic maintenance of the individual. For example, when a homegirl needs somewhere to sleep or something to eat, she can count on her gang affiliates to help. Furthermore, many women in gangs often “double up” or gather in groups in order to help each other raise their children when the fathers are absent. It should be noted that not all homegirls are helped economically. Generally, those who become addicted to drugs and show themselves untrustworthy lose economic assistance over time. The factor of protection is tied to the ideas of proximity, family dysfunction, and economics. Growing up and being overrepresented in poverty-stricken, urban neighborhoods, Latina gang members often cite protection as a major reason for their decision to join a gang. Ethnographic data suggest that for a large proportion of Latina youths, there is perceived danger in their environment. This danger is perpetual and can come at the hands of peers, often from neighboring communities, or from illicit activity in the neighborhood of residence such as drug trafficking, or even from within the family system. When interviewed about their choice to join a gang, Latina youths specify that they needed support to avoid victimization or harm. This protective support is called “backup” and represents one of the fundamental features of gang structure—the idea that a member can rely on the loyalty of other members for protection from external harm. Ironically, it is this very protection provided by gang allegiance that can lead to one’s becoming a greater target, as in the case of attacks by rival gangs. There are several methods of gang initiation. Almost all methods involve some form of pain or humiliation. It should be noted that some gangs, usually in very old and established neighborhoods, do not require initiation, but rather function by invitation only. These gangs, however, have little documentation because of the exclusivity of the membership and tend to be male only. For Latina gangsters, initiation usually consists of “walking the line,” “pulling a train,” or participation in a criminal act. “Walking the line” is a classic method of initiation. It is often also referred to as “getting jumped in.” The premise is that the young Latina must prove that she is tough, can hold her own, and is not easily beaten down. Therefore, she must go through a double line (doblefila) of homegirls and homeboys who beat her with their fists as she goes through. An alternative is for her to be “jumped” and have to fight three to five other gang members for a designated length of time. While involved in this initiation rite, the Latina youth cannot cower and must fight back in order to gain acceptance. She must show that
she has the physical prowess and willingness to fight for her gang. The other forms of initiation are less popular among Latina gangsters but exist nonetheless. To “pull a train” or be “sexed in” is the least respectable method for a young Latina to gain gang membership. This initiation rite requires her to have sex with several of the male gang members on a single occasion. The problem with this choice of initiation is that the young Latina subsequently continues to be treated as sexual property by the males in the gang. Furthermore, she is not respected by the other females in the gang, who see her as promiscuous and as a “lesser” member. Once a young Latina is initiated in this manner, it is difficult to acquire a higher status in the gang. The homegirl who was “sexed in” must prove herself to be even tougher or crazier than the other women in order to change her reputation and gain respect among her peers in the gang. Research indicates that the young women who are initiated in this manner tend to show more chronic and severe psychological distress and are more likely to become drug addicted and marginalized from the core gang membership. The third form of initiation involves committing a criminal act with other gang members. Usually the crimes involve participation in a robbery or assault, such as a drive-by shooting. These activities prove to the core gang members that the young Latina is willing to take risks and is unafraid to “back up” her fellow members in their activities. Although these more serious offenses may be necessary to pass the initiation rite, Latina gangsters predominantly commit theft and misdemeanor crimes during the actual tenure of their affiliation with the gang. More serious felonies, such as armed robbery and aggravated assault, are less prevalent in the group, often because the male members do not approve of the women’s involvement in such activities. A recurring question regarding female gang members is whether they are autonomous or are affiliated with a corresponding male gang (coed gang). There is evidence of independent all-female gang enterprises. All-female gangs that have existed, or do exist, tend to have territorial and economic foundations. The women claim a specific area or neighborhood that they protect, usually in order to defend their economic interests. However, rarely have Latina gangs been successful at maintaining complete autonomy from the male counterparts in their area. This interdependence may be rooted in traditional Latino values, such as the importance of the family and machismo, wherein the female naturally takes a less prominent role in the social structure and places herself as secondary to the male. When the focus of evaluation shifts from the larger
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García, Cristina social level to a more intimate level of individual attitudes and beliefs, one notices a distinct difference in how Latino male gang members perceive the role of females within the gang, as opposed to how the women in the gang perceive their own gender roles. Latino male gang members often exhibit an attitude of territoriality toward the women in the gang. The male gang members tend to think of the women as having a lower status in the gang structure and as available sex objects, although this belief may be a form of posturing. Research indicates that the males relegate the women to a second-class status in the gang, believing them to be potential liabilities in giving information to rival gangs, as well as not valuing the women’s adeptness in providing “backup” during organized gang activity. Ethnographic interviews also show that gang males tend to view female gang members as sex objects who are readily available for companionship, generally without commitment. A popular belief among male gangsters is that they have the privilege to be “players,” or to have more than one concurrent relationship with the homegirls. However, this same behavior is viewed as detrimental and unfavorable if it is exhibited by a homegirl. Interestingly, Latina gangsters tend to have a different perspective of their own roles in the gangs. Although the research indicates that Latina homegirls will concede their lesser status in the gang, the women often attribute the lower status to the males wanting to protect them by not allowing them to participate in the higher-risk, violent activities. Otherwise, these young women tend to view themselves as quite independent and as major forces within the gang. Specifically, they view themselves as fearless, strong, and autonomous from external or male control. Latina gangsters often describe themselves as vanguards in breaking archaic gender roles that have been perpetuated within their communities and families. Thus they would not tolerate being in an abusive relationship, nor would they allow themselves to become dependent on a male in the raising of their children. Furthermore, the women view themselves as having central roles in making the higher-risk behaviors possible by carrying weapons or delivering drugs for their male counterparts. Latina gangsters also tend to believe that their status can be elevated by increasing their fighting prowess, even though excessive violence in the women is not highly valued by their male peers in the gang. There are several methods by which a Latina gang member can leave a gang. The most absolute option is death. The second option is for the young woman to request to leave the gang and to be “jumped out.” Jumping out involves being beaten by several of the active gang members, usually for a longer period of time than was required to be initiated. Often the per-
son requesting to be “jumped out” will be seen as a traitor by some of the active members, and this person will continue to be targeted and challenged to fight even after leaving the gang. The most common manner of leaving the gang involves “fading out” or simply distancing oneself from the gang over time. This process consists of the Latina gangster “hanging out” less with the homeboys and homegirls and then eventually not participating at all in gang-oriented activities. The advantage of “fading out” is that the young Latina is able to maintain a friendly but distant relationship with the other members of the gang and is not viewed as a traitor. Fading out is often a function of maturity and life circumstances. As the Latina gangster grows older, she matures and may begin to value different experiences in her life, leading to a shift in priorities from the gang to self-improvement. For many Latina homegirls, the primary factor that incites their maturity is motherhood. As noted previously, motherhood is a highly valued role among Latina gang members. Thus part of being a good mother involves lessened gang participation and a renewed desire to live for and be available to the child. Under such circumstances the process of fading out allows the young Latina mother to exit the gang in a relatively safe and quiet manner. SOURCES: Campbell, Anne. 1991. The Girls in the Gang. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell; Huff, C. Ronald, ed. 1996. Gangs in America. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; Miller, Jody. 2001. One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender. New York: Oxford University Press; Vigil, James Diego. 2002. A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega City. University of Texas Press; Walker-Barnes, Chanequa J., and Craig A. Mason. 2001. “Perceptions of Risk Factors for Female Gang Involvement among African American and Hispanic Women.” Youth and Society 32, no. 3:303–336. Guadalupe Gutiérrez
GARCÍA, CRISTINA (1958–
)
Highly acclaimed novelist Cristina García was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 4, 1958, just six months before the revolution that would shape her life and fiction. Her parents, seeking political asylum, immigrated to Queens, New York, with two-year-old Cristina and her younger sister in 1960. García admits to having kept to herself when she was a girl: “I was so shy . . . that I refused to answer the telephone until I was 10 years old.” As a teenager during the early 1970s, García was sheltered by her mother, who was suspicious and disapproving of the liberal social changes sweeping America. As a result, her parents sent García and her sister to study French in Europe during the summer. “We were packed off in late June,” recalls García, “to the safety of a quaint
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García, Cristina Swiss town on the banks of Lake Geneva far from the dangerous hippies.” After high school García earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Barnard College, as well as a master’s degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins University. Deciding against becoming a diplomat, García became instead a correspondent for Time magazine. A successful journalist, she was promoted to bureau chief in Miami, where she covered Latin American assignments. In 1984 García and her sister traveled to Cuba. Here she “rediscovered half of [her] family”: the relatives on her mother’s side who had remained since the 1959 revolution. Upon her return to the United States following a two-week visit to the island, García suffered an overwhelming sense of loss due to her separation from her Cuban family, particularly her maternal grandmother, with whom García had been very close as a child. In 1988 García took a leave of absence from Time to try writing fiction. At UCLA she enrolled in a women writers’ course and began working on what would become Dreaming in Cuban (1992). Inspired by her experiences in Cuba, García began to cull her imagination, basing several of her novel’s characters on the family members she had left behind. According to the author, Dreaming in Cuban functions as “an exploration of the very different ways you can be Cuban.” The core of the narrative focuses on three generations of the del Pino family: Celia, the family’s matriarch and loyal supporter of El Líder (Castro); her two daughters, Lourdes, the staunch American patriot and owner of two Yankee Doodle Bakeries, and Felicia, the politically ambivalent and psychologically unstable rebel; and Pilar, Lourdes’s daughter, the novel’s protagonist and García’s alter ego. Fiercely independent and suspicious of her parents’ diatribes against Cuba and her relatives there, Pilar is initially elated at her reunion with her beloved grandmother, Celia, only to realize that she ultimately belongs in the United States. Upon its release Dreaming earned high accolades. The New York Times hailed the book as a “dazzling first novel . . . [announcing] the debut of a writer, blessed with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s fascination with the past and a musician’s intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of emotion.” The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992, and García was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Prize. Continuing to explore historical, national events and the construction of truth, García released her second novel, The Agüero Sisters in 1997. “I was curious about the stories people told themselves to get by,” reports García, “about what happens when memory and nostalgia and loss get all wrapped up together.” The
Popular author Cristina García. Photograph by and courtesy of Norma E. Quintana.
protagonists and title characters, Constancia and Reina Agüero, have been separated for thirty years. Reunited in Miami, the sisters seek the truth behind their mother’s suspicious death and their father’s suicide. Paralleling the mystery, the natural history of Cuba is revealed through the journal entries of the sisters’ father, Ignacio Agüero, an ornithologist. Like her first work, García’s second novel was highly praised. Julia Alvarez called it “a rich and complex novel about the entanglements of family and the possibility of redemption that comes with knowing the story of the past.” The New York Times referred to the novel as “haunting,” noting García’s “blending of hallucinatory imagery of Gabriel García Márquez with a homespun American idiom.” García has recently completed her third novel, Traveling through the Flesh, which features a middle-aged Chinese-Cuban-American man, Domingo Chen, as the book’s protagonist. The writer is working on an idea for her fourth book, and when she is not traveling to writers’ conferences and the lecture circuit, she lives in California with her daughter, Pilar. See also Literature SOURCES: García, Cristina. 1999. “Star-Spangled.” Washington Post, July 18, W21; Kirkwood, Cynthia Adina. 1992. “A Cuban Odyssey.” Los Angeles Times, August 30, E7; LiteraryEn-
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García, Eva Carrillo de cyclopedia (online). “Garcia [Garcia], Cristina.” www.liten cyc.com/php/speople.php?rec-true&UID=5910 (accessed July 9, 2005); Viera, Joseph M. 1998. “Exile among Exiles: Cristina García.” Poets and Writers Magazine, September/October, 40– 45.
Joseph M. Viera
GARCÍA, EVA CARRILLO DE (1883–1979) María de los Angeles Guadalupe Eva Carrillo y Gallardo was born in 1883 in Los Angeles, California. After her mother’s death when she was only five, Eva became a ward of the Methodist Church. She was raised in Mexico under the care of Methodist missionary Dr. Levi Salmans. She attended the Colegio Juárez in Guanajuato, Mexico, and graduated from a nursing school in Kansas. A devout Methodist, she graduated from the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions, a branch of Northwestern University. She worked as a nurse in the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the famous Kellogg health facility of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Eva met her husband Alberto García in Battle Creek. They married in New Orleans in 1911, and the couple had eight children. She worked at the George O. Robinson Orphanage in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and lived in Central America and Mexico with her husband before they moved to Austin, Texas, in 1915. During the early decades of the twentieth century Mexicans in Austin were segregated by neighborhood and schools and in lower-tier economic opportunities. In 1920 she joined her husband Alberto in publishing the first Spanish-language newspaper in the city, La Vanguardia. As a trained nurse, she also sought to educate others about tuberculosis through health education drives. She also worked with youths and city officials to combat juvenile delinquency. In addition to her family and community work, Eva Carrillo García taught Spanish at the Austin Military Academy. A community activist particularly with regard to public health and child welfare, García joined the League of Women Voters of Texas and during the late 1930s became a founding member of the Ladies League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) council in Austin. As a member of LULAC, she fought to desegregate Austin’s movie theaters, swimming pools, and schools during the 1940s and 1950s. She and her husband encouraged Mexican Americans to buy property, pay the poll tax, defend their rights, vote, and claim their share of the American dream. Eva Carrillo García served as an elder at University Methodist Church and participated in a number of
Methodist women’s groups. She also helped found the second Mexican Methodist church in Austin. She and her husband believed in the importance of education and sent six children to the University of Texas at Austin at a time when few Mexican Americans graduated from high school. She died at the age of ninety-six in 1979 and was honored during National Women’s History Month in 1989 by the Austin Commission for Women. SOURCES: “Eva García.” Vertical Files, Austin History Center, Austin, Texas; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “García, Eva de Carillo.” In New Handbook of Texas, 3:82–83. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
GARCÍA, PROVIDENCIA “PROVI” (1908–1995) Provi García was the most successful executive in Latin American music publishing during the epoch when much of the standard repertoire was being created by the most famous and lasting composers from throughout Latin America. In that golden age, spanning the late 1940s through the 1960s, García was the central figure in recruiting and retaining such nevereclipsed composers as the Puerto Ricans Rafael Hernández and Pedro Flores, the Mexicans Agustín Lara, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and Lorenzo Barcelata, the Brazilian Ari Barroso, Cuban Miguel Matamoros, and numerous other Dominican and South American greats for Peer–Southern Music, which became the largest publisher and rights holder for Latin American music in the world. Born into a large family in Arroyo, situated in the southern sugar belt of Puerto Rico, García became attuned to the Afro-Caribbean music that emanated from the majority black and mulatto population of the southern towns. The strong-willed, daring, and flamboyant redhead defied her parents after graduating from high school and eloped into a disastrous marriage to a womanizer. To escape her husband and the shame of the failed marriage (her divorce became final in 1939), García moved to New York in the early 1930s. In 1936 García began work as a secretary for Southern Music, which later became Peer International, and soon became the director of the Latin American section. Through the force of her charm, exuberance, and honesty, as well as her infallible ear for music and her knowledge of the Hispanic community in New York and later abroad, García became a safe bridge for Latin American composers, band directors, and musicians to the commercial music industry. For this particular market, Provi García was the ultimate word because she
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García, Providencia “Provi” represented the owner of the company, Ralph Peer, himself—and after his death, his wife Monique, and still later Ralph Peer II. In the early days, when composer-performers were living hand-to-mouth by playing in cabarets in New York, San Juan, and Havana, Provi García’s infallible taste led her to sign up compositions and even the entire repertoire of such untapped talent as Rafael Hernández, Pedro Flores, Osvaldo Barrés, Consuelo Velásquez, Manuel Espelón, and many others. Her thorough understanding of commercial viability also resulted in her signing for the Peer–Southern Music Company the standards that today are still the heart of the Peer–Southern Music catalog and are considered all-time classics of Latin American music: Bésame mucho, Frenesí, Brazil, Cuando calienta el sol, Me lo dijo Adela, María Elena, Aquellos ojos verdes, Bahia, Inolvidable primavera, and Alma llanera, among many others. García was also instrumental in facilitating the “crossover” of Latin American music into mainstream American pop, especially during the years of the mambo and cha-cha-cha crazes in the 1950s and 1960s, when, among others, the Pérez Prado recordings of Patricia and Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, Nat King Cole’s Aquellos ojos verdes, and Alan Dale’s Sweet and Gentle shot to number one in the United States and abroad. Provi García’s magic extended to the next generation when she became an important link in the success of Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias. Over the years Provi García built up and became the director of a network of offices that stretched from New York to the major cities of Latin America to Australia and even Japan. She served as the chief administrator
Provi García with Mexican singer Pedro Flores. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
over the regional directors, who were all Hispanic men. As the only woman of stature in the field, she faced indignities and insults with a smile and a great capacity for diplomacy. In fact, she was known for her great sense of humor and ribald joking, and on many occasions she easily turned adversity into outrageously funny stories for her close-knit family. At one point, when corruption became rampant in some South American offices and she had to clean house, she was spat upon by a male regional director, but this never dampened her spirits nor her resolve to continue developing the music of Latin culture for the world. In New York’s El Diario/La Prensa on November 26, 1971, Alberto Alonso published the following sketch of García: Seated behind a broad tabletop desk covered with contracts, newspaper clippings, photos of performers, and documents along the lines of records and composers, an elegant and jovial Provi García maintains a frenetic schedule in her large office-salon on Broadway. Each day she receives composers with dreams of making the International Hit Parade with one of their pieces, authors anxious for advantageous advances for their works and recording executives hoping to register a million in sales for their singers, now idols of mass audiences. Provi García receives them all equally, treating each one individually with proverbial Puerto Rican hospitality and courtesy, which she has elevated to a personality trait.
Although Provi García was sought after romantically by the wealthy and famous, in whose circles she traveled, she decided early in her career that she would never marry again nor ever have to be accountable to a male other than the president of the company. Never interested in her career for financial gain and using her salary as a stopgap and security for her large, extended family, Provi García never became wealthy herself, even while making millions for Peer and for her composers. Always working behind the scenes on the business end of the music industry, in humility Provi García never pursued the publicity and fame of the composers and performers she promoted, and to this day her name and accomplishments are known only to insiders in Latin music. She died of heart disease while in semiretirement in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1995. Years earlier she had had a massive heart attack that remanded her back to Puerto Rico during New York’s frigid winters. Provi García’s legacy remains, not only in the continued flourishing Latin music in the United States, but also in the work of her nephew, Nicolás Kanellos, who has tried to emulate her example in the world of Latino literary publishing.
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García Cortese, Aimee See also Entrepreneurs SOURCE: “Providencia García.” Dr. Nicolás Kanellos Collection. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Archives, University of Houston.
Nicolás Kanellos
GARCÍA CORTESE, AIMEE (1929– ) Reverend Aimee García Cortese is a fully bilingual (English- and Spanish-speaking) Puerto Rican woman born and raised in the South Bronx, New York City. She was nurtured in the Christian faith in a Pentecostal church where she was told by the elders in her church that if she was indeed being called by God to serve as a minister, one of the tests would be to survive street preaching over a period of time. Therefore, her career in public speaking began on the gang-ridden and impoverished streets of New York City, where she engaged in street evangelism by handing out evangelistic tracts, preaching, and giving her testimony “al aire libre” (open air), which was the popular style of Pentecostal Christians, particularly the recently converted and those interested in the ordained ministry. She obtained the credential of license to preach in 1951 and became a missionary evangelist in Latin America (Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico) for the Spanish Assemblies of God denomination. She engaged in pastoral work beginning in 1957 when she served as associate minister to her father, Reverend Rafael García, in the South Bronx congregation of Thessalonica Christian Church, where she had earlier served as educational director. Although she had the theological education required of those seeking to enter the ordained ministry in the denomination, the opportunities for women were nonexistent at the time. Her journey led her to join the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Puerto Rico, where she was ordained in 1962 to become one of the pioneers among Latina women in the ordained Christian ministry. Alongside her husband, Joseph Cortese, she worked as part of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Team in Latin America (Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala) and served as a delegate to the First Congress on Evangelism in West Berlin, Germany, in 1966, sponsored by the Billy Graham Association. In her commitment to serve, Reverend García Cortese did not limit herself to the spiritual well-being of people but also sought to gain training as a mental health counselor and psychotherapist. From 1969 to 1972 she served in the political arena as a legislative aide to her brother, New York state senator Robert García, where she worked on the issues of housing, welfare, and drug rehabilitation in the South Bronx. This prompted her to combine community social justice ef-
forts with her ministerial work in 1973, which resulted in her becoming the first female chaplain for the New York State Department of Corrections. She worked with female and male inmates in various facilities such as Bedford Hills, Ossining (Sing-Sing), Taconic, and Bayview until 1983. She continued to be active in civic affairs as a clergy leader of the city of New York and as part of New York City mayor Ed Koch’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs and Commission on Bias Affairs. Although a decade earlier the ordination of women had been a moot issue, García Cortese was ordained in New York State by the Spanish (Eastern District of the) Assemblies of God Pentecostal denomination in 1974. She continued to work interdenominationally as a preacher, counselor, and speaker, as well as fulfill the role of wife and mother to three daughters and a son. While she was volunteering as a counselor at Brooklyn Gospel Tabernacle (currently Brooklyn Tabernacle) in Brooklyn, New York City, during the late 1970s and 1980s, her daughters came to be known as the Cortese Trio, with Dámaris (now Cortese Carbaugh) as the lead singer. They sang with vocal cords that impressed not only the congregants attending the megachurch but also record companies and commercial media. The Cortese Trio became a key component of more than 100-member Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, with Dámaris as one of the soloists, which later won several Grammy Awards. In 1983 García Cortese founded a church known as Crossroads Tabernacle in the Bronx, associated with the English-speaking Assemblies of God, where she continues her full-time pastorate and spearheads efforts to provide vital services that meet the spiritual and physical needs of her congregants and the surrounding community. Her ministerial life can be summarized by using her own words: “I want to be where the people are; that’s where Jesus was.” As a dynamic orator very well grounded in scripture and a wealth of experiences in diverse areas of ministry, she is consistently invited to serve as a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and retreat leader in churches, community-based organizations, college campuses, and conferences throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. Those who have benefited from her talks have credited her effective public speaking and charisma to her good sense of humor and gentle, down-to-earth wisdom. See also Pentecostal Church; Religion SOURCES: Pérez y González, María Elizabeth. 2000. Puerto Ricans in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1988. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations before Mid-century.” Oral History Review 16, no. 2 (Fall): 47–63.
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María Pérez y González
García-Aguilera, Carolina
GARCÍA-AGUILERA, CAROLINA (1949– ) Award-winning Latina author Carolina García-Aguilera was born in Havana, Cuba, to a family with deep roots in the island’s history. One of her ancestors, Francisco Vicente Aguilera, was honored for his service in Cuba’s war for independence against Spain by having his profile imprinted on the Cuban 100 peso’s Cubanos bill. Soon after the 1959 Cuban Revolution García-Aguilera moved to New York City with her family before settling in Miami Beach. García-Aguilera attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She received her B.A. at Rollins College in Florida, from which she graduated with a double degree in history and political science. After Rollins she studied for a master’s degree in language and linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1973 she moved to Asia and lived first in Hong Kong, then in Tokyo, and later in Beijing. In 1981 she returned to the United States and began studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where in 1983 she earned an M.B.A. with a concentration in finance. After marriage and motherhood García-Aguilera became inspired by the idea of writing mystery fiction with a Cuban American woman as the protagonist. In 1986 she became a private investigator. “I wanted to be a private eye so I could utilize my experience and write about it,” explains the author. For ten years she worked in the rough-and-tumble environment of Miami as a private eye, always gathering experience she would eventually incorporate into her novels. Rais-
Cuban American mystery writer Carolina García-Aguilera. Photograph by Ali, 1999. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
ing three daughters and maintaining a long-distance marriage, she was able to grow a successful business even when it required her to work at all hours, often under hazardous conditions. The experience of handling complex and dangerous cases gave her a solid understanding of the profession that would serve her well as a mystery writer. With the experience gained from having worked as a private investigator, García-Aguilera took a sabbatical and began working on her first novel in the Lupe Solano mystery series. In 1996 her first book, Bloody Waters, was published. Her mysteries feature a savvy, sexy, and sophisticated private investigator, Lupe Solano, as the protagonist who works and lives in the vibrant city of Miami. Like the author who breathed life into her, Lupe is a strong-willed, yet family-oriented, Catholic and muy cubana. Smart and witty, Lupe Solano drives a Mercedes and hates to shoot people because “it messes up her nails.” Combining a compelling story with subplots drawing upon Cuban politics and history, García-Aguilera developed a critically acclaimed six-book mystery series. More than just a mystery writer, García-Aguilera draws upon her life experiences to write novels that educate as well as entertain. Each book in the Lupe Solano series develops subplots around history, Hispanic culture, and global politics. The series quickly won an international audience, and Lupe’s adventures are read in eight languages, distributed in ten countries, and acclaimed for their intriguing historical plotlines and cultural insights. García-Aguilera has been identified with a new wave of Hispanic crime/mystery writers, including Rodolfo Anaya and Lucha Corpi, whose works dispel age-old stereotypes about Hispanics. García-Aguilera’s understanding of the complexities of investigation, law, and criminal behavior permeate her writing. She continues to hold a private investigator’s license in the state of Florida and occasionally takes cases, keeping her investigative instincts sharpened. Not resting on her successes, she has taken her first steps toward writing in other genres, as well as for television and film. Depasse Entertainment has purchased the film and television rights for her first book, Bloody Waters, and has a series in development at ABC television. As a wife and mother raising three children, GarcíaAguilera is also familiar with the fine line many woman walk, balancing professional achievement with personal happiness. She has achieved professional success, developed real-life coping skills, and created and maintained a thriving investigation business while carving her own niche in the supersaturated market of mystery fiction, where novels by Hispanic women were previously nonexistent. In 2000 García-Aguilera’s fifth book in the series,
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Garcíaz, María Havana Heat, received the Shamus Award for best private eye novel published that year. This award is given by the Writers of America to honor excellent work in the detective/private eye genre. In 1999 her fourth book in the series, Miracle in Paradise, won the Flamingo Prize for the best novel set in Florida. Her other recent mysteries include Bitter Sugar (2002) and One Hot Summer (2003). Cristina García-Aguilera just released her eighth book, Luck of the Draw, in 2004. SOURCES: Brinson, Claudia Smith. 2000. “Gun-Toting Mystery Writer to Be Honored.” State, December 4, 1; Cogdill, Oline H. 2001. “Exploring Cuban Exiles’ Lost Heritage.” SunSentinel, October 17, C+; Fichtner, Margarita. 2000. “House of Mystery.” Miami Herald, October 1, K+; Flores, J. C. 2000. “Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Creates a New Kind of Private Eyes.” LatinHeat, July, 11, 18; García-Aguilera, Carolina. 2001. Interview by Rebecca Torres-Wilkner, September 15; People. 1996. “Talking with Carolina Garcia-Aguilera.” April. Rebecca Torres-Wilkner
GARCÍAZ, MARÍA (1957–
)
Born on February 13, 1957, in Salt Lake City, Utah, María Garcíaz is the executive director of Salt Lake City Neighborhood Housing Services (SLNHS), a nonprofit housing agency that combines community development with at-risk youth employment. Her dedication to affordable housing and home ownership stems from her own working-class childhood in Salt Lake City. She grew up in a single-parent household with five brothers and one sister. Her mother would repair their dilapidated living quarters, but the landlords would reward her hard work by raising the rent beyond her means. In 1970, with the pooled wages of every family member, including thirteen-year-old María, the Garcíazes purchased their own home. “The Chicano Movement saved my life.” Facing intense discrimination in school, María Garcíaz began to act out. Chicano students at the University of Utah visited her high school and encouraged her and other Mexican Americans to see a world beyond the stifling atmosphere of indifferent and at times hostile teachers. Garcíaz remembers her mentor’s words: “Don’t become the loser they want you to be.” She turned her life around and attended the University of Utah, where she became a very visible and vocal Chicana activist. Her own identity as a Chicana did not necessarily influence how her mother and siblings viewed themselves. “My mother is Spanish; one brother is Mexican; my sister Mexican-American; I am Chicana. Three brothers are Hispanic and the youngest is Latino.” Her family’s divergent cultural locations speak volumes about the heterogeneity within Latino communities, a heterogeneity that cuts across region, gender, religion, sexuality, and even individual families.
After graduating from college María Garcíaz worked as a probation officer but was disturbed by the twotiered justice system she encountered. A Latino youth with a minor infraction would receive a harsh sentence, while a Euro-American counterpart who had committed a more serious offense would merit only a slap on the wrist. She earned a reputation as a skilled, caring probation officer. She asserts that she still feels “more comfortable with gang bangers than politicians.” Desiring to help youths on a larger scale, she began to volunteer with Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services in 1982 and eight years later became its executive director. Along the way she received a master’s degree in education from Utah State University. Since 1977 Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services has revitalized working-class neighborhoods, such as Fairpark and Guadalupe. With the motto “Rebuilding Neighborhoods . . . one block at a time,” SLNS embraces a multifaceted approach: building new homes, rehabilitating older structures, conducting home-ownership classes, and providing low-interest financing. Furthermore, since 1982 more than 1,200 adolescents have participated in YouthWorks, a program for at-risk teenagers, many of whom are referred by the juvenile courts. These young people earn money while learning construction trades as they refurbish neighborhood homes. They also participate in other community projects, such as creating a storefront mural. YouthWorks has an 80 percent success rate, with success defined as completing high school and avoiding further brushes with law enforcement. Many former participants have attended college and pursued careers as professionals and small-business owners. Building homes for people like themselves has given teenagers pride in their own efforts and in their neighborhoods. Journalist Bill Moyers profiled YouthWorks in a television special as “one of the leading programs in the country dealing with youth and youth related issues.” In 1990, if one drove around the Westside neighborhood of Guadalupe, one would find about half the houses boarded up and abandoned; today only two such structures remain. Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services has responded proactively to the dramatic demographic change that has occurred during the last three decades. In 1970 only 33,000 Latinos lived in Salt Lake City. Today more than 200,000 Latinos call the city home. Although working-class neighborhoods, like Guadalupe, remain predominantly Latino, newcomers from Sudan, Bosnia, and Iraq have also settled in these areas, communities with a greater sense of hope than despair. María Garcíaz and her husband, real-estate broker David Galván (María jokes that she met David at a 7– 11) made the decision to raise their children in the
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Garment Industry Guadalupe neighborhood. They have built a Craftsman-inspired home within a block from her office, and across the street is the proposed site for a new affordable housing complex. In her words: “We talk about building communities, but then we don’t live there. We talk about celebrating diversity but then we live in all-white neighborhoods.” María Garcíaz and David Galván provide a model for community activists, people who give new meaning to the phrase “the personal is political.” SOURCES: “A Morning Conversation with Community Members.” 2004. Workshop held as part of the “Mirando Adelante: Looking Forward Conference,” Salt Lake City Library, Salt Lake City, UT, October 2; Garcíaz, María. 2004. Interview by Vicki L. Ruiz, October 2; Salt Lake City Housing Services. www.slnhs.org (accessed July 10, 2005). Vicki L. Ruiz
GARMENT INDUSTRY The garment industry has been a major employer of Latinas. As a labor-intensive industry, garment manufacturing has sought low-wage workers, relying on immigrants, migrants, and women. Puerto Rican and Dominican women in New York City, Mexican women in Los Angeles, and Cuban women in Miami have all found themselves concentrated in garment-industry jobs. More recently, Central American immigrant women have been following in their footsteps in all three cities. As the garment industry continues its search for cheap labor through globalization and export-processing zones, Latinas are affected by the garment industry in their countries of origin as well. Puerto Rican women found jobs in New York City’s garment industry after World War I. Classified advertisements called for skilled and unskilled garment workers, and by 1925 more Puerto Rican women, 17 percent, were employed in factory work than in any other occupation. Confronting the need to contribute income to their household economies and care for their children, many turned to the home needlework industry despite its low wages and exploitative conditions. Between 1930 and 1936 the employment service of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor placed about 600 women. An overwhelming majority, about 80 percent, secured jobs as domestics or operatives, many in the garment industry. As Puerto Rican migration increased after World War II, so did women’s concentration in the garment industry, especially in undergarments, dressmaking, skirts, and blouses. New York was still the center of the U.S. garment industry. Through social networks women helped each other migrate and find garmentindustry jobs. Encountering a wide range of working conditions, many Puerto Rican women found jobs in
In the 1940s Puerto Rican women migrated to U.S. urban areas and found jobs in low-wage labor industries. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
union shops and became members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. By 1950, 40 percent of Puerto Rican women were in the workforce, compared with 35 percent of women citywide, and a substantial number of Puerto Rican women, 72 percent, worked in manufacturing. Yet the garment industry was about to change. After a postwar economic boom competition and imports increased, sending the garment industry in search of lower wages. As the garment manufacturers left New York, Puerto Rican women found fewer jobs and deteriorating conditions in the jobs that remained. Section work increased, in which workers sewed only a portion of each garment instead of the entire garment. Contracting and subcontracting increased as manufacturers and retailers sent garments to small shops for assembly. Sweatshops proliferated. Dominican women, whose migration to New York City increased in the late 1960s and 1970s, encountered this two-tiered garment industry, where the remaining decent jobs were engulfed by sweatshops. The garment industry relocated to lower-wage, nonunion regions of the United States, including Los Angeles, where it grew steadily during the mid-1950s. As early as 1924 Los Angeles had become the fourthlargest garment center in the United States, and by the 1930s the majority of workers were Mexican and Mexican American women. In the post–World War II era the industry grew and shifted from skilled suit and
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Giant cloak manufacturing to the lesser-skilled sportswear and swimwear trades, as well as lower-cost dresses. Mexican and Mexican American women were concentrated in the lesser-skilled, lower-paid trades. As in New York City, the structure of the industry shifted, with increases in section work and contracting. As Edna Bonacich and Richard P. Appelbaum conclude, there was “a fairly severe ethnic division of labor, with whites at the top, Asians in the middle and to some extent, at the bottom, and Latinos mainly at the bottom.” Hence, while a few Mexican Americans became contractors, most were assembly workers in small shops, many of which were underground. Conditions were harsh, with low, piece-rate wages and no benefits, seasonal work and no job security, harsh supervision, long hours, and persisting homework despite its illegality. Undocumented workers were the most vulnerable to exploitation. Miami’s garment industry grew with the arrival of Cuban immigrants and in the context of an economic enclave of immigrant businesses, where employers and employees were of the same nationality. Between the early 1960s and 1973 garment employment increased from fewer than 7,000 to more than 24,000. While most of the manufacturers were Jewish, the overwhelming majority of the contractors, 90 percent, were Cuban men, and the overwhelming majority of the workers, 95 percent, were Cuban women. Like their counterparts in New York and Los Angeles, many worked in unregulated shops or in homework. Scholars debate whether economic enclaves shield workers from exploitation in the broader labor market and benefit the immigrant group as a whole or whether employment in enclaves is just another form of exploitation. Latinas have also been affected by the garment industry beyond these major garment centers. Puerto Rican women who migrated to Philadelphia after World War II encountered industry changes comparable to those in New York City. Mexican American women in El Paso, Texas, confronted an employer who had left New York in search of cheaper, nonunion labor with a strike lasting from 1972 to 1974 that demanded union recognition and better conditions. Many Cuban women in New Jersey, like their counterparts in Miami, worked in garment-industry jobs. Hence the availability of garment-industry jobs has shaped Latinas’ migration patterns. Because Latinas turned to garment-industry jobs as one of the few avenues of employment available to them, their employment in the industry, as well as the wages and conditions in those jobs, has shaped not only their own economic well-being and that of their families, but also the economic well-being of their communities and of the inner cities.
SOURCES: Bonacich, Edna, and Richard P. Appelbaum. 2000. Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press; Fernández Kelly, M. Patricia, and Ana García. 1989. “Hispanic Women and Homework: Women in the Informal Economy of Miami and Los Angeles.” In Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, ed. Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, 165–179. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Ortiz, Altagracia, ed. 1996. Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Whalen, Carmen Teresa. 2002. “Sweatshops Here and There: The Garment Industry, Latinas, and Labor Migrations.” International Labor and Working-Class History 61 (Spring): 45–68. Carmen Teresa Whalen
GIANT Based on the novel by Edna Ferber, the epic film Giant chronicles twenty-five years in the lives of wealthy rancher and Texan patriot Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) and his wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Set amid the backdrop of a dusty Texan wilderness, the film depicts the state’s transition from cattle ranching and land wealth to oil-based wealth. The film begins when Bick visits Maryland to purchase a thoroughbred horse from Leslie’s father. Despite their different upbringings, the two fall in love, and Leslie returns with Bick to his sprawling 600,000-acre Reata Ranch to embark on their new life. In his final cinema appearance, James Dean portrays Jett Rink, a rough-around-the-edges Reata ranch hand with a grudge against Bick, his employer. Rink’s discovery of oil on an inherited patch of land brings initial riches but ultimate ruin. Throughout the film Leslie and Bick represent the tensions and binaries often perceived between an American East and West, the former civilized yet traditional and unchanging, the latter wild and untamed, but a space of potential and progress. These binaries play out over the issue of Anglo-Mexican relations in Texas. For instance, only a few minutes into the film, and shortly after Leslie has been introduced to her future husband, she asserts, “We really stole Texas, didn’t we, Mr. Benedict? I mean, away from Mexico.” Bick’s face falls and he angrily defends his state, yet his love for Leslie remains unhindered. After marrying, the couple travels to Texas by train, and the screen fills with images of the wild and untamed ranch lands. Once Leslie is settled in Texas, her interest in Reata’s Mexican servants leads Bick to instruct, “Don’t fuss over those people. You’re a Texan now.” Despite Bick’s warning, Leslie continues to challenge the attitudes of her husband and Anglo-Texan neighbors and sets about trying to improve the living conditions of her Mexican servants. These scenes set Leslie’s sophistication and civilized manners apart from her husband. Yet
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Giant as the film moves forward, Leslie’s Maryland home and family remain static and unchanging, while Texas moves rapidly into the future with the discovery of oil. A central theme of the film addresses the issue of Anglo-Mexican intermarriage. Once married and settled on Reata, Leslie and Bick begin a family. They raise three children and, as the years pass, witness an oil boom and a world war. All grown up, the couple’s only son, Jordie (Dennis Hopper), marries Juana, a Mexican woman. A disappointed Bick is forced to rethink his own racist attitudes. His major confrontation with his own and the region’s anti-Mexican sentiment serves as the film’s climax. The scene begins with Bick, accompanied by Leslie, one of his daughters, his daughter-in-law, Juana, and his mestizo grandson, little Jordie, entering a road-stop diner called Sarge’s Place. Sarge and an Anglo waitress eye the family suspiciously, clearly displeased with the mixed company of Anglos and Mexicans. When little Jordie asks for ice cream, Sarge viciously responds, “Ice cream? I thought he’d want a tamale.” Only begrudgingly does he allow the family to stay. Moments later an elderly Mexican couple and their daughter sit down at a table. “You’re in the wrong place, amigo. . . . Your money is no good here,” Sarge tells the man as he attempts to usher them out. Bick stands up to defend this family’s right to be served, reminding Sarge of the Benedict name. Sarge asks, “And that little papoose back there,” referring to little Jordie, “Is he a Benedict too?” This is a pivotal moment in which Bick seems to acknowledge his grandson for the first time. “Yeah. Come to think of it, it is.” Dramatic fisticuffs ensue to the soundtrack of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Bick loses the fight, but wins his honor, as well as the renewed respect of Leslie. Although Giant takes a progressive stance on intermarriage, the film’s Mexican Texan characters, and Mexican women in particular, are rarely given a voice. Despite the centrality of the taboo love and intermarriage theme to the second half of the film, Juana has few lines and stands by silently while her Anglo counterparts come to terms with their own prejudice. For instance, when Juana is refused service at a beauty salon in Jett Rink’s new resort hotel, she silently takes the abuse and calls her husband, Jordie. Smashing lobby furniture and ushering Juana out of salon by the elbow, it is Jordie who arrives to protect and stand up for his wife. In the culminating scene at Sarge’s Place, Juana, little Jordie, and the Mexican patrons denied service stand mute while Bick speaks, and fights, for them. Thus the film strips its Mexican characters of their agency. In Giant justice is delivered at the initiative, and as the prerogative of, its Anglo characters. Further, the film depicts Mexican Texans as a racialized “other” whose presence is clearly noted, but only in separate and distinctly marked Mexican spaces. The film
ends with a camera focus on Bick’s two grandchildren sharing a crib in the Benedict home. Little Jordie stands next to Bick’s other blond grandchild while Bick remarks to Leslie, “My own grandson don’t even look like one of us. I swear, honey, he looks like a little wetback.” Thus even after Bick has seemingly overcome his prejudice following the events in Sarge’s Place, he reaffirms the racial otherness of little Jordie. Bick’s comments suggest that although he accepts his grandson, he remains unable to question notions of racial difference. Well received by critics and viewers alike, Giant was nominated for ten Academy Awards, and George Stevens won the Oscar for best director. Quickly immortalized as a classic, the film inspired numerous other artistic works, such as Billy Lee Brammer’s political novel The Gay Place and Tino Villanueva’s collection of poems titled Scenes from the Movie Giant. Villaneuva’s poems reveal the enormous impact of the film’s theme on his youth while simultaneously capturing the frustration of the Mexicans’ silent portrayal in the film. Rehashing the scene in Sarge’s Place, he writes: “Two men have organized / Their violence to include me, as I am on the side / Of Rock Hudson, but carry nothing to the fight.” While the film fails to challenge notions of racial difference or grant agency to its Mexican Texan characters, Giant remains significant for its portrayal of the postwar nation’s increasing attention to issues of equal treatment and inclusion. Released just after Brown v. Board of Education and at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Giant reveals the growing urgency to overcome racism, segregation, and intolerance. In addition, it brought the reality of Mexican oppression in Texas to the big screen and tackled the highly controversial issue of intermarriage with a progressive position in a decade often remembered for its conservatism. See also Media Stereotypes SOURCES: Ferber, Edna. 1952. Giant. Garden City, NY: Doubleday; Griffith, Albert J. 1991. “The Scion, the Señorita, and the Texas Ranch Epic: Hispanic Images in Film.” Bilingual Review 16, no. 1:15–22; Heide, Markus. 1999. “ ‘When Borders Migrate’: The Frontier, Chicano Performance Art, and the Postcolonial in the Americas.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47, no. 4:361–377; Pérez-Torres, Rafael. 1998. “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice.” American Literature 70, no. 1 (March): 153–176; Ramírez-Berg, Charles. 1992. “Bordertown, the Assimilation Narrative, and the Chicano Social Problem Film.” In Chicanos and Film: Essays on Chicano Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega, 33–52. New York: Garland Publishing; Stevens, George, director. 1956. Giant. From a novel by Edna Ferber. Warner Bros., 201 min. Two-DVD special edition release, 2003; Villanueva, Tino. 1993. Scenes from the Movie Giant. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.
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Julie Cohen
Gómez Carbonell, María
GÓMEZ CARBONELL, MARÍA (1903–1988) Vital public servant and stateswoman María Gómez Carbonell was born in Havana on June 29, 1903, the daughter of José Fernando Gómez Santoyo and Candelaria Carbonell Rivero. On her mother’s side she came from a long line of political activists involved in Cuba’s independence movement. Her maternal grandfather was Néstor Leonelo Carbonell Figueroa, regarded as a hero of the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), who later helped organize José Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party while he was in exile in Tampa. Three of her maternal uncles, José Manuel, Néstor, and Miguel Angel Carbonell, also had distinguished careers in Cuba’s political and civic life. Her own mother’s political activism in the Cuban independence efforts earned her praise from Martí himself, who wrote a poem in her honor. María Gómez Carbonell also dedicated her life to public service, first in Cuba and later in the United States. After graduating from the University of Havana with a doctorate in philosophy and letters, she directed and taught at a primary and secondary school named for her maternal grandfather. She helped found the Alianza Nacional Femenista, which worked for suffrage and women’s rights. Gómez Carbonell was the first woman elected to the Cuban Congress. In 1936 she was elected to a four-year term in Cuba’s House of Representatives, and she served in the Senate from 1940 to 1944. In Congress she became known for her eloquence, giving more than 160 speeches. As a congressional representative, she focused on issues relating to women’s rights, as well as prison reform, juvenile courts, and social welfare legislation. She served in the presidential cabinet in 1941, 1952, and 1958. During World War II she served as the secretary general of the Women’s Civil Defense Corps. In addition, she served as president of the National Corporation for Public Assistance, where she focused on issues relating to mental health and homelessness. She was the Cuban delegate to many international conferences in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. In 1959 she chose political exile in the United States after the overthrow of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro. Along with Mercedes García Tudurí and Vicente Cauce, she founded the Cruzada Educativa Cubana (Cuban Educational Crusade, CEC) on August 2, 1962, with the twofold purpose of preserving Cuban culture in the United States and fostering the civic ideals that were necessary to create a democracy once a return to Cuba became possible. Through the CEC she sponsored the Tertulias Infantiles, weekly children’s workshops about Cuban history, geography, music, and poetry, as well as about democratic ideals. The CEC had its own weekly show
on Spanish-language talk radio, La Escuelita Cubana, on radio station WMIE, which informed its audience about the history and culture of Cuba. Over the years the organization sponsored numerous conferences and patriotic celebrations. It offered three prizes, the Juan J. Remos, José de la Luz y Caballero, and Candelaria Carbonell, to honor Cuban exiles who had distinguished themselves in different intellectual enterprises. A 1984 publication edited by Gómez Carbonell compiled the biographies of all those who had received the award. Gómez Carbonell was also active in the organizations known as the municipios. Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution the nation was divided into 126 municipios (townships) in six provinces, and each Cuban citizen belonged to a particular municipio simply by residence. In Miami Cuban exiles created mutual-aid organizations that were named after each of the municipios. When a Cuban arrived in the United States, he or she could contact his or her respective municipio-in-exile for referrals and assistance. Gómez Carbonell played an active role in the Municipio de la Habana and published its periodical, El Habanero (1969–1980). She also served on the directorate of the Cuban Municipalities in Exile, the umbrella group that supervised the various municipios. Gómez Carbonell was a sought-after speaker in the Cuban exile community, lecturing to various groups around the city on a variety of cultural and historical topics. She contributed essays to the Miami-based newspaper Diario Las Americas and authored or edited
As a community icon in both Cuba and the United States, María Gómez Carbonell lectured on cultural and historical topics. Courtesy of Collection Cruzada Educativa Cubana. The Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
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Gómez-Potter, Socorro several books, including Cuba y su derecho a la libertad. Gómez Carbonell died in Miami on May 24, 1988. SOURCES: García, María Cristina. 1996. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959– 1994. Berkeley: University of California Press; “María Gómez Carbonell.” Vertical Files, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami; Rovirosa, Dolores. 1988. “María Gómez Carbonell y una familia excepcional.” Manuscript, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami. María Cristina García
GÓMEZ-POTTER, SOCORRO (1951–
)
Born into extreme poverty in El Municipio del Soyate, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, on May 14, 1951, Socorro Gómez was the last of six children. Her father, a former bracero, sharecropped, while her mother, born and raised in Illinois until she was deported in 1932, taught reading and writing to the children of Soyate. The grinding poverty of the countryside forced the family to seek better work conditions. Initially they moved to Sinaloa, Mexico, where farming was a little better but not adequate to care for six children. Socorro’s mother migrated alone to San Diego, California, to become a live-in maid and nanny, while her father moved the family to Tecate, a Mexican border town, to prepare for immigration to the United States. Her mother’s job enabled family support, but separated her from the children for more than three years. The separation took an emotional toll, particularly on fiveyear-old Socorro. “I was reunited with Mercedes Gómez, but I was never reunited with my mother.” In 1959 her mother saved enough money to sponsor all of her children to come to the United States, while her father secured employment at Forbes Citrus Ranch in Oasis, California, in the Coachella Valley. At the age of eight Socorro crossed the border with her mother and siblings. In the United States Gómez experienced discrimination. Reflecting on her educational experiences, she comments: “I knew that there could be pain involved in school experiences from being poor, but not from being Mexican or from being from a different group, or a different language.” She adds, “School [in the United States] was painful in a way that was unfamiliar to me.” Gómez spent the first years trying to understand English and having the feeling that “people hated [me] for talking.” From grades three through seven she felt that she had “no business” being in school and felt deeply inadequate and insecure. “I lost my voice . . . and never reclaimed it.” Fortunately, her math skills enabled her to survive. In high school she received encouragement from friends, especially Yolanda Almaraz (later Yolanda Almaraz Esquivel), her teacher, Mr. Keller, and her father. In 1969 she attended California
State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), where she entered a five year B.A./M.A. program in education. Gómez became one of only twenty-one ethnic Mexican students on campus and an active member of the Chicano student group, Movimiento Estudantil de Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). She and her friends Analea Torres and Enedina López refused to accept the prevailing attitudes of Chicano leaders regarding women’s participation. Jorge and Sal Rios, two MEChA leaders, believed that “the females could cook at their meetings and the females could do certain things, but they could never aspire to a position of leadership.” Gómez, Torres, and López mobilized Chicanas, a slim majority among MEChA members, and held new elections. Gómez proudly remembers, “We took it over.” As leaders, they organized a food drive to support the United Farm Workers in the Coachella Valley, held cultural activities, and ran symposia on topics such as the antiwar movement and the Chicano moratorium of East Los Angeles. They worked with local African American leaders and welfare activists Frances Grice and Valerie Pope and Chicano organizer Richard González to assist welfare mothers and high-school dropouts in the Mount Vernon area of San Bernardino. Moreover, they secured federal funding from the War on Poverty program to start Casa Ramona Community Center in San Bernardino. In September 1973 Gómez began teaching elementary school in Mecca, and Yolanda Almaraz took a position at Dateland Middle School in Coachella. Both became outspoken critics of the school system and embroiled in a conflict with school administrators. In her first year Gómez witnessed the superintendent misappropriating federal classroom funds to build tennis courts next to his house. The following year she helped defeat a school bond issue for constructing a new football stadium at the local high school. In 1976 Gómez joined her sister Dora, Almaraz, her colleague Roman Koenig, and parents to form the Community Committee for Alternatives in Education (CCAE), an advocacy group for educational reform, bilingual education, and defending students against abusive teachers. The group raised community awareness that encouraged walkouts by middle- and high-school students in the Coachella Valley to protest physical abuse and child molestation. School officials accused Gómez, Almaraz, Koenig, and a fourth teacher, Charles Marquez, of “unprofessional conduct,” removed them from their classrooms, and initiated proceedings to revoke their teaching credentials. Parents and political leaders, including Governor Jerry Brown, rallied to their defense and overturned the district’s actions. Although Gómez won an equal-opportunity lawsuit in 1976 against the Coachella Valley Unified School District for discrimination, she returned to San Bernardino to take a position at Mount Vernon Ele-
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Gonzales, Elvira Rodríguez de See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: Gómez-Potter, Socorro. 2004. Oral history interviews by Matt García, February 13, 20, and March 12. John Nicholas Brown Center and The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University. “Educating Change: Latina Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity.” www.brown.edu/Research/Coachella/index.html (accessed July 7, 2005). Matt García
GONZALES, ELVIRA RODRÍGUEZ DE (1883–?)
Education advocate Socorro Gómez during her first year as a teacher at the Mecca Elementary School, 1973. Courtesy of Matt García.
mentary School and pursue a master’s in educational counseling at CSUSB. In 1980 she gave birth to her first and only child, Nadia. In 1983 she accepted a job in San Bernardino as a school counselor at Curtis Middle School, serving low-income black and Latino gang youths. Although the school was ranked ninth from the bottom among low-achieving middle schools in California, Gómez helped create a college preparatory program, College Capable Cats. The success of the program garnered local, state, and national awards and the praise and envy of her peers. As keynote speaker at an Achievement Council conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gómez met members of a team from Rhode Island, including her second husband, Harry Potter. In 1995 she moved to Providence, where she became principal of Alfred A. Lima Elementary School, the only two-way, Spanish-English immersion school in the Rhode Island public school system. With a strong support base of mostly low-income Latino and black Providence parents, Gómez is recognized as a strong defender of bilingual education in Rhode Island and has struggled against administrative and political pressures to reduce the program at Lima Elementary.
Born in Mier, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in 1883, Elvira Rodríguez de Gonzales represented the small group of Mexican teachers who taught in segregated schools. Perhaps recognizing her position in the community (similar to that of African American women teachers in the South during the same period), she promoted Mexican American parental involvement in the education of their children, particularly through Spanishspeaking Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs). Her parents were Nicolás and Prudencia (Reyes) Rodríguez. It is unclear when she arrived in the United States. She married Rafael M. Gonzales, a justice of the piece in San Diego, Texas, and the couple had two children. In 1903 she obtained a college degree from the Laredo Seminary (later the Holding Institute), an institution sponsored by the Methodist Church. She remained a lifelong Methodist. She also taught in Duval and Webb Counties for many years. During the 1930s she played an important role in the Spanish-Speaking Parent-Teacher Association, a separate organization for Spanish-dominant parents and teachers. From 1927 to 1936 she served as district chair and wrote the yearbook for the small network of Spanish-speaking PTAs. During the celebration of the Texas centennial (the 100th anniversary of Texas independence) she translated articles about Texas history for Spanish-language newspapers. Gonzales was unusual for her times in that as an immigrant, she obtained a college education, and perhaps because of her own position as an immigrant, she proved an effective organizer of Mexican American parents. SOURCE: Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Elvira Rodríguez de Gonzales.” In New Handbook of Texas, 5:657–658. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
GONZÁLEZ, LAURA (1954–
)
Laura González writes that her family hails from Mexico, in the coastal areas of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and
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González, Laura Guerrero. “I was conceived in Acapulco, born in Mexico City [1954] and raised between Mexico City and Acapulco. I started to be bilingual and bicultural since I was 6 years old, when I started kindergarten and later attended 6 years of elementary school at the ‘Two United Nations School.’ ” González received her licenciatura in social anthropology from the Universidad Iberoamericana in México, D.F., in 1978. Her thesis was published in 1992 by the Universidad Iberoamericana Press as Respuesta campesina a la revolución en El Bajío. She received a master’s in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 1987. This was followed in 1996 by her doctorate in anthropology at UCSB with a dissertation titled “Political Brokers, Ejidos, and State Resources: The Case of Arturo Quiroz Francia, a Peasant Leader from Guanajuato, Mexico.” She revised her doctoral dissertation and had it accepted for publication by the Social Science Research Center at the Universidad de Guanajuato, which published it in 1996 as Political Brokers, Ejidos, and State Resources in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her published work reflects twenty-five years’ worth of research in peasant communities in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, and various transnational Mexican communities in the United States in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas. In 1998, for instance, she coordinated and became the de facto editor for the Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Mexican Migration to the United States. This was a joint publication of the Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato, the Universidad de Guanajuato, and the Consejo Estatal de Población. González is a dedicated researcher and teacher whose teaching appointments stretch across both the United States and Mexico and encompass both academic settings and less traditional community-based settings, including research field stations. In 1979 she was a substitute instructor at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in México, D.F. From 1979 to 1982 she served as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, México, D.F. She was tenured at the UAM in 1980 and named associate professor. She continued to teach at UAM until 1984, when she left Mexico to enroll as a full-time graduate student in anthropology at UCSB. From 1984 to 1987 she was a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Anthropology at UCSB. Once she completed her doctoral coursework, González continued to conduct her research and write her dissertation from 1988 to 1996. Part of her research and writing entailed a stint in Pennsylvania (1991– 1993). She received partial funding for this phase of her work from UCSB, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and
the Interamerican Foundation. Needing to find fulltime employment, however, she returned to Guanajuato, where from 1994 to 1998 she was associate professor and researcher at the Social Science Research Center, Universidad de Guanajuato. She taught at the School of Economics, Philosophy, and History. Once again, she was tenured in 1994. Doctorate in hand, González returned to the United States. From 1998 to 1999 she held a visiting professorship appointment at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), located in Richardson, Texas. Since 1999 she has been a research scientist in the School of Social Sciences at UTD. Since 2000 she has been the full-time director of the UTD Angel Palerm Field Station based in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses both at UTD and Mountain View Community College, a campus of the Dallas County Community College District. Since 1998 she has been the director of the Networks of Guanajuato Migrants Research Project, School of Social Sciences, UTD, a project she directed previously from 1994 to 1998 through the Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales (CICSUG), Universidad de Guanajuato, where it was known by the project name Proyecto Redes de Migrantes Guanajatenses. González’s work on Guanajuatense migration networks in the United States and the Dallas–Fort Worth
Laura González. Photograph by Javier González. Courtesy of Laura González.
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González, Matiana area in particular is significant because she is probably the only researcher conducting this work full-time, focused as it is on the study of one group of Mexican immigrants. Her research carries important ramifications for the present and future. Guanajuatenses constitute the single largest segment of the Mexican immigrant community in the Metroplex. Among the more than 1 million Mexican immigrants in the northern Texas metropolitan area in 2000, those hailing from the state of Guanajuato accounted for about 225,000, or nearly one-fourth of the total. González’s prodigious original research and publications on the subject will long establish a vital link to the history of this community in the United States and specifically in northern Texas. In addition, she is highly active in the community, and her work is widely appreciated and acknowledged. She sits on the advisory boards of several nonprofit organizations and government agencies, such as Mexican consulates, Latino community centers, and Casa Guanajuato of Dallas, Texas. In October 2002 she was elected as advisor to the new Council of the Institute for Mexicans Abroad, an organization created by the current president of Mexico, Vicente Fox. In this capacity, together with her colleagues, González consults with the Mexican president and his government on designing and formulating policies directed at Mexican communities in the United States. In January 2004 she became the twenty-ninth recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award presented by the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (TACHE).
next twenty years González lived and worked with her parents in Jalisco and Reynosa, Mexico. Her parents permitted her to attend school for a few years. After the sixth grade her father declared that she did not need an education to do the domestic work expected of women. Her mother agreed, and González’s education in Mexico ended. There is much more to González’s story. She married at twenty-five and as a U.S. citizen moved to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas with her new husband. She informed him that she wanted to learn English, and he wisely agreed. She learned to drive a car, began wearing pants on occasion, and eventually passed the highschool equivalency test or GED, all of which were firsts for any woman in her family and in her husband’s family as well. Matiana González continued on the path of lifelong learning and for more than twenty years has taught elementary school as a certified bilingual education instructor. She and her husband reared four children, all college graduates, from Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and St. Mary’s College. She also provides assistance and mentoring to other women in her family who desire a formal education. Her work ethic, dedication, faith, and compassion have made a difference in countless lives. Simple yet courageous actions like that of Rosa Parks in the 1950s are part of González’s fiber. Matiana González’s life story continues to unfold each day—teacher, role model, friend, wife, and mother.
SOURCE: González, Laura. Personal correspondence with Robert R. Calderón, April 25. Roberto R. Calderón
See also Bilingual Education SOURCE: González, Monica. 2000. E-mail to Vicki L. Ruiz, June 13.
Monica González
GONZÁLEZ, MATIANA (1940–
)
Born in Edinburg, Texas, in 1940, Matiana González was something of a miracle to her undocumented parents. Both were more than forty years of age, literally dirt poor, and alone in the United States. Matiana survived a mysterious illness as an infant. Her mother swore that St. Jude and Our Lady of Guadalupe had heard their prayers, because certainly there was no doctor in the picture. Matiana spent the early years of her life in a one-room shack. Her parents labored as migrant farmworkers. When things were especially bleak, her mother worked for other Mexican migrant families. As González remembered, “We were indeed, among the poorest of the poor.” She also recalls her parents killing crows for food and the constant, sheer terror they all felt about being discovered by la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS). When González was five, INS agents did catch up with her family and deported them to Mexico. For the
GONZÁLEZ MIRELES, JOVITA (1904–1983) Born into a ranching family in Roma, Texas, in 1904, folklorist and educator Jovita González spent her early childhood absorbing the legends and stories of the “ranch folk” on the border. In 1910 the family moved to San Antonio so that González and her siblings could be educated in English. By her own account, the move was a wrenching experience. Indeed, González never fully separated herself from the ranch folk of her childhood, returning frequently to southern Texas for research work and in later years settling permanently in Corpus Christi, Texas. Despite what she refers to as a few unpleasant incidents during her early education in San Antonio, González excelled academically, finishing high school at the age of eighteen (notwithstanding her late start) and completing the requirements for a teaching certificate two years later.
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González Mireles, Jovita In 1925 she enrolled at the University of Texas, determined to pursue a baccalaureate degree in Spanish, but financial difficulties soon forced her to leave school. A year later González resumed her studies in San Antonio at Our Lady of the Lake College, where she was offered free room, board, and tuition in exchange for teaching two hours a day. During this period González was able to attend summer school in Austin, taking classes with the venerable professor of Spanish at the University of Texas, Lilia Casis. It was through Casis that González met J. Frank Dobie, the celebrated Texas folklorist and then secretary and editor of the Texas Folklore Society. With Dobie’s support and encouragement González rose quickly to prominence in the Texas Folklore Society, ascending to the post of vice president in 1928 and then to president for two terms, from 1930 to 1932, the first Mexican American to be elected to this position. From 1927 to 1935 González published a number of groundbreaking articles on the folklore and cultural practices of Mexicanos in southern Texas in the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society and the Southwest Review. In 1928 she was awarded a Lapham Fellowship by the American Association of University Woman (AAUW) to conduct research in the Mexicano community of southern Texas and write “a history of the social life of the Texas border from 1760 to the present.” The fellowship enabled González to complete a master’s degree in history at the University of Texas, where she wrote her thesis, “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties” (1930). This work broke new ground in the study of Mexican American culture in Texas and has been used as source material by many contemporary historians and social scientists. In 1934 González was awarded a Rockefeller Grant to return to her favorite research topic, the history and social life of southern Texas. This time her research resulted in a book-length manuscript, Dew on the Thorn, a compendium of border folklore loosely connected through a semi-autobiographical narrative documenting the lives of a ranchero family at the turn of the century. In 1935 González married activist Edmundo E. Mireles and moved to Del Rio, Texas, to aid him in his struggles for educational equity. After her marriage to Mireles, González increasingly focused her creative energy on teaching and pedagogical politics, contributing with less frequency to the activities of the Texas Folklore Society. Nevertheless, González continued to pursue her own intellectual projects. In 1936 she put together a special display that focused on the role of Mexicanas in the founding of Texas titled “Catholic Heroines of Texas” for the Texas centennial celebration in Dallas. It was perhaps her research on this subject, as well as the triumphant mood of Anglos
Texas folklorist and novelist Jovita González Mireles, 1930. Courtesy of E. E. Mireles and Jovita González Mireles Papers. Special Collection and Archives. Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Library.
during the centennial year, that inspired her most important work of fiction, Caballero. Written sometime between 1936 and 1938 in collaboration with an Anglo woman, Margaret Eimer, Caballero is a historical novel that tells the story of the Mexican-American War (1848) and its aftermath from the perspective of the Mexican hacendados who founded Texas. The novel is unique in its attention to the gendered and class politics that undermined the hacendados’ struggle against the “invading Anglos.” Because of the undeniable feminist undertones expressed in its powerful critique of the patriarchal social order, Caballero is an early example of what Chicana scholar Sonia Saldívar-Hull has termed “feminism on the border.” Though Caballero and Dew on the Thorn remained unpublished during González’s lifetime, both manuscripts were rediscovered as a result of a recovery project and published in the early 1990s. These works significantly shift our understanding of this foundational Mexican American scholar. See also Feminism; League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); Literature SOURCES: Cotera, María Eugenia. 1998. “Jovita González Mireles: A Sense of Homeland and History.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Vir-
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Govea, Jessica ginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; González, Jovita. 1997. Dew on the Thorn. Ed. José E. Limón. Houston: Arte Público Press; González, Jovita, and Eve Raleigh [pseudonym of Margaret Eimer]. 1996. Caballero: A Historical Novel. Ed. José E. Limón and María Cotera. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Limón, José E. 1994. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; SaldívarHull, Sonia. 2000. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press.
María Eugenia Cotera
GOVEA, JESSICA (1947–
)
Jessica Govea is best known for her lifelong efforts to achieve justice, equality, education, and economic opportunity for Latino workers. The eldest of five siblings and a child of the post–World War II baby boom, she was born in 1947 to Juan and Margarita Govea in Porterville, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. Her father received training at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City before immigrating as a bracero to the United States during the labor shortages of World War II. For most of his work life he was employed on the Santa Fe Railroad. Her mother, also a native of Porterville, left school at the age of seven and toiled with her parents in the cotton fields, vineyards, and citrus groves of the San Joaquin Valley. Occasionally working during the harvest season while rearing her own children, Margarita returned to school to earn a nursing credential after her children left home. Jessica Govea represents the generation of Chicano youths who came of age during the turbulent and idealistic civil rights era of the 1960s. Although she was swept up in the currents of change associated with this decade, her parents’ economic circumstances, values, and activism set an important example. As a youngster, Govea rose early to work with her mother in the harvests. However, her father’s steady salary, along with his wife’s economic contributions, provided enough family income to keep their children in school. With a strong belief in a solid education, her parents took an active interest in their children’s schooling. Govea’s graduation from high school in 1964 and her subsequent attendance at Bakersfield Community College held the prospect for a more comfortable middleclass lifestyle. Govea also inherited an interest in community activism from her parents. Influenced by the wave of social consciousness that spread throughout barrios, particularly in the Southwest after World War II, her parents became cofounders of the local chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a self-help, grassroots group that promoted civic engagement among urban Mexican immigrants and Mexican Amer-
icans. The organization encouraged family involvement, and the young Jessica Govea was an officer of the junior CSO. The entire family knew César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, two prominent executives within the CSO organization. Chávez and Huerta disagreed with the CSO when the group rejected their plan to organize farm laborers. They resigned and founded the National Farm Workers Association (the precursor to the United Farm Workers union), and many CSO members, like the Goveas, supported this new direction. A college student at the time, Jessica Govea soon began devoting her spare time to organizing in the 1965 Delano grape strike. Exhilarated at the prospect of achieving meaningful change in the lives of impoverished farmworkers, Govea abandoned the ranks of volunteers and committed herself to the union full-time. “I no longer belong to myself,” she revealed in a testament to the transforming power of La Causa, “but to the thousands of people who are struggling to be free . . . farm workers, Native Americans, blacks, Vietnamese. They are proud and they are brave, and I am happy that I am part of them.” Putting her words into action, she joined the international boycott in Canada. With the encouragement of her parents, she moved to Toronto with her companion, Marshall Ganz, the son of a local rabbi in Bakersfield and a veteran of civil rights protests in Mississippi (with whom she remained romantically involved for eighteen years). Toronto was a major grape market for California growers, with a consumer population of more than 2 million. It presented a huge challenge for the untested and inexperienced Govea. She threw herself into organizing, making speeches, and picketing. Because of her ethnic and farmworker background, her gender, and her youth, the twenty-one-year-old Govea provided a captivating subject for local activists and reporters and attracted important publicity for the union’s campaign. Her passionate appeals brought trade union members, religious supporters, students, and political reformers to their feet in outbursts of applause and needed donations. The boycott quickly made converts and great strides throughout Toronto and the province of Ontario. Because of her experience, growing confidence, and accomplishments, the UFW leadership asked Govea to open a new Canadian front, the province of Quebec. Although it meant a temporary separation from her partner Ganz, who remained in Toronto, Govea agreed to become the director of the Montreal boycott in January 1969. Her rapid rise to boycott director signaled her clear emergence as a visible and highly regarded Chicana activist. She assumed complete authority for the Montreal operation, devised local and regional strategy, and undertook new ad-
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Grau, María Leopoldina “Pola” ministrative responsibilities, joining only a handful of women boycott directors. Govea stayed in Montreal until the summer of 1970, when the union triumphantly announced the historic contracts with Delano grape growers. That same year Govea turned her organizing skills to the next challenge: the resistant lettuce growers in California and Arizona. “The most successful organizing I have been involved in or witnessed,” she declared in one speech, “is where people take real ownership of their organization by exercising both authority and responsibility.” Govea practiced this philosophy in the succession of demanding positions she held within the union. When contract talks broke down with obstinate lettuce and grape growers and Gallo executives, she returned to Canada as the codirector of the Toronto boycott for two more years. The renewed economic pressure in the United States and abroad culminated in the historic passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. Govea and other staff members plunged into organizing elections in the fields. Afterward she worked on several projects, including reconstituting the UFW health plan. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to La Causa, Govea was elected to the nine-member national executive board in 1977, the only women besides Dolores Huerta to achieve this status. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the UFW experienced an internal struggle over its future direction. Opinions divided over whether the union would move toward a more centralized structure typical of a traditional union, a plan favored by Chávez, or would pursue a more decentralized organization, characteristic of its social movement origins. After sixteen years of service to the union, Govea resigned her position in 1981 in opposition to the drift of the union to a more standard and conventional posture. Since her departure from the UFW Govea has turned her talents to other human rights issues, labor struggles, and educational efforts. In the 1980s she worked closely with Central American activists in refugee communities in the United States and with the national leadership of the coffee-processing workers’ union in El Salvador. She also served as the associate director of social services and assistant director of civil rights for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, a major garment workers’ union, and also became the New Jersey state director for the national AFL-CIO. She ventured into the area of education. From 1991 to 1997 she was on the faculty of the Labor Studies and Employment Relations Department at Rutgers University. She is presently director of Labor In-House Programs for the Division of Extension and Public Service in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations of Cornell University. She is married to Kenneth Thorbourne, a
former labor and community organizer and currently a reporter. Govea has been featured in the four-hour PBS series Chicano! The Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement. She also appeared in another two-hour PBS documentary, “The Fight in the Fields,” broadcast in 1997. In the same year she was featured in “We Were There!”—an audiovisual program about women leaders in American labor history. Her organizing work was recognized in 1994 when she was included in a mural titled Maestrapeace that covers the outside walls of the Women’s Building located in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. A breast cancer survivor, she is also pictured in the mural Who Holds the Mirror? Breast Cancer, Women’s Lives and the Environment. Through almost thirty-five years of organizing Govea has never wavered from her commitment to the empowerment of the dispossessed. “I have found a similar desire for power and voice in men, women, and children of all colors and of all economic levels . . . there are tremendous opportunities all over this country [to organize].” See also Labor Unions; United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: Cobble, Dorothy Sue, ed. 1993. Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. 1997. The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers Movement. New York: Harcourt Brace; Rose, Margaret Eleanor. 1988. “Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union, 1950 to 1980.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Margaret Eleanor Rose
GRAU, MARÍA LEOPOLDINA “POLA” (1915–2000) Pola Grau was an indomitable human rights activist who, as the spiritual godmother of Operation Pedro Pan, was responsible for bringing thousands of Cuban children to live in the United States following the revolution. Pola Grau was born María Leopoldina Grau Alsina in Cuba on November 19, 1915, the daughter of Francisco Grau San Martín and Paulina Alsina Fernández. She was the niece of Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, president of Cuba from 1933 to 1934 and from 1944 to 1948. During her uncle’s later presidency Pola Grau served as First Lady. After the death of her father in 1930, when Grau was fifteen years old, she and her brothers, sisters, mother, and grandmother went to live with her uncle, who held a professorship in the University of Havana’s School of Medicine. In her uncle’s home she witnessed periodic meetings between student members of the radical Directorio Estudiantil Universitario and her uncle, conspiring to oust
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Grau, María Leopoldina “Pola” the president, Gerardo Machado. Before long, as she remarks in her writings, “I began to conspire and work for democracy in Cuba.” Her uncle and the student plotters were discovered and incarcerated. Because of her uncle’s poor health, he was released on condition that he leave Cuba. Exiled in 1931 for the first time in Miami, Florida, the family was summoned to return to Havana three years later when the Machado dictatorship fell in a coup d’état. In 1933 Dr. Grau became president of Cuba, but was cast out of office the following year by Fulgencio Batista. Sent into short exile to Mexico and later once again to Miami, the family returned to Cuba in 1934, and in September of that year Pola Grau married fellow conspirator Roberto Lago Pereda, leader of the student movement. By August 1935 the couple was in Miami, where Lago Pereda died at Jackson Memorial Hospital following an attack of appendicitis. Four years later Pola Grau married José Agüero, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Dr. Grau was elected president in 1944, and his ascendancy into public office conferred the title of First Lady on his niece and encouraged her to become more politically active in Cuba. But in 1952 Fulgencio Batista led a coup against Prio Socarrás, Dr. Grau’s successor, and Pola Grau immersed herself in antigovernment politics, sheltering dissidents and working with underground forces to oust Batista. Forced into exile in Miami, Pola Grau remained in the United States until Fidel Castro assumed control of the nation. She returned to Cuba in 1959. At the beginning Pola Grau supported the Castro revolution, but when the government began to nationalize industries, she turned against it. A participant in a series of counterrevolutionary activities, Grau was involved in a coordinated women’s resistance movement. She helped secure weapons, hid conspirators, and worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Following the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, Pola and her brother Ramón were recruited by Miami’s Monsignor Bryan Walsh to formulate a plan for the evacuation of Cuban children. The Graus secretly distributed formal invitations from their Havana home that permitted 14,000 children to leave Cuba for homes, orphanages, and shelters in the United States. Among them were Pola’s own son and daughter, who were sent to live with friends in Miami while Grau remained in Cuba to care for elderly relatives. In 1965 Pola and Ramón Grau were charged with being CIA agents and heading an espionage ring. Sentenced to thirty years of incarceration, Pola was released in 1978 after serving thirteen years; her brother was not freed until 1986. Her life as a political prisoner was abominable. She describes movements from
Indomitable human rights activist María Leopoldina “Pola” Grau, circa 1948. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
prison to prison throughout the island, brutal beatings and rapes, forced labor, and substandard living conditions. Grau recalls in her writings that fourteen years of prison life for many who had not gone through it are insignificant, but she and all those who have gone through the Cuban political prison system count the years, months, days, and hours of suffering and the lost life during those years. Her freedom was secured as part of the dialogues held between Cuba and the United States under President Jimmy Carter. However, it was her son, Monchy, disguised as a dialoguer, who found his mother and brought her into freedom. Exiled for the fourth time in southern Florida, Grau became an American citizen, officially taking the name of Pola Grau. For twenty-two years, until the end of her life, Grau worked to increase awareness of and assistance for political prisoners. Afflicted with congestive heart disease, she never forgot the suffering she endured in prison. On March 21, 2000, Grau died at the age of eighty-four. Bernardo Benes, who was involved in dialogue negotiations in 1978, recalled Grau as “a very brave woman. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She felt very Cuban.” SOURCES: Cuban Heritage Collection Digital (University of Miami). “Polita Grau de Aguero Collection.” http://digital .library.miami.edu/chcdigital/chc0356/chc0356_main.shtml (accessed July 10, 2005); Levine, Robert M. 2001. Secret Missions to Cuba. New York: Palgrave; Rosenberg, Carol. 2000.
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Great Depression and Mexican American Women “Pola Grau, 85, dies; was first lady of Cuba.” Miami Herald. March 23.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol
GREAT DEPRESSION AND MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN The Great Depression of the 1930s was a period of tremendous economic and social upheaval for Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, who made up the overwhelming majority of Latinos in the United States. Increasing anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sentiments, rising unemployment and discrimination in the workplace, and a lack of social welfare programs proved formidable obstacles for Mexican Americans during the nation’s greatest economic crisis. Despite these barriers, Mexican American women rose to the occasion, playing critical roles in the survival of their families and communities. Women acted individually and in groups to address economic and social issues. It was a time when both middle-class and working-class women assumed leadership positions in a variety of organizations. As historian Cynthia Orozco has argued, Mexican American women have a long history of community organizing and volunteerism. The Depression proved no exception. “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929, signaled the beginning of a crisis that engulfed the nation. Across the country unemployment, homelessness, and suffering rose, profoundly affecting communities of color. The Mexican American population, estimated at 1.4 million in 1930, was in a particularly vulnerable position as the depression deepened. Viewed as foreigners whether they were U.S. citizens or not, Mexican Americans were the targets of xenophobic attacks. Mobs attacked Mexican American barrios, government policies excluded them from relief programs, and employers exploited them to new heights. At the depths of the Great Depression one-quarter of the workers in the United States were unemployed. Unemployment led to increased demands on the already underfunded local and state relief programs, which soon found themselves overburdened by requests. Media and government statements implied that Mexicans and Mexican Americans were chiefly responsible for this situation, although in reality they made up less than 10 percent of those on relief. As cities, counties, and states came under increasing pressure to provide relief, social welfare programs excluded Mexican nationals in order to give assistance to those considered more “worthy.” Cities passed laws denying relief work to immigrants. Other local governments denied Mexicans relief in order to force them to work for low
wages, particularly in agriculture and domestic work. In El Paso, after a series of cotton pickers’ strikes in the early 1930s and a domestic workers’ strike in 1933, relief agencies began to refuse any assistance to Mexicans and Mexican Americans unless they accepted low-paying work provided through these agencies. Mexican American women were caught in a double bind. They would be cut off relief if they did not accept extremely low-paying work for which local officials and employers believed they were “naturally suited.” If they did accept these jobs, their relief aid would end. Employers hoped to benefit from these policies, believing that Mexican American women would be trapped, unable to improve their wages or working conditions. Some states, such as Texas and California, made it a requirement that Mexicans either show their naturalization papers or prove that they were in the process of becoming citizens before they could receive relief. This proved to be an alarming obstacle for Mexicans who had come to the United States earlier in the century when crossing the border without documents was commonplace. The federal government also denied New Deal work relief to Mexican Americans who could not prove their citizenship. Under these conditions Mexican American women found creative ways to feed and care for their families. They took in boarders, sold food, scavenged for scraps, and made their own clothes. Some organized to fight for better conditions, and still others left the United States, either voluntarily or under pressure. Other women organized self-help groups to provide services for their members. For example, middle-class Mexican American women in San Antonio formed la Beneficencia Mexicana, which organized a health clinic to dispense prenatal services to poor women. Other San Antonio women created the Catholic Relief Association to distribute food, clothing, and shelter to the unemployed in San Antonio’s Mexican American community. Between 1931 and 1934 one-third of the U.S. Mexican population faced either deportation or repatriation. Somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Mexican-origin people left the United States, the majority of whom were children born in the United States. The federal government initiated a deportation campaign in response to popular opinion that blamed Mexicans for the national economic crisis. Government officials carried out highly publicized deportation raids in both urban and rural areas. U.S.-born Mexicans who could not produce proof of citizenship faced immediate deportation. These tactics were intended to scare Mexicans into leaving the United States. Unemployment, fear of violence and deportation, and worsening wages pushed thousands of Mexicans and Mexican
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Great Depression and Mexican American Women
Mexican family stranded with car troubles, California. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945 (Digital ID: fsa 8b38214).
Americans out of the country through a process called repatriation. Although some counties instituted formal programs, most repatriation was carried out informally. Repatriation proved especially difficult for children born and reared in the United States. Many children did not even speak Spanish. Newspapers reported that children asked “to go home.” Fellow Mexicans treated many repatriates badly because repatriates were viewed as too “American” and “foreign.” Already in the 1920s popular corridos (ballads) had complained that women in the United States had changed for the worse. Their dress, speech, and behavior—all deemed too American—were suspect. Mexican American women experienced culture shock as they tried to accommodate to different gendered expectations. While their opportunities had been limited in the United States, Mexican American women found life in Mexico even more restricting, economically and socially. On the eve of the Great Depression Mexican American women were concentrated in low-paying occupations such as domestic work, agricultural labor, fruit and vegetable packing, and the garment industry. Wages and working conditions worsened with the depression. In 1935, for example, the Texas State Department of Vocational Education called the wages of domestic workers “starvation pay.” A 1933 survey of Los
Angeles manufacturers showed that more than 40 percent of the women working in the garment industry earned less than $5 per week for a sixty-hour week. The recommended minimum wage at the time was $15 weekly. The same year a Texas physician filed a complaint with the State Department of Labor accusing El Paso garment manufacturers of paying Mexican American women as little as ten cents per week, forcing women to work on a piece-rate basis. As agricultural prices declined, wages fell disproportionately low; moreover, competition from Dust Bowl refugees and other hungry unemployed Americans drove wages down even further. Dismal wages and working conditions inspired Mexican American women to organize in the workplace. The 1930s were a time of heightened labor organizing within the Mexican American community. Women performed a variety of essential roles during this period. As historian Vicki Ruiz has stated, they “distributed food, formed picket lines, taunted scabs, and when attacked by police, fought back.” Labor activism brought Mexican American women into contact with women from other communities, strengthened their leadership abilities, and gave them more confidence. Mexican American women founded and participated in a number of labor organizations across the Southwest. In 1933, for example, domestic workers in
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Great Depression and Mexican American Women El Paso created the Asociación de Trabajadoras Domésticas (Domestic Workers Association), demanding an increase in wages to $6 per week. The same year the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) led a strike among garment workers in Los Angeles, and Mexican American women were the most active on the picket lines. The passage of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 helped encourage the domestic workers’ union and the ILGWU, as well as other labor organizations. The act bolstered workers’ confidence in the federal government because it gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, free from employer interference. Mexican American domestic workers in El Paso, for example, threatened to report employers to the National Recovery Administration (NRA) if they did not increase wages. Although the NRA was inconsistent in its economic benefits to Mexican American workers (in the case of the ILGWU, the NRA worked with employers to fire employees for union activities), it gave Mexican American women a sense of confidence and possibilities. The NRA helped Mexican Americans feel that the federal government stood behind them, protecting their rights as citizens and workers. Latinas emerged as influential labor organizers. For example, Manuela Solis Sager organized garment and agricultural workers in Laredo, Texas, acting as the first organizer for the South Texas Agricultural Workers’ Union. She also worked with the pecan shellers’ union in San Antonio. Throughout her life she continued to work for other progressive causes, including immigrant rights and the Chicano movement. Emma Tenayuca, a Tejana teenager, began organizing Mexican American cigar workers in San Antonio early in the depression, but she is best known for her work in the pecan shellers’ strike of 1938. In 1934 wages in the pecan-shelling industry had fallen to less than $2 per week. Although employers had mechanized pecan shelling by the end of the 1920s, they found it more profitable to return to hand shelling once wages dropped in the 1930s. Employers justified the low wages by saying that shellers could eat as many pecans as they wanted. Low wages and dismal working conditions created an unbearable environment for the mostly Mexican American, mostly female workforce. In addition to starvation wages, pecan shellers worked in cramped spaces with little ventilation. The dust from the pecan shells filled the air as they worked. In 1938 organizers called a strike, and an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 workers walked off their jobs for six weeks, fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. Strikers faced police brutality, and many, including strike leader Tenayuca, were jailed. The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) sent Guatemalan-
born organizer Luisa Moreno to San Antonio, where she organized pecan shellers into a viable union. UCAPAWA won recognition, and the piece rate was increased to meet the recommended minimum wage of twenty-five cents per hour. The victory was short lived, however, because employers soon began replacing workers with machines once again. In the mid-1930s UCAPAWA was a rapidly growing union. A 1939 strike at the California Sanitary Canning Company brought 400 workers, mostly Mexican American and Russian Jewish women, out to the streets, successfully demanding higher wages and improved working conditions. As in other locales, UCAPAWA encouraged women’s leadership, particularly among the rank and file. The best-known agricultural strikes of the era, including the El Monte berry strike and the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike, included Mexican American women. Involvement in labor organizations empowered Mexican American women to claim public space at a time when their communities were under siege. During the Great Depression Mexican and Mexican American women participated in politics, ranging from the Democratic Party to the Communist Party. During the New Deal President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party reached out to Mexican American voters, initiating a relationship that lasted for the remainder of the twentieth century. In Tucson, Arizona, Mexican Americans organized the Spanish American Democratic Club, which registered voters and campaigned for Democratic candidates. The leadership of the organization was composed largely of U.S.-born Mexicans who believed that their civil rights could be gained through participation in the electoral process. María Urquides, who later gained national attention as “the mother of bilingual education,” was a young woman in her twenties when she became involved with the Spanish American Democratic Club. Founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas, by middle-class Tejanos, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) provided another venue for Mexican American organizing. LULAC was founded in response to the profound discrimination and disfranchisement experienced by Mexican Texans. LULAC’s leadership believed that Mexican Americans could achieve civil rights by integrating themselves fully into U.S. society. Early on LULAC restricted its membership to U.S. citizens and focused on the electoral process and the legal system to gain equality. When workingclass Mexican American pecan shellers went on strike in 1938, LULAC condemned them. Mexican American women participated in LULAC from its founding conference, although initially its chapters were segregated by sex. During the Great Depression LULAC provided Mexican American women,
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Guerra, Fermina such as Ester Nieto Machuca and Alice Dickerson Montemayor, leadership opportunities around issues of education, child welfare, and women’s equality. Mexican American women organized local and regional fund-raisers, established women’s councils, and served as national leaders. Although historians argue over the extent to which the Communist Party influenced Mexican American politics during the 1930s, numerous leaders identified with the party, of whom Emma Tenayuca was the most visible. Both UCAPAWA and el Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Spanish-Speaking Peoples Congress) were red-baited as Communist-dominated organizations. Founded in 1939, el Congreso took strong stands on such issues as housing, employment, education, and immigrant rights. Its leaders included Luisa Moreno and Mexican-born Josefina Fierro, a dynamic Los Angeles organizer. The Great Depression was a turning point for Mexican women in the United States. Confronting terrible social and economic obstacles, women across the political spectrum responded by organizing for their families, their communities, and themselves. SOURCES: Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. 1995. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; GuerinGonzáles, Camille. 1996. Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Leyva, Yolanda Chávez. 1995. “ ‘Faithful hard-working Mexican hands’: Mexicana Workers during the Great Depression.” Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 5: 63–77; Monroy, Douglas. 1999. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. Berkeley: University of California Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1992–1993. “Beyond Machismo, la Familia, and Ladies Auxiliaries: A Historiography of Mexican-Origin Women’s Participation in Voluntary Associations and Politics in the United States, 1870–1990.” In Renato Rosaldo Lecture Series Monograph 10. Tucson: University of Arizona Mexican American Studies and Research Center; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Yolanda Chávez Leyva
GUERRA, FERMINA (1893–1988) Fermina Guerra was born on her family’s Buena Vista Ranch, a 3,000-acre ranch fifty miles northeast of Laredo, Texas. In 1860 her grandfather Justo Guerra had settled the area to raise goats and sheep. As a member of a long-standing Texas family, she attended the Ursuline Academy in Laredo and received both her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. The Guerra family valued education. Near the ranch house they built a one-room adobe school named Buena Vista Elementary and Las Blancas
Junior High. As an adolescent, Fermina Guerra served as a tutor and taught her mother to read. Guerra is best known for her work in Texas folklore. Her master’s thesis, “Mexican and Spanish Folklore and Incidents in Southwest Texas,” which she completed in 1941, documented border folktales. Following in the footsteps of prominent folklorist Jovita González, Guerra studied with J. Frank Dobie, the Texas professor who dominated the field of southwestern folklore. Her thesis addressed the region’s history, families, ranch work, and folk songs. On the basis of interviews with men and women, including her own mother, she addressed women’s domestic labor, an area often ignored by male folklorists. In 1941 she also published “Rancho Buena Vista: Its Ways of Life and Tradition” in Texian Stomping Grounds, an important publication of the Texas Folklore Society edited by her mentor J. Frank Dobie. This study covered a variety of subjects: Spanish missionaries, the Texas Rangers, folk remedies, water use, and sheepshearers. She also included a story about Indian captive Antonia Hinojosa. According to the legendary Tejano folklorist Américo Paredes, “She situated the history of her people and the development of the Mexican ranching industry within the historical events in the United States.” Two years later she published “Mexican Animal Tales” about ranch and brush-country animals in Backwards to Border, another Texas Folklore Society book. For more than fifty years Guerra was a fixture in education in Webb County. At Texas A&I University in Kingsville she taught English and Spanish and also served as an assistant principal at Central Elementary School in Laredo. During the 1950s and 1960s she tutored border patrol and other law enforcement agents in Spanish. After she retired, she continued to tutor in Spanish, often volunteering her services. She was reportedly an avid newspaper reader, an independent voter, and an active member of St. Augustine Church. One of the first Tejana folklorists, she died in 1988 at the age of ninety-five. SOURCES: Garza-Falcon, Leticia M. 1998. Gente decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance. Austin: University of Texas Press; Guerra, Fermina. 1941. “Mexican and Spanish Folklore and Incidents in Southwest Texas.” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin; ———. 1941. “Rancho Buena Vista: Its Ways of Life and Traditions.” In Texian Stomping Grounds, ed. J. Frank Dobie. Austin: Texas Folklore Society; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Fermina Guerra.” In New Handbook of Texas, 3: 368. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
GUERRERO, ROSA (1934–
)
Born in El Paso, Texas, on November 14, 1934, Rosa Ramírez de Guerrero is an internationally known cho-
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Guerrero, Rosa reographer of Ballet Folklorico and a pioneer in multicultural education. Her life mirrors the important gains achieved by Mexicans in this border city during the past fifty years. As a child, she was punished for speaking Spanish in class, but now an elementary school in El Paso bears her name. Through dance, music, and multicultural, bilingual curricula, Rosa Guerrero has participated in the transformation of a border public school system from one where the Spanish language and Mexican culture were shunned to one where diversity and bilingualism are now embraced. Both literally and figuratively, Rosa Guerrero is a mestiza. Her father identified as español and her mother as india. Guerrero remembered her father as a “beautiful, Socratic man.” “We would sit and conjugate verbs in Spanish just for the love of it.” Her mother was a party person (fiestera) who lived life to the fullest. Recalling her childhood as the youngest of six siblings, she noted, “We were so poor though; we had that one bathroom. I remember we had to share it with about thirty people and everybody was constipated.” Her father took charge of the children while his wife worked as a maid and as a “fortune teller.” Decades later, still stung by a friend’s accusation that her mother was a witch, Guerrero recited the conversation verbatim. “No, my mother is not a witch; and if she’s a witch, she’s a good witch. She’s a beautiful lady and she’s my mother.” She then elaborated, “She has a different gift from God—to psychoanalyze people, to question them, and through her cards, and her way she helps them.” Guerrero herself began to work outside the home around the age of ten or eleven as a maid, earning fifty cents per day. Throughout her schooling in El Paso she was punished for speaking Spanish. Teachers would routinely remark, “Don’t speak that ugly language, you are an American now, you Mexican child.” “They degraded us horribly.” As an adult, remembering these experiences steeled Guerrero’s commitment to bilingual and multicultural education. A chronic overachiever, Guerrero became one of the first Mexican American students to integrate Austin High School in the early 1950s and quickly emerged as a student leader. “I was president of PE leaders, of the National Rifle Association, of the Courtesy Club, the Pan American Club. My own kids call me the social climber of the fifties.” She received a dance scholarship at Texas Tech College for Women in Denton, but after a miserable year in which she witnessed and endured considerable discrimination, she returned home to El Paso. “You have to learn that . . . you are not going to be born for people to like you.” She continued, “I can change my name to Rose Guerry . . . and dye my hair, but . . . I’m just kidding myself and I’m cheating myself.” She married her highschool sweetheart Sergio Guerrero and graduated
Internationally renown choreographer of Ballet Folklorico Rosa Guerrero. Courtesy of Rosa Guerrero.
from Texas Western (now the University of Texas, El Paso) with a degree in physical education. In 1977 she earned a master’s degree in education. A talented dancer and choreographer, she founded the Rosa Guerrero International Ballet Folklorico in 1974. From 1974 to 1997 the group was one of the most respected dance troupes of its kind, and in 1991 it performed to a sold-out crowd at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She was a high-school teacher for more than twenty years and during the 1970s developed the first curricula in multicultural education implemented in El Paso’s public schools. Her 1974 dance film Tapestry is a moving affirmation of Chicano border culture widely used in classrooms throughout the Southwest. In 1995 she produced an updated film, Tapestry II. In building cultural awareness and appreciation, Rosa Guerrero notes the importance of history and homeland for Mexican Americans. “Many of us didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” The mother of three children and the grandmother of five, she credits the support of her husband and family for her achievements. Her awards have been many, including being the first Latina in El Paso to have a public school named after her. In addition, a college scholarship designated for local students is named in her honor. In 1993 she
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Guerrero, Victoria Partida was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 1999 the National Education Association bestowed on her the George I. Sánchez Memorial Award for her contributions to multicultural education. The Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation and the National Women’s Political Caucus have also recognized her work as an artist and educator. Though retired from choreography and musical direction, Rosa Guerrero is currently artist-in-residence in the Chicano Studies Research Program at the University of Texas, El Paso. “I have so many dreams. I have so many goals. . . . And every day is a new horizon and every day a new dream.” See also Bilingual Education; Education SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. “Oral History and la Mujer: The Rosa Guerrero Story.” In Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Susan Tiano, 219–231. Boston: Allen and Unwin; Texas Women’s University. “Texas Women’s Hall of Fame: Rosa Guerrero.” www.twu.edu/twhf/tw-guerrero .htm (accessed October 7, 2004); The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. “The Mind has to be opened like a parachute. Guerrero, Rosa Ramírez. 1995. Oral interview by Sarah Massey, July 26. www.texancultures.utsa .edu/memories/htms/guerrero_transcript.htm (accessed October 7, 2004. Vicki L. Ruiz
GUERRERO, VICTORIA PARTIDA (1925– ) Victoria Partida Guerrero was born in 1925 and grew up in the southern Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she remembers everyone being friendly and knowing everyone else. Her father died when she was three, and her mother remarried a few years later. The family worked in the fields to harvest spinach, potatoes, carrots, and cotton. “It was hard working out in the hot sun,” Guerrero said. “It was hard, but we were happy. We were poor but very happy because we shared each other.” For entertainment her mother would sing while a neighbor played the guitar. Guerrero also enjoyed listening to her grandmother tell stories, especially Spanish versions of “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” At nine Guerrero entered first grade at Fort Sam Houston but was then skipped to the third grade. “I don’t know whether we were smart, or they just wanted to get rid of us,” she said. The shy girl found it hard at first. “Some of the white girls were nice; others were not very nice. After a while we mingled and got along.” Her teacher worked to get the Hispanic and white children to relate to one another. By her late teens Guerrero felt comfortable associating with white students. Guerrero met her husband in 1941. She was sixteen
Victoria Partida Guerrero during World War II. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
and traveling by train with her family, headed for the sugar-beet fields of Michigan. The train stopped in San Antonio, Texas, so migrant workers could be screened for tuberculosis. While the train was in San Antonio, Luis Guerrero pulled his cousin aside, pointed to Victoria Partida, and said, “See that girl? That’s the girl I’m going to marry!” After moving to Saginaw, Luis Guerrero asked Victoria’s father for permission to court her, and the two began dating regularly, always chaperoned by her younger brother, Pedro. The couple worked hard to save money to start a life together, but World War II postponed their plans. Luis Guerrero enlisted in the marines in 1943. The oldest child in his family of fifteen, he was trained as a cannoneer. He was sent to Guam in 1944 as a member of the Third Marine Division, which took part in Operation Forager, the invasion of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. Later, Luis Guerrero spent time in Tiensing, China. “We wrote back and forth all the time,” Victoria Guerrero said. “The fear (that he could be wounded or killed) was within you constantly.” She and her mother, aunts, and cousins hoped and prayed that their loved ones would return home safely. “We prayed for peace; we prayed night and day,” Guerrero said. Her family listened to the radio for reports of those killed or wounded. Two of her cousins were killed, one as a gunner in an Air Corps warplane and the other when his tank exploded. “That’s when you
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Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda pray the hardest,” she said. “It was very hard for our families.” She attended the funeral of one cousin in Brownsville, Texas, with her family in 1945. The remains had been shipped back in a casket, with orders that the casket was not to be opened. She remembered that two sentries took turns standing by the casket, even in the family’s home. “My aunt said, ‘Maybe it’s just a casket,’ ” Guerrero recalled. The war years were hard for the family. Clothing, shoes, sugar, coffee, and meat were all rationed. Only a certain amount of gasoline was allotted per month for their Model A car, limiting travel. The family worked hard harvesting crops to feed the nation and the troops overseas. During the family’s years in Michigan, German prisoners of war worked in the fields with them. They had “POW” printed on their shirts, and Guerrero remembered some of them as “great, big, husky fellas.” She remembers being a bit afraid of the POWs escaping, but there were no problems while she was there. Victoria Guerrero remembers the telephone call as though it were yesterday. A man rushed into the office where she was working in May 1946, yelling to her that she had a phone call across the street. She dashed to the phone and heard the voice of the man she had been waiting to hear from for two long years. It was her fiancé, Luis Guerrero, who had been at war in the South Pacific. He said the words she had long wanted to hear. “You’d better get ready, because I’m coming down,” he said. He had been discharged from the marines a few weeks earlier, on May 30, 1946. After years of being separated by war, they were married on June 23, 1946, in La Feria, Texas. It was not a big wedding, because they did not have the financial means. She bought a simple white wedding dress; he wore his marine uniform. Victoria Guerrero described her husband as a quiet, intelligent man, serious about everything, and a perfectionist. He seldom talked about his war experiences, but he loved to take pictures and brought some home that he had taken in Guam and China. He was aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the formal surrender documents of Japan, and had a picture of the historic moment. The couple settled in Raymondville, Texas, for a year, where Luis Guerrero hauled pipe for oil pipelines on eighteen-wheelers. After their daughter, Ester, was born on April 7, 1947, the couple moved back to Michigan and moved in with his family in Saginaw. “They welcomed me as another child into the family,” Victoria Guerrero said. They lived with his family until they could afford their own home. They had a second child, Diane, in Michigan. Two other daughters, Patricia Ann and Catherine Gloria, followed.
Luis Guerrero worked in a steel mill that had produced machine guns and cannon parts during the war and then produced automobile parts. Eventually he quit that job and returned to his first love, trucks, working for Bender and Louden Motor Freight Company. For Victoria Guerrero and her husband, hard work had always been a way of life. World War II had an effect on them both as young people and for the rest of their lives. “He always said, ‘I can go anywhere I want to go. I’ll go in, and they’ll let me in.’ He was like that, and it made a difference,” Victoria Guerrero said. “In those years you matured quite early.” On December 19, 1989, Luis Guerrero died. See also World War II SOURCES: Desimone, Christa. 2003. “War Delayed Marriage for Daughter of Migrants.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring); Guerrero, Victoria Partida. 2002. Interview by Elizabeth Aguirre, Mexican American Cultural Center, Saginaw, MI, October 19. Christa Desimone
GUILLEN HERRERA, ROSALINDA (1951– ) Rosalinda Guillen Herrera, farmworker and union organizer, was born to Jesús Guillen and María de Jesús Herrera on December 28, 1951, in Haskell, Texas. The oldest of eight children, Rosalinda spent the first years of her life in Coahuila, Mexico, with her family, eventually settling in the northwestern part of Washington State in La Conner when she was about nine years old. Situated about an hour south of the Canadian border along the coast, La Conner was a small town of predominantly Scandinavian immigrants who had settled into logging, farming, and fishing. In the 1960s the town also became an artist colony and home to a variety of bohemian artists and intellectuals, providing the unusual backdrop to Guillen’s early life. Throughout her childhood her family was one of three Latino farmworker families in town. Guillen remembers discussing politics with her parents and their eclectic group of friends. She was introduced to progressive thought and theorists, as was characteristic of the late 1960s. Brought up in a family of avid readers, she was encouraged to argue and discuss her ideas with her parents and their friends. Therefore, it was not a surprise when at the age of fifteen, Guillen announced that she was going to spend her life working to liberate the poor and contribute to social change. Her parents were not as enthusiastic over this revelation. Deciding to take her life into her own hands, she ran away with her
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Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda farmworker boyfriend to work toward liberating the downtrodden. Marrying her boyfriend, Guillen worked as a migrant laborer for several years before eventually leaving that grueling work to raise her two sons in a more settled life. She found work with Skagit State Bank in Skagit County, Washington, as a bookkeeper, eventually became an operations officer, and remained employed there for about fifteen years. During this time she remained active in community work and in the late 1980s became involved with the Rainbow Coalition and worked to elect Jesse Jackson as the Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the early 1990s the workers at Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in central Washington sought the support of the Rainbow Coalition in a boycott against the winery. Eventually the workers asked Guillen to assist them to lead the four-year-old boycott, and at the age of forty, in an act that was reminiscent of an earlier calling, she quit her job with the bank to work with the United Farm Workers (UFW) union in Sunnyside, Washington. Although her family and parents were anxious about her decision (by then she had three sons, the youngest of whom was thirteen), she began immediately to organize the workers of Ste. Michelle Winery, “a tightly knit workforce from Michoacán, Mexico.” She explains that their strength of character
motivated her to work long days and nights together learning how to organize a boycott against one of the largest wineries in the state. Although the workers were predominantly men, women constituted about 30 to 40 percent of the winery workforce. Not accustomed to union work, women did not attend the initial organizing meetings in 1993, although she asked them to participate. By the close of the boycott in late 1994 women and children were a regular part of the union meetings. It had become their issue as well. As she explains: “The workers had transcended gender—they did not see each other—or me— as men or women; rather they saw themselves as workers, organizers, a community with common goals. . . . I didn’t go in with an agenda of forcing the men to work with the women or of forcing the women to stay for the initial planning meetings. Their ‘critical consciousness’ sort of emerged organically.” In this way traditional Mexican men found themselves supporting women, their wives, and their friends’ wives to pursue “men’s jobs,” such as working the machinery or in other technical areas. Guillen continues: “When the possibility of actually winning a good labor contract began to be realized, the men could see for themselves the women being courageous and taking on responsibilities through union organizing which resulted in changes in all of their lives . . . changes in the way they would work . . . changes in the way they worked at home.” The seven-year-long boycott was a success, resulting in the first UFW labor contract won outside of California since 1972. It was a favorable contract, lauded by both workers and winery officials. Guillen attributes the success of the boycott to the workers’ vision and strength of character, to assistance and guidance throughout the boycott years from key Rainbow Coalition activists, to union organizers, and to the spirit of César Chávez. Guillen, now an elected national vice president of the United Farm Workers of America and headquartered in Sacramento, California, states that the “ultimate goal of organizing is to empower people to change their lives. . . . it is like a little seed that grows. . . . It is the best thing I have ever done.” See also United Farm Workers of America (UFW)
Union organizer Rosalinda Guillen Herrera. Photograph by Jay Donnelly. Courtesy of Rosalinda Guillen.
SOURCES: Bobo, Kim, Jackie Kendall, and Steve Max. 1996. Organizing for Social Change: A Manual for Activists in the 1990s. 2nd ed. Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press; Freire, Paolo. 1990. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Press; Gonzáles, Sylvia. 1980. “Toward a Feminist Pedagogy for Chicana Self-Actualization.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2: 48–51; Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda. 2001. Interview by María D. Cuevas, Sacramento, CA, October 8; Pardo, Mary. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. 1990. Com-
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Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán munities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. London: Verso Books.
María D. Cuevas
GUTIÉRREZ, LUZ BAZÁN (1945–
)
Luz María Bazán Gutiérrez was born on August 4, 1945, in Falfurrias, a small southern Texas town, to well-established fourth-generation Texas Mexicans. As she states to the hapless person who raises the “problem of immigration” to her, “My family never crossed any border—the border crossed them!” She, her two brothers, and her sister enjoyed a wonderful childhood in which they were raised by hardworking and loving parents. Gutiérrez recalls fond memories of her mother and father taking her and her sister to political rallies in town, where streets were blocked off so candidates could appear to a captive audience, lured by plenty of Mexican food, drinks, and music. Memories of the determined women in her family contributed to her passion and love for politics and social activism. Her “Tia Chinda” had been one of the first Chicana elementary-school principals hired in southern Texas to preside over a predominantly Mexicano/Chicano student population, but had been fired for insubordination when she refused to accept used and old school furnishings while other schools received new furnishings and equipment. Closer to home, she remembers her parents’ divorce during high school, when divorce was taboo and divorced women were known behind whispers as dejadas (someone who abandoned her family). The divorce forced her mother into the labor force with no skills other than her determination to keep her family intact. Upon graduation from high school in 1963 Gutiérrez headed off to college at Texas A&M in Kingsville, Texas, where the organizations of choice for Chicanos at the time were the Spanish Club and the Young Democrats. It was at this time that she met her soul mate, Jose Angel Gutiérrez. Luz married José Angel after graduating from college in 1967 and settled in San Antonio, where she taught school as one of the first bilingual teachers; he attended graduate school. Buzzing with activity, laughter, and music, their home was always the site for strategic planning sessions, reminiscent of Luz Gutiérrez’s childhood. The establishment of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) by José Angel Gutiérrez and four of his college friends served as a catalyst for the beginnings of La Raza Unida Party. Moving to Crystal City, they worked hand in hand to organize the Chicano community. The idea for a third political party that would more adequately address the needs of the Chicano community had inspired them.
During that time Ciudadanos Unidos, an all-men group organized toward this goal, met regularly on Sunday afternoon. Women were excluded from participating in the meetings but were expected to cook tamales and hold fund-raisers to support the group. Luz Gutiérrez and some of the women in the group decided that they had had enough, and an ultimatum was given to the men: “We are treated equally as voting members or we will no longer cooperate in any way.” They forced the membership to vote. The women won, but the result caused some of the men to walk out in protest. Nevertheless, the organization was successful in electing a slate of Chicanos to the school board and city council, and in 1970 Luz Gutiérrez was elected to serve as the first Raza Unida Party county chair for the state of Texas. Since then, Gutiérrez has served the Chicano and Latino communities in the fields of health care and economic development for more than twenty years. In the early 1980s she settled in the Northwest. She wasted no time establishing a Latino presence in the predominantly white communities of northern Oregon and central Washington. Not settling for the status quo, she leaves behind structures to address the growing Latino population in the Northwest. She established various clinics, programs, commissions, and small businesses serving the Latino community. Despite her success in addressing the needs of minority communities, she was terminated from a toplevel position with the Department of Health and Human Resources in Yakima, Washington, for “ruffling the feathers” of the old guard, which was not used to being challenged. Gutiérrez then obtained her realestate license and assisted immigrants to buy their first homes. She organized and solely financed the Washington Association of Minority Entrepreneurs (WAME), which was based on a model of economic development she initiated in Oregon. She has served as the president and CEO for thirteen years. WAME provides business assistance for new and emerging businesses, and since its inception the demand for services has established the organization as the only Latino group to create wealth in the Latino community in the state of Washington. WAME has financed more than 120 Latino-owned businesses and loaned more than $2 million. Luz Bazán Gutiérrez has overcome enormous obstacles to establish a better quality of life for the Chicana/o communities she has resided and worked in. Known for her “strong” personality, she shows no signs of slowing down. Her current goal is to prepare and train Chicanas and Chicanos for political office and leadership positions in the Northwest. SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas
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Guzmán, Madre María Dominga Press, 2003; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press.
María D. Cuevas
GUZMÁN, MADRE MARÍA DOMINGA (1897–1993) María Dominga Guzmán was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, on September 3, 1897, one of nine children of José Guzmán Cancel and Belén Florit Oliveras. She lost her father at the age of eight and her mother when she was eleven. Because of financial circumstances she spent one year in the Colegio Para Niñas Huérfanas, an orphanage in Santurce. A scholarship made it possible for her to study in the United States. Those who knew her as a child described her as somewhat shy and serious, but of good disposition and affable smile. On August 26, 1913, she entered the religious congregation of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Cross, otherwise known as the Amityville Dominicans, in Brooklyn, New York, but shortly thereafter became ill and was sent home to recuperate. She returned to the convent in 1914 and in less than three years formally made her first vows to the religious life as a professed sister of the Amityville Dominicans. The life of Sister María Dominga, as she was known in the Amityville Dominicans, was punctuated by periods of ill health that inconvenienced but did not deter her from her ministry, first as a parish schoolteacher and later as a founder and first mother general of the second Puerto Rican congregation of women religious to be founded on the island. Shortly after professing in 1916 she was sent to teach at Colegio Santa Rosa de Lima in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, where she remained until 1921, when she transferred to Colegio Santo Tomás de Aquino in San Juan for a year. It was during this period of the young sister’s missionary work that news reached Puerto Rico of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fátima on May 13, 1917. Because of her deep devotion to the Catholic tradition of the Holy Rosary, this news was of great importance. Later she chose this appellation of the Virgin Mary for the congregation of native religious she founded. Despite frail health and the exigencies of the religious life, at the age of twenty-six Sister María Dominga vowed to remain permanently faithful to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Faced again with poor health in 1924, she was sent for treatment to St. Catherine’s Hospital in Brooklyn. She resumed normal conventual obligations, and for the remainder of that year and most of the next she was assigned to St. Agnes School in Rockville Center, New York. On Au-
Madre María Dominga Guzmán. Courtesy of Hermanas Domínicas de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Fátima.
gust 25, 1925, she returned to Puerto Rico to teach in Colegio Santísimo Rosario. Henceforth Yauco was her home and Puerto Rico her ministry field. In 1927 Sister María Dominga was given charge of the boardinghouse for Santísimo Rosario, a post she held for twenty-two years. From 1943 to 1949 she assumed the responsibility of sister superior for the Yauco Amityville Dominicans. When her term as sister superior ended, Sister María Dominga petitioned her congregation for permission to be “on loan” to a new group of Puerto Rican women catechists seeking to form a congregation. Though the bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn was not in favor, the mother general of the Amityville Sisters acted on her behalf to obtain the necessary permissions for a “leave of absence.” Thus on November 3, 1949, Sister María Dominga and four Puerto Rican women founded a congregation of religious women under the auspices of Our Lady of Fátima. The new congregation was housed in an old, dilapidated chapel, Santuario de la Milagrosa, in Yauco. Three months after its foundation Sister María Dominga fell seriously ill and was hospitalized in Ponce. Despite her illness, the scarcity of material resources, and the arduous work that the establishment
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Guzmán, Madre María Dominga of a new religious congregation entailed, the incipient congregation grew in strength and numbers. On February 22, 1953, las Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Fátima, hereafter known as las Hermanas de Fátima, acquired an old but spacious house in the village of Santa Rita. This house, leased from the Guánica Central, became their motherhouse and novitiate. The first step in founding a new religious congregation was to petition for its establishment to the local bishop, in this case, James MacManus, C.SS.R., bishop of Ponce. A second step was to petition and to be received by the master general of the Dominican order as a member congregation. Las Hermanas de Fátima was received into the Dominican religious family on the feast of the patron saint of Puerto Rico, St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1954, and on August 4 the sisters wore the Dominican habit for the first time. With the approval of the Dominican master general and the acceptance of the bishop of the Ponce Diocese, the group’s status changed from that of pious union to that of diocesan congregation of religious women. In 1965 las Hermanas de Fátima celebrated its first general chapter, and Sister María Dominga was unanimously elected the first mother general. Henceforth she was known to las Hermanas de Fátima and to all others as Madre Dominga. She was reelected six years later for a second term. In 1983 the congregation received its pontifical decree of approval from Rome. For the rest of her natural and religious life, rather than returning to the Amityville Dominicans, Madre Dominga remained with las Hermanas de Fátima at the motherhouse. Madre Dominga’s work on behalf of the Puerto Rican people has been amply recognized and celebrated. In 1967 she received a doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico. She lived to see the native congregation she helped found grow and extend its work beyond Puerto Rico. Madre
Dominga had the pleasure of welcoming to the motherhouse many visitors, including Mother Teresa, whom she admired and respected. Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Madre Dominga met at the Fátima Motherhouse at Santa Rita on July 4, 1986. Two years before, on July 12, 1984, Madre Dominga had received a special blessing and a petition for prayers from John Paul II upon his visit to the island. During her long and fruitful life three things guided her actions: love of God as expressed in the consecration of her life to religious life and the foundation of a religious congregation of women; love for others as manifested in the motto of the congregation she founded, “llevar a Cristo a la familia y la familia a Cristo” (To take Christ to the family and the family to Christ); and love for the country God chose as her place of birth. A candidate for canonization, Madre María Dominga Guzmán died at the age of ninety-five on January 16, 1993. See also Nuns, Contemporary; Religion SOURCES: El Visitante Online (Catholic Periodical of Puerto Rico). Chévere, Sor Ana. 2005. “Madre Dominga Guzmán frente al successor de Pedro.” April 10–16. www.elvisitante.biz/vistante-web/evwebed1505/edespe cial/o.php (accessed July 11, 2005); Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra. Señora del Rosario de Fátima. 1985. “Special Publication of las Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Fátima marking seventy-five years in religious life of Madre M. Dominga Guzmán, O.P.” Destellos 6 November 3; ——— . 2005. “Madre M. Dominga Guzmán Florit, O.P.” http//netdial.caribe.net/~promvoc/madredominga.htm (accessed July 11, 2005); Parroquia San Isidro Labrador, Puerto Rico (parish Web site). “Las Historias Hermanas.” http://sanisidropr.com/historiahermanas (accessed July 11, 2005); “Un proyecto de restauración de nuestra herencia historia.” Promotional flyer. Dominican Sisters of the Holy Cross General Archives, Amityville, NY.
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H q HAMLIN, ROSALIE MÉNDEZ (1945–
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The career of Rosalie Méndez Hamlin, or “Rosie” of the music group Rosie and the Originals, provides insight into the unique experiences of women in the maledominated industry of rock ’n’ roll during the 1960s. Early in her career Hamlin’s participation in an emerging music and dance-hall culture proved to be her salvation. Born in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on July 21, 1945, to an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, Hamlin grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, National City, California, and San Diego, California. During a period of great upheaval at home caused by the separation of her parents, Hamlin ran away to live with her Aunt Soccoro and Uncle Frank. There she cultivated her talents as a piano player and singer. According to Hamlin, “Music was a way to not lose it, you know, because you don’t understand why grown-ups are doing all this fighting and breaking up.” When her single “Angel Baby” was a big hit in 1962, Hamlin moved to Los Angeles to join the dance-hall circuit. Once she arrived, she found a diverse group of veteran male performers who supported her professional development. Hamlin recalled, “I was put on stage with a lot of well seasoned entertainers that I respected a whole lot and they kind of raised me and taught me a lot about music.” She added, “It became like a family and it was really good because I no longer really had any family, I was sort of just traveling around a lot and it was wonderful to have that support and influence.” Relying on a surrogate family that included popular performers such as Richard Berry, Johnny Otis, and Don Julian, Hamlin became one of the few women to gain fame in the Los Angeles music scene. The support and guidance of veteran musicians, however, did not make Hamlin immune to the discrimination experienced by women in this industry. According to Hamlin, women in rock ’n’ roll bands performed either as background singers with little visibility or as lead singers restricted to singing only. Although her hit single “Angel Baby” earned her an elite place among women performers, she resented
some of the restrictions placed on her as a woman musician. Hamlin explained, “Usually, in those days, if you were a female singer, you were the front person . . . and you didn’t get back there and play.” “Or,” she continued, “a lot of times women would not do any front work, they’d just be up there and sing and then disappear discreetly, and the band leader, like Ike, of Ike and Tina Turner, would be the one that was the important person.” Even during the mid-1960s, when Hamlin had established herself as one of the few successful women performers in southern California, she experienced discrimination from concert promoters who denied her equal rehearsal time before shows and rescheduled her appearances to accommodate the whims of younger, male performers. Despite such barriers, Hamlin succeeded in the business and is today regarded by many in Los Angeles as the “first lady of rock ’n’ roll.” Her hit “Angel Baby” is a staple of oldies stations, and she is a frequent performer and guest of honor at car shows throughout the Southwest. Director Gregory Nava, who featured the song in his 1995 film Mi Familia, called it the “anthem of East Los Angeles.” “As a matter of fact,” Hamlin remembered, “when we had the premier of Mi Familia . . . he said something like ‘And we couldn’t have put together this movie without including the lady who wrote the Hispanic national anthem,’ and he asked me to stand up!” Although the song was a boon to Hamlin’s image in the Chicano and oldies rock ’n’ roll community in California and earned her a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame under the category of hit singles, she did not begin profiting from the song until very recently. In the early 1960s the teenaged Hamlin was coerced into an illegal contract with Highland Records that paid her only a penny per record and no royalties for use in films, radio, and television. In 1988 Hamlin won a copyright infringement lawsuit that invalidated the original contract and allowed her to capitalize on some of the success of the record. Today Hamlin serves as a music consultant at the Barrio Station Youth Center in San Diego through a grant from the California Arts Council and continues to travel and perform on a regular basis.
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Rosalie Méndez Hamlin of “Rosie and the Originals” with band member Noah Tafoya. Courtesy of Matt García.
SOURCES: García, Matt. 2001. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900– 1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Hamlin, Rosalie Méndez. 1997. Oral history interview by Matt Garcia, June 26; Rosie and the Originals website. “Rosie’s Life and Biography.” www.rosieandtheoriginals.com/main/rosiehamlin .htm (accessed July 16, 2005). Matt García
HAYWORTH, RITA (1918–1987) Rita Hayworth, one of the greatest Hollywood stars during the 1940s, was of Spanish, English, and Irish descent. Born Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino in New York on October 17, 1918, she was the daughter of Eduardo Cansino, a dancer from Madrid, Spain, and Volga Hayworth. They eventually moved to Hollywood, where Eduardo opened his own dancing school. Rita became one of his students and in 1932 his dancing partner. During the depression Eduardo closed his studio to take other work. Because of her age, Rita and Eduardo could only find jobs across the border in Tijuana and Aguascalientes. Besides performing for tourists, they also appeared as extras in films made in Aguascalientes. Max Arno, a casting director for Warner Brothers, gave Margarita her first screen test. Her name was shortened to Rita Cansino, and she appeared in several films for Fox in 1935, including Dante’s Inferno, Under the Pampas Moon, Charlie Chan in Egypt, and Paddy O’Day.
Released from her contract in 1936, Hayworth met the twice-married, forty-plus Ed Judson, who became her first husband. Realizing her potential, Judson became her manager. She signed a contract with Columbia in February 1937. Columbia at first placed Hayworth in B pictures. She did find a minor, but significant, role in the film Only Angels Have Wings (1939) with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. The film was a success, and the reviews singled her out. It was during this period that Hayworth began painful electrolysis treatments to raise her hairline and dyed her dark brown hair red, erasing any ethnically identifiable physical characteristics. The turning point for Hayworth’s career came when Carol Landis refused to dye her hair red for the role of Doña Sol in Blood and Sand (1941). That same year a photograph solidified Hayworth’s image as America’s “sex goddess.” It appeared in the August 11, 1941, issue of Life magazine. In the photo Hayworth appeared in a black lace negligee, pillows behind her, looking over her shoulder at the camera. More than 5 million copies were sold by the end of World War II. Studio mogul Harry Cohn made Hayworth, now a “sex goddess,” Columbia’s number one star, appearing in a steady stream of musicals, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), You Were Never Lovelier (1942), Cover Girl (1944), and Tonight and Every Night (1945). In 1942 Hayworth began dating Orson Welles, although she was engaged to Victor Mature. She and Welles married in September 1943, during the filming of Cover Girl. Hayworth gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca, in December 1945. The following year Hayworth made her most memorable film, Gilda (1946). The Lady from Shanghai (1948) paired her with Welles. Still riding on the success of Gilda, Columbia Studios paired her once again with Glenn Ford in The Loves of Carmen (1948). Though not as critically acclaimed as Gilda, it was a financial hit for Columbia. Her marriage to Welles over, Hayworth traveled to Europe in 1948, where she met the prince Ali Khan, son of the Aga Khan. Announcing to the world that she was leaving the movie business, she married Ali Khan in May 1949 in France. She gave birth to a daughter, Princess Yasmin, later that year. But life as a princess proved unsatisfying for Hayworth. She sought a divorce in 1953. Except in Blood and Sand and You Were Never Lovelier, Hayworth played white Anglo women. She bypassed her ethnic and class status. Articles that made reference to her ethnicity usually just acknowledged her given name and the transformation she made. Hayworth resumed her movie career in the 1950s and 1960s, but gained a reputation for being unreliable and drunk, sometimes in public. Affair in Trinidad (1952) teamed her once again with Glenn Ford. She
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Legendary 1940s movie siren Rita Hayworth. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945 (Digital ID: fsa 8b010351).
later appeared in Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Pal Joey (1957), and Separate Tables (1958). Her last film was The Wrath of God in 1972. Rita Hayworth came to fame during a time when Hollywood studios controlled every aspect of an actor’s life, including their appearance, publicity, and roles. She exemplified the “fabricated movie star” and shined because of it. She married twice more. Overcoming alcoholism in 1978, Hayworth succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. She died on May 14, 1987. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: Hill, James. 1983. Rita Hayworth, a Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster; Leaming, Barbara. If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth. New York: Viking Press, 1989; Reyes, Luis, and Peter Rubie. 1994. Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television. New York: Garland Publishing; Vincent, William. 1992. “Rita Hayworth at Columbia, 1941–1945: The Fabrication of a Star.” In Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio, ed. Bernard F. Dick, 118–130. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
HEAD START Head Start is the single remaining program from the War on Poverty initiatives instituted under the Johnson administration. Project Head Start was part of a com-
prehensive program aimed at reducing poverty in the United States by offering children, aged three to five, health care, education, and social services. The program also promoted community and parental involvement. Over time Head Start evolved to include parent/child centers, transitional programs into elementary school, and infants and toddlers. In spite of its proven success, Head Start seldom received sufficient federal funding to serve all the children who could benefit from it. Sociologist Jill Quadagno has demonstrated in The Color of Welfare how the measures within the war on poverty amounted to halfhearted attempts at remedying socioeconomic inequalities because of the prevalence of racism in shaping the political debate. The initial phase of Project Head Start was “community empowerment” (1965–1980), which sought to bypass state and local governments in the funding process by providing federal funds directly to community action groups that served the underrepresented populations of the United States. Essentially, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services continues to award 80 percent of the cost of running the program to local public and private nonprofit agencies. Many southern politicians viewed this as the federal government’s attempt to institute programs, provide funding for poor African Americans, and thwart politically controlled systems of racial segregation and unequal access to public services. But Head Start in predominantly Latino areas regionalized and localized the program. Latino and Native American children became crucial beneficiaries of Project Head Start, and the special issues these children faced in their social, emotional, and cognitive development were acknowledged at the national level. However, Head Start at the federal administrative level moved away from community empowerment. The issue of cultural awareness was supplanted by calls for “school readiness.” This second phase, which defined Head Start in the late 1980s and 1990s, came precisely at the time when the program was becoming more diverse in its student base. When the Department of Health and Human Services implemented the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey in 2000, it reported program weakness in the area of cultural awareness for 75 percent of the national Head Start surveyed sites. The current political situation of neoconservatism implies that Project Head Start will be further underfunded, and cultural awareness may be replaced by “universal” early literacy programs that assume one language, one culture, and one ethnicity. Yet in the face of these political maelstroms, Head Start families, teachers, directors, and family social workers are creating genuine and long-lasting experiences for Latino
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Health: Current Issues and Trends children. In San Diego County, for example, approximately 56 percent of Head Start recipients are Latino. Overall, in reaching its Latino clientele, the program celebrates Cinco de Mayo, Mexican Independence Day (September 16), and el Día de los Muertos; creates art projects for Mother’s Day, and seeks parental input in deciding other events to commemorate. Although some teachers complain that they cannot celebrate the Dia de los Santos because of the strictly enforced separation between church and state, others manage to incorporate holy days of significance to Mexican culture into their curriculum in creative ways. Evelia Alcaraz is certainly at the core of Head Start in San Diego. Though she makes her classrooms accessible and open to all, her transmission of cultural heritage and commemoration is the hallmark of her center. The only female originator of San Diego’s renowned Taco Shop Poets, Alcaraz has raised her children, some of her grandchildren, and thousands of Head Start children while working as a teacher and center director for San Diego Head Start since the first program was introduced to the city in 1965. Marie Alianza is newer to Head Start, but her dedication to program families is evidenced by her working with a Sudanese family in an exclusively Mexican Head Start center. Her goal is not only to make the family feel welcome, but to find ways to express Sudanese culture to all of the children. In some ways she is reinforcing a lesson learned from the early days of Head Start in San Diego. When Latinos were in the numerical minority in several Head Start centers, some teachers made sure that families felt welcomed and their cultural and linguistic traits were fostered as a community project. There are certain structural features of Head Start that facilitate empowerment wherever a program is established. Parental involvement, authoritative decision making by parent councils, the presence of community action organizations, and a commitment to promote from within are values that make Head Start an organization with a potential for alleviating poverty. But it should be noted that there are barriers. For instance, Head Start employees’ salaries often fall below poverty level. Most often, it is the teachers and staff who commit themselves to the project and make Head Start a positive force for social change in the lives of Latinos. SOURCES: Ellsworth, Jeanne, and Lynda J. Ames, eds. 1998. Critical Perspectives on Project Head Start: Revisioning the Hope and Challenge. Albany: State University of New York Press; Quadagno, Jill. 1996. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press; Sissel, Peggy. 1999. Staff, Parents, and Politics in Head Start: A Case Study in Unequal Power, Knowledge, and Material Resources. New York: Garland Publishing. Ronald L. Mize
HEALTH: CURRENT ISSUES AND TRENDS Much of what is now known about Latina women’s health is rooted in the personal narratives collected by Latina scholars. Unlike Euro-American social scientists, these Latina scholars use a distinct approach to frame the broader structural problems of health care through the reflective voices of Latina narratives. An example of this reflective voice that illustrates the structural barriers faced by Latinas is presented by Gracie S. in her commentary on life growing up in Texas: When I was growing up my father always used to say that we could graduate, as girls we could graduate up to high school, but afterwards he expected us to work and contribute to the family. To him, there was no need for me to go to college, ’cause I would probably just get married, have kids, and there would be no need for it. And so his understanding of the role of the woman was very difficult or very different from what was actually taking place in the U.S. My father had actually been raised in Mexico and came to the U.S. as an adult, so his understanding of the role of how he thought he should raise us as women was a conflict in my life, and a real struggle. (Gracie S., age 46)
Gracie’s eloquent description of her father’s expectations for his daughter aptly captures the multiple contradictions faced by many daughters of Latina immigrants. Within the broader construct of their class position in U.S. society are embedded clear cultural roles for young Latina women. While these roles may become more fluid over their lifetime, nonetheless they frame the gender relations that define how women like Gracie manifest their health care concerns within the broader U.S. society. Thus the contested domains of ethnicity, gender, and class are forces that must be understood within any analysis of the health status and health care of Latina women. The class position of Latinas no doubt becomes a defining element in how they access health care. Moreover, as is the case for a large segment of the Latino community within the United States, access to health care, specifically defined as health care insurance, is an important predictor of their overall health status. Latinas are disproportionately uninsured, which has significant consequences for their health and the health of their families. Individual health is intricately related to sociodemographic conditions such as geography, education, location, age, immigrant status, English-language proficiency, employment, marital status, and genetic factors that may influence the likely risk of specific health con-
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World War II nurse Rafaela Muñiz Esquivel (on the right). Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
ditions. These specific factors influence Latina health in general, as well as the quality of care they ultimately receive within the health care delivery system. The overall health status of Latinas can be divided into four age categories: adolescent women, women of childbearing age, leading-edge women, and senior women. Health status for most Latinas is closely linked to their socioeconomic status. Health care problems such as diabetes, cervical cancer, and teen pregnancy are issues that can be directly addressed through educational outreach and early screening. As illustrated by the different age groups, health status is inextricably linked to health care access. For many Latina subgroups, obesity is a major problem, but it is increasingly becoming a concern for Mexican-origin girls. Obesity elevates the risk factors for diabetes, particularly Type II, non-insulindependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM), and heart disease in adulthood. To a large extent the problem of obesity can be attributed to high dietary fat, low fiber intake, and lack of exercise among Latina girls. Existing evidence indicates that body self-image differs among Latina adolescent girls, resulting in a less negative stigma associated with body size. However, how this image affects adolescent health is not well understood.
Of growing concern within the overall Latino population is early sexual activity and teen pregnancy among Latina adolescents. According to 2002 data released by the Centers for Disease Control, Latina teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen have the highest teen birthrates in the nation compared with African American and European American teenagers. Lack of knowledge about sexuality and contraception contributes to the high teenage pregnancy rates of these young women. Adolescence is a time of rapid physiological maturation for all young women. However, a Latina subgroup that appears to be at greater risk during this time of accelerated physical development is Mexican American girls. Mexican American girls reach puberty at an earlier age than Euro-American girls. The early onset of menarche influences the higher fertility rate found among Mexican Americans, as well as the higher teen pregnancy rate. Even though Mexican American girls have a lower reported rate of sexual activity in comparison with Euro-American girls, they tend to use contraceptives less. This places them at greater risk for pregnancy and for sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS, syphilis, and gonorrhea. Lack of contraceptive use by adolescent Mexican American youths can certainly lead to unintended pregnancies and a life of lowered socioeconomic status. Latinas in the United States are a relatively young population. In addition to their youth, these women have relatively higher fertility rates as compared with other groups. Given these factors, it is not surprising that maternal and infant health issues are important factors that influence the health status of these women. In general, a large segment of childbearing Latinas have good birth outcomes despite their relatively low economic status. This outcome is particularly prevalent within the Mexican immigrant population and illustrates an interesting paradox. Unlike other high-risk groups such as African American women, Mexican immigrant women have relatively good birth outcomes despite high risk factors such as poverty and lack of health care access. For many pregnant Latina immigrant women, health behaviors are consistent with cultural practices that minimize risk to the fetus and the infant. For example, despite lower levels of education, many Mexican immigrant women will not smoke or drink during pregnancy, unlike other groups of similar socioeconomic status. However, these healthful cultural practices are not completely resistant to the new environment faced by Latina immigrant women. As these women enter the workforce and establish new social relationships beyond their traditional kinship ties, protective cultural factors that buffer these women from health risk factors begin to erode. Also, the additional stress created
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Health: Current Issues and Trends by the migration process that results in language loss, family distance, and limited access to social services adversely impacts the mental health of many Latina immigrants. Issues such as increased depression emerge as important health problems for these women, with the concomitant problem of inadequate diagnosis and treatment of this disease. Another major issue that poses a growing health concern for Latina women is the increase in the number of nonchildbearing women, that is, those between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four. Women who fall within this age bracket are at greatest risk for health problems because they have the lowest rate of health insurance status and higher rates of chronic health conditions that result in pressing health problems for these women. For example, cardiovascular disease and diabetes require close monitoring by a primarycare physician, as well as continuous treatment with prescription drugs. However, because these women have the highest rate of uninsured status, they are at greatest risk of lack of access to primary care. For example, the most common types of cancer in Mexicanorigin women are breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and cervical cancer. One of the most important methods for achieving lowered incidence and prevalence of all common cancers found among these women is early detection through appropriate screening. While this appears to be an easy solution, there are numerous sociocultural factors that prevent this from occurring. These include a general lack of knowledge regarding symptoms and treatment and the lack of health care access and use of preventive health services. For many older Latinas, cultural factors relating to attitudes and values regarding the human body, especially areas most affected by these cancers—the breast, cervix, and rectum—also affect their medical screening practices. Finally, a key factor in reducing the mortality rate in cancer is early and regular medical screening. This is extremely difficult for many older Latinas because they have relatively lower rates of health insurance than Euro-American women. This lack of health insurance prevents older Latinas from regular screening by a primary health care provider. Although a large segment of Latina women are relatively young, there are still significant issues affecting the health status of senior women. As in the case of leading-edge women, lack of adequate health insurance, combined with increased chronic health problems, places them at greater risk for higher rates of morbidity and mortality. In addition, these women have less access to Medicare due to their employment and marital status. For example, since many of these women worked in low-tier service-sector jobs with no benefits or worked as part-time employees, they did
not obtain the same level of Medicare eligibility because they did not contribute the necessary amount to the Medicare trust fund. Thus eligibility rates for Medicare are lower for Mexican-origin women than for Euro-American white women. Latinas who are immigrants often experience discrimination in the delivery of health care services in the United States. This discrimination is ever present today, but has historical roots throughout the twentieth century in the Southwest. For example, legislation like Proposition 187, which was passed in California in 1994, but was later found to be unconstitutional, had a direct impact on Mexican-origin women because it limited access to publicly subsidized health care services for undocumented immigrants. In the United States access to publicly subsidized health care such as Medicaid is linked to citizenship and resident status. Therefore, Latinas who are immigrants are at greater risk of not having publicly subsidized health care services. Mexican immigrant women are more vulnerable than, say, Puerto Rican women because they are not citizens, whereas Puerto Rican women have U.S. citizenship status. Cuban immigrant women are more likely to fall within the domain of refugee status and therefore are more likely to have greater access to publicly subsidized services than Mexican immigrant women. Yet even in the case of Puerto Rican and Cuban women health services are not always available. Since the passage of Proposition 187 there has been increased interest in curbing the access of recent immigrants to social services. This obviously includes publicly subsidized health care programs such as Medicaid. With the advent of welfare reform at the federal level, there have also been serious attempts in Congress to limit entitlement programs like Medicaid. The rising costs of programs, as well as the goal of decreasing the welfare rolls as mandated under welfare reform, provide an impetus for considering the removal of legal immigrants from the eligibility pool. Even in states with relatively generous eligibility requirements, the relation of citizenship status to health care access has become a serious issue, given popular sentiment to limit state benefits to undocumented residents. For example, immediately after the passage of Proposition 187 Governor Pete Wilson announced on November 9, 1994, via executive order, the enforcement of the provisions of the proposition concerning health care access for immigrant pregnant women and immigrant elderly. The ability of immigrant women to readily adapt to the new institutional environment and bureaucratic health care system of the United States also places real constraints on access to public and private health insurance. Thus, for Latinas, the issue of financial health
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Health: Current Issues and Trends care access goes beyond a simple model linked to employment to broader social issues that are defined by their immigrant status, as well as marital status and other factors. Often low-income immigrant families must rely on a family member to provide treatment for childhood and family illnesses, as illustrated by Gracie S.: “The only time that we ended up in the hospital or in the doctor’s office is when it was an extreme emergency. For all other things such as the upset stomachs, the burns, the cuts, the scrapes, were taken care of by herbs, teas and home remedies, which my mother had great knowledge of. She was very well versed in the folkloric healing.” This quote illustrates that in many Latino immigrant families the primary health care providers are mothers. Many of these women learned folklore remedies through their multiple kinship ties and family oral traditions. Thus a clinician whose practice serves a large number of Latina women should be aware of traditional treatments used by Latina immigrants, as well as cultural interpretations of illnesses. Linguistic competency is also important but must be viewed within the broader context of cultural competency. Folklore illnesses express a cultural interpretation that may result in patient-clinician misunderstanding if the medical staff is unaware of these cultural expressions. This is further complicated when a patient treats an illness with folklore remedies. Because of the lack of health insurance, it is not uncommon for Latinas, especially low-income immigrant women, to seek alternative treatments or delay treatment for a disease until a medical crisis emerges. Literature on Mexican folklore illnesses and treatment further develops the idea of incorporating cultural beliefs and practices as mediating factors in diagnosing and treating patients. This broader definition provides an opportunity for improving access to and quality of health care for the Mexican-origin population. One of the major problems in training programs that focus on cultural competency is that they generalize and refer to cultural stereotypes when they describe accepted gender roles. Instead of conforming to a monolithic ideal of gendered behavior, it seems that Latina women, particularly Mexican immigrant women, often question or shift boundaries, particularly as they renegotiate their gender roles with increased acculturation, which in turn affects health behaviors. Since many Latina women define their gender roles within their culture, this will determine how receptive they may be to frank discussions on, for example, sexuality, alcohol use, or child-rearing practices. Therefore, the intersection of gender, cultural identity, and culture for Latina women must be understood before developing a model of culturally competent health care
Dental care for city children in New York. Courtesy of Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
for these women. Although there is historical evidence on generational impacts that influence Latina behavior, there is a paucity of this type of research in the overall health literature. Future studies should focus on the impact of generation on cultural behaviors relating to health. Recently Chicana scholars have attempted to reframe stereotypical models explaining cultural behaviors. These scholars view behavioral characteristics specifically through the lens of Mexican American culture. Moreover, Chicana feminist scholars include an analysis of how Chicana/Mexican American women have resisted the negative characterization associated with the ethnic and gender stereotypes. While these gender stereotypes are sometimes reaffirmed in Mexican women’s attitudes and behavior, Chicana scholars assert that immigrant women question their validity by redefining these stereotypical roles. There is a clear pattern in this literature, including the work of Vicki L. Ruiz, showing that Mexican-origin men and women may renegotiate their traditional roles as their levels of economic participation and exposure to a new social milieu are altered over time. More research that looks at Latina subpopulation variation, such as Central American women, who
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Henríquez Ureña, Camila share immigrant experiences similar to those of Mexican immigrant women, may provide additional evidence regarding similar adaptive responses to traditional gender roles. These women may very well renegotiate their cultural values and roles within the context of expanded economic power and resistance to the dominant culture. To date there is little empirical evidence linking health care outcomes with varying levels of cultural competency of providers. Nonetheless, the goal of cultural competency is to enhance communication skills so individuals of different ethnic backgrounds will have greater access to cost-effective and quality health care, including preventive care information. Cultural competency in the delivery of health care services and treatment is a variable in health care prevention strategies, particularly as it addresses the needs of Latina women. Because these women are the primary decision makers on health care for their families, they must feel comfortable with the site and type of delivery of health care. As the number of Latinas increases, it will be increasingly important to eliminate these racial disparities in health care and promote broader understanding of the health care system for these women. See also Aging; Family SOURCES: Avila, Ellen, with Jay Parker. 1999. Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. New York: Putnam Publishing Group; de la Torre, Adela. 1993. “Hard Choices and Changing Roles among Mexican Migrant Campesinas.” In Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz Pesquera. Berkeley: University of California Press; ———, Robert Friis, Harold R. Hunter, and Lorena García. 1996. “The Health Insurance Status of U.S. Latino Women: A Profile from the 1982–84 Hispanic HANES.” American Journal of Public Health, 86:4 (April): 533–537; ———, and Antonio R. Estrada. 2001 Mexican Americans Health: Sana¡ Sana¡. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; ———. 2002. Moving from the Margins: A Chicana Voice on Public Policy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control. 2003. “Births Final Data for 2002.” National Vital Statistics Reports 52:10, December 17:1. www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/teenbrth.htm (accessed July 19, 2005). Adela de la Torre
HENRÍQUEZ UREÑA, CAMILA (1894–1973) The fourth child and only daughter of two prominent Dominicans, Salomé Ureña de Henríquez and Francisco Henríquez Ureña, Camila Henríquez Ureña is one of the finest Latina-Caribbean intellectuals of the twen-
tieth century. She was born in the Dominican Republic three years before the death of her mother, the prominent poet and educator Salomé Ureña de Henríquez. Camila Henríquez Ureña’s figure has often been overshadowed by the presence of her two better-known siblings, the literary luminaries Pedro and Max Henríquez Ureña. Camila Henríquez Ureña spent a good deal of her life in Cuba, where she moved with her father and his second wife and family in 1904. Henríquez Ureña received her doctorate in philosophy, letters, and pedagogy from the University of Havana in 1917. Her dissertation was titled “Pedagogical Ideas of Eugenio María de Hostos,” honoring the memory of the illustrious Puerto Rican educator and her mother’s mentor and supporter of her founding the first normal school for girls in the Dominican Republic. From 1918 to 1921 Henríquez Ureña lived in Minnesota, where she studied and taught classes at the University of Minnesota. Returning to Cuba in the early 1920s, Camila Henríquez Ureña became a Cuban citizen in 1926. She lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne from 1932 to 1934. While living in Cuba in the 1930s, she was active in organizing feminists, as well as cultural institutions and events. Most notable among her activities is her role as cofounder and president of the Lyceum, a feminist cultural organization, and the Hispanic-Cuban Institute. In 1942 she moved to the United States and taught at Vassar College until 1959 in the Department of Hispanic Studies, where she served twice as chairperson and was a tenured professor. During a number of summers in her 1942–1959 residence in the United States, Henríquez Ureña was also on the faculty of the prestigious language and literature summer program at Middlebury College. Her contribution is notable, for she was one of the earliest instances of a LatinaCaribbean academic earning tenure and chairpersonship at a prestigious academic institution in the United States. Henríquez Ureña, however, gave up her pension as professor emerita at Vassar College to return to Cuba and to participate in the restructuring of the University of Havana, where she taught in the Department of Latin American Literature until her retirement in 1970. At the time of her death while visiting her native Dominican Republic, Camila Henríquez Ureña held the title of professor emerita from the University of Havana, as well as Vassar College, a rare if not unique accomplishment, worthy of note. The breadth of knowledge to be found in Camila Henríquez Ureña’s writings gives evidence of her erudition and lifelong commitment to learning. Henríquez Ureña was a woman of many and varied interests. Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s letters, collected in the family’s Epistolario, record his own amazement at his sis-
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Henríquez Ureña, Camila ter’s capacity for learning and her curious intellect. In several testimonios provided by Mirta Yáñez in her “Camila y Camila” one finds how truly diverse Henríquez Ureña’s interests were: her knowledge of, participation in, and even singing of operas in various languages; her ability with music and her fine, distinguished, but very Caribbean way of dancing; her work as an educator and in women’s movements; and her ability to learn foreign languages, ostensibly so that she might read works in the original by some of her favorite authors—Dante, Ibsen, Racine, Shakespeare, and others. Furthermore, a selection of her essays, collected posthumously and edited by Mirta Aguirre, one of her most distinguished students and later her colleague at the University of Havana, gives evidence of a sound liberal education and a serious intellect. In brief, her intellectual capacity is evident in the subject matters she chose: her doctoral dissertation on Hostos, her introduction to a Spanish version of Dante’s Inferno published in Cuba in 1935, her collaboration with the Spanish poet laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez in the now-classic La poesía en Cuba in 1936, and her studies of the pastoral genre in Spain and on the theater of Lope de Vega, to name just some of her known works. Camila Henríquez Ureña’s most significant contribution to the genre of the essay, however, is her nowclassic collection of essays on the condition of women, her formidable trilogy: “Feminismo” (1939), “La mujer y la cultura” (1949), and “La carta como forma de expresión literaria femenina” (1951). Mirta Yáñez, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, and Chiqui Vicioso, among others, have pointed out the importance of these essays to the history of the feminist essay in the Spanish Caribbean. In “Feminismo” Camila Henríquez Ureña traces the history of the role women have played in societies from prehistoric time to her day. In this essay Henríquez Ureña takes to task the male creation of “exceptional women” to justify denying women’s rights. It is not in these examples or “exceptions” that women are to find the road to moral, spiritual, intellectual, and economic independence. In “La mujer y la cultura,” an essay she first wrote in 1939 but did not publish until 1949, she explains that true change comes about as a result of collective efforts: Las mujeres de excepción de los pasados siglos representaron aisladamente un progreso en sentido vertical. Fueron precursoras, a veces, sembraron ejemplo fructífero. Pero un movimiento cultural importante es siempre de conjunto, y necesita propagarse en sentido horizontal. La mujer necesita desarrollar su caracter, en el aspecto colectivo, para llevar a término una lucha que está ahora en sus
comienzos. Necesita hacer labor de propagación de la cultura que ha podido alcanzar para seguir progresando. (Exceptional women in past centuries represented isolated cases of progress in the vertical sense. They were precursors; at times they planted fruitful examples. But an important cultural movement is always a group effort, and it needs to be propagated in a horizontal sense. A woman needs to develop character, in a collective sense, to bring to fruition a struggle that is now in its inception. She needs to work on propagating the culture that she has acquired in order to be able to continue to make progress.)
In a certain sense, in reading “La mujer y la cultura,” one finds understanding of why Camila Henríquez Ureña returned years later to Cuba to help out, as she would say, putting in practice the theories expounded in her cited essay. Indeed, this fine intellectual and teacher approached many of her studies and writings as a woman. In her essay “La carta como forma de expresión literaria femenina” she chooses four authors whose correspondence served as barometer, expression, and answer to the historical moment they lived. Among them are two writers whose names ought to head any history of the essay written in Spanish: Santa Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695). Henríquez Ureña’s essay is a tour de force in the art of reading and the importance of the reader’s response to giving meaning to the literature written by women. Tellingly, today, having gone through various stages of readings as women and as feminists, many people find themselves back where Camila Henríquez Ureña was fifty years ago: understanding more than ever the importance of reader’s response, de leer con la sensibilidad de las mujeres las obras de las mujeres (to read with a woman’s sensibility other women’s writings), to the creation of a feminine and feminist aesthetic. Camila Henríquez Ureña earns a place in the history of Latinas in the United States as a pioneer educator, essayist, and thinker who was able to transcend borders and whose work continues to have resonance in the development of new generations of readers, as evidenced by the publication in 2000 of Julia Alvarez’s In the Name of Salomé, a fictionalized retelling of Camila’s and Salomé’s lives. See also Literature SOURCES: Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salomé: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books; Cocco De Filippis, Daisy, ed. 2000. Documents of Dissidence: Selected Writings by Dominican Women. New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute; ——, 2001. “La mujer y la cultura.” In Madres, maestras y militantes dominicanas, 116–126. Santo Domingo: Búho; Familia Henríquez Ureña. 1995. Epistolario. Santo Domingo: Publicación
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Hernández, Antonia de la Secretaría de Educación, Bellas Artes y Cultos; Henríquez Ureña, Camila. 1971. Estudios y conferencias. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro; Yáñez, Mirta. 2003. Camila y Camila. La Habana: Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau.
Daisy Cocco De Filippis
HERNÁNDEZ, ANTONIA (1948–
)
Born in Torreón, Mexico, on an ejido (communal ranch) known as El Cambio, Antonia Hernández was the oldest of seven children of Manuel and Nicolasa Hernández. Her grandfather was born in Texas but was forced to migrate to Mexico during the Great Depression, when government officials passed through small towns and singled out families of Mexican descent, forcing them to leave the United States because of the job shortages. Hernández moved to the United States with her family in 1956 at the age of eight. The family lived in the Maravilla Housing projects of East Los Angeles, where she often endured taunts of mojada (wetback) from neighborhood children. Her parents worked in chicken factories and in manufacturing to provide for the family. They taught their daughters not to feel constrained by traditional gender roles. To help make ends meet, the young Hernández joined her father to sell her mother’s tamales at East Los Angeles garages and bars on the weekends. In the summers all members of the family worked as migrant farm laborers. Hernández graduated from Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. She attended East Los Angeles College and was later admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under an affirmative action type of program. One of a few Chicano students attending UCLA, Hernández was often mistaken for a wealthy Latin American by fellow Anglo students. After graduating in 1970 she was accepted to the UCLA School of Law. “I went to law school to be a public interest lawyer to serve ‘the people.’ ” While still a law student she accepted a job as a clerk at the California Rural Legal Assistance Office in Santa Maria, where she met and soon married attorney Michael Stern. The couple has three children. Hernández’s first job as an attorney was with the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice. Almost immediately she was thrust into the public spotlight in a class-action lawsuit against Los Angeles County General Hospital and the state of California. The suit charged that doctors at the facility performed involuntary sterilization on women after they had been delivered of children. “I was outraged that someone would violate another human being and do things to another
human being, such as taking away your right to bear children . . . and to do this without your consent, to abuse you when you’re in pain. It offends your sense of justice and of right.” The judge ruled on the side of the defendants. Although the women were not victorious in court, they did succeed in pressuring the hospital and the state of California to launch important reforms. Hernández worked as a legal aide and civil rights attorney until 1979, when she became a staff counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the first Latina to hold that position. In 1981 she joined the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), rising through the ranks to become that organization’s president and general counsel in 1985. As head of the nation’s leading Latino civil rights organization, Hernández litigated a series of pivotal cases that have helped expand the rights of Latinos. MALDEF filed landmark voting rights suits in California, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states that led federal judges to put an end to the gerrymandering and other discriminatory practices that kept Latinos from winning election to public office. Among the more notable beneficiaries of MALDEF’s historic legal crusade was Gloria Molina, who in 1991 became the first Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In 1994, after California voters approved Proposition 187, an initiative that sought to bar undocumented immigrants from public education, hospitals, and other services, MALDEF, under Hernández’s guidance, joined other groups in filing suits in federal court. Resistance to Proposition 187, which was sponsored by California governor Pete Wilson, led to a groundswell of Latino activism in California, the largest in a generation. Eventually a judge threw out most of the initiative’s provisions. Hernández also joined the fight against California’s Proposition 227, which ended bilingual education. With the status of Latino immigrants at the center of public debate from Arizona to Georgia, Hernández became a nationally known spokeswoman for the rights of immigrant families. See also Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF); Sterilization SOURCES: Hernández, Antonia. 1998. Oral history interview by Virginia Espino, March 24; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press; Stewart, Jocelyn. 1999. “The Advocate: As President of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Antonia Hernández Speaks for Millions.” The Los Angeles Times, September 12.
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Virginia Espino
Hernández, Ester
HERNÁNDEZ, ESTER (1944–
)
One of six children born of Mexican farmworker parents, Ester Hernández remarks that she is not the only member of her family who practices an art form. “My mother carried on the family tradition of embroidery from her birthplace in north central Mexico. My grandfather was a master carpenter who made religious sculpture in his spare time, and my father was an amateur photographer and visual artist.” Hernández, a native of Dinuba, a rural town located in the Central Valley of California, points to her labor in the fields, the natural landscape of her surroundings, and the communal spirit of her rural family and friends as early influences in the development of her aesthetic sensibility. She says, “Farm working provided me with my first opportunity as an artist to explore all of the raw organic materials around me. It was through my personal involvement with my family and community that I learned to nurture and develop a great respect for and interest in the arts.” In the 1960s Hernández left her childhood home to attend the University of California, Berkeley, intending to study anthropology. Instead, she followed her interests in the visual arts and developed her talent through coursework at the university and affiliation with artists involved in the emergent Chicana/o movement. One such artist is the Chicano lithographer Malaquías Montoya, who became an early mentor of hers. Beginning in 1974 and continuing for approximately three years, Hernández worked intermittently with the highly celebrated all-female collective Mujeres Muralistas. Hernández recalls that when she first joined the group as an assistant to the more experienced core artists or maestras, as they were called, the artists were designing the formal elements of the now-famous mural Latinoamerica (1974). While the core artists were well trained in the artistic considerations of depicting broad social concerns and actions through the representation of everyday life, they were less familiar with accurately rendering the verdure of the fields in which their farmworker subjects toiled. Although she was new to mural painting, Hernández was able to provide important direction with regard to the representation of natural surroundings. She recalls, “Some of the stuff they did was really hilarious. The vegetables looked like they were mutated, from Mars. They looked totally unreal. I showed them pictures or talked to them [about how to paint vegetables].” At that time she was also the sole member of Mujeres Muralistas who was the mother of a child. The artists permitted her toddler son to apply his brush to their murals, and he, in turn, provided the painters a live model for their renditions of children. Important early works include the etchings La Vir-
La Virgen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos. Painting by and courtesy of Ester Hernández.
gen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos (1976) and Libertad (1976), whose oppositional refiguration of two familiar representations—the Virgin and the Statue of Liberty—makes these pieces foundational articulations of Chicana feminist visual art production. Two works created in her second decade of production, the serigraphs Sun Mad (1981) and Tejido de los desaparecidos (1984), further underscore her apt ability for potent social comment. The print Tejido de los desaparecidos seems at first glance a backstrap weaving typical of the Maya, especially from the highlands of Guatemala. Closer examination reveals that the cloth is replete with images of skulls, skeletons, and helicopters. Hernández stratifies these figures in a horizontal pattern that mimics the weaving style she evokes; the black, white, and gray of the cloth are in sharp contrast with the four bullet holes that drip blood from the center of the print. In this work Hernández reminds the viewer of the atrocities inflicted on the indigenous people of the region during a series of civil wars, as well as of their rich textile heritage. Hernández frequently casts her artistic gaze on the most deeply marginalized Chicanas/os—field and service workers whose occupations and social status ren-
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Hernández, María Latigo der them invisible to the eyes of most people. La Virgen de la Calle (2001), a pastel-on-paper portrait of a middle-aged Latina floral peddler, provides a quiet moment to reflect on the ubiquitous labor of street vendors. Her head is covered with a star-studded rebozo, and she is covered from neck to knee by an oversized cherry-colored sweatshirt emblazoned with the letters “USA.” Bright red and yellow roses pop out of the recycled laundry detergent can at the feet of the vendor. “Future” is the brand of detergent formerly held in the can. A viewer cannot help but wonder what the future in the “USA” holds for this silently resolved woman. Hernández’s inspiration frequently returns to her family, especially the women. Her serigraphs Mis madres (1986) and Cosmic Cruise (1990) are the most explicit examples. Cosmic Cruise takes for its subject the fact that Hernández’s mother was the only woman in a community of migrant workers who knew how to drive a car. Hernández also creates works that honor women who are icons of Mexican visual and performance culture. Her Frida Kahlo series includes If This Is Death—I Like It (1987), a pastel on paper, Yo y Frida (1989), a lithograph, and the acrylic-on-canvas painting Heartless Melon (2003). The works inspired by Lydia Mendoza include the silkprint Lydia Mendoza, Ciudad Júarez, Mexico (1937) (1987) and the pastel-on-paper Con cariño, Lydia Mendoza (2001). A more contemporary figure, the Mexican singers/performance artist Astrid Hadad, emerged as a subject of Hernández’s in the pastel-on-paper Astrid Hadad in San Francisco (1994). Hernández is prolific in a range of media: serigraph, pastel on paper, acrylic, oil on canvas, and occasionally three-dimensional installation. Her work is readily identifiable by her sure hand, bold line, and strong application of color, elements that stand in contrast to the subtle contouring of her human subjects, especially in the detail of their faces. Her artistry is marked, as is all creative expression born of the Chicana/o art movement, by visual representations that indelibly forge aesthetic applications with social commentary. In recognition of her exceptional work, Hernández has received several highly competitive grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She exhibits widely throughout the United States and abroad, including Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Japan, and her work is included in permanent collections throughout the Americas, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, and the Frida Kahlo Studio Museum in Mexico City. Hernández teaches art part-time to developmentally disabled adults attending Creativity Explored in San Francisco.
See also Artists SOURCES: Día de los muertos/Day of the Dead. 1991. Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Center; Johnson, Mark Dean, ed. 2003. At Work: The Art of California Labor. San Francisco: California Historical Society Press; Marin, Cheech. 2002. Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Boston: Little, Brown; Ochoa, María. 2003. Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Sánchez, Holly Barnet. 2001. “Where Are the Chicana Printmakers?” In¿Just Another Poster?, ed. Chon Noriega. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara. María Ochoa
HERNÁNDEZ, MARÍA LATIGO (1896–1986) Born in Garza García, near Monterrey, Mexico, María Latigo Hernández was an “untiring fighter” for the rights of both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Her life spanned more than two generations of activism in Texas from the mutualistas (mutual-aid societies) of the 1920s to La Raza Unida, the Chicano third party of the 1970s. Her parents were Eduardo Frausto Latigo, a college professor, and Francisca Medrano Latigo. Well educated, María Latigo taught school in Monterrey before immigrating to the United States. She married Pedro Hernández in Hebbronville, Texas, and the couple had ten children. The family moved to San Antonio in 1918, and eleven years later she and her husband founded the mutualista Orden Caballeros de America, an organization open to all Latinos regardless of citizenship. Unlike some organizations such as Mexican patriotic groups that appealed primarily to immigrants or the League of United Latin American Citizens that offered membership mainly to U.S. citizens, this mutualista was open to all, men and women, Mexican citizens, and U.S. citizens. Unlike many mutualistas that disappeared after a few years, Orden Caballeros de America was a San Antonio institution for more than forty years, and the Hernández family remained integrally involved. During the Great Depression María Hernández helped organize the Asociación Protectora de Madres (Association for the Protection of Mothers), which offered financial aid to expectant mothers. She and her husband joined furniture-store owner Eleuterio Escobar in establishing la Liga de Defensa Pro-Escolar, an association that sought to improve and replace segregated educational facilities on the West Side of San Antonio. Serving as secretary of this organization, María Hernández worked to rid the West Side of the “firetraps” that posed as elementary schools for Mexican American youth. Unlike most middle-class activists who shunned labor unions, she supported the
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Hernández, Olivia striking pecan shellers in the big strike of 1938. In addition, she founded Club Liberal Pro-Cultura de la Mujer and presided over the Círculo Social Damas de America. An inveterate organizer, María Hernández was also a writer. In 1945 she penned Mexico y los cuatro poderes que dirigen el pueblo, published in Spanish by a small press in San Antonio. In this piece, reminiscent of “republican motherhood” popular among middleclass New England women during the early years of the United States, Hernández argued that the home was the foundation of society and mothers the authority figures who molded nations. Indeed, she encouraged women to educate themselves in political matters and to work to improve the material and social conditions of their neighbors. According to author Martha Cotera, Hernández was an important feminist role model who emphasized “ ‘the importance of family unity’ and the ‘the strength of men and women working together.’ ” Hernández credited her “liberated” husband for supporting and encouraging her decades of community activism. A talented speaker, she became San Antonio’s first Mexican woman radio announcer in 1932. From the 1940s to the 1960s she made hundreds of civil rights speeches. In 1970 she hosted a local television program called La Hora de la Mujer and that year joined La Raza Unida Party, the Chicano third political party. Hernández commanded respect even among Chicano nationalist men who rarely gave their compañeras due respect. In 1972 she delivered the keynote speech at the state La Raza Unida Party convention. María Hernández actively campaigned for political candidates from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Henry B. González, who became the first Tejano to serve in the U.S. Congress. In 1972 she and her husband toured southern and central Texas encouraging Tejanos to support La Raza Unida’s candidate for governor, Ramsey Muñiz, and LRUP’s candidate for the Texas State Board of Education, Martha Cotera. LULAC founder Alonso S. Perales described Hernández and her husband as “untiring fighters, always active, honorable, enthusiastic, and sincere.” María Hernández promoted political empowerment of Mexican Americans in all areas of life, from education to neighborhood associations to women’s rights. Referring to herself as a “daughter of Mexico,” she was one of a few women activists who bridged more than five decades of civil rights activism among Mexican Americans in Texas. She also represented a blending of Mexican and Chicano nationalism. She noted, “I have been active in civic and social struggles in this great nation for 20 years . . . but Mexico is my base of inspiration because I was born there, because I’m Mexican by blood, and because my grand intuitive vi-
sion makes me live in Mexico.” She died in 1986 at the age of ninety on the ten-acre ranch she and her husband had purchased in 1955. An elementary school in San Marcos, Texas, bears her name. A wife, mother, feminist, community organizer, and orator, María Hernández stands as one of the most enduring and endearing civil rights leaders in Chicana history. See also Feminism; La Raza Unida Party SOURCES: Foster, Sally. 1996. “María Latigo Hernández.” In Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, ed. Joseph C. Tardiff and L. M. Mabunda, 421–423. New York: Gale Research; Hernández, María. 1945. Mexico y los cuatro poderes que dirigen el pueblo. San Antonio: Artes Gráficas; ———. 1975. Interview by Angie del Cueto Quiros, April 19; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “María L. de Hernández.” New Handbook of Texas 3:572–573. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Cynthia E. Orozco
HERNÁNDEZ, OLIVIA (1947–
)
In 1969, at the age of twenty-two, Olivia Hernández arrived in South Chicago, Illinois, towing three young daughters. She left a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico, to meet her husband, then employed at Wisconsin Steel. There Hernández experienced rejection from local business patrons and church priests who turned her away, stating that they had no services for Mexicans. After several years her husband left the marriage, and she became a single mother of six. Hernández’s neighborhood was also in transition. Major steel mills, manufacturers, and factories in the area began to close, leaving thousands of families destitute. When Wisconsin Steel closed in 1977, approximately 15,000 people were suddenly out of work. Many lost their homes and health; others moved from the area. Each subsequent industrial closing worsened the situation. Hernández moved to a once active and affluent community, South Chicago. Its economic decline was coupled with increased crime, violence, and drug usage. Street gangs littered the streets and graffiti-tagged buildings. Motivated by the desire for her children’s future well-being, Hernández joined the bilingual council at Thorpe Elementary School, where she evaluated programs and organized parents in order to effect change. She served as bilingual council president for three terms. At Bowen High School she joined the school council in 1981. As the student population changed from Caucasian to Latino and African American, the principal ceased to maintain the school’s physical condition and quality of education. Rival street gangs also created an unsafe, prisonlike environment. Parents were often told that the school board lacked funds for
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Hernández, Olivia materials or books, and it was suggested that if parents wanted the school clean, they would have to provide the cleaning supplies themselves. Hernández organized more than 150 parents who traveled to the state capital on numerous occasions to demand school reform. They wanted funds to clean the school, erect metal detectors, implement the use of uniforms, improve the quality of education, including bilingual education, and replace the principal. In the next few years many of these goals were accomplished. On another occasion the board wanted to close the school after finding asbestos. Again, Hernández organized more than 800 parents to repair and keep the school open. At Bowen she served as school council president for four terms. At this time Hernández was neither legally documented nor fluent in English. Hernández concluded that to bring significant change, the community would have to improve along with the school. She began to volunteer with the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) and the Immaculate Conception Church. A handful of people formed block clubs to begin community cleanup. They went door-to-door with district-donated paint and provided materials for residents to paint their homes or painted over graffiti themselves. At first they were ridiculed. Some community members refused to help; others feared gang retaliation. Eventually more and more people joined their efforts. Ironically, gang members themselves began to help with the cleanup and joined in evening vigils held for deceased members. Hernández and others in the block clubs worked with the police department to combat the gang problem and rampant violence. Arnold Mireles, a volunteer Hernández met through UNO, worked closely with youths to keep them out of gangs, and with the city to knock down abandoned buildings. Mireles was later murdered. There were limits to how much change volunteers could effect on their own, so they sought community agencies to implement antigang and antidrug programs in schools. Many agencies made promises; none delivered. Frustrated by these fruitless attempts, the volunteers decided to create their own center. For a year Hernández, along with seven other women, including María Urrutia, Guadalupe Barragan, Elena Ochoa, and Lourdes Soto, and a priest, Father Alfred Gundrum from St. Kevin’s Church, planned their own social service center. They were not without misgivings; Hernández remembers, “We were all immigrant women, working mothers, the majority of us undocumented, and we did not know perfect English. I worked in a tortilla factory seven nights a week, but during the day, I worked on my children’s education, organized the community, and slept very little.” The women gathered information, began registration procedures, and unofficially opened the Juan
Diego Community Center (JDCC) in 1994 on Hernández’s front porch. Initially they provided a food depository, taught health classes, and, with the help of volunteers, provided translation services for those who could not read important correspondence or needed help with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) matters. Many women began to attend classes. Six months after their unofficial opening they received their official registration and with a $6,000 donation were able to rent an apartment. Hernández states, “We were received well by the community. [When we opened] we had credibility. We already cleaned the streets, painted over graffiti, worked in the schools, were school council members, and had the block clubs. The people in the community were happy that we finally had a location.” Two years later they outgrew the apartment and rented a bar, which they cleaned and used for another two years. With the help of two Marist nuns they learned to raise funds and write proposals. Over the years many agencies have donated funds or resources for programs. Hernández is hesitant to accept state or federal money because many of the people served by the Juan Diego Community Center are recently arrived immigrants and undocumented people. In order to use federal funds, visitors would need to prove legal residency or citizenship. An immigrant herself, Hernández believes that this is one of the populations most in need of services and refuses to turn them away. The JDCC helps immigrants find jobs and homes and provides a food pantry and clothes depository. Twice a year the JDCC holds a health fair, where more than thirty clinics and hospitals provide free services for the people of South Chicago, including diabetes examinations, mammograms, high-cholesterol and blood pressure examinations, and immunizations. During the first couple of years approximately 500 people attended, and the number grows exponentially each year. JDCC’s Health Promoters program is a ten-week course focusing on one of a number of themes, including asthma, diabetes, breast cancer, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, and domestic violence. Upon completion of the course attendees become certified and teach in the community as well, leading their own classes, presenting at schools, or going door-to-door. English-language classes, computer classes, and afterschool tutoring programs are available. After Mireles’s murder JDCC opened a human rights advocacy center focusing on workers’ rights and employment exploitation. Hernández remains active investigating housing and immigration policies. The community of South Chicago, predominantly Mexican and African American, has responded enthusiastically to both the programs and classes the JDCC offers, and a majority of attendees remain with the agency as volunteers. By
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Hernández, Victoria 2005 the agency served more than 21,000 people throughout the year. The JDCC also ventures outside South Chicago. It maintains a sister agency called Flor del Rio in Chiapas, Mexico. This community is composed of families that have been displaced into the mountains and are fighting for survival. JDCC helped in fund-raising efforts to buy an oven so the women could bake and sell bread as a source of income. Each year two representatives from the JDCC visit, discuss their needs, and establish their next projects. Most recently they have been addressing Flor del Rio’s health needs. Serving as executive director has brought more than its share of challenges for Hernández. Overcoming personal barriers, she has had to face many Latino taboos in promoting safe sex and HIV/AIDS programs. Many of the social service agencies in the area are resistant to her efforts because they see the JDCC as a competitor for funds. Others have come through the agency wanting to supplant Hernández; still others have tried to use the JDCC as an easy means to obtain city funds but without the commitment to help the people and the community progress; yet others doubt that Hernández has been able to found and raise the agency herself. Hernández states, “They think that a Hispanic person—especially a Hispanic woman—cannot manage this. They ask, ‘Who is behind you? Who tells you what to do?’ It’s difficult for people to believe that no one is behind me but God.” Nonetheless, Hernández remains wholeheartedly dedicated to the Juan Diego Community Center’s mission: “To promote leadership, create social change, while serving those in need.” SOURCES: Alter, Peter T. 2002. “Chicago Global Communities: Recent Immigrants from Mexico and Romania Reveal Their Perspectives on Chicago, One of the World’s Most Ethnically Diverse Cities.” Chicago History Magazine, Fall; Black, Curtis. 2000. “Latino Women Organize as Health Promoters.” Newstips, May 29; Hernández, Olivia. 2000. Recorded interview by Martha Espinoza, June 16; Holli, Melvin G., and Peter d’A. Jones. 1994. Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait. 4th ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans; Kerr, Louise A. N. “The Mexicans in Chicago.” http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/iht 629962.html (accessed April 17, 2003). Martha Espinoza
HERNÁNDEZ, VICTORIA (1897–1998) Pioneer entrepreneur Victoria Hernández was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, to Afro–Puerto Rican tobacco workers. She and her brothers Rafael and Jesús were raised by their grandmother, who encouraged their musical careers and helped them all become accomplished musicians. In 1919, when Rafael was discharged from the U.S. military following World War I,
Rafael, Victoria, and other family members moved to New York City. In 1927, after working as a seamstress in a factory and teaching embroidery to the daughters of Cuban families, Victoria Hernández bought a storefront for $500 and opened Almacenes Hernández (also known as Hernández Music Store) in East Harlem (El Barrio) at 1735 Madison Avenue. According to Hernández, it was the first Puerto Rican–owned music store in New York City. Bartolo Alvarez, musician and founder of Casa Latina music store, remembers that to accommodate her growing business, “Victoria moved the store from there because she had a very small store and she had a piano in the back because she was a music teacher. She moved to a bigger store at 1724 Madison Avenue.” The store helped support Victoria’s family and gave Rafael time to write music; he was to become one of the most prolific and best-known Latin American composers. Victoria supplemented the family’s income by giving piano lessons. Her students included two young neighborhood boys who later became internationally known Latin music performers, Tito Puente and Joe Loco. Rafael wrote and played his music in the back of the store. The song that would become the unofficial Puerto Rican anthem, Lamento Boricano, was first heard by Canario in 1930 in this space. He would become the first of many singers and bands to record it. Though Victoria was an accomplished violinist, cellist, and pianist, she dedicated herself to the business aspect of the industry. At that time being a business owner was more respectable than being a musician, especially for a woman. She was one of approximately sixteen women, or .5 percent of the Puerto Rican female migrant population, who, according to historian Virginia Sánchez Korrol, supervised or owned their own businesses in the mid-1920s. In addition to running Almacenes Hernández, Victoria served as a manager, organizing tours and recording dates, for Rafael’s group, Cuarteto Victoria, which he formed in 1932 and named in her honor. Her role as a booking agent extended to serving as intermediary between representatives from record labels such as Victor and Decca and the musicians the companies were seeking to record. Bandleaders like Xavier Cugat contacted her looking for musicians and other necessities like musical instruments for a Latin sound. Victoria, in this capacity, became known to musicians as la Madrina, or the Godmother. She was also involved in the production, as well as the marketing, of music. In the same year she bought the store, Victoria started a record label called Hispano that, according to her, was the first Puerto Rican record label. The label produced records by los Diablos de la Plena and las Estrellas Boricuas that recorded Rafael’s famous song “Pura Flama” (Pure Flame). Unfortunately, although the
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Herrada, Elena Hernández in the Bronx, Victoria Hernández was a pioneer in female entrepreneurship and played a vital role in the developing Latin music scene. She was also in the vanguard of the Puerto Rican migration and settlement in the Bronx that reached its peak in the decades after World War II. Hernández continued to give piano lessons to budding musicians in the neighborhood, though she came to rely on selling her dresses more than the music. In 1965, when Rafael died, Victoria lost interest in the business and turned over the management of the store to her friend Johnny Cabán. In 1969 she sold it to Puerto Rican composer and musician Mike Amadeo. Later in life Hernández married Puerto Rican entrepreneur Gabriel Oller, who had opened the Spanish Music Center in East Harlem in 1934 and founded the record label Dynasonic. She died in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, in 1998 and was buried in her brother’s tomb in the Old San Juan Cemetery. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Alvarez, Bartolo. 2001. Interview by Elena Martínez, January 1; Glasser, Ruth. 1995. My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917– 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elena Martínez Musicians Victoria and Rafael Hernández, 1930. Courtesy of Miguel Angel Amadeo.
HERRADA, ELENA (1957–
records sold well, she had to close the company when her bank went bankrupt at the start of the depression in 1929. In November 1939 Victoria and Rafael sold Almacenes Hernández to Luis Cuevas, a record producer from Puerto Rico. Rafael went to live in Mexico, as did Victoria, where she unsuccessfully tried to start a business. By 1941 she had moved to the Bronx and opened Casa Hernández at 786 Prospect Avenue in the Manhanset Building, where she also resided. Her new store featured music and instruments on one side and dresses on the other, presenting an eclectic assortment of wares not uncommon in stores at this time. It was not until the late 1940s that music shops became more specialized in their products. Music stores such as Victoria’s were significant business ventures for new migrants arriving in New York, providing a place where other migrants could hear the music of their homeland and at the same time creating financial benefits by providing jobs for musicians and forming an integral part of the economic infrastructure of the community. With Almacenes Hernández in El Barrio and Casa
One summer day in 1975 future union organizer and community activist Elena Herrada and her friends were killing time. “They’re giving away money if you’re Mexican at Wayne State University,” said Gilberto Gutiérrez, her boyfriend at the time. Herrada and her friends jumped in her car and headed to WSU for the free cash. Having recently graduated from high school, Herrada had worked and organized in a factory that had closed and was waitressing, between jobs, to make ends meet. She had never considered going to college. When she and her friends arrived, a Chicano professor asked her if she had heard of Emiliano Zapata and the Plan de Ayala. No one in her high school had ever mentioned anything from Mexican history. Observing her in conversation, her friends grew impatient because they had received the money and were ready to leave. Herrada tossed them her car keys and told them to pick her up in two hours. That discussion piqued her interest, and she entered Wayne State University that very year. Born in Detroit to Alfredo and Annabelle Herrada, a Mexican American father and an Irish American mother, Elena Herrada grew up on Detroit’s East Side with her parents, her siblings Fred, Mary, and Julie, and
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Herrera, Carolina a large extended family. Herrada’s paternal grandfather José Santo Herrada had a tremendous impact on her life. Santo Herrada had fled the Mexican Revolution, only to be drafted to fight for the United States during World War I. After the war he met her grandmother Alicia in San Antonio. The Santo Herradas, like countless other families, headed to Detroit for the promise of Henry Ford’s five dollars a day. The promise of good wages did not last. In 1930, with the formation of the Mexican Bureau in Detroit and growing antiMexican sentiment, Santo Herrada sent his family to Mexico during the repatriation, while he worked for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) from 1930 to 1932. Santo Herrada taught himself to read and write, after which he circulated a newsletter criticizing local and national political machines. In speaking about her grandfather’s intellectual influence on her, Elena Herrada stated, “I am still unwrapping his gifts.” Her grandfather and father taught her that poor people can be self-governing, and that her voice and that of her family must always be on the side of the poor. Herrada’s maternal grandmother Loretta McCall taught her “poker, euchre, and how to organize.” Herrada’s father worked for Chrysler and was a union member. Coming from a family of labor and social activists, her parents constantly offered their solidarity to workers in labor struggles or on strike. Herrada recalled, “Growing up, I thought that is what everybody did.” In 1980 Herrada received a B.A. in criminal justice from WSU. Rather than taking a position with the police department or a bureau of prisons, she became an advocate for prisoners. She recalled, “It was the best work I have ever done; sitting in cells with people who were abandoned and forgotten.” While working on prison advocacy, she organized grape and lettuce boycotts, working alongside United Auto Workers (UAW) staffers and members. In 1986 she quickly organized the Friends of Chicano-Boricua Studies at WSU when the program that had changed her life came under attack. This militant and powerful organization was composed of professionals who had benefited from the program. The Friends not only saved the program, but also achieved its expansion. The dean of the College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs was so impressed by Herrada’s negotiations with the WSU president and board of regents that he offered her a fellowship to enter the graduate program in industrial relations. In 1992 she received her M.A. and went to work as a union staffer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). In 1999 United Catering, Restaurant, Bar, and Hotel Workers Local 1064 recruited her, and she continues to work there. In the late 1990s Herrada undertook another chal-
lenge. As an undergraduate student, Herrada had learned about the Mexican repatriation in a Chicano studies class. She also knew that her family had returned to Mexico for a time while her father was a child, but no one ever talked about it. Herrada, Julio Guerrero, Laura Martínez, Robert Muñoz, Blanc Sosa, and members of the Repatriation Project collected interviews and oral histories from people in the barrio with a grant from the city of Detroit for Detroit’s 300th anniversary celebration. The Repatriation Project is a multigeneration committee composed of members of the Mexican American community. In July 2001 the Repatriation Project presented its film and project Los repatriados at St. Anne’s Catholic Church. With music, food, and displays, repatriados spoke about being sent back to Mexico, whether they were citizens or not, about losing their jobs and property, and about the splitting of families. On that summer day the public discussion of the past unified the diverse Mexican community in Detroit. Since its debut the project has traveled throughout Michigan. Herrada stated, “The repatriation instructs everything in the community. . . . [it] allows us to be introspective—why we don’t vote, why we won’t fill out census forms, why we are not political, and why we don’t help other immigrants.” The project historically positions the fear and distrust that permeated the Detroit Mexican American community. It also displays the strength and resilience of the community that continues to grow and thrive despite its past. Herrada envisions a community as a place “where people want to be, not hiding, not attacked, and not brutalized. A place where we can be the cosmic people that we are: multidimensional, spiritual, artistic and intelligent.” Elena Herrada lives in Detroit with her partner Jim Embry and her daughters Alicia Gurulé, Alejandra and Zoë Villegas, and Roxana Zuñiga, and her grandson Gabriel Joaquin Gurulé. See also Deportations during the Great Depression SOURCES: Balderrama, Francisco, and Raymond Rodríguez. 1995. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Vargas, Zaragosa. 1993. Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elaine Carey
HERRERA, CAROLINA (1939–
)
Distinguished fashion designer Carolina Herrera was born in 1939 in Caracas, Venezuela, to a prominent family. She was the second of four daughters born to Guillermo Pacanins, a retired officer in the Venezuelan Air Force, who also functioned as Venezuela’s foreign
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Herrera, María Cristina minister. María Carolina Josefina Pacanins y Niño grew up in a wealthy family accustomed to glamorous parties, horseback-riding lessons, and a love of fashion and entertaining encouraged by María Carolina’s mother and grandmother, who inspired in Carolina a love of fashion and admiration for designers such as Schiaparelli and Yves Saint Laurent. As a young girl, Herrera enjoyed designing clothes for her dolls, and when she turned thirteen, her grandmother treated the two of them to a fashion show in Paris, where she met the legendary Cristobal Balenciaga. Growing up in a strict family environment that emphasized responsibility, returning home on time, and an ethics of hard work, Herrera credited her family for endowing her with a sense of commitment and resilience that would steer and motivate the successful running of the Herrera fashion house. Despite her wealth, love of fashion, and busy social life, Herrera married wealthy landowner Guillermo Behrens Tello at the young age of eighteen. Divorcing in 1964, she and her two daughters moved in with her parents. The aspiring designer then began working in public relations with Emilio Pucci’s fashion house and remarried in 1968, this time to her “first love,” Venezuelan aristocrat Reinaldo Herrera, who would move them to his sixty-five-room mansion, Hacienda La Vega, built in 1590. After her husband became the special projects editor of Vanity Fair magazine, the Herreras moved to New York with their four daughters, Mercedes, Ana Luisa, Carolina, and Patricia. Carolina Herrera then made the decision to postpone her professional career until her children were grown. Ten years later Carolina Herrera was inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame. During an interview with Newsweek magazine Herrera remarked that shortly after opening the House of Herrera she “changed from being a mother with nothing to do but arrange flowers and parties to being a professional working twelve hours a day.” Two years after opening her business Herrera earned worldwide notoriety by dressing political icons, celebrities, and First Ladies such as Jacqueline Onassis and Nancy Reagan. In 1981, Herrera held her first fashion show in Caracas, working closely with Armando de Armas, a Venezuelan publisher. She has credited her passion for style and fashion to many, including some of her favorite designers, Walter Albini, Ken Scott, and Emilio Pucci. Carolina Herrera has also recognized Diana Vreeland and Count Rudi Crespi as two of her most inspiring and supportive friends who realized her talent before she became world known and encouraged her to pursue a profession in fashion. Herrera’s company, Carolina Herrera Ltd., offers a couture line, a bridal couture collection, a leather and
fur collection, a sportswear line for young women, and the more affordable CH line. Herrera also sells her own line of perfumes, Carolina Herrera and Flore, a fragrance that reminds her of her childhood. Carolina Herrera made the annual best-dressed list in 1971. In 1987 she won the MODA award as Top Hispanic Designer, and in 2000 she opened a New York boutique on Madison Avenue and worked closely with her daughter Carolina. On June 7, 2004, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) announced special honorees at the 2004 CFDA Fashion Awards. Carolina Herrera was named Womenswear Designer of the Year. Carolina Herrera’s appearances at international social events have been chronicled in society and gossip columns. Despite her wealth, her outlook in business is motivated by the premise that there is always room for improvement. “I am a perfectionist. When I see the show is ready, and the collection is out and it is quite nice, I still stay ‘I could do much better.’ ” Still, Carolina Herrera chooses to walk to work with her dog Alfonso, rather than drive. She believes in working a full day and then leaving work at work. She attends charity events regularly and relishes family and personal time between Manhattan’s East side and la mansion La Vega. SOURCES: Benson, Sonia G., Rob Nagel, and Sharon Rose, eds. 2003. Hispanic American Biography; 2nd ed. New York: Thompson Gale. Conant, Jennet. 1986. “The Social Sewing Circle.” Newsweek, June 30, 56–57; Estrada, Mary Batts. 1989. “Carolina Herrera Talks About Fashion.” Hispanic Magazine, March, 28–32; Graham, Judith, ed. 1996. 1996 Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson Co. Soledad Vidal
HERRERA, MARÍA CRISTINA (1934–
)
Dynamic scholar María Cristina Herrera was born in Santiago de Cuba in Oriente Province. Her father, Gustavo Herrera, was a colono, a sugarcane planter, and her mother, María Fernández, a housewife. Sadness tinged the joyous news of her birth, for she was born with cerebral palsy, and doctors offered little hope for the one-and-a-half-pound infant. They were wrong. Her mother’s unrelenting determination to save her, combined with years of stringent rehabilitation, enabled Herrera to defy the odds. There was only joy in her father’s tears when, as a young woman, she stepped in line with her classmates to receive her highschool diploma. In 1955 Herrera graduated from the University of Oriente. In 1959 she wholeheartedly embraced a Cuban revolution that promised dignity and freedom for all. For her family, however, as for thousands of others, the revolution soon lost its aura. In 1961 Herrera became an exile in the United States.
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Hijas de Cuauhtémoc Cuba and the Catholic Church had become her raison d’être. The church’s social doctrine has been her moral compass since she was a girl of thirteen when she became, in her words, a “lay apostle” among her fellow santiagueros. During the 1950s Cuban Catholicism blossomed, and Herrera within it, presiding over the Catholic Youth Association at the University of Oriente. At first the revolution offered rich opportunities to meld her patriotism and her faith. For example, in 1959 she joined a church-sponsored literacy drive. Not long thereafter Herrera and hundreds of thousands of her compatriots were branded gusanos (worms), counterrevolutionaries with few options but silence, jail, or even death if they stayed and defied the currents of the new Cuba. Hers is a story not unlike that of her fellow Cubans arriving in the United States in the early 1960s: hard times at first, then success and recognition. In 1968 she earned a doctorate in international and comparative education from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. In 1970 she joined the faculty of Miami-Dade Community College, where she has taught ever since. Exile confronted Herrera with special challenges. She learned to drive, an unlikely accomplishment had the revolution not ended her privileged life in Cuba. “I’m a good, safe driver,” she says beaming. Neither could she ever have imagined that she would one day be her family’s primary breadwinner. But she did provide for her father until his death in 1979 and continued to tenderly care for her nonagenarian mother. Herrera’s crowning professional achievement, however, is the Institute of Cuban Studies (ICS), el instituto. Founded in 1969, the ICS has brought together three generations of Cubans in a commitment to scholarship, dialogue, and pluralism. Meetings of el instituto have provided a forum for the full gamut of ideas and opinions and a platform of civility and democracy among Cubans. Most Cuban American specialists on Cuba and the Cuban American community are, or have been, ICS members. “We sought and seek an honest and intelligent dialogue about Cuban matters,” says Herrera. Honesty and intelligence have not always reaped the desired fruits. At three in the morning of May 26, 1988, a bomb exploded at the Herrera home. The perpetrators aimed to derail an ICS symposium on U.S.Cuba relations, and they almost succeeded: the Miami hotel where the event was scheduled canceled. Nonetheless, a 400-strong, mostly Cuban American audience attended the event that was quickly moved to the University of Miami. In December 1988 the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union honored Herrera with an Act of Courage Award. In 1978 Herrera returned to Cuba for the first time in seventeen years. She joined a group of exiles in what
became known as the Dialogue. Three thousand political prisoners were released, and Cuban American travel to Cuba was permitted in its aftermath. In 1979 Cuban academics first participated in an ICS conference. The following year the ICS held a seminar in Havana. Shortly thereafter the Cuban government froze relations with Herrera and el instituto and denied her the right to travel to Cuba until 1989. Between 1989 and 1991 Cuban scholars once more participated in ICS meetings, and the institute sponsored a symposium in Havana. In 1992 the Cuban government again clamped down on Herrera and has since refused to allow her entry because she is as outspoken an advocate of democracy as she is a critic of the U.S. embargo. Nearing retirement, Herrera can look back with pride and satisfaction on a life well lived. “Love, faith, knowledge, and freedom are the four pillars of my life,” she quietly says. Her dream is to spend her senior years in Santiago, once again the lay apostle among her fellow santiagueros, but in a Cuba where all Cubans finally enjoy freedom and dignity. See also Education SOURCES: Geldof, Lynn. 1992. Cubans: Voices of Change. New York: St. Martin’s Press; Herrera, María Cristina. 2000. Interview by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, May 17; Novo, Mireya L. 1994. “María Cristina Herrera: Ni mártir ni Mata Hari.” Exito, June 29, 24–27; La voz de la Iglesia en Cuba: 100 documentos episcopales. 1995. Mexico City: Obra Nacional de la Buena Prensa, A.C. Marifeli Pérez-Stable
HIJAS DE CUAUHTÉMOC (1971–1972) Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was a feminist newspaper published by a Chicana student organization at California State University, Long Beach, in the early 1970s. Along with numerous other women’s groups that formed within the Chicano student movement, las Mujeres del Longo, as they were formerly known, began to organize in 1968 to address political and gender issues ignored in the Chicano movement. Known by the name of the newspaper, las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, the organization emerged out of the contradictions between the civil rights principles of equality and the gender discrimination women faced in the Chicano movement. Reclaiming a long history of women’s participation within revolutionary struggles, las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc took their name from a Mexican feminist organization that worked against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship in Mexico and called for women’s suffrage and the right to an education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other Hijas de Cuauhtémoc groups along the U.S.-Mexico border provided safe
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Hinojosa, Tish houses and trafficked arms for the Partido Liberal Mexicana. Although there were only three issues, Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc documented the conditions women faced within the student movement, where a gendered division of labor relegated them to secretarial roles and cooking for fund-raisers. This group consolidated as a women’s organization in response to the opposition of women’s leadership. They mobilized after Anna Nieto Gómez, who had been democratically elected to the presidency of the Movimiento Estudiantal Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), was hung in effigy by male student leaders who felt that they did not want to be represented by a woman at MEChA conferences. The newspaper served as a link between women in a multitude of community organizations in the southern California area. The newspaper was a vehicle for regional communication where Chicanas spread information about their political activities, campus issues, Mexicana history, the growth of Chicana feminism, women in the prisons, the role of women in the movement, and a struggle against sexism and sexual politics. Defining a philosophy of Chicana thought and practice, the newspaper included interviews with women community activists and Brown Berets, poems, conference reports, and essays from Chicanas throughout the country. Along with community groups and other Chicana activists from California State University, Los Angeles, the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc organized the first Chicana regional conference on May 8, 1971, as a preparatory meeting for the first-ever Chicana national conference, Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza, held in Houston later that year. Led by early Chicana feminist theorists and poets, such as Anna Nieto Gómez, the organization’s members founded the first Chicana journal, Encuentro Femenil, in 1973, offered the earliest Chicana studies courses, and dedicated their lives to Chicana/o community institutions and political empowerment. See also Chicano Movement SOURCE: Blackwell, Maylei S. 2000. “Geographies of Difference: Mapping Multiple Feminist Insurgencies and Transnational Public Cultures in the Americas.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. Maylei Blackwell
HINOJOSA, TISH (1955–
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Tish Hinojosa was born on December 6, 1955, on the West Side of San Antonio, Texas. She was the youngest of thirteen children of immigrant parents from Mexico. Especially influential in her life was her mother, who was born and raised in Juárez, Coahuila. Her musical influences were varied because she grew up listening
to Spanish-language radio soap operas and traditional Mexican ballads by Augustín Lara, as well as the conjunto sounds unique to San Antonio and southern Texas. In addition, Hinojosa grew up in the age of 1960s pop radio, where she heard the music of Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. She began playing the guitar at the age of fourteen, borrowing the instrument from friends at school. Her mother eventually bought her a guitar on a trip to Mexico. Hinojosa was especially influenced by folk music played live in the coffeehouse scene popular at the time. In fact, His Brothers’ Children, a folk group organized by local Catholic high schools, was the first formal music group Hinojosa joined. In 1974 Hinojosa graduated from San Antonio’s highly esteemed all-girl Catholic school Providence High School. That same year she signed her first record company contract with Lado A/Cara in San Antonio when she was eighteen years old, recording four Mexican pop music singles (Spanish versions of English pop songs, including “The Way We Were” and “You Make Me Feel Brand New”). At the age of nineteen Hinojosa was playing in local clubs and restaurants along the San Antonio Riverwalk. She also did radio jingles for KCOR Spanish-language radio in San Antonio. In the late 1970s the path of Hinojosa’s career took a turn when she made a move to a Texas music scene in New Mexico. There she learned about country music and its foundational artists such as Merle Haggard and Rosanne Cash. After she spent a few years in New Mexico, Hinojosa’s next career transition took her to Nashville, Tennessee. Making the move along with husband Craig Barker, she attempted to enter the Nashville country-and-western music scene but found the boundaries of the country music genre far too stifling. She lost her father at the age of sixteen in 1972 and returned in 1985 to San Antonio, where she was able to care for her mother before her death. Hinojosa states that her mother’s death motivated her to recapture aspects of her cultural roots. This reintroduction to her Mexican music influence as a child laid the groundwork for the unique musical sound and style that is especially evident in her early hit song “The Westside of Town,” a song that honors her parents and her childhood growing up on the West Side of San Antonio. Her 1991 Aquella noche was her first all-Spanish compact disc, and its first song also represented the ideological stance in her music that had to do with retaining cultural memory and heritage: “Tu que puedes, vuelvete” (You who can, return). Many music writers have attempted to capture Hinojosa’s unique musical style in one encapsulating term, but her music usually escapes the confines of commercialized conventional music genres. In many
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Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program ways Hinojosa’s music represents the crossing of genre, language, and stylistic borders, an intersection metaphorically captured in her 1995 release Fronteras, arguably the defining musical project of her career. Hinojosa’s music and performance have consistently been shaped by her foundational belief that music should serve to better motivate individuals to be actors addressing societal issues. As she states, “We should realize the power of messages and the power of music.” Hinojosa has consistently devoted time and effort toward charitable and nonprofit Chicano/Latino cultural and educational events in Austin and around southern Texas. In particular, Hinojosa has devoted her talents to the National Latino Children’s Agenda and the National Association of Bilingual Education. Hinojosa is the mother of two children, Adam and Nina, and she currently makes her home in Austin, Texas. SOURCES: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books; Saldivar, José David. 1997. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deborah Vargas
HISPANIC MOTHER-DAUGHTER PROGRAM (HMDP) (1984– ) Targeting adolescents beginning in the eighth grade and their mothers, the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program (HMDP) provides an innovative program of workshops, field trips, interactive activities, and individual mentoring designed to motivate and prepare them for higher education. Founded in 1984 as a community outreach program at Arizona State University (ASU), the HMDP requires a five-year commitment that starts in the eighth grade and continues through the senior year of high school. Daughters who attend ASU also have HMDP-related activities, including peer advising of younger teens. The curriculum for each grade level integrates both academic and personal issues. Participants learn how to apply for financial aid, how to study for the SAT, and how to write a personal statement. Moreover, they attend structured workshops on pragmatic life decisions—managing money, avoiding friendship violence, and discussing the consequences of unplanned pregnancy. Teens even interview their mothers as part of a Latina history and culture component. Throughout the five-year curriculum there are separate bilingual workshops for the mothers. Students must meet certain criteria to participate in the program. They must be first-generation college bound and enrolled in a specific intermediate or high school. The number of schools served by HMDP has expanded considerably during the last twenty years, with more than forty local public and parochial schools
designated as eligible sites. The adolescents and their mothers agree to a five-year commitment, and the students must have at least a 2.75 GPA in the seventh grade and demonstrate fluency in the English language. Young women whose parents attended college are ineligible. The program has enjoyed remarkable success. According to former director Rosie López, “Since 1988, over 80% of the daughters who began the program in eighth grade have graduated from high school and 63% have enrolled in college.” In 1997–1998, of the 92 daughters who attended Arizona State, 45 percent had grade point averages of 3.0 or higher, and only 6 percent withdrew or were disqualified. In 1998, out of 106 HMDP seniors, 89 graduated from high school and 82 (77 percent) were college bound. Moreover, during the same year the program’s teen pregnancy rate hovered at only 3 percent. The Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program is not a small-scale endeavor. In 1997–1998, 1,198 mothers and daughters attended workshops. Longtime community activist Rosie López directed the program during this period of expansion in the mid-1990s and deserves much credit for bolstering its visibility. Although López resigned in 2000, HMDP continues to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of young women and their mothers. For the 2003–2004 academic year, 750 mothers and daughters participated, and every year, HMDP strives to recruit 100 new mother-daughter teams for the entering eighth-grade class. While inevitably attrition occurs, for the daughters who stay the course, the rewards are well worth the effort. According to a May 10, 2004, article in the Arizona Republic, “85 to 90 percent of the girls finish high school, with 70 percent of the graduates going on to college.” Mothers are also encouraged to pursue their education, and “about one-third of the mothers have been inspired to attend college and several have graduated from ASU.” Raquel Hidalgo, for instance, enrolled in nursing school as the result of participating in the program with her three daughters. In May 1996 the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program reached a milestone: the first mother-daughter team graduated from Arizona State. Lucy and Monica Orozco both majored in bilingual education. Mother Lucy “graduated with a 3.8 grade point average from the Honors College,” while daughter Monica trailed with a 3.2. In Lucy’s words, “I’m too old not to try hard. . . . I had never even dreamed of coming to college. I knew this world existed but it was like a different planet. . . . The people in the program let us know it was possible.” In 1998 the first mother graduated with a master’s degree. As a community partnership initiative, the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program at ASU provides an exciting and effective model of community engagement. Sev-
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Houchen Settlement, El Paso eral schools in the University of Texas system also have Hispanic Mother-Daughter Programs, but their goals are more specific, urging young women to pursue undergraduate degrees in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. At Arizona State HMDP encourages young women to explore all of their academic interests and career options, and many of the academic workshops are rooted in the humanities and fine arts. The success stories continue. When Reyes Hidalgo began HMDP activities with her daughter, she cleaned houses for a living. As her daughter flourished in the program, graduating from high school and then from ASU, Reyes started classes at a community college, transferred to ASU, and now holds a master’s degree in social work. In May 2004, forty HMDP seniors graduated from high school, and twenty-eight were admitted to ASU; “the program’s graduating seniors have secured $232,550 in scholarship money over a four year period.” See also Education SOURCES: García, Matthew. 2002. “ASU program helps Hispanic mothers, daughters.” The State Press (official student newspaper of Arizona State University), December 6; Hermann, William. 2004. “Magazine: ASU 24th for Latinos.” Arizona Republic, May 10; Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program Web site. www.asu./edu/studentlife/msc/hmdp.html (accessed October 7, 2004); Romero, Manny. 2004. “Ceremony recognizes academic achievement by Hispanic women.” ASU Insight (official faculty/staff publication of Arizona State University), May 14; Ruiz, Vicki L. 2002. “Colored Coded.” In Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, ed. Arturo Aldama and Naomi Quiñonez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
HOUCHEN SETTLEMENT, EL PASO (1912– ) For more than ninety years the Rose Gregory Houchen Settlement House has provided social services, day care, and recreational activities for the residents of Segundo Barrio, a poor Mexican neighborhood in El Paso, Texas. Operated by the Methodist Church, the settlement was founded in 1912 on the corner of Tays and Fifth Streets in the heart of the barrio. In 1921 Methodist missionaries, all single European American women, established a small health clinic, providing the first public health services to Mexican immigrants. By 1937 they had raised enough money from Methodist churches and women’s societies across the nation to open the Newark Methodist Maternity Hospital, which offered an array of prenatal, delivery, and well-baby services available on an affordable sliding income scale to area residents. Staffed by volunteer physicians, missionaries, and volunteers, the hospital became an im-
portant community institution. Between 1937 and 1986 more than 62,000 babies were born there. When the settlement, named after a Michigan schoolteacher, opened its doors, the missionaries had two projects: a Christian boardinghouse for single mexicana workers and a kindergarten. Within a few years Houchen offered an array of Americanization programs—citizenship, cooking, carpentry, English instruction, Bible study, and Boy Scouts. Unlike many Americanization projects in the Southwest during this time, Houchen staff encouraged the use of Spanish, and indeed, the women missionaries became fluent Spanish speakers. They also established a bilingual kindergarten and preschool with tuition based on family income. While Houchen prided itself on its bilingual environment, it was not bicultural. Emphasizing “Christian Americanization,” the missionaries during Houchen’s first forty years believed that Catholicism was antithetical to leading a good Christian life and that Protestant beliefs, good citizenship, economic mobility, and social acceptance went hand in hand. In the words of Houchen staff member Dorothy Little, “We assimilate the best of their culture, their art, their ideals and they in turn gladly accept the best America has to offer as they . . . become one with us. For right here within our four walls is begun much of the ‘Melting’ process of our ‘Melting Pot.’ ” Although missionaries strove to create a Protestant enclave, few clients attended El Buen Pastor (the Good Shepherd), the small church established next to the settlement. Most Mexican residents used Houchen services selectively—taking cooking, citizenship, and vocational classes, enrolling their children in the bilingual day-care center and kindergarten, and availing themselves of quality, affordable health care for expectant mothers and children. Conversions, however, appeared to be few and far between. For many years Houchen provided the only playground in Segundo Barrio. While some local priests warned neighborhood children that they would fall into sin if they ventured onto the slide and swing sets, the playground proved a popular attraction, as did a round of children’s activities from music and dance classes (beginning with the kindergarten rhythm band of 1927) to Campfire Girls and Scouting. According to El Paso native Lucy Lucero, “My Mom had an open mind, so I participated in a lot of clubs. But I didn’t become Protestant. . . . I had fun and I learned a lot, too.” Houchen staff members strove to give what they perceived as middle-class advantages to area children with dance recitals, musical pageants, and youth clubs. Valorizing European cultures writ large in all of their activities, the Houchen staff also held out unrealistic images of “the American dream.” Sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, the privileging of race, class, culture,
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Houchen Settlement, El Paso
For many years the elaborate playground at Houchen Settlement was the only recreation area for children of El Paso’s Segundo Barrio. Courtesy of Houchen Community Center, El Paso, Texas.
and color had painful consequences for their pupils. Relating the excitement of kindergarten graduation, one instructor noted in her report a question asked by one of the young graduates: “We are all wearing white, white dress, slip, socks and Miss Fernandez, is it alright if our hair is black?” In other instances former Houchen children remembered the settlement as a warm, supportive environment. “The only contact I had with Anglos was with Anglo teachers. Then I met Miss Rickford [a Houchen missionary] and I felt, ‘Hey, she’s human. She’s great.’ ” By the 1950s Houchen Settlement became more ecumenical and more reflective of the population it served. The emphasis on conversion was dropped, and priests were even invited inside the hospital to baptize
infants. It is no coincidence that these changes occurred at a time when Latinas held a growing number of staff positions. Serving as cultural brokers, these Latina missionaries had participated in Methodistsponsored activities as children and had decided to follow in the footsteps of their teachers. In fact, staff member Elizabeth Soto was an alumna of Houchen. Furthermore, they were assisted by a growing number of neighborhood lay volunteers as settlement activities became more closely linked with the Mexican community. For example, during the 1950s Houchen sponsored two League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) chapters—one for teenagers and one for adults. LULAC was the most visible and politically powerful civil rights organization in Texas.
Saying grace at meals. Courtesy of Houchen Community Center, El Paso, Texas.
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Huerta, Cecilia Olivarez Houchen began to change in other ways as well. Carpentry classes, once the preserve of males, opened their doors to young women, although on a gendersegregated basis. Staff members, moreover, made veiled references to the “very dangerous business” of Juárez abortion clinics; however, it appears unclear whether or not they offered any contraceptive counseling. During the early 1960s the settlement, in cooperation with Planned Parenthood, opened a birth-control clinic for “married women.” Citing climbing insurance costs, Newark Methodist Maternity Hospital closed its doors in 1986. Today the Child Development Center continues to enroll more than 200 local children. Staffed by social workers and community volunteers, Houchen continues to serve the people of Segundo Barrio, today as in the past a neighborhood of rickety tenements and crumbling adobe structures. It offers recreational programs for youths and senior citizens. Houchen’s greatest legacy, however, is in the medical services it provided during the course of sixty years. In the words of historian Eve Carr, “Providing accessible quality health care proved the most effective means of simultaneously combating poverty, serving the community, and earning its trust.” See also Americanization Programs SOURCES: Carr, Eve Ariel. 2003. “Missionaries and Motherhood: Sixty-Six Years of Public Health Work in South El Paso.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1991. “Dead Ends or Gold Mines? Using Missionary Records in Mexican American Women’s History.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 12: 33–56; ———. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
HUERTA, CECILIA OLIVAREZ (1944–
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Cecilia Olivarez Huerta has managed the Nebraska Mexican American Commission since 1994. The only state-funded policy group chartered with a directive to advocate on behalf of the state’s Mexican American and Latino immigrant populations, the commission opened in 1971. Then a secretary to state senator Richard Marvel of Hastings, Nebraska, Huerta served as clerk of the state budget committee that originally funded the commission, but it was not until 1991 that she joined its staff, first as an administrative assistant, then as acting director, and finally as director. Born in her parents’ hometown of Bayard, Nebraska, Huerta remembers the ironies of growing up Mexican in a largely German-Russian farming community. As a young girl, she did not understand why classmates never invited her to parties, yet she relished the community ambiance her activist parents, John Paul Olivarez and Mary Ann Valdez, brought into their
home. Her father built the family house directly behind the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which both sets of grandparents had helped construct in 1920. Proximity and close personal ties to the church made Huerta’s childhood home a sanctuary for Mexican migrant workers in search of community. Her parents provided social services, often boarding people and mediating disputes between Spanish-speaking beet and railroad workers and local employers. Their activism fueled Huerta’s sense of duty. After graduating from Bayard High School in 1962 she moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to attend the Lincoln School of Commerce. Unable to afford more than several months’ tuition, she began working full-time and married. She has a son, Michael, and three daughters, Janet Fiala, Anita Marie, and Monica Eisenhauer. In 1972 Huerta worked for Richard Marvel’s legislative team and then joined the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. During this period the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) began heavily recruiting students from western Nebraska. Following family tradition, Huerta graciously opened her home to Mexican American college students embarking on the same journey she had attempted nearly ten years earlier. She helped form the UNL Mexican American Students Association, organized Spanish masses for the Catholic diocese, and became a member of the Bishop’s Hispanic Advisory Committee, a post she still holds today. In 1974 she helped found the Mexican American through Awareness Association (MATA), a selfbetterment and outreach group for Mexican Americans in the Nebraska state prisons. MATA provided bilingual social programs and helped Spanish-speaking prisoners make the transition into the community upon release. Returning to western Nebraska in the late 1970s, Huerta joined the staff of the Western Nebraska General Hospital School of Nursing and became an officer in the local chapter of Business and Professional Women (BPW). A recognized political activist, she declined an appointment to the Scottsbluff City Council but continued her activist agenda through the BPW. She organized a regional women’s conference that brought Colorado legislator, Polly Baca to speak to the BPW. Huerta described Baca’s speech as a political coup considering the long history of discrimination against Mexicans in the state panhandle. “Bringing in a Latina woman of national stature had never been done before.” Ultimately she diversified the organization. In 1988 Huerta returned to Lincoln, where she continued her advocacy as a board member of the Hispanic Center, a post she held through 1994. At the center she organized an oral history project on Latinas in Lincoln, which later spurred a statewide initiative to document Latino historical experiences in Nebraska. In
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Huerta, Dolores 1995 the Nebraska Mexican American Commission wrote a proposal with the Nebraska State Historical Society for a project called Mexican American Traditions in Nebraska. Funded by the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Community Folklife Program, the project documented the traditional arts, beliefs, and histories of Mexican American communities in Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha, and the Scottsbluff region. As codirector, Huerta organized collaborators from UNL, the historical society, and the Chicano communities to train volunteers in collection methods. The project generated fifty oral histories, a traveling photographic exhibit, a publication titled Nuestros tesoros: Una celebración de la herencia mexicana de Nebraska, and a nationally distributed radio series called The Best of Both Worlds: Hispanics and Nebraska. Among Huerta’s greatest accomplishments, Nuestros tesoros fulfilled her longtime goal to demonstrate Nebraska’s Mexican heritage and her family’s long Nebraskan past. “We contributed to this state and we’re like everybody else. We existed.” SOURCE: Our Treasures: A Celebration of Nebraska’s Mexican Heritage/Nuestros tesoros: Una celebración de la herencia mexicana de Nebraska. 1998. Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society and Nebraska Mexican American Commission.
CSO, sent Huerta to Sacramento to head its legislative program. She pushed for legislation that would give farmworkers access to medical care, disability insurance, and retirement pensions regardless of citizenship status or language skills. During her CSO years Huerta married her second husband, Ventura Huerta, and together they had five children: Fidel, Emilio, Vincent, Alicia, and Angela. The marriage dissolved over disagreements about Huerta’s balance of work and family. In 1962 Huerta joined César Chávez in cofounding the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFWA), later the United Farm Workers (UFW), AFL-CIO, to address the issues of migrant farmworkers in California. Life expectancy for California farmworkers was only fortynine years. Exposed to dangerous pesticide chemicals, entire families often had to work for very low wages, continually migrating with the growing seasons and keeping their children out of school. Huerta’s advocacy efforts on behalf of farmworkers were varied: she persuaded the Department of Motor Vehicles to reinstate revoked licenses and insurance companies to write
Natasha Mercedes Crawford
HUERTA, DOLORES (1930–
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Dolores Huerta was born Dolores Fernández on April 10, 1930, to Juan and Alicia Fernández in Dawson, New Mexico. Her parents divorced in 1935, and Huerta moved with her mother and two brothers to Stockton, California. She experienced a political awakening at Stockton High School, where teachers were sometimes reluctant to believe that she was submitting original work when she earned A grades. Huerta married her high-school sweetheart, Ralph Head, after graduation in 1948 and had the first two of her eleven children, Celeste and Lori. They severed the marriage after three years, and Huerta began to study at local colleges, earning an associate’s degree and provisional teaching credentials. She taught English to rural children for one year before realizing that she could do more good for farmworkers as a labor organizer than as a schoolteacher. While Huerta was not raised in a migrant family, her evolution as an organizer stemmed from her origins in a Mexican agricultural community. In 1955 Huerta met Fred Ross, an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a statewide confederation that mobilized Mexican American communities to register voters and improve public services. She began to work with the CSO on local civil rights campaigns. Huerta met César Chávez in the late 1950s. In 1961 Chávez, then executive director of the
Co-founder of the United Farm Workers, Dolores Huerta in a pensive moment. Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
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Hull-House, Chicago automobile policies for union members. She also pressured the Welfare Department of Kern County to permit Mexicans access to the county hospital. To attract farmworkers to the union and earn their trust, Chávez and Huerta used the “house meeting” method. The team persuaded workers to join the union in the neutral, safe space of someone’s home, away from the threat of grower reprisals. With her children in tow, she canvassed the fields, struggling to garner support for the union. She and Chávez shared early plans to create a cooperative, a credit union, insurance policies (unemployment, health, life), and a newspaper, El Malcriado, all of which eventually came to pass. In 1964 successful lobbying resulted in the U.S. Congress’s abolishment of the Bracero Program, which had permitted the contracting of Mexican nationals as “scab” (nonunion strike-replacement) workers, making it difficult for labor activists to successfully execute strikes. Farm labor activists were much encouraged by this victory. In September 1965 Mexican and Filipino workers in Delano walked off the fields, refusing to pick grapes. The strike lasted five long years. Growers used legal injunctions and violence to try to stop the picketing. In contrast, nonviolent protest marked UFW organizing from the beginning, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Union leaders decided to launch a consumer boycott of table grapes. Their objective was to force growers to negotiate contracts with the UFW that established increased benefits and improved conditions for union members. Dolores Huerta ultimately moved to New York City, the center of grape distribution, to coordinate the industry-wide boycott in 1968 and 1969. After the success of the strikes and boycotts Dolores Huerta represented the UFW in negotiating contracts with the growers. She earned a nickname among the growers—“dragon lady”—referring to her ability to speak “with fire” as she held fast to the terms and conditions that UFW members demanded. One of the union’s most important victories came in 1975 with the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in California. Huerta worked as a lobbyist to secure the passage of the ALRA, which was intended to protect the rights of agricultural laborers in California. It was modeled after the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which excluded agricultural laborers from its provisions. The ARLA provided for the right to boycott, secret ballot elections, voting rights for migrant seasonal workers, control over the timing of elections, the redress of grievances, and certification of union elections. In the 1980s Huerta’s primary concern was lobbying to outlaw the use of harmful pesticides. On September 14, 1988, in the course of a peaceful demonstration
during which she spoke on that issue, San Francisco police severely beat Huerta. She suffered six broken ribs and the removal of her spleen in emergency surgery, injuries for which she was awarded a financial settlement in a lawsuit. At the height of Huerta’s activist career she forged her third marital union with Richard Chávez, brother of César, and the two became the parents of Juanita, María Elena, Ricky, and Camilla. Balancing child rearing with activism was among the greatest challenges of Huerta’s life, but her work illuminated how political engagement could also be a path to women’s selfdetermination. See also Labor Unions; United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: Baer, Barbara L., and Glenna Matthews. 1974. “ ‘You Find a Way’: The Women of the Boycott.” Nation, February 23, 232–238; Bonilla-Santiago, Gloria. 1992. “Dolores Huerta: A Life of Sacrifice for Farm Workers.” In Breaking Ground and Barriers: Hispanic Women Developing Effective Leadership. San Diego: Marin Publications; Chávez, Alicia. 1998. “Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; Rose, Margaret. 1990. “From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga, Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975.” Labor History 31, no. 3 (Summer): 271–293; ———. 2002. “César Chávez and Dolores Huerta: Partners in ‘La Causa.’ ” In César Chávez, ed. Richard Etulain. Boston: Bedford Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Alicia Chávez
HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO (1889–
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Social reformers Jane Addams (1860–1935) and Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940) founded Hull-House as a social settlement on Chicago’s Near West Side in 1889 to serve the rapidly expanding immigrant population of Irish, Italians, and German, Russian, and Polish Jews. By the 1920s and 1930s Mexicans represented a substantial proportion of the neighborhood, which was, in turn, the largest of the three areas of Mexican settlement in Chicago. Accordingly, Hull-House residents developed clubs and activities specifically geared toward their Mexican neighbors, invited Mexican organizations to use Hull-House facilities, and incorporated Mexicans into their ongoing multiethnic and multiracial programs. In the decades before World War I Hull-House became the foremost social settlement in the United States, developing model programs to meet the needs of neighborhood people, engaging in Progressive-era social movements and politics, and attracting private donors from among Chicago’s wealthy industrialists.
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Hull-House, Chicago By the 1920s and 1930s Jane Addams had become internationally famous for her peace activism and less involved in the daily operation of the settlement house. After Addams’s death in 1935 Hull-House floundered. The new leadership did not hold the loyalty of previous donors, whose fortunes suffered in the Great Depression. Moreover, faced with the development of the field of social work as a profession and with increased governmental provision of services through New Deal programs, social settlements in general found their fundamental philosophy and mission challenged. In the mid-1960s eleven of the thirteen buildings that formed the Hull-House complex were torn down to make way for the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a public university with a substantial Latino/ Latina student body. The remaining two buildings—the original house built by Charles Hull and the Residents’ Dining Hall—became a National Historic Landmark and a Chicago Historic Landmark, respectively. They now form the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, which is a unit of UIC. Social service and arts programs continue today, dispersed throughout the city, through the work of the Hull-House Association, a not-forprofit organization. Central to the philosophy of settlement houses was the notion of “residents” living in the community they intended to serve. Hull-House residents paid room and board to live in the Hull-House complex. Although both men and women were residents, Hull-House was especially important as a place that nurtured women’s talents and provided a women’s community. Moreover, Hull-House achievements, for example, the passage of the (Illinois) Factory Act in 1893 that regulated child labor and established an eight-hour day for women and children, resulted from the combined efforts of Hull-House residents and a network of female reformers in Chicago. Jane Addams and other residents were committed to strengthening democracy by aligning private philanthropy with social needs and by holding government accountable. Hull-House residents created a vast array of programs that addressed a wide range of issues. They used research findings, for example, the results from their social survey of the neighborhood, Hull-House Maps and Papers, to buttress their legislative and policy reform efforts. The Immigrants’ Protective League helped immigrants in legal battles; Hull-House offered citizenship and English classes. The Labor Museum demonstrated immigrant crafts and sought to bridge the generation gap by honoring the work traditions of the parents and grandparents of the children who were becoming Americans. Hull-House residents supported local striking workers and participated in the Women’s Trade Union League. Single working women organized the Jane Club as a residential and social unit at
Hull-House. The Juvenile Protective Association kept young people out of trouble and out of the adult criminal justice system. Hull-House organized the first public playground and public baths in Chicago. The kindergarten and Mary Crane Nursery provided day care and children’s medical services. Hull-House clinics disseminated information about venereal diseases and birth control, the latter being controversial among neighborhood Catholics. The Hull-House music school and art school offered courses for children and adults, both for beginners and for talented students who went on to become professionals. Similarly, dramatic activities ranged from children’s classes through elaborately costumed tableaux to ethnic theater and the HullHouse Players theater company. Fleeing civil conflicts, Mexicans moved to Chicago in increasing numbers after World War I, drawn by economic opportunities in the Midwest. Many Mexicans who came by rail ended up living for a period of time in boxcars in settlements scattered throughout the metropolitan region. Eventually Mexican immigrants clustered in three neighborhoods that were linked to male family members’ primary sources of work: South Chicago (steelworkers), Back of the Yards (meatpackers), and Hull-House (railroad workers). Initially the largest of the three communities, the HullHouse neighborhood supported many neighborhood organizations that met at Hull-House, including the Spanish American Society, a mutual-benefit group; the Mexican Athletic Club; the Mexican Art Association; various theater companies; the Mexican Band of Chicago; and the Benito Juárez Society. Men from the Cuauhtémoc Club and the Aztecas organized social events and dances. A social event sponsored by the Mexican Fiesta Club followed the Mexican consul’s weekly visit to meet with Hull-House neighbors and residents. True to its practice of inviting local ethnic groups to celebrate their traditions and culture even while it aided them in becoming U.S. citizens and preached ethnic and racial tolerance, Hull-House sponsored fiestas with Mexican food and dances. The first Mexican American mural in Chicago was painted by Mexican immigrant Adrian Lozano on the wall of the Boys’ Club, where Mexican American boys and other groups met. Consistent with its commitment to foster spirited debate and not duck controversy, Hull-House opened its doors to the left-wing el Frente Popular. Mexican women, girls, men, and boys participated in HullHouse classes and clubs, both in the arts and in gender-specific manual training for jobs. Young men heavily utilized the gymnasium and joined the sports clubs organized to keep them off the street and out of gangs. From its beginnings Hull-House residents sought to
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Hull-House, Chicago learn from and be responsive to their neighbors. In keeping with this philosophy, residents Myrtle Meritt French and Beals French, along with Vinol and Hazel Hannell, initiated the Hull-House Kilns (1927–1937), a commercial pottery that operated out of Hull-House and drew in part upon the skills of Mexican neighbors who came from villages with pottery craft traditions in Mexico. The Kilns, Hull-House, and the potters split the profits from sales of utilitarian and decorative art wares, with potters receiving 40 percent of the sales price. Potters at the Hull-House Kilns were mostly men, a gender division of labor that partly reflected and partly modified practices in their villages of origin. Hull-House attracted Mexican immigrant women by supporting their commitment to their families and by challenging gender norms. At a time when many Mexican immigrants distrusted health care institutions that did not provide interpreters, Hull-House provided a Mexican doctor and visiting nurse services. Mothers who feared that their sons might turn to gangs could send them to numerous clubs and athletic activities; those who sought to have their children taught remunerative skills found classes. At the same time, for some girls and young women, Hull-House offered a space away from home acceptable to their parents. Esperanza Domínguez McNeilly, who later worked as a nurse at the Bowen Country Club, a Hull-House summer camp, recalls being exposed to new ideas through the library and her girls’ club, the Skipperettes: “In that group, you had a voice, and you were listened to, and you mattered in decision making, which wasn’t true in school and . . . in my own home because of the Hispanic culture.” Her brothers, allowed to roam more freely, participated in more Hull-House activities than did she. Marie Díaz, who came from a more affluent family than did most Hull-
House neighbors, taught young Mexican women shorthand, typing, and Spanish. As a teenager, activist Anita Villarreal served as an interpreter at Hull-House before moving on to community organizing. As Mexicans moved into the Hull-House neighborhood, revolutionary political and artistic currents attracted Hull-House residents to Mexico. Emily Edwards wrote about Diego Rivera’s murals before returning to Hull-House to head the Art School. Jane Addams visited Mexico in 1925 and spoke with Mexican feminist leaders, including those in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Latinas’ experiences with Hull-House paralleled those of other immigrant women. Hull-House residents respected and reinforced ethnic groups’ cultures and values even as they sought to strengthen U.S. democracy by preparing immigrants to function as citizens in a multiethnic community and nation. Created and sustained by a cohort of women who chafed at restrictions on the exercise of their talents, Hull-House offered immigrant women the opportunity to develop concrete skills while they also learned new ideas about the larger society and themselves as women. See also Americanization Programs SOURCES: Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, and Allen F. Davis, eds. 1990. 100 Years at Hull-House. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Díaz, Marie D. 1982. Oral history interview by Evelyn Crawford Smith (OH–018, November 4), Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; Ganz, Cheryl R., and Margaret Strobel, eds. 2004. Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920– 1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; McNeilly, Esperanza Dominguez. 2001. Oral history interview with Margaret Strobel (OH–092, June 25), Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Margaret Strobel
I q IDAR JUÁREZ, JOVITA (1885–1946) On September 7, 1885, in Laredo, Texas, Nicasio and Jovita Vivero Idar welcomed the birth of their first daughter, Jovita. The second of eight children, Jovita displayed a love of education and a passion for civil rights early on. In these endeavors her father, the publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, proved influential. Nicasio Idar took pride in his daughter and sent her to Holding Institute, a local Methodist school. In 1903 Jovita Idar earned a teaching certificate at Holding and taught at a small school in Los Ojuelos. The inadequate conditions at this school frustrated her. She resigned and moved back to Laredo to work for La Crónica. Working alongside her father and brothers, Idar used La Crónica to address issues such as racism, school segregation, poverty, the denigration of the Spanish language and Mexican culture, and lynchings. Displaying its transnational orientation, the newspaper also provided extensive coverage of the Mexican Revo-
lution and often took positions in support of progressive reforms in Mexico. Idar and her family saw a direct correlation between the battle for reforms in Mexico and the struggle against oppressive conditions in Texas. La Crónica called a convention of the Orden Caballeros de Honor. This fraternal order sponsored the First Mexican Congress, spearheading the earliest statewide civil rights campaign in Texas. Congress participants gathered in Laredo, Texas, on September 14– 22, 1911, to discuss the educational, social, and economic conditions of Mexican Tejanos. Women participated in the congress and, in fact, formed an offshoot organization called the League of Mexican Women. The league, led by Jovita Idar as its first president, sought to improve the educational experience of Spanish-speaking women and children. Idar often said, “Educate a woman, and you educate a family.” She also favored roles for women in public life. The ideals of the league permeated Idar’s life. For instance, her commitment to education continued even after her formal departure from the profession. In
Writer Jovita Idar, is second from the right in the print shop El Progreso. University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. No. 084–0592, Courtesy of A. Ike Idar.
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Immigration of Latinas to the United States 1911 she began to publish El Estudiante, a weekly bilingual educational magazine used by local teachers for pedagogical purposes. As for women, Idar demonstrated her faith in their ability to function successfully in public arenas, including battle zones. In 1913 Laredoans witnessed firsthand the bloodiness of the Mexican Revolution. The battle of Nuevo Laredo, across the river from Laredo, inspired a number of Laredo women to cross the bridge and aid the wounded. Idar assisted her friend Leonor Villegas de Magnón in the creation of the White Cross. Similar to the American Red Cross during the U.S. Civil War, this medical brigade nursed combatants during Mexico’s own civil strife. Idar, Villegas de Magnón, and others traveled with the Revolutionary Army of Venustiano Carranza from the El Paso–Cuidad Juárez border to Mexico City. Upon her return to Laredo, Idar joined the newspaper staff of El Progreso. The newspaper published an editorial critical of President Woodrow Wilson’s order to send troops to the Texas-Mexico border. The Texas Rangers attempted to shut down the offices of the newspaper but were met at the door by a determined Jovita Idar. Arguing that the rangers’ plan was unconstitutional since it violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, she stood her ground until the rangers left. The next day the rangers returned when Idar was not present and destroyed the presses. In 1914 Idar’s father died. She and her brothers continued to publish La Crónica. Idar also worked for a number of other newspapers, including El Eco del Golfo, La Luz, and La Prensa. In 1916 she joined her brother Eduardo in the publication of another family newspaper, Evolución. Jovita Idar married Bartolo Juárez on May 20, 1917, and the couple moved to San Antonio. She and her husband established the Democratic Club, and she worked as a precinct judge for the party. She established a free kindergarten, worked at Robert G. Green County Hospital as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients, taught hygiene and infant care courses for women, and coedited El Heraldo Christiano, a publication of the Methodist Church. Idar Juárez did not have children, but she became the family matriarch, serving as a strong role model for her nieces and nephews. In 1925 her sister Elvira died in childbirth, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter, Jovita Fuentes. Idar Juárez helped raise and educate her niece. The work of Jovita Idar Juárez reflected a commitment to improve the lives of Mexicans in Texas and Mexico. She died in San Antonio on June 13, 1946. See also Feminism; Journalism and Print Media; Mexican Revolution
SOURCES: La Crónica (Laredo, TX). January 1, 1910–April 18, 1914; González, Gabriela. 2004. “Two Flags Entwined: Transborder Activists and the Politics of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in South Texas, 1900–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Idar, Ed, Jr. 2000. Interview by Gabriela González, August 31; Limón, José. 1974. “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo.” Aztlán 5, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Fall): 85–117; López, Jovita Fuentes. 2000. Interview by Gabriela González, September 11; Primer Congreso Mexicanista, Verificado en Laredo, Texas, EEUU de A. Los Dias 14 al 22 de Septiembre de 1911. Discursos y Conferencias por la Raza y para la Raza. 1912. Tipografía de N. Idar. Gabriela González
IMMIGRATION OF LATINAS TO THE UNITED STATES The process and experience of immigration vary widely for women from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but they have in common the reality of the unintended consequences of living in the United States. Similarly, the perception and understanding of immigration differ dramatically in both the sender and host countries. Traditionally, many American liberals have relished the view that immigrants come to America for a better life, and that that dream has been fulfilled to the benefit of both American society and the immigrants (or their children, actually) who assimilate to the new country’s ways. Others, usually associated with conservative postures and the defense of AngloEuropean cultural supremacy, believe that immigration is a threat to the American standard of living and social order. In recent decades yet others, often political leftists or cultural nationalists, have understood immigration within the context of the American-led capitalist world order and view transnational migration as part of neocolonialism and the means by which the capitalist metropolis is supplied with cheap labor. This same framework of a new world order encourages yet others to see in polyglot America a future world that celebrates and encourages diverse cultural expressions and preservation, even while a postmodern world economy breaks down economic and social barriers. Much evidence can be marshaled in support of any of these positions, and indeed, each may contain some element of truth. In response to immigration in general, the United States passed several important immigration acts in 1917, 1921, and 1924 that affect Latina immigration. These acts stemmed the flow of southern and eastern European immigrants and placed literacy and other restrictions on Western Hemisphere movements, but posed unclear attempts to curtail Mexican men and women, who were badly needed as a cheap, pliable
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Immigration of Latinas to the United States labor force. The acts, therefore, reflected AngloAmerican ambivalence about the presence of Mexican immigrants who simultaneously did the important service and agricultural work for the nation and irritated Anglo sensibilities about race and religion. Between 1930 and 1965 relatively few Latinas migrated. Economics, including the depression of the 1930s, and congressional legislation (especially the Immigration Act of 1965) made the difference in first stemming immigration, as did the act of 1952, and then facilitating it, especially with the amendments of 1978. In this latter measure Congress effectively collapsed the quotas for Europe and the Americas into one and, since European immigration waned considerably, opened up hundreds of thousands of new slots for people from Latin America. The legislation of 1965 also liberalized opportunities for family unification; in other words, if a man could get established in the United States, it became easier for his family to join him. While this legislation dealt with legal immigration, the controversial Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) sought to solve the problem of illegal immigration by simultaneously dramatically enlarging the INS Border Patrol and legalizing the status of many long-term undocumented immigrants. Immigration historically comes in waves: its rates vary over time because political and economic conditions in both the sender countries (the “push” factors) and in the host country (the “pull” factors) change in ways that alter the appeal or necessity of migration. For example, as stated earlier, few women immigrated to the United States in the 1930s from Mexico or anywhere else because the depression meant that there were few jobs to attract (or “pull”) them. One should
always be aware, however, that while some trends are certainly discernible, matters relating to the decision to leave one’s country, frequency of return, legal status in the United States, and economic success cannot be reduced to hard-and-fast tendencies or theories. Indeed, when Latinas have immigrated to the United States, they have almost always done so within the complicated tensions created by the demands of their socioeconomic environment, their families, and their own personal choices. Thus each immigrant woman simultaneously fits into larger, more common patterns of population movements and retains unique characteristics. A not improbable but imaginary narrative illustrates this complexity. One woman from Michoacán, Mexico, might have immigrated to the United States to reconstitute her family when her husband received legal status via the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. Another from Puerto Rico, abandoned by her fiancé who flew to New York, might have taken advantage of her status as an American citizen and decided on her own to board a plane. Yet another, who lost her husband in the terrible civil war in El Salvador of the 1980s, might have journeyed by bus and foot, first to Mexico, then to the border, and managed to cross into the United States illegally. These Latinas, with dramatically different backgrounds and reasons for migrating, might work together in the same hotel in Chicago or Las Vegas and discuss with one another in Spanish ways to negotiate the new place. When times were good, the work would be steady and the tips generous. When the economy slumped or catastrophic events rattled the security of the host country, fewer guests stayed at the hotel, and the workers could all be laid
Family of Puerto Rican migrants at the airport with a travelers’ aide agent. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Immigration of Latinas to the United States
Mexicans at the U.S. immigration station, El Paso, Texas. Photograph by Dorothea Lange, June 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-018215-E.
off. Then they would likely share information about where new jobs might be found, but the Mexican woman could take the bus to join her husband in Fresno, the Salvadoran could join her cousin in San Francisco, and the Puertorriqueña could fly back to the island. Therefore, as one might expect, there are certain ways in which the immigration of Latin American women reflects general trends, as well as ways in which gender makes the experience of border crossing distinct. Mexican women have historically moved on a north-south trajectory to what was once the far northern frontier of New Spain, then became Mexico, and then became the American Southwest and California after 1848. This place, at once alien and familiar, is now understood by many of them as el norte. It was in the first three decades of the twentieth century that the immigration of Mexican women to the United States flourished and began to establish the framework by which people continue to assess, not always accurately, the migration of women from all over Latin America. They arrived in several ways. Many of the women migrated as a member of a family that sought the relatively consistent work, usually agricultural, that residence north of the border symbolized. Others migrated following their husbands, brothers, or fathers in a quest for family reunification. A few others came as solas, or women alone. While faith, food, and language often remained familiar for them in the colonias of Texas and California of the 1920s, the two main destinations for Mexican immigrants, there were important ways in which women’s lives changed in the new land. The Mexican cultural inheritance prescribed that women’s work would be confined to the home, and figures such as the Virgin of Guadalupe provided powerful models of ideal
womanhood. These customs and icons traveled north, but they came into conflict with the reality of making a living in places like San Antonio and Los Angeles or in the agricultural industry. In these areas women, especially daughters but sometimes mothers, worked for wages or in piecework. While they usually contributed some part of their earnings to the family economy, there could be a little left over that could be used at their discretion. During this era a common theme found in Mexican, Latin American, and American history was urbanization. It is important to understand its impact on female immigrants living in the cities. Immigrant women saw girls attending public schools (some were segregated and some were mixed), young women going to movies of the 1920s, unchaperoned women going out in public to work or socialize, and new modes of dress, courtship, and male-female relationships. With their own money and new patterns of behavior, female immigrants could, and despite some family conflict often did, achieve some degree of independence from their fathers and husbands. While statistics verify the fact that throughout the twentieth century most Mexican and other Latina immigrants came from the poorer sectors of their home countries and then worked at menial jobs in the north, it is important to know that teachers, writers, entertainers, and wives of the wealthy—indeed, women from all social classes—have also immigrated. Nevertheless, immigrants often replicated the social divisions of the home country in the new land. The more established or affluent immigrant women often shunned the newer arrivals and frequently distanced themselves from their less fortunate compatriots, whom they blamed for bringing on the discrimination in schools and public places that all Latinas faced.
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Immigration of Latinas to the United States
Newly arrived family greeted by a travelers’ aide agent. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Nonetheless, Latinas of all classes could gaze in wonder upon the silver screen at the movie-star immigrants Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez in the 1920s and 1930s and listen with joy to the songs of the daughters of immigrants, Selina and Gloria Estefan, in the 1980s and 1990s. The rationale for immigration in the latter decades of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century has continued to vary widely. Mexican women faced a decline both in economic opportunities and the viability of their family farms, as well as in the number of men they can depend upon because so many have migrated. In the view of many analysts, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has exacerbated these troubles. Guatemalans and Salvadorans have fled civil war and in many ways understand themselves to be political refugees, a category that U.S. authorities deny applies to them. It is the opposite for Cuban women, who, if they make it to American shores, receive resident status and resettlement aid. They are granted refugee status for political reasons based predominantly on the U.S. opposition to the Marxist Castro government. Puertorriqueñas, whose cultural norms may not proscribe work outside the home, have historically migrated to the United States for economic reasons. They have American citizenship status, which allows them to commute freely between the island and the mainland and may entitle them to welfare benefits once state residency requirements are met. Among the increasingly large Dominican community, centered in New York City, women immigrants—who are not conditioned to engage in wage labor—are much more likely to journey in the cause of family unification.
Cultural differences notwithstanding, most recent Latina immigrants, including Cuban refugees, engage in wage labor. Indeed, Latinas in general have provided a solution to the problem faced by employers who will not or cannot hold on to native-born workers by paying more money and improving working conditions. The employment of needy immigrant women at wages below the American standard has saved many factories, especially in the garment industry in New York and Los Angeles, from extinction. Latina immigrants also find work as domestics and in day care, and their employment has enabled many American professional families to gain the affluence afforded by a twosalary income. This situation can be analyzed within the context of globalization and the view that the widening gap between rich and poor countries produces a migration/immigration scenario that benefits the American economic system in many ways. Within that global context Latinas have either immigrated for a limited amount of time to earn a set amount of money and then return to their homes with some cash or have crossed the border for a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children. About two-thirds of Dominican immigrants of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, work as factory operatives in New York and one-fifth as domestics. In California Central American and Mexican women more likely work cleaning hotels and offices and in agriculture, but many do work in garment factories and as domestics or niñeras. In all of these jobs in all of these places work tends to be low paid and inconstant, but integral to the functioning of local economies. Then, too, as immigrant communities have grown, women have been able to find jobs in sales and clerical work in
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Immigration Reform and Control Act the wide variety of stores and businesses that cater to immigrants. The sort of job one works in has much to do with legal status, length of stay, and Englishlanguage skills. Latina immigrants inevitably find that life in the United States requires adaptations whether they are married or unattached to a man. Single women find that they must rely on networks of friends and relatives both to organize their migrations and then to prevail in the new place. One who migrates from Mexico or El Salvador virtually always has a prearranged destination, a place where shelter and advice about finding a job will be at least temporarily available. A woman may have a sponsor or proper papers to regularize her transportation and her residence in the United States. Others, especially given the increased surveillance at the border since IRCA, must rely on a coyote, or smuggler, who has been obtained for her by friends or relatives. Once women are in the United States, they must rely on these networks for financial help, material assistance (child care, for example), and information about where to live and find a job. The literature on Latina immigration demonstrates that such support systems provide female solidarity, solace, some safety, and familiar food and language in the unfamiliar place, and that these relationships are vulnerable to the human foibles of jealousy, tardy repayment of loans, unreciprocated tendering of meals or lodging, and the inevitable stresses of people living in crowded conditions. These networks are what make migration a selfsustaining social process. Once women adopt the strategy of migration to sustain family and community, or simply to enhance their lives, and enact these networks of support, then they and their sisters, cousins, mothers, and friends will continually join the migration process. The lives of married women undergo transformation too. It is the goal of many heads of households to migrate to the United States to make money so that they can go back to their countries of origin with more resources. This is part of the reason that women’s wage labor may be looked upon more favorably in the north than in Mexico or the Dominican Republic. It is also part of the reason that Latinas expect more equality in the immigrant household, especially regarding child care and financial obligations. Indeed, the literature affirms that wives prefer to spend money on things that will make their lives better in the United States— appliances, home furnishings, and education—while husbands prefer to save for the return. Thus the matter of women’s work outside the home proves more complex than simply its lowly status and the overcoming of cultural presumptions about it. It can be a creative, and sometimes destructive, tension in the marital relationship.
It is certain that the immigration of Latinas is of great importance for both the home countries and the United States, that such migration will continue, that adjustment for both Americans and immigrants will not be easy, and that the different frameworks for understanding these phenomena mean that agreement on causes and solutions will not be forthcoming. This is the rich and difficult history of migration worldwide, one that Latinas migrating to the United States are continually in the process of remaking. SOURCES: Colón-Warren, Alice. 1994. “Puerto Rican Women in the Middle Atlantic Region: Employment, Loss of Jobs and the Feminization of Poverty.” In The Commuter Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Migration, ed. Carlos Antonio Torre, Hugo Rodriquez Vecchini, and William Burgess, 255– 285. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de las Universidad de Puerto Rico; Grasmuck, Sherri, and Patricia R. Pessar. 1991. Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press; Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Douglas Monroy
IMMIGRATION REFORM AND CONTROL ACT (IRCA) In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was enacted to curb undocumented immigration to the United States. The main objectives of IRCA included ending the economic incentive of employment to undocumented immigrants while at the same time conferring legal status on these immigrants. Policy makers felt that by stopping the pull factors associated with undocumented immigration to the United States and by changing the legal status of approximately 3 million immigrants, they could control the rate of undocumented immigration. IRCA contained two major provisions. Legalization, also known as “amnesty,” established a procedure for granting legal resident status to undocumented immigrants who had entered the United States before January 1, 1982, and who had lived continuously within the country. If an immigrant met all the qualifications for legalization, he or she would then be granted temporary resident alien (TRA) status. After eighteen months an immigrant’s status would be adjusted to permanent resident alien (PRA) status, and then after five years an immigrant could apply for naturalization. Special agricultural workers (SAWs) were also allowed to apply for legalization. These immigrants were required to have labored in the agricultural sector for at least ninety days between May 1, 1985, and May 1, 1986. IRCA mandated that the amnesty or legalization process
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Intermarriage, Contemporary begin on May 5, 1987, or 180 days after the enactment of the law, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was in charge of processing the applications. Employer sanctions formed the second main provision of IRCA. This policy prohibits employers from knowingly hiring or recruiting immigrants unauthorized to work in the United States. Employers must ask employees to show proof of legal status in the United States, and in order to verify this status, employers must examine a worker’s documents, such as a Social Security card, passport, or other identification. Employers must fill out forms (I-9) verifying the status of each employee. Before implementing sanctions, the INS first ensured that employers were cognizant of the new policy. After several months of outreach and educational visits by the INS, employers were then selected for inspections. If an employer continued to violate the employer sanctions provision as specified by IRCA and continued knowingly to hire undocumented immigrants, he or she would then be penalized. INS agents faced the difficult task of monitoring all employers, as well as their hiring practices, in addition to confronting a high reliance on undocumented workers in the service and construction sectors. As a result, employer sanctions have failed. The policy was also fraught with many loopholes. For instance, immigrants may circumvent sanctions by simply using fraudulent identification cards. Amnesty has been the most lasting policy implication because approximately 3 million immigrants, many of whom were Latino, applied for amnesty under IRCA. Benefiting from the legalization program, many immigrants who applied for amnesty have now become naturalized citizens. See also Immigration of Latinas to the United States SOURCES: Bean, Frank D., Barry Edmonston, and Jeffrey S. Passel, eds. 1990. Undocumented Migration to the United States: IRCA and the Experience of the 1980s. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press; ———, Rodolfo de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, and Sidney Weintraub, eds. 1997. At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield; Magaña, Lisa. 1998–1999. ”The Implementation of Public Polices in Latino Communities.“ Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, 11:75–88; ———. 2003. Straddling the Border: Immigration Policy and the INS. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lisa Magaña
INTERMARRIAGE, CONTEMPORARY Twentieth-century intermarriage serves as an indicator of the diversity of Latina heritage in the United States. Interracial marriages are also examples of how Latina women have engaged with the shifting social land-
scapes of the twentieth century. Latinas in the 1900s, like their Spanish colonial foremothers, exercised a level of personal choices in their selection of a partner despite cultural taboos and social mores. Since marriage is often characterized as a private matter, a common misconception is that intermarriage has little effect on public dynamics. On the contrary, intermarriage holds social, civic, and cultural significance in shaping communities and identities in the United States. Intermarriage in the lives of Latinas exemplifies how Latinas from various parts of the United States have navigated the convergence of public and private matters. From the early-twentieth-century Imperial Valley to the Bronx of the 1950s and to the early-twenty-firstcentury city of San Jose, intermarriage has taken a variety of shapes and forms. The relationships between Latinas/os and Euro-Americans do not accurately reflect the diversity of unions that have spanned the century. Intermarriage throughout Latina history has included relationships with other Latinos of different national origin, Asians, Asian Americans, and African Americans, as well as Euro-Americans. These diverse unions were not anomalies of U.S. multiculturalism; they are rooted in the settlement and interaction of Asian, African, and European peoples in Latin America. At the end of the nineteenth century the coolie trade brought a large labor force of Chinese men to various parts of Latin America. These men partnered with local women in places such as Mexico, Cuba, and Peru. Known for singing rancheras such as “Mexico lindo,” Mexican singer and entertainer Ana Gabriel traces her Chinese ancestry to these interactions. In the United States a number of social and cultural factors shaped intermarriage. Historical discrimination played a significant role in dictating which intimate relations unfolded in places like California. Until the 1940s antimiscegenation laws banned non-European or Euro-American men from marrying Euro-American women. Filipino men migrated to the Imperial Valley, San Diego, and Sacramento areas. As targets of antimiscegenation laws and comprising mostly bachelor communities, Filipino men established relationships with Mexican and Mexican American women in the area. These communities also came into frequent contact with each other as farmworkers in the Pajaro Valley of Salinas and sugar-beet fields of the central valley, which led to the forging of intimate relationships. Discriminatory legislation, uneven gender ratio in different communities, and high levels of interaction all contributed to the intermarriages between people of Asian and Mexican descent in California. Similar relations developed among Punjabi and Mexican women in the Imperial Valley of California. In the early 1900s a number of Punjabi men from India
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Intermarriage, Contemporary settled in the Imperial Valley. In the absence of Indian women, these settlers and future farmers developed social and intimate relationships with local Mexican and Mexican American women. Depending on the physical traits of the bride, antimiscegenation laws rarely prevented marriages between Mexican women and Asian or South Asian men. If the woman appeared too fair and was presumed to be white, county clerks would deny couples a marriage license. In response, the bride and groom would travel to the next town where other clerks were known to be less intrusive. Cultural characteristics of Mexican and Punjabi families facilitated the forging of these relationships. For many Mexican and other Latina women, extended familial ties and compadrazgo (fictive kinship) served as an important network that shaped and maintained work, cultural institutions such as the church, and social relationships. Lala Sandoval met her husband Sucha Sing Garewal through her sister, Matilde Sandoval, who had married Kehar Sing Gill, Sucha’s business partner. Punjabi men, accustomed to arranged marriages, relied on some form of social/familial network to establish unions. The extensive networks among Mexican women between sisters, cousins, mothers, and daughters coalesced with Punjabi customs. Both groups welcomed the informal matchmaking that took place among Mexican female networks. The decisiveness of romance and personal choice did not function in a vacuum in American society. Other social factors such as community formation, segregation, and cultural norms also operate in the fashioning of intermarriage. Social scientists identify these factors as structural determinants of intermarriage. The size of a community played a significant role in the rate and pattern of intermarriages throughout the twentieth century. Within a small ethnic/racial community individuals looked to other ethnic/racial groups for social relationships and used networks already in place. For example, at midcentury in the boroughs of New York, initial Dominican migration to the United States was relatively small. Intermarriage between Dominicans and other Latino groups was common from the 1950s to the 1970s. As the Dominican community grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dominicans formed their own social and cultural networks, and intermarriage decreased. According to many social scientists, social structures limited the rate of intermarriage. In the barrios of New York City, El Paso, and Los Angeles segregated housing (de jure or de facto) and minimal opportunities for mobility (jobs and education) defined the level of interaction between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and other Latinos and other racial groups, especially EuroAmericans. In circumstances where communities were segregated, racial characteristics and features further
Petra and Manuel Santiago at their wedding in New York, 1941. Courtesy of the Petra Santiago Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
complicated the dynamics of intermarriage. Latinas/os who appeared whiter navigated through social structures and institutions with much more fluidity. Language also played a significant role in determining the possibility of intermarriage. Women and men who wielded some knowledge of English could venture outside their own immigrant communities. As a result, second-generation Latinas demonstrated higher rates of intermarriage in New York City and Los Angeles. Increased opportunities for cross-cultural contact often led to intermarriage. During the 1940s the onset of World War II ushered in a great deal of social change that altered racial and gender hierarchies. Because many American men were drafted into the armed services, job opportunities in the growing defense industry opened up for women. The collective identity these women took on was “Rosie the Riveter.” Based in cities such as Long Beach, California, the factory floors of companies such as Douglas and Lockheed became grounds for social and cultural exchange. Beatriz Morales Clifton, born in Texas and raised in San Bernardino, took a job in the defense industry. She met
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Intermarriage, Historical both of her husbands, Frank Jones and John Clifton, at Lockheed. Echeverría Mulligan also met her husband in the wartime era. He was in the military, and she briefly worked for Avion, a subsidiary of Douglas Aircraft. Because she was of Mexican descent, Rose and her husband’s courtship did not go unchallenged. His family did not welcome the match. Andrea Pérez, a daughter of Mexican immigrants, met her fiancé Sylvester Davis through their work in the defense industry. The couple’s union and resistance to the antimiscegenation laws culminated to the landmark California Supreme Court case Perez v. Sharp. Because Davis was African American and Pérez was considered “white,” they were denied a marriage license. The case showcases how antimiscegenation operated at full force until World War II. The couple garnered the support of the Los Angeles Interracial Council, which argued on their behalf that the court case violated their equal protection and religious freedom under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1948 the court decided in favor of Pérez and Davis and found the antimiscegenation law unconstitutional. By using shared religion to navigate laws that enforced racial codes, Andrea Pérez negotiated the political and legal terrain, decided the course of her personal matters, and helped reshape the future of interracial relations. As in Pérez’s case, the relationships that developed out of new encounters, romantic courtships, or other particular motives did not go unchallenged. Throughout the twentieth century intermarriage has tested the boundaries not only of the law but also of cultural change. Like Rose Echeverría Mulligan, many Latinas were not readily welcomed into their husbands’ families or social network. In the early twentieth century Mexican women were at times criticized for taking Punjabi men as husbands. In the latter half of the twentieth century, at the height of the Chicano movement, women who chose to engage in social relationships with someone outside of the Chicano community were viewed as traitors to the movement’s efforts to promote cultural pride and unity. Despite these challenges, the end of the twentieth century showed increased tolerance of cross-cultural unions between Latinas and other groups. For instance, in San Jose an organization called Animating Democracy introduced Ties That Bind, an art exhibit that opened up discussions on Latina/o and Asian intermarriage. Contrary to many theories alleging that intermarriage was a key indicator of assimilation and posed a threat to ethnic cultural maintenance and social cohesion, Latinas in the twentieth century who intermarried demonstrated that cultural coalescence remained a dynamic force in Latina history that dates back to the colonial era. Regardless of marriage partners or last
names, Latinas have drawn from numerous sources and influences to maintain and refashion their culture. Reflecting the diversity of backgrounds and the constant forging of a Latina identity, contemporary intermarriage serves to illustrate how Latinas continue to negotiate social and cultural encounters and change in private and public ways. In the 2000 census the option of “mixed race” as a racial category was made available. Six percent of Hispanics or Latinos identified themselves as mixed race. At the turn of the twenty-first century Latina identity is not defined by surnames, phenotypes, or rigid census categories. Concurrently, increased rates of intermarriage and growing numbers of individuals selfidentifying as “mixed race” have not caused the downfall of Latina identity or culture. Prominent examples of women who are partners in or products of cross-racial unions, such as actresses Salma Hayek and Rosario Dawson and educators Pat Mora and Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, have proven that intermarriage continues to be a vibrant dynamic woven into the creation of twenty-first-century Latina identity. SOURCES: Anderson, Robert N., and Rogelio Saenz. 1994. “Structural Determinants of Mexican American Intermarriage, 1975–1980.” Social Science Quarterly 75, no. 2 (June): 414–430; Brilliant, Mark. 2002. “Color Lines: Civil Rights Struggles on America’s ‘Racial Frontier,’ 1945–1975.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Gilbertson, Greta A., Joseph Fitzpatrick and Lijun Yang. 1994. “Hispanic Intermarriage in New York City: New Evidence from 1991.” IMR 30, no. 2:445–459; Keefe, Susan E., and Amado M. Padilla. 1990. Chicano Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Leonard, Karen Isaksen. 1992. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Marquez, Sandra. 2004. “What’s in a Name: The Next Generation of Hispanics May Not Have Spanish Surnames.” Hispanic Magazine, April; Lubin, Alex. 2004. “ ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ The Politics of Race and Marriage in the California Supreme Court’s 1948 Perez v. Sharp Decision.” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 4 (July): 31–37; Murguía, Edward. 1982. Chicano Intermarriage: A Theoretical and Empirical Study. San Antonio: Trinity University Press; Pascoe, Peggy. 1996. “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America.” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June): 44–69; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
INTERMARRIAGE, HISTORICAL Intermarriage has played a prominent role in shaping the lives of Latinas in the United States. The dynamics of historical intermarriage and interracial unions account for the multiracial heritage that has characterized the background of Latinas. Interracial relations can be
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Intermarriage, Historical traced to the colonization of the Americas by Spanish conquerors. Interracial or interethnic social relationships did not always fall under the formalized institution of marriage. These social encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans led to intimate relations, formalized and informal, voluntary and involuntary, and contributed to the development of racial categories known as the caste system in Latin America and racial hierarchy in the United States. The most notable of the initial unions during the colonial era was the relationship between Malintzin Tenepal, also known as “La Malinche,” and Hernán Cortés, the most commonly recognized interracial union of New World encounters. Malintzin was an Aztec woman, born of nobility. As a child, she was sold into slavery by her mother. At the age of fourteen Malintzin was given to Hernán Cortés and served as a translator and diplomatic guide. Malintzin had a son fathered by Cortés. The children born of interracial sexual relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans—as in the case of La Malinche and Cortés— were mestizo. This biological and cultural mixture, known as mestizaje, became a racial category that determined the social standing of many people during the colonial period. Malintzin has been cast as a traitor to the Aztec people and an accomplice in the conquest and subsequent colonization of the Americas. This misrepresentation of her history conceals the personal choice involved in historic interracial relations and intermarriages. Like many men and women during this time period, Malintzin made personal choices in light of her social position. At the young age of fourteen and as a woman of slave status, Malintzin possessed linguistic skills and crucial diplomatic skills. She demonstrated initiative and leadership, certainly enough to improve her own situation, by exercising her skills and responding to the social and cultural transformations of the time. Because of her tenuous image as a cultural and social negotiator, “La Malinche” has been embraced by Chicana/Latina feminists as a symbol of the struggle and creation that emerge from negotiating two distinct worlds. Interactions between Native Americans and Europeans were not the only cross-racial unions. Africans, in a forced migration to the Americas through slavery, were also historical players in interracial interactions. The institution of slavery not only involved physical displacement and forced labor, but also included sexual violation. Many African women were forced into sexual relations at the hands of European plantation masters and foremen. The children of these unions, including rape, continued to live under bondage because of their African heritage and mulatto status. Mulatto became the racial category to define those of both African and European descent. An Afro-Latino her-
itage, born of interracial relations, was most common in regions of the Caribbean and South America, such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Venezuela. The imperialist expansion efforts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries connected people and places in unexpected ways, resulting in a variety of interracial marriages and relationships. For instance, Spain was the colonial power of most of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Spanish ships frequently transported trade goods between New Spain and the Philippines. In 1810 Mexico revolted against Spain and demanded independence. While a Spanish ship from the Philippines was docked in Mexico, a few hundred Filipino mariners deserted the ship to escape bondage and their Spanish masters. A number of these men became established in Acapulco and married Mexican women. Intermarriage played a significant role in the lives of Latinas in the southwestern region of what is today the United States. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries this region was home to diverse groups of people. Spain was the sovereign state over this region from 1521 through 1821. Until the late eighteenth century it was inhabited by Native Americans. Spanish authorities attempted to settle the area, considered a frontier, in 1540 by sending missionaries into what is today New Mexico. The Pueblo Indians, infuriated by the poor treatment involved in the “civilizing” efforts of the Spanish settlers, expelled the intruders in 1680. Spanish expeditions did not venture into the northern frontier until the 1770s. In 1769 Father Junípero Serra led an expedition and established the first nine missions in California. Missionary settlement in California and the northern frontiers of Mexico served several functions. Spanish state and church sought to convert Native Americans of the region to Catholicism. Indians who were incorporated into the missions and who converted to Christianity were identified as neophytes, implying their perceived childlike status as newly converted Christians and their inferiority compared with Spanish peoples. Expansion and settlement in California and other frontier regions were also responses to foreign threats to Spanish imperial lands. Settlement in the uninhabited areas was necessary to fortify Spain’s sovereignty in the regions. In response to the state’s request for settlement, Father Serra recruited families to join the expedition into California. Marriage and the presence of women played a crucial role in efforts of settlement and colonization. Spanish women were seen as central to replicating Spanish society in frontier regions. The state encouraged single women to join expeditions in order to provide suitable marriage partners to single soldiers of the
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Intermarriage, Historical presidios (forts that protected the mission settlements). Spanish families were subsidized for their travel to California, were granted equal rations of land (to both husbands and wives), and were compensated with a promised annual salary. The year 1774 marked the first arrival of Spanish-speaking women in Alta California. Marriage played a significant role in the organization of social and political relations in Alta California. Marriage ensured the social and cultural roles assigned to men and women, served to reproduce the population, and sustained the patriarchal order of the Catholic Church and state. The Spanish state feared that without the presence of suitable marriage arrangements sanctioned by the church, the social and political order of Spanish rule would unravel and have little success in the colonies and in the frontier. As a result, intermarriages were arranged on a variety of levels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before the arrival and availability of Spanish women, Spanish lawmakers attempted to persuade Spanish soldiers of the presidios to marry Christian Native American women or neophytes. These marriages served not only to establish family structure and daily life in the Spanish frontier but also to calm conflicts between Indians and Spanish soldiers. These conflicts resulted from the soldiers’ excessive sexual assault of Indian women. By awarding land to soldiers who agreed to marry Christianized women, the Spanish government hoped to attract soldiers to remain in California, quell Indian distrust of soldiers and mission authorities, and forge healthier relations. Between 1769 and 1821 only 15 percent of all marriages recorded united neophyte Indian women and Spanish-mestizo men. Five women of the Ohlone tribe married either presidial soldiers or Spanish sailors in 1773. Among these women were Margarita Domínguez, María Seraphina, and María de García. These unions were among the first intermarriages and produced the first mestizo families in California. Policies regarding intermarriage between neophyte women and Spanish men shifted in light of the political and social atmosphere. Originally the state sought to convert soldiers into settlers by granting those who married Indian women land rights from areas surrounding the mission, in addition to retirement and financial support. Margarita Domínguez married Manuel Butrón, and the couple was granted land adjacent to Mission San Carlos. Many neophyte women, accustomed to Indian traditions of marrying outside their communities in order to benefit their families, recognized the advantages of marrying Spanish soldiers. Twenty years later the Catholic Church revised the policy of granting land in order to preserve the land for mission Indians. Unfortunately, Indian women who
married Spanish man were not included and lost the rights that other Indians of the mission maintained. In addition, Spanish soldiers no longer saw an incentive to marry Indian women. The expeditions of Father Junípero Serra and later Juan Bautista de Anza in 1774 brought settlers, including families and single women, to California. At this point most marriages occurred between gente de razón, or those of Spanish descent. The descendants of these families were to become some of the most prominent California families of the nineteenth century. Doña María Feliciana Arballo de Gutiérrez joined the Anza expedition with her two daughters and was known to have kept morale up among the journeying group. One of her daughters, Estaquia Gutiérrez, eventually married José María Pico, the father of future California governor Pío Pico. The Mexican War for Independence of 1810 created a number of transformations that altered the social landscape of the northern frontier. In 1821 the country gained its independence from Spain. One change was the shift in landholdings. The young Mexican government secularized the missions and issued land grants to Spanish Mexican families in California. The rancho or ranch-style estates became the major economic and social institution in place of the California mission. The owners of the ranchos were known as Californios, referring to those who were born in California and to families granted land titles. About 370 land titles were issued by the Mexican government to Californios. Contrary to British and American traditions that reserved landownership to men, Mexican law allowed women to inherit and own land. Thus daughters and widows could serve as sole proprietors of properties they inherited from fathers and husbands. Another change was economic trade. Under Spanish sovereignty Mexico’s trade was limited within the Spanish Empire. Once it was independent, Mexico opened up commercial exchange with traders from all over the globe. California’s hide and tallow industry became a source of economic activity and attracted traders from the United States and England. Intermarriage between Californios and foreign merchants was not unusual. At the age of thirteen Doña Anita de la Guerra y Noriega became engaged to Alfred Robinson, age twenty-seven. Originally from Massachusetts, Robinson came to California to trade hides as an agent of Bryant, Sturgis, and Company. In 1834 he came before Don José Antonio Julian de la Guerra y Noriega and confessed his love and commitment to Anita. Several social, political, and economic dynamics shaped intermarriage, particularly in early-nineteenthcentury California. Family formation and relations played a significant role in the organization and con-
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Intermarriage, Historical trol of California society. Marriages between families of the landed elite were not only publicly declared intimate relations, but also political and economic arrangements. Marriage served to unite land titles, ranches, and economic resources, making some Californio families very powerful. The connections made through marriage resulted in an extended kin network of Californio families. Since California women were entitled to land, marriage to a daughter of a California ranchero was beneficial not only socially but also economically. British and American men who wed Californianas became part of this elaborate network of families, gained the elite status of their wives, and saw their economic positions become more secure or improve. Foreigners had to complete several requirements to intermarry. They had to become citizens of Mexico, convert to Catholicism, and apply to the governor for permission to marry. John Forster, later known as Don Juan Forster, was originally from England and migrated to Mexico to assist with family business. In 1837, already a Mexican citizen, he traveled to California. He later married Ysidora Pico. Through land titles and purchases Don Juan Forster and Ysidora Pico acquired a number of ranches, including Rancho Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita, Rancho Desechos, and Rancho Trabuco. They became one of the most prominent families of California’s history. During Mexican rule of California, 1821 to 1848, there were eighty recorded intermarriages. Similar unions took place in Texas. The Mexican government, in efforts to encourage settlement of Texas, offered men who married a Tejana an additional quarter of land to the one-third league of land given to single men. Ursula de Veramendi was the daughter of the governor of Coahuila y Tejas and married James Bowie. Her father, Juan Martín de Veramendi, and Bowie became partners in the cotton business in Saltillo. Doña Petra Vela de Vidal, widowed by the death of her first husband, became one of the most prosperous Tejanas. As in California, Tejanas maintained their rights to inherit land after Texas became part of the Union in 1845. Stories circulated that she inherited the Vidal silver fortune in Durango, Mexico. Doña Petra eventually married her second husband, steamboat captain Mifflin Kennedy, and together they accumulated substantial property holdings. Their ranch in Nueces County had an area of 172,000 acres and was the home of twenty families. In many cases husbands gained considerable financial benefits by intermarrying. Doña Petra used her wealth to build a reputation and became known throughout Texas as a rancher and philanthropist. Not all interracial unions had the element of economic benefits. Intermarriage was not always a union in the interest of social and economic mobility, but re-
flected class parallelism. With the high number of foreign men in the Mexican frontier, versus the low number of foreign women, many bachelors established intimate relations with Mexican women. Tejana Juana Cavasos, after being captured by Comanches, was ransomed. She married Charles Barnard, the brother of her rescuer, and in 1849 opened a trading post in Somerville County. Holding no animosity toward Native Americans, Doña Juana began trading with Indians and accumulated wealth and property, including a gristmill. In New Mexico women married trappers, traders, and mountain men traveling along the Santa Fe Trail. Marriage, as a formal institution, did not prevail over all interracial unions. Many men and women lived under common-law marriages. In the 1850 census of Santa Fe 50 percent of Euro-American men appear to be listed with Spanish Mexican women. Although the number of men in this group was about 300, the census does show how many interracial relationships were forged in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When U.S. forces conquered the Southwest after the Mexican-American War of 1848, an influx of American men flooded the new U.S. frontier. The political and social changes that swept the region had an impact on families, particularly those of the landholding elite. With their status now in question under U.S. sovereignty, some viewed the war with hate and despised the presence of Americans. Like those in California, some used social relations to weather the changes and adjust to the new social and political atmosphere. Mexican women were still prospective marriage partners because of their ability to inherit land and capital. American men became prospective marriage partners for women, especially Californianas, to forge links to the American political establishment and to maintain their elite status. Almost all six daughters of Manuel and María Engracia Domínguez married European American men. John Carson and John Watson were the lucky Americans who entered into the prominent family that owned Rancho San Pedro. Later, at the turn of the century, the Carson and Watson families became some of the most prominent in Los Angeles. The Carson and Watson land companies eventually developed into the city of Carson and the city of Watts. The children of intermarriages grew up in bicultural households. Although women willingly entered into these unions with American men, culture and identity were not willingly surrendered. Families maintained Spanish as the principal language and Catholicism as their faith, among other cultural indicators. Women who intermarried contributed to the fashioning of new identities in late-nineteenthcentury U.S. society.
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International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Casas, María Raquel. 2006. “Married to a Daughter of the Land: Californianas and Interethnic Marriage, 1820–1880.” Reno: University of Nevada Press; Castañeda, Antonia I. 1990. “Presidaria y Pobladoras: Spanish-Mexican Women in Frontier Monterey, Alta California, 1770–1821.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Gonzalez, Deena J. 1999. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press; Hurtado, Albert L. 1999. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Monroy, Douglas. 1990. Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Berkeley: University of California Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
INTERNATIONAL LADIES GARMENT WORKERS’ UNION (ILGWU) (1900–1995) As Latinas migrated to the United States and became concentrated in garment-industry jobs, many became members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). The ILGWU was founded in 1900 in New York City, and by 1904 there were sixty-six locals in twenty-seven cities, with more than 8,000 members. Membership grew to 90,000 by 1913 and to 305,000 by 1944. Initially more than half the members were men,
most of whom were in the skilled cloak and suit trade. These eastern European Jews and Italians retained the leadership positions even when the industry and the workforce changed. While Puerto Rican women joined the ILGWU in New York, Mexican and Mexican American women (hereafter Mexicanas) predominated in Los Angeles. The ILGWU provided the means to struggle for improved working conditions. Some scholars, however, have argued that the union leadership discriminated against Latinas, but others stress the challenges of organizing in the garment industry. In New York Puerto Rican women joined the ILGWU during the 1920s, and an organizing campaign in the early 1930s brought more than 2,000 Puerto Ricans into the union, mostly into Dressmakers’ Local 22. Efforts in 1933 to 1934 to create a Spanish-speaking local in the dressmakers’ industry were rebuffed by the union leadership. Nevertheless, two Puerto Rican women served as delegates at the 1934 annual convention. As migration increased after World War II, so did Puerto Rican women’s union membership. In 1947 the ILGWU claimed 7,500 Puerto Rican women members and estimated that an additional 4,000 to 8,000 worked in other small shops. Puerto Rican women also joined Skirtmakers’ Local 23. According to labor economist Roy B. Helfgott in 1959, half of the local’s 8,036 members were Latin Americans, mostly Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans held leadership positions on the executive board and various committees. Puerto Rican garment workers in journalist Dan Wakefield’s Island in
Latina migrants were concentrated in garment industry jobs. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union
Members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union giving their support to the reelection of Mayor Robert Wagner, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
the City (1959) and those interviewed years later by Rina Benmayor and her colleagues described the better wages, conditions, and benefits in union shops, as well as the inclination to turn to the union when work issues arose. Yet the garment industry was changing in ways that had a major impact on Puerto Rican women workers and on the union. Competition fostered the industry’s relocation to places outside New York and exerted downward pressure on wages. Section work increased, in which workers sewed just one portion of the garment instead of the entire garment, which meant deskilling and lower wages. As union shops left the city, small contracting shops proliferated and were far harder to organize. Tensions between Puerto Rican workers and the union leadership surfaced during the 1950s, because union leaders and staff were not Spanish speakers, and because the union again rebuffed the creation of a Spanish-language local and did not recognize Local 60A, which was mostly composed of Puerto Rican men. In 1957 and 1958 Puerto Rican workers challenged the ILGWU’s representation on several occasions. But the globalization of the industry affected both workers and the union as employment and union membership plummeted. During the 1960s the union supported wage restraint in an effort to keep the industry in New York. While some charged the union with discrimination against the new majority of Puerto Rican and African American workers, others noted that the garment industry was the first to face
the challenges presented by an increasingly global economy. In Los Angeles the ILGWU organized women dressmakers, including Mexicanas, into Local 103 during the 1920s, yet the local had to be rechartered in 1923 and was out of existence again by 1926, despite an estimated 3,000 workers in the ladies’ garment industry, mostly dressmakers and mostly Mexicanas. In 1933 Rose Pesotta, an ILGWU organizer, went to Los Angeles to organize the estimated 7,000 dressmakers, 750 of whom were in the union but did not have a contract. Pesotta challenged union leaders who thought that Mexicana dressmakers could not be organized. Local 96 was chartered, and within one month Mexicanas participated in a strike. In 1934 a more successful organizing campaign was launched, and by 1935 the ILGWU had 2,460 members, with 1,100 in Dressmakers’ Local 96. In 1936 another strike by 3,000 dressmakers led to agreements with fifty-six dress shops that employed 2,650 workers. They won a closed shop, weekly minimum wages, and a thirty-five-hour week. By 1947 the Los Angeles ILGWU’s membership grew to 5,804. Still, an estimated 17,000 unskilled workers, mostly in the growing dress and sportswear industry, were not unionized. An organizing campaign and a 1948 strike resulted in sixty-nine new sportswearmanufacturing shops signing union contracts and another twenty-two renewing their contracts, accounting for 1,400 and 800 workers, respectively. Union demands for health, welfare, and vacation benefits were
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International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union met. By 1950, 4,527 workers in the sportswear industry were organized. The early 1950s witnessed the first retirement fund, the establishment of an ILGWU Health Center, and a 1953 agreement that increased wages for all dress workers. Despite gains, the union was unable to organize more than 10 to 15 percent of sportswear workers, who numbered 50,000 by the 1970s, still mostly Mexicanas. Persisting ethnic, cultural, and language gaps between the union leadership and workers created obstacles. So did structural changes in the industry that paralleled those in New York. Raids by the Immigration and Naturalization Service against undocumented workers created an atmosphere of fear. In the 1970s the ILGWU hired Mexicana/o organizers and strove to increase workers’ and communities’ involvement. Nevertheless, union membership declined from 12,206 in 1948 to 9,842 in 1953 and to just 3,700 in 1979. In 1995 the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU) merged to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE). The changes affecting the industry in New York and Los Angeles were nationwide. In the late 1960s the two component unions represented
800,000 workers, but by the end of 1997 UNITE represented about 300,000. UNITE has established Garment Workers’ Justice Centers in New York and Los Angeles, serving workers, regardless of where they are employed, by providing basic services and education and helping workers get the back wages they are owed. SOURCES: Benmayor, Rina, Ana Juarbe, Blanca Vásquez Eraso, and Celia Alvarez. 1988. “Stories to Live By: Continuity and Change in Three Generations of Puerto Rican Women.” Oral History Review 16 (Fall): 1–46; Laslett, John, and Mary Tyler. 1989. The ILGWU in Los Angeles, 1907–1988. Inglewood, CA: Ten Star Press; Ortiz, Altagracia. 1990. “Puerto Ricans in the Garment Industry of New York City, 1920–1960.” In Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960, ed. Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, 105– 125. Albany: State University of New York Press; Soldatenko, María Angelina. 2000. “Organizing Latina Garment Workers in Los Angeles.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 137–160. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications. Wakefield, Dan. 1950. Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Carmen Teresa Whalen
J q JARAMILLO, CLEOFAS MARTÍNEZ (1878–1956) In 1955 Cleofas Martínez Jaramillo wrote Romance of a Little Village Girl, her autobiography, in which she stated, “I feel that I have accomplished one thing—preserved in writing our vanishing Spanish folk customs.” Spanning seventy years, Jaramillo’s autobiography is also a history of Nuevomexicano culture. Writing the history of Nuevomexicanos was extremely important to Jaramillo, because she saw her world changing in the face of new populations and the twentieth century. She thus tried to maintain the cultural traditions that she held dear to her heart through writing and through preservation. Jaramillo was born in 1878 in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, to Julian Antonio Martínez and Martina Lucero Martínez. In 1906 she left the small village and attended the Loretto Convent School in Taos, New Mexico. She later attended Loretto Academy in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1898 she married Venceslao Jaramillo, a politician and businessman. As Venceslao Jaramillo’s wife, she rose in status when he was elected to the New Mexico legislature. With Jaramillo she bore three children, but only one daughter, Angelina, survived infancy. When Venceslao Jaramillo died, Cleofas Jaramillo faced a new future as a widow. Because Venceslao had never shared his business dealings with his wife, Cleofas Jaramillo was shocked to discover herself in debt after his death. To survive financially, she sold some of her personal belongings, gave up her home to move into a two-bedroom apartment, and took her only daughter, Angelina, out of private boarding school. It was Jaramillo’s custom to link her personal experiences to the overall experiences of Nuevomexicanos in the same era. Thus in Romance of a Little Village Girl Jaramillo wrote about the death of her husband, “Yes, a big man had disappeared from the political and social scene of New Mexico, and for me, the happiest epoch of my life had ended. . . . During his life the people had lived in peace and harmony, but a few years after he departed this life, plunder, burning of buildings, and murder disturbed the peace that had reigned before.”
She saw her world as changing. The historical circumstances, in which Euro-Americans took over the land once owned by native Nuevomexicanos, caused Jaramillo to believe that the culture she had known as a child and for much of her adult life had ended. Thus Jaramillo clung to a Spanish heritage both as a weapon in the struggle to retain a sense of the community and culture that she perceived as lost, and as a method for her to hold an exalted status over Euro-Americans, when in financial reality Jaramillo had none. For Jaramillo, an accurate depiction of Nuevomexicanos and their culture became essential. For example,
Prominent New Mexico writer Cleofas Jaramillo, circa 1898– 1900. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Neg. no. 9927.
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Jiménez, María de los Angeles Jaramillo decided to write her cookbook, The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, because of the “deficiencies” she saw in Spanish cookbooks written by EuroAmericans. She wrote, “And still these smart Americans make money with their writing, and we who know the correct way sit back and listen.” In addition, Jaramillo became involved in planning the Santa Fe Fiesta activities because Anglos had botched earlier events. In this same spirit Jaramillo penned her other two books, Cuentos del Hogar (1939) and Shadows of the Past (1941), and founded la Sociedad Folklorica (the Folkloric Society). An educated Nuevomexicana, Jaramillo tried to resist the total domination of Hispano land by EuroAmericans. She perceived the consequences of the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, the annexation of New Mexico by the government of the United States in 1848, and the growing immigration and modernization of New Mexico in the 1880s as fatal to the traditional way of life. In many ways her world had changed forever. She saw that Nuevomexicanos no longer owned much of the land on which their families had lived. As a Nuevomexicana, she believed that land tied people together and fostered their way of life. This loss of land compelled her to preserve her own vision of Nuevomexicano culture and traditions, one that she passed on to future generations. SOURCES: Jaramillo, Cleofas M. 1939. Cuentos del hogar (Spanish Fairy Tales). El Campo, TX: Citizen Press; ———. 1939. The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes. Santa Fe: Seton Village Press; ———. 1941. Shadows of the Past/Sombras del pasado. Santa Fe: Seton Village Press; ———. 1955. Romance of a Little Village Girl. San Antonio: Naylor Company. Marisela R. Chávez
JIMÉNEZ, MARÍA DE LOS ANGELES (1950– ) A committed human rights activist in a variety of community-based organizations, María de los Angeles Jiménez has consistently sought to remedy injustice and civil rights violations in both Mexico and the United States. Born the oldest of five children on August 8, 1950, in Castanos, Coahuila, in Mexico, she, along with her four siblings and her parents, immigrated to Houston, Texas, in 1957. Jiménez excelled at learning, and in 1969 her debating skills won her the state championship. This talent later served her well in her personal and professional organizing efforts. She attended the University of Houston and graduated in 1974 with a B.A. in political science. During this time Jiménez became active in the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and worked on furthering Chicana/o political representa-
tion through her efforts in La Raza Unida Party. In an interesting turn of events that enriched her political development, she married in 1974 and migrated back to Mexico. Jiménez worked on economic improvement and social justice projects for campesinos (farmworkers), organized independent unions, and taught English classes in Sinaloa and Mérida, Yucatán. She had twins in 1978 and after divorcing in 1984 decided to move back to Houston so that her children could be near her parents. Upon her return she worked for a youth employment agency and served as a Texas State Employees Union and farmworker organizer. Jiménez’s transnational experiences heightened her awareness regarding the pervasiveness of gender, race, and economic discrimination directed at migrants throughout the United States, but in particular along the U.S.-Mexico border. These personal experiences and observations of migrant abuse moved and inspired her to influence policy and legislation at all levels of government in both nations. In 1987, and for the next sixteen and a half years, Jiménez served as the coordinator of the Law Enforcement Monitoring Project of the American Friends Service Committee, headquartered in Houston. She coordinated efforts to document human and civil rights violations along the California, Arizona, and Texas-Mexican border as U.S. immigration policy and officials increasingly sought to criminalize immigration and enforce punitive legislation. In coordination with various border organizations and communities Jiménez also highlighted the impact of globalization on immigrants. In her testimony on immigrant rights before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. attorney general in 2003, Jiménez pointed out the “shortcomings of current immigration law and policy that create obstacles to an orderly, safe and legal movement of people across international borders.” Jiménez asserted that the immigrant population bears the “brunt of human rights violations . . . in terms of being shot unjustifiably, beatings, etc. Many of the [documented] cases meet the international standards of torture.” Jiménez has worked tirelessly to reform immigration law and policies and provide safety and justice for migrants as they cross the international border. She argues, “It is time to provide legal alternatives of moving across international borders. It is time to reclaim life, dignity and rights for all persons.” In 1998 Jiménez was one of the main proponents who lobbied the Mexican government to change its constitution and institute a dual-nationality policy for Mexican nationals living away from their homeland. She became one of the first 100 U.S. citizens to claim dual nationality under this landmark legislation. In 2004 this longtime immigration activist chaired the Mayor’s Advisory Committee for the Office of Immi-
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Journalism and Print Media grant and Refugee Affairs of the city of Houston, the fourth-largest city in the nation, with a population of 28 percent foreign-born residents. SOURCES: Jiménez, María. 1998. Interview by José Angel Gutiérrez, June 14. CMAS no. 96. Center for Mexican American Studies Oral Histories, Special Collections, University of Texas at Arlington Library; ———. 2002. “Enforcement of Immigration Laws Harms Border Communities.” Interview by Nic Paget-Clarke. In Illegal Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. William Dudley. San Diego: Greenhaven Press; U.S. Congress House. Committee on the Judiciary. 2003. Deadly Consequences of Illegal Alien Smuggling: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims Committee. 108th Cong., 1st sess., June 24. Lydia R. Otero and Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith
JOURNALISM AND PRINT MEDIA Latinas share a long tradition of writing, either bylined or anonymously, for Spanish, English, or bilingual newspapers and magazines in the United States. Latino and Latina journalists wrote for Spanishlanguage newspapers that proliferated throughout the nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, playing an important role in shaping public image and opinion even as they defined Latino barrios and organized social, political, and cultural activities. Hundreds of newspapers serving Latino enclaves throughout the Southwest, the Midwest, and the East Coast committed community presses to informing a predominantly agricultural and working-class readership, raising political and economic consciousness, and commenting on a myriad of sociocultural issues. Whether large or small, urban, rural, or suburban, weeklies or dailies, the Hispanic press offered alternatives to the dominant media, preserved and protected cultural values, especially the Spanish language, and provided barrio news and views of broader issues and concerns in the countries of origin that both informed U.S. Latino communities and connected them with each other. Newspapers assumed leadership roles, wielded the power of the pen to support the political and economic welfare of the local populations, and often acted as defensores del pueblo hispano (defenders of the Hispanic people), protecting communities against encroaching Americanization. In addition to homeland events and affairs and coverage of the Spanish-speaking world, the press ran advertising and reported current affairs in the United States. It printed intellectual and popular literature, promoted education, provided special-interest columns, and often founded magazines, publishing houses, and bookstores to disseminate the creative work and ideas of local and external writers.
The maintenance of a bilingual or Spanishlanguage press required capital and the involvement of hundreds of individuals, from the owners of the enterprise to the writers, the marketing people, and the consumer. It was, without doubt, an expensive proposition. Nonetheless, Hispanic periodical literature flourished throughout the United States. Los Angeles and San Antonio each supported more than one newspaper. Periodical scholars generally identify three historical categories for newspaper publishing, although some periodicals overlap, depending on the time frame, the region, and the ethnicity of the consumer of the literature. They are the press in exile (1850s–1917), the immigrant press (1917–1930s), and the ethnic or minority press (1940s–present). From the early 1800s to the present, Latina journalists have participated in the production of periodical literature as writers, editors, and entrepreneurs. During the era of the exile press the experiences of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, a staunch supporter of Cuban independence from the mid- to the late nineteenth century, are noteworthy. From 1869 until 1897 Casanova de Villaverde consistently wrote revolutionary articles in the New York–edited newspaper América Latina and surreptitiously sent them throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States to raise sympathy for the cause of Cuba Libre. The daughter of Cuban hacendados, Casanova was home educated according to the privileges of her class. She married Cirilo Villaverde, author of the first novel to focus on issues of Cuban racial blending on the island, Cecilia Valdés, and other notable literary works. Supporters of political independence and the abolition movement in the 1850s, the couple was exiled from Cuba for their actions. The Villaverdes promoted propaganda and extended their revolutionary zeal throughout the United States and Latin America from their home base in New York City. Emilia Casanova raised funds for the insurgents of the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) by selling her jewelry and other valuables. Hundreds of her letters to worldfamous leaders petitioned for collaboration and endorsements of Cuban independence. During the 1880s New York City was a hotbed of incendiary exile politics. Expatriates from the Caribbean and Latin America lived and worked in the city, the headquarters for fomenting independence in the homelands. In the revolutionary journalistic tradition La Voz de America (1865), a manifestation of the press in exile, published the work of Lola Rodríguez de Tió, the Puerto Rican patriot supporter of Antillean independence, whose nationalistic verses and rousing speeches often appeared in print. Founded in New York by Puerto Rican and Cuban intellectuals where
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Journalism and Print Media Doña Lola also lived in exile, the paper sought to topple Spanish colonialism in both Cuba and Puerto Rico. Insurgent enclaves took root in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Tampa and Ybor City, Florida, using revolutionary presses and clandestine activities to convert other Latinos and U.S. nationals to their cause. The leading revolutionary paper was La Patria, founded by José Martí and the Partido Revolucionario Cubano y Puertorriqueño in New York. La Patria often praised women for their revolutionary roles and noted their personal sacrifices, as in the case of Mariana Grajales, who lost her husband and sons in the rebellion, or acknowledged their organizational efforts, as it did with Carolina Rodríguez, spy and courier during the Ten Years’ War. La Patria spawned a publishing house, Ediciones de la Patria, to print and sell the works of leading intellectuals of the period. Early in the twentieth century increasing evidence of women’s journalistic involvement and intellectual production was apparent in the exile presses. Associated with the militant activities of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), founded by the Flores Magón brothers, Regeneración was the journalistic voice of the party. Published in various cities of the Southwest, Regeneración and its counterpart in Los Angeles, Revolución, supported the overthrow of the Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico and was resourcefully smuggled to sympathizers across the border. Among the women closely associated with the activities of the PML were the schoolteacher Sara Estela Ramírez (1881–1910), Leonor Villegas de Magnón (1876–1955), and the daughter of Narciso Idar, founder of the newspaper La Crónica, Jovita Idar. Brought from Mexico to teach in Mexican schools in Laredo, Texas, Ramírez promoted labor organizing and revolutionary social reform in Mexico. Adhering to the notion that women needed to reduce their own dependency on men, Ramírez advocated strongly for women’s education. She wrote for La Crónica and El Demócrata Fronterizo and founded La Corregidora in 1901 and the literary magazine Aurora. She also penned articles for Vésper: Justicia y Libertad, founded by another progressive woman, Juana Gutiérrez de Mendoza. Ramírez’s contemporary, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, was noted for founding and financing la Cruz Blanca, a nurses’ corps that aided the sick and wounded on both sides of the border during the Mexican Revolution. Villegas de Magnón was born in Mexico and educated in the United States. In 1901 she married Adolpho Magnón, an American citizen not entirely committed to the rebel cause, and the couple had three children. In 1910 Villegas de Magnón and the children were caught on the U.S. side of the border when hostilities broke out in Mexico. Forced to remain in Laredo, Texas, Villegas de Magnón opened a kindergarten in
her home while she collaborated with Idar on numerous revolutionary efforts. The women demonstrated their sympathy for the rebel uprising by writing articles in La Crónica, a paper dedicated to fomenting unity among Mexican Americans as they struggled for civil and economic rights. Published by Narciso Idar and his eight children, the paper stressed support for Laredo’s Mexican American population. Extremely influential, La Crónica spearheaded numerous civic and political projects and the Idar family also published La Revista de Laredo. Concerned as well with opposing racial discrimination and stereotyping, La Crónica was ideally situated to foreground Jovita Idar’s progressive position on women’s issues. Villegas de Magnón attempted to serialize accounts of her wartime experiences, especially her exploits on crossing the border with twenty-five nurses and joining Venustiano Carranza and his victorious army in their march into Mexico City. Some excerpts were printed in the Laredo Times six years after her death. However, her accounts withered in an attic trunk for three generations before they appeared in print as her autobiography, The Rebel. Gender issues permeated revolutionary fervor in numerous publications, including Teresa Villarreal’s El Obrero (1909) and La Mujer Moderna, which she published with her sister Andrea in San Antonio. Another publication addressed collectively to mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters, Isidra T. Cárdenas’s La Voz de la Mujer (1907), professed a rebellious mission, to seize liberty rather than see one’s children become slaves. Pluma Roja particularly placed the liberation of women in sharp focus. Founded in Los Angeles, Pluma Roja was edited by Blanca de Moncaleano, a Colombian drawn to Mexico in support of the rebellion and exiled from Mexico by President Francisco Madero in 1912. Moncaleano’s Pluma Roja promoted women’s struggles for social, political, and economic freedom and their emancipation from the control of the church, the state, and the patriarchal system. These women viewed women’s issues in tandem with the revolutionary agenda and stressed the notion that one movement could not succeed without the other. Dedicated as well to political journalism, Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo lived in New York City and later in southern Florida. In 1912 she wrote essays on feminist emancipation in the pages of Cultura Obrera. Capetillo published the second edition of Mi opinión in Ybor City in 1913 and penned Influencia de las ideas modernas in 1916. Although the press in exile highlighted conflicts in the homeland, the immigrant press turned an eye toward the development and protection of U.S. Latino communities. From the 1900s to the 1930s newspapers incorporated the interests of an increasingly immigrant
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Journalism and Print Media population from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America that, on the East Coast, assumed a panHispanic outlook but maintained a stricter antiAmericanization focus on the West Coast. Employing hundreds of talented writers, La Prensa, founded in New York in 1913, and El Diario de Nueva York (1948), along with an array of other publications geared to the Spanish-speaking communities, continued to blanket Latino barrios with diverse types of journalism. These papers merged in 1963 to form El Diario/La Prensa, which remains in circulation to the present day. The major and most politically and economically powerful newspapers to emerge in the Southwest were San Antonio’s La Prensa (1913–1963) and Los Angeles’ La Opinión (1926– ), both founded by Ignacio E. Lozano. A family enterprise, the business of publishing La Opinión to this day is maintained in the hands of Lozano descendants, including Lozano women. Ignacio Lozano emerged as a highly influential businessman. He cultivated a specialized, segregated market of consumers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and provided culture and entertainment unavailable in the Anglo press. Moreover, Lozano led the way in recognizing the importance of the Mexican American community, linking its members to their traditions and heritage. Several Latina writers follow in this tradition. María Cristina Mena (1893–1965) focused on Mexican culture, sometimes to the point of stereotyping, in magazines like Century, Cosmopolitan, Household, and American Magazine. Both Jovita González (1904–1983) and Adelina Otero-Warren (1881–1965) penned folkloric works intended to evoke heritage and the connections with the Mexican culture. The Spanish-language press, particularly in the Southwest, promoted cultural nationalism and, ascribing to the ideology of “México de afuera,” attempted to preserve undiluted Mexican communities in the United States. Cronistas (satiric columnists), who also wrote for East Coast papers like Gráfico, satirized women in particular for straying from their Mexican roots and becoming overly aggressive and too American during the liberal days of the Roaring Twenties. The hub of family life and cultural transmission, women were central to the survival of the Mexican and other Latino communities and, as such, were targets for the satirists of the day. The threat of assimilation, coupled with institutionalized programs of Americanization in daily life, presented journalists with a dilemma to be checkmated by emphasizing cultural nationalism. While most cronistas were male, there were also women journalists like San Antonio’s María Luisa Garza (1887– 1990), known by her pen name Loreley, who chided women in her column “Crónicas Femeninas,” published in El Imparcial de Texas, for bobbing their hair, revealing their legs, and smoking in public. Garza was
editor in chief for La Epoca and wrote also for El Demócrata, El Universal, and Gráfico. Class issues entered into the fray when cronistas ridiculed speech habits among the poor or working class or mocked mixing English and Spanish. Women journalists took up the mantle of class and workers’ struggles, and by the 1930s and 1940s activists like Lucia Eldine Gonzáles Parsons (1853–1942) penned editorials in support of labor, socialist, and anarchist causes. Parsons was born in Johnson County, Texas. She married a journalist, Albert Parsons, and became a labor organizer and reformer. A founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Parsons moved to Chicago in 1873, where she continued to advocate for the rights of workers. Like Parsons, Puerto Rican Franca de Armiño was a labor leader, in her case in New York City, where she published commentary in the pages of Gráfico. Among other labor organizers who also wrote is Emma Tenayuco. In 1938 her essay “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” appeared in The Communist. Increasingly entering the arenas of education, social reform, class, gender, and labor issues, and politics, women employed the power of the pen in numerous venues, including writing for organizational newsletters and newspaper editorials. By the 1930s the combination of the Great Depression and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans brought about a decline in newspaper publishing and in the writing of women journalists, due in large measure to the depopulation of the market. Less affected by population decline, the East Coast, particularly New York City, continued to receive migrants and immigrants from Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean into identifiably Latino communities. Another journalistic perspective emerged that aimed at uniting this diverse ethnic-minority community. Josefina Silva de Cintrón, a Puerto Rican woman, founded and edited a slick monthly literary magazine, Revista de Artes y Letras (1933–1945). She considered herself a feminist and surrounded herself with cultivated women of similar persuasion. A member of the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, Cintrón had access to a broad international readership. Revista de Artes y Letras purposefully highlighted intellectual women writers. With a decidedly middle-class focus, women intellectuals wrote short stories, advice columns, poetry, and commentary that appealed to an educated, bourgeois audience involved in cultural and philanthropic activities. Among the notable journalists who wrote for Revista de Artes y Letras were Isabel Cuchi Coll, Carmen Alicia Cadilla, Martha Lomarr, Concha Meléndez, Carmelina Vizcarrondo, Julia de Burgos, and, on occasion, the Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral and the Argentine Alfonsina Sorni. In addition to creative expression, ar-
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Journalism and Print Media ticles emphasized family and child welfare and the importance of maintaining the Latin heritage. But the magazine also took strong stands on relevant community issues, particularly discrimination against Puerto Ricans and the failure of the school system to educate them. Julia de Burgos, an avowed supporter of Puerto Rican independence, also wrote for Pueblos Hispanos— Seminario Progresista. Consuelo Lee Tapia helped found Pueblos Hispanos and managed it from 1943 to 1944. Although it was short lived, it offers another view of how the ethnic-minority press operated. Pueblos Hispanos encouraged electoral participation and particularly supported Democratic Party politics and the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It endorsed local, state, and national candidates for election and promoted pan-latinidad and socialist causes. Paradoxically, it also supported Puerto Rican independence. Lee Tapia integrated a feminist perspective into the paper, actively seeking to critically advance women’s issues. She wrote numerous biographies of Puerto Rican and Latina women. From the 1940s through the 1960s the journalistic advocate for Puerto Ricans and Latinos in New York was Luisa Quintero (1903–1987). Perhaps the most influential woman of that epoch, Quintero worked for La Prensa and later for El Diario/La Prensa. She is remem-
bered best for “Marginalia,” a daily column that cut a wide swath, incorporating community issues, politics, history, religion, and culture. Cultivating a faithful readership, Quintero invited her followers to contribute to political campaigns, which they did. She helped found community organizations and cultural institutions, including ASPIRA and the Puerto Rican Day Parade. In the twenty-first century Rosana Rosado has followed in this tradition. A young and committed Nuyorican journalist, she has been El Diario/La Prensa’s editor and chief executive officer since 1999. Across the nation Latina journalists continue to play important editorial and managerial roles in American periodicals. Los Angeles’ La Opinión has remained in Lozano family hands for generations. Monica Lozano-Centanino has been its associate publisher and Martí Buscaglia its director of marketing. In 1993 Liz Balmaseda won a Pulitzer Prize for her commentaries on Cuban American and Haitian concerns in the Miami Herald. Born in Puerto Padre, Cuba, in 1959, Balmaseda was brought to Miami as an infant. She received a bachelor of science degree in communications from Florida International University in 1981 and, except for a brief period in Central America, has been connected with the Miami Herald ever since. Balmaseda began as a feature writer but soon landed her
Journalist Luisa Quintero interviewing the actor Mel Ferrer. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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La Prensa supports political mobilization against Batista’s government, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
own column. She is interested in a broad range of issues: homelessness, poverty, discrimination, health care, and AIDS, but with a special focus on the people behind the statistics. Balmaseda took a strong stance opposing the mayor of Miami and urging the unification of father and son in the Elián González case.
Rossana Rosado (left) and Monica Lozano (right), the only two Latinas in the United States to head major daily newspapers, El Diario/La Prensa and La Opinión. Photograph by Angelica Willard, El Diario/La Prensa, “Mujeres Destatacadas,” March 20, 2005, Special Supplement.
In 1995 Alma Guillermoprieto was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. A distinguished journalist, Guillermoprieto was born in Mexico in 1949 but moved to New York to become a professional dancer in the 1960s. She became a journalist for the Guardian and later for the Washington Post. Based in Mexico City, Guillermoprieto was one of the journalists to break the story about the slaughter of villagers in El Mozote, El Salvador. As a freelance writer, Guillermoprieto has written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on topics like the Colombian civil war, the Shining Path rebellions in Peru, and post-Sandinista Nicaragua. Both Guillermoprieto and Balmaseda provide sterling examples of contemporary Latina journalism at its best. In their dedication to Latino and Latin American issues and journalistic endeavors, these women are following in the footsteps of a long historical tradition. SOURCES: García, Mario T. 1991. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, and Claudio EstevaFebregat, eds. 1994. Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States. Vol. 3, Sociology. Ed. Félix Padilla. Houston: Arte Público Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell. 2000. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: Origins to 1960. Houston: Arte Público Press; Villegas de Magnón, Leonor. 1994. The Rebel. Ed. Clara Lomas. Houston: Arte Público Press.
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Virginia Sánchez Korrol
Jurado, Katy
JURADO, KATY (1927–2002) Best known for her portrayal of Helen Ramírez in High Noon (1952), Katy Jurado has enjoyed a long and varied career, both in Mexico and in the United States. Born María Cristina Estella Marcel Jurado García in Guadalajara, Mexico, on January 16, 1927, she was the daughter of a cattle rancher. Because her parents forbade her to work in the film industry, Jurado married film actor and writer Victor Velásquez at the age of sixteen. They had two children, Victor Hugo and Sandra. Her third film, La vida inutil de Pito Pérez (1943), garnered her numerous awards in Mexico. Her American debut came in 1951 as the wife of Gilbert Roland in The Bullfighter and the Lady. Through this film she came to the attention of director Stanley Kramer, who hired her for High Noon opposite Gary Cooper. Still not fluent in English, she had to learn her lines phonetically. As the saloon/brothel owner Helen Ramírez, she defiantly stood by Will Kane (Gary Cooper) when no one else would. For the role she received a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe. Two years later Jurado was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for the movie Broken Lance (1954), opposite Spencer Tracy. She portrayed Tracy’s Comanche wife and the mother of Robert Wagner. In Hollywood Jurado portrayed Indian and “halfbreed” women, for example, a Comanche in Broken Lance and Arrowhead (1953). In Stay Away Joe (1967) she appeared as the half-Apache mother of Elvis Presley. In a 1955 interview with Louella Parsons Jurado commented on the mostly Indian roles she was given: “I don’t mind dramatic roles. I love to act, any character at all. But just once I would like to be my Mexican self in an American motion picture.”
Jurado continued to make movies in Mexico. She made El bruto in 1952 with writer and director Luis Buñuel. Her other films include Y Dios la llamó tierra (1961), Un hombre solo (1964), and La puerta y la mujer del carnicero (1968). In 1974 she won a Silver Ariel for Fe, esperanza, y caridad (1973). It was on the set of The Bandlanders (1958) that she met her costar Ernest Borgnine, whom she subsequently married on December 31, 1959, but their tumultuous marriage ended in divorce in 1963. Jurado’s other American movie credits include The Racers (1955), Trial (1955), Man from Del Rio (1956), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Barabbas (1962), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), The Children of Sánchez (1978), and Under the Volcano (1984), with Albert Finney. From time to time Jurado appeared on television, both in the United States and in Mexico. She did guest appearances on Playhouse Drama and The Rifleman. She costarred in a situation comedy series for ABC in 1984, A.K.A. Pablo, with Paul Rodríguez. The network canceled the show after a month due to its low ratings. In Mexico Jurado appeared in the television series Prisíón de sueños (1994) and Te sigo amando (1996). Jurado’s last English language film was The Hi-Lo Country in 1998 with Woody Harrelson and Penelope Cruz. That same year she won the Best Supporting Actress Silver Ariel for Evangelio de las maravillas (1998). Like many Mexican actors, she was typecast to play certain roles in the United States. Katy Jurado died in 2002. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Movie Stars SOURCE: Reyes, Luis, and Peter Rubie. 1994. Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television. New York: Garland Publishing.
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Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
K q KIMBELL, SYLVIA RODRÍGUEZ (1934–1994) Hillsborough County, Florida’s, first black and Hispanic woman to be elected county commissioner was Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell. After two years in this position she was unanimously selected as chairperson of the county commission. In that post she also served as board chaplain and became known for her eloquent, impassioned, forthright manner, as well as for her touching sermons and prayers, which she delivered in a distinctive, resonant voice. A Democrat, Rodríguez Kimbell was active in local civic affairs and served as president of the Thonotosassa/Seffner Council for Community Affairs. At age fifty-five she retired from the Hillsborough County school system after spending twenty years as a teacher and later as a supervisor of English programs in secondary schools. In 1989 she entered organized politics by running against, and eventually defeating, Rubin E. Padgett, the county’s first African American commissioner. She was elected to the position in 1990. Throughout her career Rodríguez Kimbell worked tirelessly to assist minority groups in her district. One of her projects was convincing environmental officials that a Superfund site was polluting wells in the area that brought county water to residents. It came to fruition after her death. After a racist attack on an African American tourist and a bitter controversy over a proposed pirate/slave– ship museum in 1993, Rodríguez Kimbell created an annual symposium on race relations. The Sylvia Kimbell Symposium on Race Relations, which was first held in May 1993, had as its goal the development of a concrete community action plan to combat racial intolerance and encourage economic inclusion and political empowerment for all people. Professionals from education, government, business and industry, the media, law enforcement, and religious and community groups participated and pledged to work toward improving relations among the county’s diverse ethnic communities. Local leaders credited the annual symposium with
an improved climate. One of the direct results—citizen study circles designed to follow up on ideas aired at the symposia—received national acclaim. In December 1993 Rodríguez Kimbell was honored at the twentieth annual Human Rights Awards in Tampa for her work in the community. Rodríguez Kimbell enjoyed being a public servant but hated the term “politician.” Because of her seemingly limitless energy and determination, many of Rodríguez Kimbell’s constituents did not know that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the fall of 1991. Despite an immediate mastectomy, the cancer spread to other parts of her body. “I don’t ask myself, ‘Why me?’ ” She once said. “I’m more likely to ask, ‘Why not me?’ ” During her leave of absence Rodríguez Kimbell participated in commission meetings via teleconference. After a long bout with the illness and related therapies, Rodríguez Kimbell planned to resign in May 1994, but her condition worsened quickly, and she was not able to sign her letter of resignation in time. She died
Politician Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell. Courtesy of the Tampa Tribune.
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Kissinger, Beatrice Amado on June 2, 1994, at the age of sixty, survived by her third husband, Frank Kimbell Jr. In all, she gave thirty years of her life to education and public service in the Tampa Bay area. After her death supporters asked the Hillsborough County School Board to rename district facilities and the county’s moral courage award in Rodríguez Kimbell’s honor, stating in a petition that Kimbell “touched numerous lives with her caring approach to learning.” The Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell Full Service School pays tribute to her legacy. This school offers “education, medical, social, and human services that are beneficial to meeting the needs of children and their families, in an easily accessible location.” From Head Start programs to truancy prevention to adult and community education, this school brings an array of social services to families in need. SOURCES: Melone, Mary Jo. 1994. “When Sylvia Kimbell Spoke, You Could Hear Backbone.” St. Petersburg Times, June 12, 1B; Scherberger, Tom. 1994. “A Politician with a Mind of Her Own.” St. Petersburg Times, March 12, 23A; Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell Full Service School Web site. http://app s.sdhc.k12.fl.us/sdhc2/SupportiveServices/studentservices/o ther_fullservice_kimbell.htm (accessed July 14, 2005); Tucker, Jennifer. 1993. “Fulfillment of Her Dreams.” Tampa Tribune, January 11, 1B, 5B. Bárbara C. Cruz
KISSINGER, BEATRICE AMADO (1922– ) Beatrice Amado Kissinger was born on November 19, 1922, in Tucson, Arizona, the third of seven children and the oldest daughter. Her father, Ricardo Amado, worked as a welder for the Southern Pacific Railroad and was also a professional boxer known as “Boilermaker Dick” who fought professionally in Arizona, California, and Mexico. Before she started school, her father was laid off from his railroad job as a result of the depression, so the family moved to Patagonia, Arizona, where her paternal grandparents lived. “It was hard, but we survived, all seven of us,” Kissinger said, referring to the seven children in her family. “We had no doctors, no dentists, no clinics . . . nothing.” In Patagonia Kissinger began attending school, where she faced a language barrier. Although her parents were both born in Arizona, they primarily spoke Spanish at home, though her father “spoke good English.” Students were punished for speaking languages other than English, even at recess. “I didn’t like that discrimination,” Kissinger said. “So I made a promise to myself that I would learn English and that I would speak it better than all of my peers, which I did.” While she was in grammar school, her family moved to Ruby, Arizona, where she finished grammar school. She
moved back to Patagonia to live with her grandparents and attended Patagonia Union High School, graduating in 1940. After high school Kissinger moved in with friends in Nogales, Arizona, and began to look for work. She managed to get a job selling men’s hats at J. C. Penney, despite the fact that she knew nothing about men’s hats or dealing with Mexican currency, which was used often in the border town. She was quickly fired. “I never dealt with money because I never had any money,” she said. Despite her employment difficulties, Kissinger fondly remembers her time in Nogales. “I was staying with these friends and we would go across the border,” she said. She and her friends spent their time “dancing and smoking cigarettes till all hours of the night.” Kissinger’s parents and her family doctor became concerned about her lack of direction. She said that they were afraid she was wasting her time and would turn to “no good.” So her doctor wrote the necessary letter of recommendation and gave her the required physical, and in 1941 she went to St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing in Tucson. The program, which included room and board, was free to young women who agreed to work forty-eight hours a week. Shortly thereafter the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. “What I recall was that we had to turn the lights off, and that we had to put our shades down in the evening. There were to be no lights,” she said. “Davis-Monthan Air Force Base became quite active, and many servicemen appeared in the city.” As the war progressed, many of the registered nurses at St. Mary’s enlisted. Beatrice Amado Kissinger looked forward to the opportunity. After her enlistment in 1943 she was sent to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California, for six months. She then received orders to go overseas to the Pacific. However, those orders were reversed, and she served in San Francisco during the war. “I was doing good work there, and they didn’t need me overseas; otherwise they would have sent me. Personally, I didn’t want to go.” Ensign Amado did not miss small-town life in Arizona. She recalls that she dated many of her patients and spent a great deal of time dancing to big-band music. She got along well with her fellow nurses, although they came from varied backgrounds. “The nurses came from every state of the union, and here we were thrown together. It was a beautiful experience.” After the war Lt. J. G. Amado served at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital just north of Chicago, Illinois, where in 1946 she met Marine Sgt. Jim Kissinger, a patient from Chicago who was ill with scarlet fever. It was not love at first sight. “He was a recalcitrant old Marine that didn’t do anything I told him to,” she said.
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Sophomore nurse Beatrice Amado Kissinger tends to a patient at St. Mary’s School of Nursing in Tucson, Arizona, in 1942. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
“All he did was play cards with his old Navy chief in the solarium part of the ward.” At the end of his hospital stay Sgt. Kissinger’s navy chief bet him that he could not get Lt. J. G. Amado to go on a date with him. She turned him down twice. Finally, the third time he asked, she relented. On the date she discovered that he “wasn’t such a bad guy,” and that they had many things in common. “He was a guy who didn’t put on airs,” she said. “I met so many that were putting on airs.” After a seven-month engagement the couple married in 1946 in Chicago. They lived in Chicago for three years, during which time their oldest children, Jim and Beverly, were born. Afterward, they moved to Nogales and then to Tucson, where they lived for seven years and had four more children, Janet, Dorothy, John, and Elizabeth. Her husband was a “man of many hats,” she said, selling insurance for Metropolitan Life for seven years, as well as working as a chemist for steel mills in Carnegie, Illinois. Jim Kissinger also worked as a computer data manager and even served as justice of the
peace. After a six-year battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he died in 1986. “He was a hard-drinking man, chain smoker, and tough, very dedicated to his job. Very stressful job. He became ill with this lymphoma,” Amado Kissinger said. “I don’t know whether there’s a correlation.” Amado Kissinger lives in Tucson, where she is taking a writing class at a community college that is helping her write her memoirs. She looks back fondly on her years in the Navy. “It was a beautiful experience,” she said. “The best years of my life were those in the Navy.” See also World War II SOURCES: Kissinger, Beatrice Amado. 2003. Interview by Ernesto Portillo, Tucson, AZ, March 26; Traphagan, Amanda. 2003. “Young Woman Found Freedom as Navy Nurse.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring).
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Amanda Traphagan
L q LA LLORONA La llorona, the weeping or wailing woman of Hispanic folklore and legend, is one of the most complex female symbols in contemporary Mexican American literature and mythology. Some describe la llorona as a female ghost, a woman with razor-sharp fingernails dressed in white or black with a face resembling death. Others believe her to be a young and beautiful woman who, when approached by traveling young men, transforms herself into a hag. The figure of la llorona has been characterized in various and complex ways. The most widely known version describes la llorona as a woman who killed her children and tossed their bodies into a river. Constantly weeping, la llorona roams along rivers and ditches searching for her offspring. Legend has it that if she cannot find them, she will take any other child. Multiple versions of the folktale exist and have been passed down from generation to generation in Mexican towns and barrios. Storytellers also describe la llorona as a tortured soul, a mestiza, a woman who married a man with three children, of whom she was very jealous. One day she took the children to the river and drowned them. When she died, God forbade her entry into Heaven until she returned to him the souls of the murdered children. La llorona appears in mythology as the archetypal evil/good woman, a mother who, acting as a goddess, murdered her children in a sacrificial attempt to save Mexico from rapacious Spain. A spin-off of this particular version claims that la llorona of the New World was actually La Malinche, the consort of Hernán Cortés. Malinche, who is said to have fallen in love with Cortés, represents a woman torn between her love for a Spaniard and the cruel acts that Cortés and his people perpetrated on Mexico by pillaging Aztecan culture. When Malinche gave birth to Cortés’s children, legend has it that she was disliked both by local and Spanish women who teased her children as halfbloods. When Cortés resolved to take Malinche’s children to Spain with the intent to sell them as slaves, Malinche prayed to the Aztec gods for guidance, who
ordered her to kill them. Malinche, alias the first llorona, killed her children in order to spare them, and all of Mexico, from Spanish control. Folktales and popular stories such as those of la llorona can act as powerful reinforcers of stereotypes. Holding an ambivalent identity, la llorona is both sinner and saint. Therefore, Mexican American culture has drawn the legend as a disciplinary tool to threaten children into behaving and as an instrument of social control by labeling “amoral” or neglectful mothers as lloronas in the hope of preventing women from acting outside prescribed societal roles. The legend of la llorona has also been adapted into fictional characters that reveal cultural, political, and social assumptions surrounding the portrayal of women in Chicano culture, history, and myth. The legend of la llorona continues to be used to promote Chicanismo because the legend adds to the promotion of cultural awareness through the re-creation of old traditions and myths and the making of new heroes. La llorona folktales are used to study the power and fluidity of folklore and folktales because they reveal how folktales remain adaptable, changing for a multiplicity of reasons. Storytellers and listeners long for myths that are relevant to their lives. Folktales such as those of la llorona remain local treasures that help reconstruct a people’s history and promote cultural unity and pride. Myths, legends, and folk stories trickle down from generation to generation, contributing to a cultural pool of oral traditions that help families re-create and relive culture, history, and folklore wherever they go. Compilations of stories and myths contribute to a collective set of cultural codes that people have used over time to identify behavioral cues and to create role models. These stories enable people to differentiate good and bad behavior through the transmission of preferable moral values. La llorona remains a popular folktale representative of the expressions of Mexican and Chicano culture and community. Through stories like la llorona many Chicanos have learned about their roots. The fluidity of folktales ensures that history and time-tested traditions will be passed along to the next
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“La Lupe” generation, where new morals and stories will be invoked and privileged. SOURCES: Anaya, Rudolfo A. 1984. The Legend of La Llorona. Berkeley, CA: Tonatiuh–Quinto Sol International; Cantú Norma E., and Olga Nájera-Ramírez’, eds. 2002. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Gaspar, Tomas Rodriguez. 1977. “Lupe and La Llorona.” M.A.T. thesis, University of California, Irvine. Soledad Vidal
“LA LUPE” (GUADALUPE VICTORIA YOLI RAYMOND) (1939–1992) Victoria Yoli Raymond, known as “La Lupe,” was born to a poor family in Santiago, Cuba, on December 23, 1939. In her early twenties she followed her family to Havana, attended university, and complied with her father’s insistence that she graduate with a teaching certificate. In Havana, however, La Lupe also began singing with los Tropicubas. She appeared with los Tropicubas at the Roco night club, married one of the band members, and cut her first album with them, Con el diablo en el cuerpo. Despite her popularity, her husband claimed that when she performed, it was as if she were having an “epileptic fit.” The band expelled La Lupe for her “sexualized performances” and “undisciplined behavior,” and the Cuban press began condemning her “scandalous,” “eccentric,” “half-crazed” performances where she used “obscene” words and made noises that resembled orgasms. La Lupe divorced her husband, produced another album, Is Back, and performed solo at La Red. Despite the enormous success of her album, the press continued to criticize her performances, in which she screamed, cried, bit her hands and breasts, pulled her face, said “dirty” words to audiences, and took off her shoes to hit her pianist with them. La Lupe eventually opened her own club, but, experiencing financial and professional pressures in a postrevolution Cuba, she left for Mexico, then moved to Miami, and arrived in New York City in 1962. Although she is perhaps the most controversial figure in the history of Latin American music, Latinas and Latinos nonetheless remember Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond in largely personal terms. They remember the Afro-Cuban singer affectionately as “La Yiyiyi” or, more often, “La Lupe” because she shared their personal struggles and triumphs as outsiders, migrating to New York City and repeatedly reinventing themselves once there. In both her music and her life La Lupe came to symbolize Latina alienation, rejection, and victorious struggle for survival. La Lupe entered New York when musicians were experimenting with music and developing their own version of Latin music. She began performing at La
Barraca with Johnny Pacheco, where she met Mongo Santamaria. With Santamaria she produced Mongo Introduces La Lupe and performed at various places, including the Apollo in 1965, where she met Tito Puente. The resulting collaboration proved mutually beneficial, and she signed with Tico Records later that same year. Gold records followed with Tito Puente on Tito Puente Swings and The Exciting La Lupe Swings, and she was named singer of the year by the Latino press. Her fame grew with three other top-selling albums (also with Tito Puente), tours throughout the United States and Latin America, and performances at Carnegie Hall and on the Merv Griffith and Dick Cavitt shows. La Lupe’s music transcended salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, rock, mariachi, boleros, and love ballads by moving them beyond their traditional romantic styles and infusing them with a passion inspired by Santería. Like her life, La Lupe’s performances embodied Latinas’ struggle to define and express their talented, aggressive, independent, and powerful womanhood. At home she was a wife and a mother. On stage, as an artist, she was ahead of her time. She would appear on stage in low-cut dresses, jump, take off her wig and false eyelashes, pull her hair, kick off her shoes and throw them and her beaded jewelry to the audience, bang herself against walls, strike her chest with bright red nails, and occasionally rip her shirt open and expose her breasts. Regardless of how one views these performances, La Lupe paved the way for future Latina performers. Her strong voice, torrid love affairs, poor financial management, and large gay following made her a Latina Judy Garland. Despite unprecedented record sales, La Lupe’s career suffered serious setbacks in the 1970s, when she was banned from appearing on television in Puerto Rico because she had torn off her clothing during a live broadcast. In addition her career suffered more serious setbacks when Fania Records absorbed Tico. The label sought to promote the “safer” Celia Cruz. Although La Lupe released albums between 1977 and 1980, including collaborations with Puente, the label’s neglect eroded her formerly successful career. La Lupe retired at the early age of forty-one amid several personal setbacks. As royalties from recording contracts were uncommon at the time, religious donations and medical bills for her husband’s mental illness bankrupted her. In 1984 she injured her spine and was paralyzed. She was confined to a wheelchair and later relied on a cane. In the same year an electrical fire in her home left her homeless. La Lupe often found herself without money to pay for rent or food and eventually reverted to public assistance. La Lupe faced these seemingly insurmountable obstacles by reaching out within her communities. Often finding herself homeless, she lived with friends or in
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La Malinche shelters and public housing. For rent and food, she received grant money by enrolling in Lehman College in the Bronx. To pay for her medical expenses, she performed a benefit concert with Tito Puente. Eventually the Pentecostal community reached out to her. After healing by an evangelical preacher, she converted to Pentecostalism and became an ordained minister and preacher in the South Bronx at Iglesia Pentecostal el Fin Se Acerca. She began recording again with new Christian-oriented material. La Lupe died of a heart attack on February 28, 1992, at age fifty-two, and was buried at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. Her funeral was attended by celebrities, including La India, Joe Cuba, and Fernando Ferrer. The memory of La Lupe also lives on in the film music for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988); directed by Pedro Almodovar, and in Ela Troyano’s La Lupe (2003); in Carmen Rivera’s theatrical production La Lupe: My Life, My Destiny (2001); and in Rafael Albertori’s La Reina, La Lupe (2003). In addition to cultural forms, La Lupe left her footprint in the Bronx, where East 140th Street, between St. Ann and Cypress Avenue, has been renamed Calle La Lupe, La Lupe Way. She also lives on through her music, where her voice lingers in the ears and hearts of Latinas/os everywhere. See also Salsa SOURCES: Acosta, Jose. 2002. “Inmortalizan a La Lupe en calle de El Bronx.” El Diario/La Prensa, June 13, 4; Areizaga, Albert. 2003. “Remembering Lupe ‘La Lupe’ Yoli.” http://www.planetlatino.net/sub1.htm (accessed October 6, 2003); Moreno-Velázquez, Juan A. 2000. “La Lupe en Nueva York, un exito extraordinario.” El Diario/La Prensa, February 25, 2; ———. 2000. “La leyenda de ‘La Lupe,’ una vida llena de Exitos, controversia y dolor.” El Diario/La Prensa, February 24, 24; Navarro, Mireya. 2001. “Resurrecting La Lupe, a Wild and Soulful Singer Whose Life Fell Apart.” New York Times, June 27, 5; New Pittsburgh Courier. 1965. “Variety Show at the Apollo.” New York edition, May 1, Sec. 6, p. 16; Pareles, Jon. 1992. “Obituary.” New York Times, March 7, early city edition, 32; Romero, Raúl E. 1996. “La Lupe or the Broken Cuba.” ARS, 52– 55. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
LA MALINCHE (MALINALLI TENEPAL) (1505–1551) The indigenous woman who was the mistress and companion of Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Tenochtitlán, capital of the Mexicas, and other states in ancient Mexico, was known as La Malinche. The most important historical source of information for Malinche is Bernal Díaz del Castillo in his narrative of the conquest of Mexico. Malinche was supposed to have been born in a noble or “principal” family of some social leverage,
but she was far from being a “princess.” However, modern historians and some linguists who consider her ability to speak well, learn quickly, and address persons of high social stature with aplomb and knowledge assume that she came from a family of social importance. Her name, Malinalli, had a negative implication in the Nahua horoscope. However, after the conquest she began to be called Malintzin, in which the ending tzin signified respect. Although she was baptized as Marina, the Spanish conquerors and indigenous contemporaries addressed her as Malinche, possibly a corruption of Malintzin. The attribution of Tenepal as part of her name or a nickname originated in indigenous historian Domingo de San Antón Muñón, known as Chimalpahin, and was apparently part of the oral history of the Nahua-speaking town of Painalla (Coatzacoalco), where Bernal Díaz del Castilllo places her birth. Tenepal has been interpreted as a word meaning sharp and cutting or also a person who possesses a lip and speaks a lot. Both could refer to her ability as a translator for the Spaniards. The story of her childhood is obscure and uncertain. Several scholars affirm that she was stolen by merchants and sold as a slave in the Maya area. Bernal Díaz tells of a child who was abandoned and sold by her mother to save their inheritance for a younger half brother. The sale or theft of children among families of some means was not a common practice in fifteenthcentury Mexico. Slaves were often the result of warfare or, more infrequently, a choice by an impecunious person. Malinche was given to the Spaniards as a gift on March 15, 1519, in the coastal area of Potochán. Soon it was discovered that she could handle Maya and Nahua, and her value to them became obvious, since they had to rely on translators to communicate with the indigenous groups. Cortés had previously relied on a Spaniard found in Yucatán, Alonso de Aguilar, who spoke Maya, but could not speak Nahua. Malinche provided that valuable asset. She was originally allocated to Alonso Hernández Portocarrero, a relative of Cortés. After Hernández Portocarrero was sent as an envoy to the Spanish court in 1519, Cortés took Malinche for himself. She remained his mistress and companion during the conquest of Tenochtitlán (1519–1521) even though Cortés also took two of Moctezuma’s daughters as his mistresses. In late 1524, when he began a trip to present-day Honduras in pursuit of treacherous fellow conquistador Cristóbal de Olid, he married her off to Juan de Jaramillo, a hidalgo (man of rank) whom Cortés appointed as a councilor for the city of Mexico, and who subsequently held other bureaucratic positions and considerable wealth. Cortés had one child with Malinche, Martín, named after Cortés’s own father and legitimized by papal bull in 1527. He was later
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La Malinche tenía sus razones, 1997. Painting by and courtesy of Cecilia Concepción Alvarez.
awarded a knighthood. Martín married a Spanish woman, Bernardina de Porras. In 1568 he was involved in a conspiracy against the viceroy with his half brother of the same name, but unlike his Spanish brother, the son of Malintzin was not punished by the king. With Jaramillo, Malinche had a daughter, María Jaramillo, who married Luis López de Quesada, an early settler who arrived in New Spain in 1535. Malinche served Cortés faithfully throughout the conquest, becoming not only a valuable translator among the Nahuas and in the court of tlatoani (chief, leader) Moctezuma, but also deciphering for him and his men the key elements of the indigenous worldview. She provided essential intelligence of their movements at critical times. According to Bernal Díaz, she was always at his side whenever he received envoys or needed to address indigenous tlatoani. Malinche was at his side when he met Moctezuma in their first encounter, and she warned Cortés and his men of the plans to slaughter them in the town of Cholula. During the siege of Tenochtitlán by Cuauhtémoc, successor to Moctezuma, she was rescued on July 1, 1520, and es-
corted to safety by Cortés’s soldiers. Malinche became so much part of Cortés’s presence and activities during the conquest that he began to be called Señor Malinche. Despite this, Cortés hardly mentions her in his several letters to the king. There is no certitude about the date of Malinche’s death. Some documents state that she died in 1531, after which date Jaramillo married Beatríz de Andrada. However, French historian Georges Baudot claims that Malinche could have possibly been still alive in 1551 as a respected property owner. He supports his claim by citing two archival records that mention “doña Marina” as still living in 1551. These dates and facts remain to be validated. Malinche occupies a central position in some of the key codices or indigenous narratives of the conquest such as the Codices Florentino and the Lienzo of Tlaxcala. Her symbolic placement as the center of many scenes, at the side of Cortés, or as mediator between indigenous people and conquerors attests the importance this woman held in their eyes and the respect that she commanded. While her figure remained one of
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La Mujer Obrera neutral acceptance of the conquest in colonial historical narratives, her image began to deteriorate after Mexican independence. Nineteenth-century historians began to depreciate her and describe her as a traitor who sold her “nation” to the conquerors, even though she was not an Aztec. This representation, the product of a nation-making effort, was reinforced in the twentieth century by male essayists, novelists, and playwrights who coined “malinchismo” as a word to denote love for foreigners. In contrast, women writers such as Rosario Castellanos, Sabina Berman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Pat Mora, and others, critical of the patriarchal models created by the traditional masculine view, give her a more independent and self-assertive role and extol her importance as a founder of the Mexican nation. SOURCES: Baudot, Georges. 1994. “Malitzin, imagen y discurso de mujer en el primer Mexico virreinal.” In La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos, ed. Margo Glantz, 45–74. Mexico: UNAM; Cypess, Sandra Messinger. 1991. La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History to Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1956. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Glantz, Margo, ed. 1994. La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos. Mexico: UNAM; Karttunen, Frances. 1997. “Rethinking Malinche.” In Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, 291–312. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Asunción Lavrin
LA MUJER OBRERA (1981–
)
La Mujer Obrera (The Woman Worker) is a grassroots, community-based organization that represents working-class women, especially factory workers increasingly displaced by free-trade agreements. In recent years La Mujer Obrera (LMO) has spawned several new organizations with overlapping agendas, including the Asociación de Trabajadores Fronterizos (ATF), and El Puente Community Development Corporation (CDC). Founded in El Paso, Texas, in 1981, LMO was first called the Centro de Obrero Fronterizo and focused on the plight of the border worker. At this time garment workers toiled at minimum or lower wages in El Paso’s textile-industrial mix of corporations, businesses, and sweatshops. In Texas, touted as a “right-to-work” state, a small percentage of the labor force belongs to labor unions, particularly in El Paso. A bitter strike against the Farah Clothing Factory resulted in layoffs and eventual plant closure. The majority of garment workers were middle-aged Spanish-speaking women without academic preparation or credentials such as high-school diplomas.
In the poststrike atmosphere organizer Cecilia Rodríguez and others recognized the need for women to unite and advocate for their interests within the “system,” however tied together corporate and government interests seemed to be at the time. Mexico’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 led to more plant closures. In the late 1980s some of El Paso’s garment-factory subcontractors asked employees to work without pay, sometimes for weeks at a time, after which employers declared bankruptcy or opened other factories under new names. El Paso was a city with double-digit unemployment then; it continues to have double the unemployment rate of the state and nation. Cecilia Rodríguez, Cindy Arnold, María del Carmen Domínguez, and LMO activists pursued public protests, chaining themselves to machines and fences, in order to spread awareness about the corrupt payroll practices in factories. LMO achieved an important goal. Legislation was passed in 1990 to make nonpayment of wages a felony. In the meantime LMO faced a dilemma. Should the organization pursue goals to strengthen garmentfactory workers and protect this dying industry? Or should it seek to develop small businesses and promote neighborhood redevelopment for alternative work? Whichever it chose, it would have to pursue partnerships and fund-raising strategies, acquire community and nationwide visibility, and forge supportive contacts in the process. During the 1990s LMO moved toward the strategy of self-sustaining development. In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) dealt another blow to the industries on which women workers depended. Three years after the trade agreement was implemented, El Paso earned a dubious distinction. It became the top American city in the number of NAFTAdisplaced workers. While the government provided trade-adjusted assistance, which El Pasoans tapped, the temporary money in no way compensated for the total loss of wages. LMO became a leading critic of workforce training, even though an LMO leader participated in overall community leadership on workforce policy and spending. “Outsiders,” like LMO leaders, challenged the system, but “insiders” continued to work within the system. Ultimately LMO transformed itself into a hybrid operation, pursuing outsider and insider strategies. LMO leader Cindy Arnold became an effective communitywide leader, sitting on various boards relating to workforce training and enterprise development. She directs El Puente Community Development Corporation, which operates a large, remodeled building complete with a child-care service center, a mercado (market), and restaurants named Mayapan and Rayito de Sol.
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Café Mayapan, a restaurant run by La Mujer Obrera. Courtesy of Kathleen A. Staudt.
These facilities train workers for new incomegenerating activities and businesses and encourage partnerships with banks, businesses, and nonprofit boards. The Asociación de Trabajadores Fronterizos is dedicated to popular education, mobilization, challenge, and protest. María del Carmen Domínguez heads LMO and its approximately 200 families, and Guillermo Glenn, spokesperson for the ATF, claims to represent 2,000 workers in factory and school committees who challenge the flaws of existing programs. Overall, LMO and its offshoots strengthen the voices and opportunities of a relatively small proportion of El Paso’s population; nevertheless, these voices have an impact on all of El Paso and the nation. SOURCES: International Relations Center Web site. Faulkner, Tina. 1997. “La Mujer Obrera Challenges Free Trade.” Borderlines 31 5:1. January. http://americas.irconline.org/borderlines/1997/bl31/bl31focs_body.html (accessed July 14, 2005); Márquéz, Benjamin. 1995. “Organizing Mexican-American Women in the Garment Industry: La Mujer Obrera.” Women and Politics 15:65–87; La Mujer Obrera. http://www.grass-roots.org/usa/mujer/shtml. (accessed December 18, 2001); Staudt, Kathleen, and Irasema Coronado. 2002. Fronteras no más: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kathleen Staudt
LA RAZA UNIDA PARTY (1970–1980) Established in January 1970 at Campestre Hall in Crystal City, Texas, La Raza Unida Party (LRUP) became the first Chicano political party and one that served as a vehicle for Chicanas to establish an agenda specific to their needs. LRUP’s founders included José Ángel Gutiérrez and Mario Compean, who had also been active leaders in the Mexican American Youth Organiza-
tion (MAYO). A resolution of the MAYO meeting in 1967 called for the development of a third party, which resulted in LRUP. LRUP served the economic, social, and political interests of Mexican Americans, giving them the political power they lacked in their communities. LRUP faced opposition from the beginning, because officials found reasons to disqualify candidates or invalidate absentee votes. Even moderate Mexican American politicians opposed the new political party, calling MAYO’s rhetoric “inflammatory.” La Raza Unida Party provided Chicanas with the opportunity to run for political office, which had not been offered by the existing political parties. As active members of the new party, Chicanas took it upon themselves to point out to the male leadership why they needed Chicanas on the forefront. In addition, they made it clear that the party could stand to lose a great deal, including support from the outside, if the needs of Chicanas were not addressed. There was much to be learned from the 1969 Denver Chicano Youth Conference, where the consensus of its women’s caucus was that “Chicanas did not want to be liberated.” Immediately after that declaration Chicanas insisted on having space and time allocated to issues specific to La Chicana; however, this did not solve the tension that existed among the various regional camps. At the July 1970 Raza Unida Conference in Austin, Texas, Chicanas held an informal caucus led by Martha Cotera. Later that year Chicanas, including Yolanda Birdwell, Carmen Lomas Garza, Gloria Guardiola, Martha Cotera, and Alma Canales, held another informal caucus meeting to address the absence of women speakers and workshop leaders. A 1972 conference handout indicated that Chicanas suffered a triple exploitation and wanted their concerns to be included in the party platform. The state and local elections of 1972 resulted in the largest number of Mexican Americans running for office. At the gubernatorial level LRUP’s Ramsey Muñiz brought in enough votes to automatically place a Raza Unida Party candidate on the ballot for the 1974 election. A large number of Chicanas ran under the LRUP ticket, including Martha Cotera for the Twentythird Congressional District. During the next two to three years Chicanas continued to press for more visibility both inside and outside the party. At the May 1973 National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) Chicanas pushed to have LRUP recognized at the same level as the Democratic and Republican parties. A resolution was passed by the NWPC that read: “Therefore be it resolved that the NWPC endorse Raza Unida Party as an innovative means of political expression for Chicanas, and be it further resolved that the name of Raza Unida Party be included in all official and promotional materials which cite the Democratic
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Labor Unions and Republican parties.” On August 4, 1973, Chicanas from the Texas LRUP organized and hosted the Mujeres Pro–Raza Unida Conference. Organizers included Irma Mireles, Juanita Luera, Ino Alvarez, Evey Chapa, Chelo Avila, and Martha Cotera. Under the Raza Unida Party banner Alma Canales became the first and youngest Chicana to run for the office of lieutenant governor of Texas. LRUP’s founding roots in a southern Texas community resulted in the support of the majority of Texas Mexican Americans and ultimately gave Chicanas more opportunities to participate. In February 1974, six women filed for office under the Raza Unida Party in Crystal City, Texas. Active Texas members included numerous outspoken women in both rural and urban areas, for example, Martha Cotera, Alma Canales, María Elena Martínez, Ines Hernández Tovar, Virginia Musquiz, Luz Gutiérrez, Elizabeth Martínez, Carmen Zapata, and Rosie Castro. Although women showed a strong presence in the party, they could not overcome the debilitating effects of the arrest of Ramsey Muñiz in 1976 on drugtrafficking charges. The election of María Elena Martínez as Texas LRUP chairperson in 1978 came too late because the party faced near destruction. At the same time there was a constant struggle against the relentless attempts of outside forces to keep LRUP candidates off ballots. However, by that time women had flexed their political muscle by participating at all levels of the party, from local precincts to the state chair. See also Mujeres por la Raza SOURCES: Chapa, Evey. 1974. “Mujeres por la Raza Unida.” Caracol, October 3–5; Martha Cotera Collection. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; García, Ignacio. 1989. United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mary Ann Villarreal
LABOR UNIONS Latina laborers (las obreras) have been major contributors to the formation of strong labor unions in the United States. Textiles, packing and canning, agriculture, and hotel, restaurant, and hospital services have benefited greatly from Latina activism. During the first two decades of the twentieth century single Mexican men or solos were the few Latinos who participated in the U.S. workforce and labor unions in the West and Midwest. However, recruitment of potential workers for World War I– and World War II– related industries significantly increased the demand for Mexican workers, both men and, gradually, women, throughout this period. Despite the preference for male workers at the beginning of the century, some women emerged within a nascent labor movement
among Mexican workers. In southern Texas, for example, Sara Estela Ramírez became an important intellectual during the first decades of the twentieth century. Regarded as a public figure and a member of the radical Mexican political party Partido Liberal Mexicano, Ramírez served the AFL-affiliated Federal Labor Union No. 11953 of Laredo from 1905 to 1907. She encouraged Mexicans in skilled positions such as railroad workers to unionize along the border. Ramírez spoke often in the mutualistas (mutual-aid societies) and helped establish one of the earliest unions organized by Mexicans in the Southwest. By the time of the Great Depression and World War II, Latinos emerged as major players in the struggle for fair wages and safe working environments. The Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), which represented a substantial number of poor white and Mexican workers in central California, mobilized to challenge declining wages and poor living conditions on many farms. During 1933 alone CAWIU led twenty-four of the thirty-seven major agricultural strikes that occurred in California. The San Joaquin Valley cotton strike was the union’s most ambitious labor action, involving between 12,000 and 20,000 workers and spanning a 120-mile area. While white unionists provided the leadership, Mexican families composed 95 percent of the rank and file. According to historian Devra Weber, “By performing traditional nurturing roles such as feeding and clothing their families and strikers, as well as walking the picket lines themselves, Mexican women became indispensable assets to the strike.” In Corcoran, California, for example, several women (but no men) mentioned Magdalena Gómez, a financially independent woman who stored food and helped distribute it to strikers. These female networks of support helped the workers achieve modest wage increases after months of acrimonious and sometimes violent confrontations with employers and law enforcement officials. Some women, such as Guatemalan-born Luisa Moreno and Tejana Emma Tenayuca, asserted themselves as labor leaders within the formal structure of unions. Moreno, like other Latina/o workers then and now, responded to poor wages and unsatisfactory work conditions by organizing labor unions. Impressed with her charismatic personality, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) hired her in 1938 to organize cannery and food-processing workers throughout the Southwest under the CIO-affiliated United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO). Inspired by a passion for social justice and human rights, Moreno became a leading advocate for worker and immigrant rights in the United States from 1938 to 1947. Under UCAPAWA Moreno helped organize Mexican, Jewish,
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Labor Unions and Anglo women cannery workers for higher wages and benefits. Similarly, the radical Emma Tenayuca distinguished herself as a prominent leader of UCAPAWA in San Antonio, Texas, during the pecan shellers’ strike of 1938. Although Tenayuca was affiliated with the Communist Party for only a year and a half, her aggressive public persona and reputation as a radical ideologue angered conservatives and concerned liberals. Union colleagues who hoped to shed the Communist label during a period of increasing anti-Communist public sentiment supported UCAPAWA in replacing the outspoken Tenayuca with Luisa Moreno. Ironically, both women suffered as a result of red-baiting and Communist witch-hunts throughout the 1940s and 1950s. During World War II Tenayuca was blacklisted from union jobs and struggled to find work. Ultimately, Jewish women who admired her militancy helped her secure a job sewing military uniforms during the war years. During the post–World War II period conservative politicians and trade unionists attacked Moreno for her radical views and exploited her noncitizen status by attempting to deport her. Offered citizenship in exchange for testimony against noncitizen, allegedly Communist labor organizers, Moreno refused, stating that she did not wish to be “a free woman with a mortgaged soul.” She left the United States in 1950 under terms listed as “voluntary departure under warrant of deportation.” Other Latinas successfully built on their participation in labor unions during World War II to create careers in politics. For Hope Mendoza Schechter, the union took the place of formal education for a time, and she became an important community organizer in Los Angeles County. In 1938 she dropped out of high school to work in the garment industry. After a stint working in defense factories, Mendoza returned to the garment industry to serve as an organizer and business officer for the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. This experience established her liberal credentials and earned her a prominent place in the local Democratic Party during the late 1940s and 1950s. Cofounding the Los Angeles Community Service Organization and serving on committees of the state Democratic Party and the Central Labor Council stand out as a few of her greatest achievements. On the East Coast Cuban men and women served in cigar factories in Florida, Puerto Ricans and Cubans participated in manufacturing in New York City, and some Puerto Ricans traveled with the migrant stream of farmworkers who picked crops along the Atlantic coast during the early twentieth century. Organizations designed to meet the needs of the working class, such as the Federación Libre de Trabajadores, served Cuban and Puerto Rican cigar factory workers in the United
States. When Puerto Rico became a colony at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, U.S. clothing companies established manufacturing plants on the island almost immediately. By 1915 an elaborate needlework industry existed on the island that allowed companies to escape unions, but also provided job training for Puerto Ricans, particularly women. Puerto Ricans soon found it impossible to survive on such wages and chose to market their skills in the United States. In the depression era Puerto Rican women joined unions primarily associated with the textiles industry. Some 50,000 Puerto Ricans lived in the United States by 1930. Sewing meant economic survival for many Puerto Rican families, especially during the depression when many women competed for jobs with Italian and Jewish women. Puerto Ricans became important rank-and-file members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). In 1937, 2,000 Puerto Ricans claimed membership in the union, and in the 1950s they became a greater force as a result of the great migration. By the 1960s Puerto Rican women made up more than 25 percent of New York sewing-machine operators. Yet despite these high numbers in the industry, many Puerto Ricans were locked out of positions of power within the union by discrimination from fellow unionists. The exclusion of Latinas within ILGWU varied from local to local. In Los Angeles the hiring of Mendoza Schechter during the 1950s demonstrated that the union was open to some Latinas in leadership positions. Latinas played important roles not only as leaders and organizers of unions but also as dedicated spouses who willingly went to the picket lines when issues at the workplace threatened the security of the entire family. This commitment was eloquently portrayed in the controversial film Salt of the Earth in 1954. The film documents and dramatizes the Empire Zinc strike by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) in Silver City, New Mexico, from October 1950 to March 1952. The film accurately accentuates the underlying issues of the strike: the company’s arrogance toward the workers, its resistance to their efforts to negotiate their own demands, the history of discrimination against Mexican American workers in the area, and the larger struggle for power between labor and management. The film, however, is perhaps best remembered for the insightful portrayal of the central role of women in the strike, specifically their demand to vote at union meetings and their picketing of the mine. In real life, as in the film, women distinguished themselves as family members vested in the success of the union. During the 1960s and 1970s the United Farm Workers (UFW) union became the focal point for union ac-
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Labor Unions
Members of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union at the United Nations in 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
tivism and civil rights among Mexican and Filipino workers in the United States. Women figured prominently in the movement, none more so than Dolores Huerta. Through her involvement in a community interest group, the Community Service Organization (CSO), Huerta met fellow activists Fred Ross and César Chávez. Along with Filipino labor leaders, Ross, Chávez, and Huerta built a union for the protection of farmworkers against poor wages, unsanitary housing, and exposure to pesticides. In 1962 the UFW won an important battle when it used marches, protests, and a boycott against grapes to force John Guimarra, the leading grape grower in California, to recognize the union as the representative for all agricultural workers. Although temporary, the victory was an important symbol of the strength of the union and became a building block for further organizing. Throughout these struggles women such as Huerta and Helen Chávez (César Chávez’s wife) played a prominent role in organizing workers, and numerous rank-and-file Latina workers staffed the picket lines and fought against police and grower harassment. Simultaneously, women began to emerge as leaders in non-farm-related industries. Chole Alatorre, for example, came to Los Angeles with her husband in the early 1950s and began working in the garment industry. At one of these plants, which made swimsuits for women, Alatorre became both a supervisor and a model. While the employer exploited her labor by not paying her for her services as a model, it did give her the ability to circulate throughout the plant. When the
all-female workforce began to have problems with poor wages and long hours, Alatorre talked to them about forming a union. Before they could start a union, however, the company disbanded and moved elsewhere. Eventually, however, Alatorre found a job in a pharmaceutical plant where she became very active in the Teamsters’ Union. She served as a steward and a member of the contract-negotiating committee, two skills that enabled her to organize a local for the United Electrical Workers at her next job. She continued union work into the 1980s, when she shifted her focus toward the protection of undocumented immigrants in the organization la Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. The efforts of pioneering women unionists and movements for ethnic empowerment during the 1960s and 1970s inspired a new generation of Latinas to embrace the labor movement and seize power within labor organizations. Like Alatorre and Mendoza Schechter, the famous Chicana labor leader María Elena Durazo got her start as an organizer in the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union in 1979. Durazo began by fighting for the rights of those who worked in the factories of designer-label manufacturers. She made house calls and worked in the office of the ILGWU until Abe Levy, a labor lawyer for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), hired her as a law clerk. At that time HERE was not supportive of the majority of its members. Leaders of HERE, mostly white and some retired workers, found themselves and their poli-
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Labor Unions cies out of step with the actual membership of the union, which was composed largely of people of color, particularly Latino immigrant laborers. For example, although 70 percent of the rank and file were Hispanic and spoke mostly Spanish, union leaders refused to run bilingual meetings and insisted on English-only communication within the organization. As a result of policies such as this one, by the mid-1980s membership had dropped by 50 percent, or more than 12,000 members. Durazo saw these conditions as untenable and the leadership as vulnerable and therefore organized one of the most stunning coups in the history of labor politics. Although Durazo had been working as an organizer and arbitrator for the union for only three years, she had confidence that with the support of the rank and file, she could win an election against Andrew (Scotty) Allan, who had presided over the union for twenty-three years. In 1987, when Durazo ran her slate of candidates against Allan’s, both sides charged election irregularities, and the international union seized control of the local. After analyzing the problems, Miguel Contreras, a union administrator, hired Durazo as a staff director to help him return the union to its proper function. Under Durazo and Contreras HERE became more responsive to its Latino majority rank and file and more proactive for workers’ rights. They conducted meetings in Spanish and English and encouraged Latino members to participate in contract negotiations. The change of attitude produced favorable results for workers: HERE gained its biggest wage increase in twenty years, benefits and promotions were clarified and made more accessible, and undocumented immigrants received greater protection from exploitative labor conditions. These improvements earned Durazo the respect of her peers, and in 1989 she won an election that made her president of the union and replaced the governing body of Local 11 with her fifteen-person slate of candidates. From 1989 to the present Local 11 emerged from a period of internal restructuring to become a vital force in the lives of those living and working in Los Angeles. At the July 1996 International Convention of HERE Durazo became the first Latina elected to the executive board, representing the national leadership of the HERE International Union, with a nationwide membership of more than 250,000. On March 12, 2001, California lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante honored María Elena Durazo as Woman of the Year for her leadership in HERE. Although the integration of women of color within union leadership positions remains a challenge today, Latinas continue to participate at the highest ranks of labor unions. Linda Chávez Thompson is an executive member of the AFL-CIO. Alicia Sandoval, a Chicana
born and educated in southern California, earned an influential position within the AFL-CIO. After years as an educator and coproducer of programming for Hispanic audiences on southern California television stations, Sandoval became the public relations director for the AFL-CIO in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987. In 1988 she moved to Washington, D.C., to become the first Latina executive of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest independent union outside the AFL-CIO. During her three years with NEA Sandoval kept Latino issues in the forefront and launched a $14million outreach campaign that made Latinos more aware of educational issues. Finally, an overlooked aspect of the union history of Latinas is the role Latina academics have played in writing this history. Two scholars in particular, Vicki Ruiz and Patricia Zavella, have distinguished themselves in the field of Chicana/Chicano studies by documenting Mexican women’s union activities in their scholarship. Ruiz’s 1987 book Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 is considered essential reading within the field of Chicano history, providing the first thorough history of Mexican women in labor unions from the depression through World War II and detailing the lives of important organizers like Luisa Moreno. Patricia Zavella has achieved the same status in the field of anthropology with her 1987 book Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley. Both scholars continue to be an important presence in the fields of U.S. labor studies and Latino/Chicano studies. In the area of Puerto Rican studies historian Virginia Sánchez Korrol provided the first complete history of Puerto Ricans in New York in her From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (1994). In this work Sánchez Korrol presents an intimate look at how women survived within the textile industry. Since then, through an oral history project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the experiences and frustrations of Puerto Rican women in the garment industry and the ILGWU have been documented in Nosotras trabajamos en la costura/Puerto Rican Women in the Garment Industry by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, New York City. The efforts of these pioneering labor scholars have revealed the hidden history of women in the U.S. labor movement, a history in which las obreras contributed as supportive spouses of workers, as rank-and-file members, and as labor leaders. SOURCES: García, Mario T. 1994. Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona. Berkeley: University of California Press; García, Matt. 2001. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press;
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Lares, Michelle Yvette “Shelly” Gutiérrez, David, ed. 1996. Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants to the United States. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press; Rosenfelt, Deborah Silverton. 1978. “Commentary on Salt of the Earth.” In Salt of the Earth by Michael Wilson and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt. OldWestbury, NY: The Feminist Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press; Vargas, Zaragosa. 2005. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Weber, Devra. 1994. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press; Zamora, Emilio. 1993. The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M Press; Zavella, Patricia. 1987. Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Matt García
LARES, MICHELLE YVETTE “SHELLY” (1971– ) Shelly Lares was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of Providence High School in San Antonio, Shelly recalls that “ever since I can remember I always told my parents I’m gonna be on stage, I’m gonna be a star!” Influenced by women artists such as Pat Benatar, Heart (the Wilson sisters), and the Judds, Lares was only ten years old when Jimmy Jiménez, the leader of the Hot Tamales band, heard her sing at her sister’s wedding and asked her to join the group. Lares also entered local talent contests and was featured in summer and fall festivals at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, where she attended school. In 1983 Lares recorded her first single, “Break It to Me Gently,” with the Hot Tamales band. This was followed by several other singles. In 1983 she recorded the single “Enamorada/Que sacrificio” and in 1986 “Por ti/Amor amor” for the Colores Records label. Eventually Lares saved enough money to buy her own small sound system, at which time she was introduced to several young musicians, including Chris Pérez (before he joined Selena y los Dinos) and Rudy Martínez. Lares’s cousin Tony Lares, who played keyboards, joined the young musicians as they launched Lares’s first band. Eventually her cousin Tony left the group and was replaced by keyboardist Val Solis. This new band, Shelly Lares and New Generation, recorded the first song Shelly and Chris Pérez cowrote, titled “Amame.” In 1989 Lares signed a five-year contract with Amen
Records, which was owned and operated by Manny Guerra. She recorded her first album with Amen Records, Tu solo tu (1989), which also resulted in a hit single of the same name. Lares consistently recorded throughout the 1990s, beginning with Dynamite (1990) and followed by Sabes que si (1990), Tejano Star (1991), Shelly’s Greatest Hits (1992), Apaga la luz (1993), and her last release with Guerra/WEA Latina, Quiero ser tu amante (1994). In 1995 she signed a recording contract with Sony Discos and recorded her first compact disc (CD), titled Shelly (1996). The CD, written and coproduced by Lares, was the fulfillment of her desires to cultivate her unique music style, which was a combination of original Tejano songs with country-andwestern songs. Lares represents her Tejano generation’s desire to link Tejano with country-and-western style and genre. An accomplished guitarist and percussionist, she writes most of her own songs and has performed with country artists such as Holly Dunn and the legendary Tejano country-and-western singer Johnny Rodríguez. Lares recorded some of the country-and-western songs for the 1996 CD in Nashville, Tennessee, where she invited singer Vince Gill to sing background vocals to four of her songs. Every year since 1984 Lares has been nominated for Tejano Music Awards in various categories, including Best Female Entertainer, Single of the Year, Album of the Year, and Female Vocalist of the Year. In 1998 she received a Tejano Music Award for Female Vocalist of the Year. At the end of the twentieth century Lares remained a consistent force in the recording industry. Aqui me encuentro (1997) marked her second release on Sony Discos and her ninth overall recording. The latest releases with Sony include Lo mejor de Shelly Lares (1997), Donde hay fuego (1998), and Mil besos (2000). In 2001 Shelly Lares came full circle, choosing to sign once again with a regional Tejano record label, Tejas Records in San Antonio, while still remaining at the top of the Tejano music industry with her latest CD, Tres veces (2002). As the twenty-first century begins, Lares, in her mid-thirties, remains one of the key figures in the male-dominated Tejano music industry, an industry where, as she states, “only the strong survive.” Fans and critics alike agree that Lares has certainly flexed that strength in the music and fan following she has established during the past decade and a half. Shelly Lares represents the best of what Texas Mexican women have to offer to regional and international Latino music and culture and to country-and-western music. SOURCES: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books.
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Deborah Vargas
Las Hermanas
LAS HERMANAS (1971–
)
“Años de un caminar que se hace historia, de mujeres valientes que han tomado con decisión, firmeza, fe y anhelo las riendas de la vida junto al Pueblo.” “Years of a journey that becomes history, of valiant women who have taken with conviction, firmness, faith and devotion, the reins of a life bonded with the people.” As musician and community organizer Rosa Marta Zárate Macías sang these words in 1991 at the twentieth anniversary of Las Hermanas, the 200 women in attendance remembered the long, hard struggle that had brought them to this point. Many of those present had been with Las Hermanas since its inception in 1971, when fifty primarily Chicana women religious or sisters gathered in Houston, Texas, to discuss how they might better serve the needs of Spanish-speaking Catholics in the United States. Their desire for more effective service resulted in Las Hermanas, a national feminist organization of Latina Roman Catholics dedicated to empowerment for grassroots Latinas. For more than three decades Las Hermanas has created an alternative space for Latina Catholics to express a feminist spirituality and theology. The initial call to unite on April 2–5, 1971, came from Gregoria Ortega, a Victory Knoll sister, and Gloria Gallardo of the Sisters of the Holy Ghost. Their letter of invitation, dated October 20, 1970, and sent to all Mexican American sisters, identified their intentions to mobilize, “not just for strength and support, but to educate ourselves as to who we are, where we’re going, why we’re going, and how.” Within six months of the first meeting membership grew from 50 to 900 representing twenty-one states. The decision to form a national organization quickly took root, and members chose Las Hermanas as the official name, as well as the motto “Unidas en acción y oración” (united in prayer and action). Sisters of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent soon joined the organization, and by 1975 membership included Latina laity. Religious women and workingclass laity collaborated on a new way of being Latina and Catholic. A leadership team composed of three national coordinators with equal status and power offered a new model that promoted creativity and coresponsibility. Las Hermanas organized during a time of intense social upheaval for the Roman Catholic Church, U.S. society, and the world. The modernization of the church after Vatican II, ethnic civil rights movements, American feminism, and anti–Vietnam War protests influenced these women to challenge injustices within the church and secular society. Sister Yolanda Tarango explains, “At that time you were supposed to leave behind your past as it was not desirable to work with one’s people. We were forbidden to speak Spanish
even in hospitals, schools, not even to the janitors. . . . It was a violent tearing away from our pasts.” Experiencing patterns of racial discrimination constituted only a portion of the women’s concerns. An absence of Latino/a representation at all levels of the church hierarchy exacerbated their grievances. The rapidly growing 28 percent U.S. Latino/a Catholic population could no longer be satisfied with the appointment of only one Chicano bishop and a minimal number of Latina sisters and Latino priests. The historical underrepresentation of Latinos/as in positions of ecclesial authority created a severe absence of culturally sensitive ministries. The few Latino ministry programs in existence had very limited funding and decision-making power. Mexican nuns labored as domestics for low wages in seminaries and rectories at the same time that Spanishspeaking religious were sorely needed for ministry. All of these factors added fuel to their decision to mobilize. Four goals received unanimous support during Las Hermanas’ first decade of organizing: (1) to activate leadership among themselves and the laity; (2) to effect social change; (3) to contribute to the cultural renaissance of La Raza; and (4) to educate the Anglodominant congregations on the needs of Spanishspeaking communities. Members participated in student protests for education rights, the farmworker struggle for labor rights, and widespread community organizing. As member Theresa Basso states, “It was the beginning of Hispanic women coming together to respond to the voice of the people and to work as agents of change within the church. We understood the power that we had.” Their activism brought the Chicano movement into the religious arena as they systematically challenged the church to address ethnic, gender, and class discrimination. Membership peaked at approximately 900 in the late 1970s and has fluctuated since then. A vacuum in leadership during the late 1980s and early 1990s signaled a decline of the organization, but a new leadership team and a renewed sense of purpose have invigorated the now approximately 400 members, who continue to convene national conferences biennially. Over the years the organization has attracted diverse women, including Rosa Guerrero, Theresa Basso, Rosa Marta Zárate Macías, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Yolanda Tarango, María Carolina Flores, Lupe Arciniega, and Demetria Martínez. The class and ethnic diversity of the members has given them recognition by sociologist Ana María Díaz-Stevens as “the most creative and successful effort for solidarity in a diverse U.S. Latino reality.” In its first ten years of existence, Las Hermanas influenced the policy decisions of major ecclesial bodies, including the United States Catholic Conference/Na-
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Latina U.S. Treasurers tional Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCC/NCCB), the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), and the Secretariat for Hispanic Affairs of the United States Catholic Conference, regarding issues of institutional representation and culturally sensitive ministries. Together with PADRES (a social justice organization of Latino priests) it lobbied to increase the number of U.S. Latino bishops, which currently totals approximately twenty-one. Las Hermanas played an integral role in the three national Hispanic pastoral encuentros held in 1972, 1977, and 1985. It consistently lobbied for the full recognition of Latinas in the leadership of the church, including ordination. It also played a pivotal role in the founding of the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) in San Antonio, the first pastoral center to focus on Chicano Catholicism and to train ministers for Spanish-speaking communities. Las Hermanas and PADRES forged the path for Latino/a representation in the decision-making levels of the institutional church. Since 1980 Las Hermanas has focused specifically on issues affecting grassroots Latinas, including moral agency, reproductive rights, sexuality, domestic abuse, and labor issues. Its second decade marked a significant shift from a primarily community-based focus to that of women’s empowerment. For Las Hermanas, the two concerns community and women are not mutually exclusive, because it understands that the empowerment of women is directly tied to the empowerment of the Latino community. By 1990 the spirituality and theology of Las Hermanas was clearly grounded in a history of struggle for the purpose of transforming personal, social, and political constraints. Las Hermanas provided the source of inspiration for Latina Catholic theological understandings first articulated in Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s and Yolanda Tarango’s Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (1988) and subsequently named mujerista theology. According to Isasi-Díaz and Tarango, Las Hermanas provided “a real link” and “the seedbed” for the production of mujerista theology. The role that Las Hermanas takes in providing Chicanas and Latinas a space to raise critical issues regarding women in the church and in society has not been mirrored by any other national organization. The distinct mixture of spirituality and political activism that Las Hermanas has become known for marks its contribution to Latina strategies of resistance to social injustice. See also Feminism; Nuns, Contemporary; Religion SOURCES: Díaz-Stevens, Ana María. 1994. “Latinas and the Church.” In Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, and Yolanda Tarango. 1988. Hispanic Women: Prophetic
Voice in the Church. San Francisco: Harper and Row; Matovina, Timothy. 1999. “Representation and the Reconstruction of Power: The Rise of PADRES and Las Hermanas.” In What’s Left? Liberal American Catholics, ed. Mary Jo Weaver. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Medina, Lara. 2004. Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lara Medina
LATINA U.S. TREASURERS Throughout the twentieth century Latinas have increased their presence in government administration at the local, state, and federal levels. More than ever, Latinas are successful candidates or have attained decision-making positions in public office, either through electoral party participation or by appointment. Four women have served as treasurer of the United States: Romana Acosta Bañuelos (1971–1974), Katherine Davalos Ortega (1983–1989), Catalina Vásquez Villalpando (1989–1993), and Rosario Marín (2001–present). Romana Acosta Bañuelos was born in Miami, Arizona, in 1925, and grew up in Mexico. Her parents were undocumented immigrants repatriated to Mexico during the Great Depression. At the age of nineteen, toward the end of World War II, she returned to the United States. In 1949 she went into business for herself, starting a tortilla factory that eventually grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, Romana’s Mexican Food Products. An employer of hundreds of workers, Romana’s produced an impressive line of products. Bañuelos developed a reputation as a businesswoman and helped found the Pan American National Bank in Los Angeles. In 1969 she was named Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year in Los Angeles. In 1971 President Richard M. Nixon appointed Bañuelos treasurer of the United States, the first Latina to hold the position. The second Latina, Katherine Davalos Ortega, was the treasurer during the Reagan administration. Ortega was born in New Mexico in 1934. She attended Eastern New Mexico State University, majoring in business and economics. In 1969 she worked with Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company in Los Angeles and two years later became a vice president of the Pan American National Bank. In 1975 Ortega became the president of the Santa Ana State Bank, the first Latina to hold a position as president of a bank, but returned to New Mexico shortly thereafter and became active with the Republican Party. She was sworn in as treasurer of the United States on September 22, 1983, and served throughout the remainder of President Reagan’s terms in office. Catalina Vásquez Villalpando succeeded Ortega as
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Latinas in the U.S. Congress treasurer when she was sworn into the office in 1989 by President George Bush. A native of San Marcos, Texas, Villalpando was born in 1940. She was director of the Community Services Administration from 1969 until 1979, when she became vice president of the MidSouth Oil Company in Dallas, Texas. As treasurer of the United States, Villalpando was responsible for the operation of the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the U.S. Savings Bond Division. Unfortunately, Villalpando was found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to four months in prison, three years of community service, and a $150 fine. She stood accused of concealing information important for actions taken by the Treasury Department and other government agencies. Villalpando was found unfit to hold the position of treasurer of the United States. The fourth Latina appointed treasurer, Rosario Marín, was born in Mexico in 1957. She arrived in the United States with her parents when she was fourteen years of age, very much concerned that she would miss her quinceañera, the Latina coming-of-age ritual. A graduate of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Programs for Senior Executives in State and Local Government, Marín has spent much of her life in business and public service. She was mayor and councilwoman of Huntington Park, California, a city with a large Spanish-speaking population, and worked with Governor Pete Wilson’s administration as an advocate for people with disabilities. Her advocacy for the disabled stemmed from the birth of her son, Eric, who has Down’s syndrome. Marín was recognized for this work when she received the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Prize in 1995. The highest-ranking Latina to serve in President George W. Bush’s administration, Marín was sworn in as treasurer of the United States on August 16, 2001. See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress SOURCES: Kanellos, Nicholás, ed. 1998. The Hispanic American Almanac. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research; The Currency Gallery and Research Foundation Online Museum. “Catalina Vásquez Villalpando.” www.currencygallery.org/ sigs/villalpando.htm (accessed July 15, 2005); ———. “Katherine Davalos Ortega.” www.currencygallery.org/sigs/ortega .htm (accessed July 15, 2005); ———. “Romana Acosta Bañuelos.” www.currencygallery.org/sigs/banuelos.htm (accessed July 15, 2005); ———. “Rosario Marín.” www.currency gallery.org/sigs/marin.htm (accessed July 15, 2005). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
LATINAS IN THE U.S. CONGRESS Latino representation in the U.S. Congress has been steadily increasing since Latino districts were included under the Voting Rights Act of 1975. There were twenty-seven Latino representatives in the 109th Con-
gress (2005–2007), seven of whom were women— Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Lucille Roybal-Allard (DCA), Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), Loretta Sánchez (D-CA), Grace Napolitano (D-CA), Hilda Solis (D-CA), and Linda Sánchez (D-CA). At present, Latinas make up 26 percent of the Latino delegation. This is a much higher proportion of female representation than can be found among Anglo representatives, 12 percent of whom are women, but lower than that of African American women, who make up 33 percent of African American members of Congress. Fifteen percent of the female representatives from the Democratic Party and 4 percent of the Republican women are Latina. No Latina has ever served in the U.S. Senate. Of the seven Latinas in Congress, six are Democrats and one is Republican. All but two (who happen to be sisters) began their political careers by serving in local government and then in their state legislatures. Term limits in the state of California seem to be encouraging the election of Latinas to Congress; five of the seven are from that state, and three of those chose to run for Congress after serving their maximum of six years in the legislature. Four of the women, Ros-Lehtinen, Napolitano, Roybal-Allard, and Linda Sánchez, were elected to open seats (seats without incumbents). RosLehtinen succeeded an incumbent congressman who died in office and Napolitano one who retired. RoybalAllard and Sánchez were elected to represent new districts that were created after the redistricting that followed the 1990 and 2000 censuses, respectively. The other three, Velázquez, Loretta Sánchez, and Solis, were elected in competitive races in which they defeated an incumbent. Ros-Lehtinen, Roybal-Allard, and Velázquez are, respectively, the first Cuban American, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican women elected to Congress. Despite the fact that they come from different political parties, they share strong similarities in terms of their legislative priorities. All see the environment, especially water quality, as an important issue. Women and family issues are also listed as high on their agendas, especially issues of education, children’s health, the elderly, and economic development. This emphasis is reflected in their committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005–2007). Two serve on the International Relations Committee; one serves on the House Resources Committee, which deals with environmental issues, and two on the Small Business Committee, which deals with economic development, especially in depressed areas. All the Latina representatives are members of the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues, a bipartisan group of female representatives interested in addressing issues important to women and families. All except Ros-Lehtinen are members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
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Latinas in the U.S. Congress The first Latina elected to the House of Representatives was Cuban-born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who was elected in 1989 to represent Florida’s Eighteenth District. Her district encompasses South Miami Beach, Little Havana, Westchester, Coral Gables, and Key Biscayne, parts of Kendall and Homestead, and suburban Miami. She won her seat in a special election held after the death of Congressman Claude Pepper. Before serving in Congress, Ros-Lehtinen was the first Latina elected to the Florida state legislature, where she served as a state legislator from 1982 to 1986 and as a state senator from 1986 to 1989. She is a member of the Republican Party. Ros-Lehtinen was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 15, 1952, and came to the United States with her family when she was seven years old. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Florida International University and her associate in arts degree from Miami-Dade Community College. She has also been granted an honorary doctor of pedagogy degree from Nova Southeastern University. She is presently working on her doctoral dissertation in higher education from the University of Miami. Ros-Lehtinen began her career as an educator and founded a private elementary school in southern Florida. Ros-Lehtinen has focused primarily on issues of international relations, specifically the U.S. relationship with Cuba. On the domestic front she has focused on issues concerning education, children, senior citizens, women and their health, victims’ rights, and the environment. She serves on the International Relations Committee, Committee on Government Reform, and the Budget Committee. She is the first Latina ever to chair a House subcommittee—she currently chairs the Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia for the International Relations committee. Within that committee, she also serves on the subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere, which is responsible for, among other things, U.S.-Cuba policy, and the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations. The first Mexican American woman elected to the U.S. Congress was Lucille Roybal-Allard. Roybal-Allard was elected in 1992 to represent the Thirty-third Congressional District of California, the district with the largest Latino majority in the nation. Her district includes downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, and eight southeast cities of Los Angeles County. She was born and raised in Boyle Heights, California, and is the eldest daughter of retired congressman Edward R. Roybal. Her father served for thirty years in Congress, and Roybal-Allard’s district includes portions of her father’s old district. After working in the field of public relations and as a fund-raising executive for the United Way, she was elected in 1986 to the California State
Assembly, where she served for three terms. She graduated from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1965 and is a member of the Democratic Party. During the 105th Congress (1997–1999) RoybalAllard served as chair of the twenty-nine-member California Democratic congressional delegation. She was the first woman, the first Latina, and the first member to assume this position through election rather than seniority. During the 106th Congress (1999–2001) she served as the first female chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, an eighteen-member coalition of Latino members of Congress (the three Latino members from the Republican Party are not members of the Caucus). She also chairs the newly formed Congressional Hispanic Caucus Livable Communities Task Force. The task force is meant to improve the quality of life for working families by focusing on community empowerment, home ownership, transportation, and environmental justice. Roybal-Allard is regarded as a strong supporter of social legislation, particularly in the fields of jobs, health care, education, housing, women’s rights, and the environment. She is the first Latina to serve on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which is the committee responsible for overseeing funding for the entire federal government. During the 109th Congress as a member of this important committee, she serves on the Homeland Security Subcommittee, which is responsible for funding for the Department of Homeland Security. She also serves on the Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. This subcommittee oversees, among other entities, funding for the Department of Labor, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, and the Department of Education. The first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives was Nydia M. Velázquez. She was elected to Congress in 1992 after defeating incumbent Democrat Stephen Solarz in the primary election. She represents the Twelfth district of New York, which encompasses parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. She began her political career in 1983 when she served as special assistant to U.S. representative Edolphus Towns. In 1984 she became the first Latina to serve on the New York City Council. From 1986 to 1989 she was the national director of the Migration Division Office in the Department of Labor and Human Resources of Puerto Rico. From 1986 to 1992 she was director of the Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs in the United States for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Velázquez was born on March 28, 1953, in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. She was the first person in her family to receive a college diploma. She entered the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras at the age of sixteen and
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Latinas in the U.S. Congress graduated magna cum laude in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. In 1976 she received a master’s degree in political science from New York University. From 1976 to 1981 she was a professor of political science at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. In 1981 she joined the faculty of Hunter College at the City University of New York as an adjunct professor of Puerto Rican studies. Velázquez’s legislative priority has been economic development. To that end, she serves on the House Small Business Committee. The Small Business Committee has oversight of a wide array of programs and federal contracts totaling nearly $100 billion annually. In 1998 she was named ranking Democrat of that committee, making her the first Latina to serve as ranking member of a full House committee. Velázquez is also a member of the Banking and Financial Services Committee and serves on three of its subcommittees: the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government-Sponsored Enterprise, the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, and the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity. In addition, she is chair of the Hispanic Caucus’s Business and Economic Development Task Force and is a member of the Hispanic Caucus, the Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Caucus on the Census, the Congressional Children’s Caucus, the Congressional Jobs and Fair Trade Caucus, the Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Caucus, the Human Rights Caucus, the Older Americans Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Urban Caucus, and the Women’s Issues Caucus. Loretta Sánchez is Mexican American and was elected to Congress in November 1996 in a controversial election in which she defeated the Republican incumbent, Robert Dornan. She represents California’s Forty-seventh Congressional District, which includes parts of Anaheim, Santa Ana, Fullerton, Garden Grove, and Fountain Valley. This is the first political office she has held. Before her election to Congress Sánchez worked both in the public and the private sector, with an emphasis on municipal government. She was a financial manager at the Orange County Transportation Authority and an assistant vice president at Fieldman Rollap and Associates, specializing in advising clients of the firm in the area of municipal finance. She was an associate at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, arranging financing for municipalities, as well as private companies. Sánchez then started her own consulting business in Santa Ana, specializing in assisting public agencies and private firms with financial matters. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Sánchez was born and raised in Anaheim, California. She attended Chapman College in Orange, California, where she received her bachelor’s degree in eco-
nomics in 1982. In 1984 she obtained a master’s degree in business administration from American University in Washington, D.C. During the second year of her M.B.A. program at American, Sánchez spent a year in Rome, Italy, attending the European Community’s Market Management School. She serves on the House Committee on Homeland Security and the House Armed Services Committee. She is a member of the Hispanic Caucus, the fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, the New Democratic Coalition, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the Women’s Congressional Caucus, the Older Americans Caucus, the Law Enforcement Caucus, and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus. The Sánchez family made history in the 108th Congress (2003–2005) when Loretta Sánchez’s sister Linda Sánchez took office to represent California’s Thirtyninth District, which includes Artesia, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens, Lakewood, La Mirada, Lynwood, Paramount, and South Gate, a large portion of Whittier, small portions of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and parts of unincorporated Los Angeles County—East La Mirada, Florence-Graham, South Whittier, West Whittier, and Willowbrook. Linda Sánchez has worked as a civil rights attorney and labor leader and is a member of the Democratic Party. She ran for office in an open Latino-majority seat created after the 2000 redistricting process. While a number of brothers have served in Congress together, the Sánchezes are the first sisters ever to serve in the House of Representatives at the same time. Linda Sánchez serves on the House Judiciary Committee, Committee for Government Reform, and Small Business Committee. Grace Flores Napolitano was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998. She defeated Republican Ed Pérez to succeed retiring congressman Esteban Torres. Napolitano represents California’s Thirtyfourth District, which covers the City of Industry, La Puente, Montebello, Norwalk, Pico Rivera, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, and the unincorporated areas of Avocado Heights, Bassett, East Los Angeles, Hacienda Heights, Los Nietos, South and West Whittier, and Valinda. She began her political career as a member of the Norwalk City Council, winning her first election in 1986. She served as the city’s mayor from 1989 to 1990. She was elected to the California State Assembly in 1992, where she served as chair of the women’s caucus and vice-chair of the Latino Caucus. She served in the state assembly for six years and is a member of the Democratic Party. Napolitano is Mexican American and was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. After high school she moved to California. She spent her career working as a secretary for the Ford Motor Company. After retiring from Ford, she focused full-time on public service. Her
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League of United Latin American Citizens domestic legislative agenda has centered on economic development, environmental issues, women’s health, and education issues. Napolitano currently serves as Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. She is also co-Chair of the Mental Health Caucus, which she helped to create. This caucus aims to increase access to mental health services, particularly for veterans, children/adolescents, minorities, and the elderly. In addition to the International Relations Committee, she serves on the Resources Committee, which addresses environmental and water issues. She is the ranking member of the Water and Power Subcommittee. She is a member of the Indian, Armenian, and Greek Caucus and the centrist, business-oriented New Democrat Coalition. Hilda L. Solis is of Mexican and Nicaraguan origin. She was elected to Congress in 2000 after defeating the Democratic incumbent, Matthew Martínez, in the primary election. She represents the Thirty-first Congressional District of California, which includes parts of East Los Angeles and the cities of Irwindale, El Monte, South El Monte, Azusa, Baldwin Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel, Alhambra, and Monterey Park. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Solis graduated from California Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1979 and earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California in 1981. During the Carter administration she was the editor in chief of the White House Office of Hispanic Affairs and was later appointed as a management analyst with the Office of Management and Budget in the Civil Rights Division. She was first elected to public office in 1985 as a member of the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees. She served in the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1994, and in 1994 she made history by becoming the first Latina ever elected to the California State Senate. Solis’s domestic agenda has centered on issues of environmental justice, education, and workers’ rights. Congresswoman Solis is the first Latina ever to serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Within that committee, she is the ranking member of the Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee. She also serves on the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee. In 2005, Congresswoman Solis was made coChair of the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues and Chair of the Democratic Women’s Working Group. See also Politics, Electoral; Politics, Party SOURCES: Foerstel, Karen. 1999. Biographical Dictionary of Congressional Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Martin, Mart. 1999. The Almanac of Women and Minorities in American Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Swers, Michele L. 2002. The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press; Vigil, Maurilio. 1996. Hispanics in Congress: A Historical and Political Survey. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Lisa García Bedolla
LEAGUE OF UNITED LATIN AMERICAN CITIZENS (LULAC) (1929– ) Founded by middle-class Tejanos in February 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) emerged as the most significant civil rights organization for Mexican Americans in the Southwest from 1930 to 1960. LULAC membership was restricted to English-speaking U.S. citizens and, as noted in its first constitution, was reserved for men only. “Ladies LULAC” or women’s chapters emerged in 1933 at the statewide annual LULAC convention in Del Rio, Texas. At this meeting LULAC leaders “permitted Latin American women to organize on the same basis as men.” These chapters replaced the few ladies auxiliaries that had been organized in San Antonio, Kingsville, and Alice in 1931. Women first organized Junior LULAC chapters in the 1930s, and in El Paso they formed Project Amistad for the elderly. Ladies LULAC grew in national strength, but its base remained strongest in Texas, with eighteen chapters. These branches operated locally and had casual contact with other women’s chapters at the state and national levels. They worked mostly independently from the men’s councils but cooperated on projects such as the LULAC newsmagazine or organizing conventions. They participated in a wide range of activities, including desegregation, poll tax drives, voter registration, and scholarship fund-raising. They have also been concerned with children, the elderly, the poor, and women. During its first thirty years LULAC members envisioned their mission as twofold: (1) to pursue their civil rights as American citizens and (2) to uplift their less fortunate Mexican immigrant neighbors. While LULAC’s written statements seem to suggest considerable distance between middle-class members and working-class immigrants, the voluntarist activities of Ladies LULAC suggest otherwise. They participated in numerous charitable and social welfare projects that benefited immigrant women and children, such as clothing and toy drives. Most of the LULAC Ladies were middle-class or working-class women with highschool degrees. Some were small-business owners, like Alice Dickerson Montemayor, or teachers, like renowned folklorist Jovita González Mireles. They often worked behind the scenes raising money to pay poll taxes or to underwrite legal expenses with regard to desegregation litigation. Indeed, LULAC was responsible for a number of legal victories that broke
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League of United Latin American Citizens
Since the 1930s, LULAC, a predominantly middle-class organization, has been among the most visible and effective civil rights groups in the Southwest. Courtesy of the Mexican American Collection, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
down the barriers of segregation in public schools, parks, theaters, and swimming pools. Southern California LULAC chapters, for instance, raised funds to support the landmark Méndez v. Westminster (1946) case, a school desegregation suit with tangible ties to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The organization also conducted voter registration drives and mobilized Mexican Americans as a political force, especially at the local level. For example, LULAC helped elect Raymond Telles, the first Mexican American mayor of El Paso, in 1957. During the Chicano movement many youthful activists considered LULAC a relic of the past, the civil rights group of their parents’ generation. However, LULAC has continued as a national organization and in 2004 celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. By 1970 most women joined integrated councils of men and women, and in 1972 LULAC supported the Equal Rights Amendment. During the 1990s El Paso’s Ladies LULAC council remained the last Ladies LULAC chapter. Most women today are in chapters composed of women and men. The national organization has also sought to expand its base. In 1986 LULAC opened its doors to Mexican immigrants, but few have joined. Filipinos have joined California LULAC councils; several chapters were established in Puerto Rico; and Cuban Americans joined the organization in the 1980s. However, when
LULAC president Mario Obledo visited Cuba, Cuban American LULACers were so offended that they disbanded their chapters. However, LULAC chapters can now be found throughout the country, including the Midwest, the Northeast, and even the South, reflecting the growing presence of Latinos nationally. Belén Rob-
Symbolizing post World War II aspirations for civil rights and the good life, a local LULAC Council holds a fund raiser for the Méndez school desegregation case with a new refrigerator as the raffle prize. Courtesy of Margie Aguirre of the California LULAC Heritage Commission.
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Lebrón, Dolores “Lolita” les, a vocal feminist, has served as the only woman president of the national organization. While strides have been made in terms of the visibility of women in leadership positions, Latina lesbians have had a cool reception in the organization. Criticisms notwithstanding, for more than seventy-five years LULAC has been an important civil rights organization that has made a qualitative difference in the lives of Latinos, especially Mexican Americans at the local level. See also Méndez v. Westminster SOURCES: Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Ladies LULAC.” In New Handbook of Texas, 3: 1–2. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; ———. 1996. “League of United Latin American Citizens.” In New Handbook of Texas, 3:129–131. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; ———. 1998. “League of United Latin American Citizens.” In Reader’s Companion to US Women’s History, eds. Wilma Mankiller, Wendy Mink, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith, and Gloria Steinhem, 378. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Cynthia E. Orozco
LEBRÓN, DOLORES “LOLITA” (1919–
)
Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón was the youngest of five children born into an impoverished family in the countryside of Lares, Puerto Rico, in 1919. When Lebrón was in her teens, her father, Gonzalo Lebrón, a field hand, died for lack of medical care. His premature death at forty-two years of age and the poverty that engulfed the family following his death were, according to Lolita Lebrón, common ills endured by the island’s poor during that era. Despite her impoverished life, she said that she remained “a dreamer,” more interested in nature, poetry, and social causes than in politics. “I grew up,” she recalled, “not taking much notice of Puerto Rico’s political situation. I did not know much. I had heard about the Ponce Massacre [referring to the assassination of 19 Nationalists and the wounding of more than 100 by the island’s police in 1937] because someone came to our house who had lost a relative in it. I had heard about a man named Pedro Albizu Campos but I never knew him personally.” Lebrón finished high school, had a daughter, and sought to make a life for herself in Lares, but unable to find a job, she followed the example of her neighbors and in 1940 migrated to New York City. In New York the twenty-one-year-old Lebrón found work, but at “a high price” to her. She explains, “After three days of looking for work, getting lost in the trains, walking in the snow, without money for lunch or shelter, I had to deny that I was Puerto Rican in order to have a job.” A
Lolita Lebrón, Puerto Rican nationalist, circa 1950s. Courtesy of the Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
textile company hired her as a seamstress because she claimed to be from Spain. A skilled seamstress, she quickly rose to a supervisory position within the company, earning about thirty dollars a week when she worked overtime. These wages enabled her to support herself and to send money home to her mother, who had remained in charge of her daughter. In 1944 Lebrón gave birth to a son, Félix, whom she also sent to her mother in Lares. Her political career seems to date from the early 1940s when she joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party chapter in New York City. Her activism earned her a series of leadership posts within the party. These ranged from secretary of the New York chapter (1946) to president of the Feminine Chapter of the ProLiberation Committee for the Nationalist Prisoners (1952) and delegate of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (1954). It was as a delegate of the island’s Nationalist Party that she performed the act that launched her onto the
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Ledesma, Josephine world stage as a fighter for Puerto Rico’s independence. On March 1, 1954, Lebrón, then thirty-four, accompanied by three young men in their twenties, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores, wrapped herself in the Puerto Rican flag, pulled a gun from her purse, and opened fire from the visitors’ gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. When they were captured, she insisted that she was the one responsible for the attack. Years later, in a statement from prison, she explained why she and her compatriots had resorted to violence: “Attacking the U.S. in its own heart, its own entrails, was Puerto Rico’s last recourse . . . because the island could not arm itself . . . and confront the U.S. in a traditional war. We made our war the only way we’re able to.” She was subsequently convicted of five counts of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to serve from sixteen to fifty years at the Federal Correctional Institution for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. Her time in prison was spent sewing uniforms and other items used in the prison, writing poetry, praying, and standing up for her rights and those of other fellow prisoners. “Conditions at the Alderson facility,” she stated, “were so arbitrary that women were intimidated and placed in isolation just to keep them in line.” Angered by such conditions, she frequently refused to eat and helped organize hunger strikes within the prison. Because she viewed herself as a political prisoner, Lebrón refused to accept the validity of her conviction or to apply for parole when she became eligible. She claimed that the only way she would leave prison was when she received a pardon from the U.S. government. Since that seemed unlikely, she resigned herself to her fate by “entrusting her soul to God,” making an altar in her cell, and surrounding her space with religious images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. With faith and prayers she endured the harshness of confinement and the sadness brought by the deaths of her son Félix (1954), her mother (1974), and her daughter Gladys (1977). During the 1970s many distinguished figures within the Catholic Church, political circles, labor, and academia from Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago organized to demand the release of the five Nationalists still serving time in U.S. prisons. They argued that the Nationalist prisoners had served unusually long sentences for their acts and should be pardoned and released. President Jimmy Carter reviewed their cases and freed Andrés Figueroa Cordero first because he was ill with cancer. The others were released shortly thereafter, in September 1979. After a week of celebrations in Chicago and New York, Lebrón settled in a suburb of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she became a revered heroine to many
within the independence movement. But when her pacifist views and her devotion to the Catholic faith became known, she was abandoned by the more radical sectors. Married to Dr. Sergio Irizarry, a physician she met shortly after her release from prison, she took time to develop her skills as a housewife and gardener. She continued to pray, to write poetry, and to offer her views on the political status of Puerto Rico. In 2001, as the struggle to oust the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques began to overshadow all other issues in Puerto Rico, Lebrón joined the protesters and was twice arrested for trespassing on what the navy considers its property. SOURCES: Fernández, Juan A. 1997. “Lebrón Urges Nonviolent Struggle.” San Juan Star, September 24, 7; Ferrer, Melba. 1997. “An Enduring Ardor.” San Juan Star, May 4, 6–7; González, David. 2001. “Vieques Advocate Turns from Violence of Her Past.” New York Times, June 18, A-14; Lebrón, Lolita. 1976. “A Personal Statement,” written while she was in prison. Ruth Reynolds Papers, Box 2, Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; Ojito, Mirta. 1998. “Shots That Haunted 3 Generations.” New York Times, May 26, E-1, E-6; Summary of Lolita Lebrón’s Political Activities, part of a Dossier (Carpeta), no. 13,888, kept by the Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rican Government. Fondo: Departamento de Justicia, Policía de Puerto Rico. Serie: Documentos Nacionalistas. Tarea: 90-29, Caja 9, Item 14. Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim
LEDESMA, JOSEPHINE (1917–
)
When Josephine Kelly Ledesma was trained as an airplane mechanic during World War II, she was the only woman in her training group. As an airplane mechanic at Bergstrom Air Field in Austin, Texas, Ledesma was one of three women out of her seven-person work group. “In Bergstrom Field our duty was ‘to keep them flying.’ We were taking care of all transit aircraft that came that needed repairs,” she remembers. Ledesma grew up with her mother, Josephine Leonor Barrera, a schoolteacher, her father, John Arthur Kelly, a conductor for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and her grandparents in a country house in Kyle, Texas. “There was a big fig tree on the outside of the window. And I remember till today the smell of that tree when I used to go to bed. The breeze was just wonderful at night. And we didn’t have to have any air conditioning or anything like that,” Ledesma recalls. Her grandparents were farmers and always planted a garden. That helped the family survive during the depression. Her grandmother from her mother’s side was a distant relative of José Antonio Navarro, a signer of the Declaration of Texas Independence. “Her people were Spanish, real Spaniards, those who had blue eyes, and even the top of her head was pink.” One
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Lee Tapia, Consuelo great-grandfather, on the other hand, was a fullblooded Sioux. Ledesma, who was twenty-four when the war broke out, worked as a mechanic between 1942 and 1944. In 1944 the United States produced 96,318 airplanes. More than 250,000 airplanes were produced between 1939 and 1945. Those airplanes needed mechanics. Ledesma volunteered to work as an airplane mechanic after her husband, Alfred, was drafted. Because he was the father of a five-year-old, however, his duty was waived. Ledesma signed up for a six-month training class at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Her training was hands-on. “You didn’t sit in there reading books,” she recalls. After Randolph Air Force Base, she was sent to Bergstrom Air Field and then to Big Spring. “You had people working on the electric part, on the hydraulic part, on the engines,” recounted Ledesma. “I happened to work on the fuselage, the body of the plane.” She was the only Mexican American woman at Randolph. Two women, both Anglos, worked at Bergstrom, and several more at Big Spring. All worked in the sheet-metal department. At Big Spring Ledesma was the only woman working in the hangar. “Oh, I loved it. I thought I was just doing a real big thing,” she recalls. After she left the hangars, Ledesma continued her role as a homemaker. “This had been a job and that was all. . . . So you went back to your own job: housekeeping and raising kids,” she said. The war did not change that in her life. Ledesma had four children. Alfred, the eldest, was born in 1937. Dolores was born in 1944, John in 1946, and Linda in 1948.
After the war she returned to her previous occupation as a salesclerk. Some jobs were off-limits to Mexican Americans. Before the war she had tried to find a job in a department store. The owner said that he would be glad to give her a job if she used Kelly, her maiden name. That was not the only incident of racial discrimination she faced. During the war she and her husband went to a restaurant. After a few minutes they had to leave because the personnel refused to serve him. “Big Spring was absolutely terrible with MexicanAmericans and blacks.” A woman in her eighties, today Ledesma belongs to the Ladies of Charity and is the president of her senior community. She believes that education is the only thing Mexican Americans can have to fight against discrimination and achieve equality. “I really would like for the Mexican-American girls and boys of today to get an education. We are not going to get anywhere unless we are educated.” SOURCE: Rivera, Monica, 2001. “To Keep Them Flying.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 2, no. 2 (Spring). Monica Rivera
LEE TAPIA, CONSUELO (1904–1989) Often overshadowed by the prominence of her husband, Puerto Rican nationalist poet Juan Antonio Corretjer, Consuelo Lee Tapia was a committed writer and militant nationalist in her own right. She is the author of the book Con un hombro menos (With One Less
Josephine Ledesma teaches a soldier how to repair the fuselage of an airplane, January 1942. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Legal Issues Shoulder) (1977) and of numerous uncollected essays on political and cultural issues that are still scattered in various newspapers. Lee Tapia was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1904. Her mother was the daughter of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, one of the island’s leading intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and her father was the North American writer Albert Lee. Lee Tapia never knew her famous grandfather, who died several decades before she was born. She received part of her schooling in Puerto Rico, but at the age of fifteen was sent to Dwight College in the United States. During the 1930s she witnessed the extreme poverty that plagued the Puerto Rican masses and the political turmoil and persecution of the burgeoning nationalist movement by U.S. and island colonial authorities. She deplored the prevailing environment of political repression, the dire conditions faced by the majority of the peasant population, and the exploitation of Puerto Rican workers by U.S. absentee corporations and the Creole privileged class. All of these might have influenced her decision to become affiliated with the U.S. Communist Party. During those years she met and married Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Corretjer, a militant member of both the Nationalist and Communist Parties who was sent to prison in 1936 along with party leader Pedro Albizu Campos and many Nationalist Party supporters. Lee Tapia and her spouse settled in New York during the early 1940s after Corretjer was released from prison. In New York she assumed the post of administrative editor of Corretjer’s newspaper, Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples) (1943–1944), a progressive publication aimed at promoting the unification of Spanishspeaking peoples in the United States, as well as Puerto Rican independence, and at combating the fascism that was digging in its claws all over Europe, including Spain. The articles she published in Pueblos Hispanos show her to have been a strong advocate of women’s and workers’ rights and of Puerto Rico’s independence from the United States. She also studied photography in New York and Baltimore before returning to Puerto Rico in 1946. In Puerto Rico Lee Tapia worked at the Escuela Betances in Guaynabo and initiated a popular literacy program. In 1962 she became a member of the Liga Socialista (Socialist League) and was placed in charge of Marxist instruction. The late 1960s were a period of political turmoil in Puerto Rico because of the growing resistance to U.S. military service during the Vietnam War, the continuous undermining of the civil rights of independence supporters by federal and local authorities, and the U.S. refusal to improve or resolve Puerto Rico’s colonial status. In 1969 Lee Tapia and Corretjer were arrested and accused of conspiring against the
U.S. government in Puerto Rico. They spent several weeks in jail, but were later exonerated of most charges. In the 1980s Lee Tapia headed the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners Committee, aimed at generating support for their release from federal prisons. She dedicated many years of her life to this effort. After Corretjer’s death in 1985 she established the Fundación Museo-Biblioteca Juan Antonio Corretjer to honor his memory as a writer and patriot. She spent her remaining years working at the museum-library. See also Journalism and Print Media; Literature SOURCE: Lee Tapia, Consuelo. 1977. Con un hombro menos. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura. Edna Acosta-Belén
LEGAL ISSUES In terms of their contemporary legal status, Latinas are not a monolithic group; they are diverse in their immigration status, English-language fluency, and backgrounds. Although some are recent arrivals to the United States, others trace familial roots that include several generations of U.S.-born individuals. Nonetheless, Latinas face unique legal issues with regard to immigration, as battered women, and in reproductive rights, health care, welfare, education, sexual harassment, employment discrimination, and criminal justice. Their legal positions are exacerbated by their underrepresentation within a multilayered legal and administrative system. Women who come from Latin America, Central America, or the Hispanic Caribbean face immigration issues that are not the same as those faced by their immigrant male counterparts. Many Latina immigrants work as farm laborers and are subject to the travails of farmworkers. Others become domestic workers subject to different types of exploitation, including salaries below minimum-wage requirements and abuse based on employers’ use of authority to negatively influence their immigration status. Despite equal-pay laws, Latinas earn less than men and less than non-Latina women. Some gains have been made in the area of employment discrimination and sexual harassment laws. For example, one of the first federal rulings concerning the rights of immigrant workers, EEOC v. Tortillera “La Mejor,” ruled in favor of an undocumented worker who was fired when she became pregnant. Despite positive rulings in egregious cases, Latinas continue to face discrimination that is sometimes not adequately remedied by the courts. In addition, Latinas who have confronted discrimination in the form of sexual harassment, illegal wage differentials, occupational hazards, or other abuses
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León, Ruth Esther Soto generally do not seek or obtain redress in the courts because of economic, language, and cultural barriers. These obstacles often prohibit access to the justice system. Within the immigrant family unit, however, the role of women tends to differ. Congress has reformed some of the immigration laws, such as the Violence against Women Act, to help women immigrants who may be victims of domestic violence. Nonetheless, the immigration laws still do not adequately take into account women’s status as potential mothers of young children, or those who may be survivors of domestic violence, or those who actively defend themselves against their abusers. Latinas who are battered women may also face different issues from those faced by nonLatina women. Shelters, among the few safe havens for battered women, do not always offer bilingual services. Many programs for survivors of domestic violence stereotype cultural issues or do not take cultural issues into account when counseling or providing services. The local legal protective services may also not meet the language needs of Spanish speakers. Even within the legal system Latinas may not have adequate assistance to obtain the help they need. Poverty, racism, and language barriers disproportionately affect Latinas and their families. They often fail to obtain benefits to which they are entitled. Cuts in funding for legal aid programs adversely affect their ability to use the legal system. Desegregation and other educational legal reforms have not always helped Latinas achieve their educational potential. The dropout rate for both Latinas and Latinos continues to rise and is higher than it is for non-Latinas, African Americans, and other people of color. Attacks on affirmative action, as well as bilingual education, in California, Florida, Texas, and Washington State have limited access to higher education for Latinas and other people of color. Title XI, which guarantees equal opportunities for female athletes, has provided some very talented Latinas with opportunities to pursue careers in sports, but it has not been fully implemented for female athletes of color. Latinas also face similar limitations in dealing with the criminal justice system. Among the general population many Latinas and Latinos, particularly those who live in urban barrios, have experienced police harassment and selective enforcement and prosecution. Once they find themselves involved in the criminal justice system, they often do not have access to quality legal representation, nor are they adequately represented in jury pools. Cases like Hernández v. New York, 500 U.S. 352 (1991), which allowed the exclusion of bilingual jurors on the ground that they might give more credence to the Spanish words spoken rather than the English translation, deny monolingual
Spanish-speaking individuals even a semblance of a jury of their peers. Latinas are underrepresented in the judiciary and among court personnel. As criminal defendants, they may suffer from cultural stereotypes or humiliatingly benefit from cultural stereotypes of passivity or gender-role expectations in attempts to reduce sentences. Given the bleak situations described here, it is not surprising that Latinas are sorely underrepresented within the legal profession. A Mexican American, Antonia Hernández, headed the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and is one of the most visible Latina lawyers in the United States. Its Puerto Rican counterpart, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), has never had a woman in its leadership. Moreover, the American Bar Association Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession found that Latinos constitute 2 percent of the legal profession. The percentage of Latina lawyers is less than half that figure. For the most part, Latina lawyers are concentrated in government, community agencies, small law firms, or public interest jobs, which might perhaps provide more satisfying work but do not pay as well as positions with large, prestigious law firms. In 1995 seven Latinas served on the federal bench, five as district court judges, one on the bankruptcy court, and one as a federal magistrate. As law professors, Latinas constitute three-quarters of 1 percent of all law teachers in the United States. While Latinas represent about half of all Latinos (male and female) attending law school, the proportion of Latinos in law school is small. See also Domestic Violence; Immigration of Latinas to the United States; Rape SOURCES: Ebben, Maureen, and Norma Guerra Gair. 1998. “Telling Stories, Telling Self: Using Narrative to Uncover Latina Voices and Agency in the Legal Profession.” ChicanoLatino Law Review 19:243–256; Hernandez-Truyol, Berta. 1998. “Las olvidadas: Gendered in Justice/Gendered Injustice: Latinas, Fronteras, and the Law.” Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 1:353–404; Holmquist, Kristen L. 1997. “Cultural Defense or False Stereotype: What Happens When Latina Defendants Collide with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.” Berkeley Women’s Law Journal 12:11 45; 68 Sedillo, Antoinette López, ed. 1999. Latina Issues: Fragments of Historia (Ella) (Herstory). New York: Garland Publishing. Antoinette López Sedillo
LEÓN, RUTH ESTHER SOTO (“LA HERMANA LEÓN”) (1939–
)
La Hermana León has traveled a long distance from her birthplace in the San Juan suburb of Río Piedras to her current home in the California Bay Area. Moreover,
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León, Tania her entrepreneurial spirit and faith in God enabled her to achieve remarkable grassroots church/community organizing during an age when dominant North American society held little regard for Latinas. It was on the tiny Caribbean island of Puerto Rico that “Rucita” first witnessed the power of faith in the lives of those who “trust in God.” Her mother, Justa Soto (1918–1986), and her father, Arcadio Soto (1911– 1989), were poor but hardworking. They were members of Defensores de la Fe, a Pentecostal church organization on the island. Arcadio began preaching at the age of sixteen. Additionally, he owned and operated a business as a home painter. Rucita was close to her younger brother, Louis, and elder sister, Ana Dina. In the 1940s Puerto Rico’s population suffered from the alarming poverty, illiteracy, diseases, and mortality rates that characterize the undeveloped world. Yet the church structured a vital mutual-support network that provided the material and spiritual aid enabling families and individuals to survive and even to thrive. In 1945 the Sotos relocated to New York City and were part of a mass diaspora to the United States—1 million in eighteen years. There Arcadio continued to operate his business and began to attend the Spanishlanguage church Juan 3:16. Rucita began her studies in the tough and ethnically diverse public school system. In 1947 the Soto family moved across the continent to San Francisco. California offered better schools, Latino mission fields, and economic opportunities. There Arcadio and Justa opened a church called Mision Bethel. “Ruthie” studied hard and graduated six months early from Balboa High School in 1957. Even though the social realities of 1950s American racism limited her opportunities, she went to work as a stenographer and continued attending her father’s church in San Francisco. It was there, in 1955, that she met Daniel León. They were married four years later. The son of immigrants from Guanajuato and Sonora, Mexico, Daniel left college after completing his first year. At California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obisbo professors had discouraged him, instructing him that his merit-based scholarship was wasted on his name. Defeated, he moved north, where he rented a room from a Mexican Pentecostal family. Soon he was “born again” and began to work toward his dream of a fully independent network of Spanishspeaking evangelical churches that would ordain ministers, own property, and create schools. Ruth and Daniel were married in 1959. By 1965 they were raising three children, a girl, Laura, and two boys, Leonardo and Luis. Feeling the call, in 1962 Daniel and Ruth purchased their first church in downtown Oakland after renting a temple from a Pilipino Methodist congregation for a brief time. In 1972 they purchased an adjacent large Victorian home that was used as ad-
ditional space for classrooms and meetings; this church they called la Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal. Together Ruth, Daniel, and a group of less than a dozen ministers wrote the legal and theological bylaws to legally incorporate their union and to register Christian ministerial credentials with the state; this church council was called Iglesias que trabajan por la communión Cristiana, and at its peak it organized and owned more than twenty churches with nearly 200 licensed ministers. Ruth and Daniel León served as pastors of the local church for sixteen years. Additionally, they worked at the development and growth of the larger church council while both held full-time jobs. Through their message of hope, faith in God, and the transforming power of the gospel, combined with honest, hard work, the churches have helped hundreds of people realize happier and more fruitful lives and answer the call for ministry with an organization rooted in the Latino community. The Reverend Daniel León passed away in 1988, and Ruth León continued to realize the vision alone as pastor of the Oakland church and as shepherd of the church council. Even though their church council had ordained women since its inception, after her husband passed away, the congregation was reluctant to accept her solo leadership and pressured her to relinquish control of the ministry. She recounts, “They would not accept me because I was a woman.” Still, her unwavering faith and the justice of her and Daniel’s vision prevailed. Eventually she installed a pastor who has since launched another Christian council of churches. Today the church continues to operate with her input, and the council is active throughout California. La Hermana León has seen her three children graduate from college, and one has attained a doctorate in religious studies and is currently a university professor. She claims that her obstacles would not have been overcome were it not for her profound “faith in God.” SOURCE: León, Ruth Soto. 2003. Interview by Luis León, January 11.
Luis Daniel León
LEÓN, TANIA (1943–
)
Acclaimed composer, conductor, and music director Tania León was born in Cuba in 1943. As a young girl growing up in Cuba, León dreamed of traveling the world and going to exotic and interesting places. She plastered postcards of foreign countries all over her bedroom walls, invented languages that only she could understand, and read books about other times and places. León’s family in Cuba was of the middle class, and her grandmother, in particular, supported all of León’s fantasies. León describes the family as a mix-
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Lesbians
Notable composer and music professor Tania León. Courtesy of Tania León.
ture of Spanish, French, Chinese, and African. Most influential in her young life, León’s grandmother also encouraged the girl’s many talents and took every opportunity to provide her granddaughter the opportunities to develop her natural gifts. If she was there for León for the celebratory aspects of her young life, she was also there to cushion the bruises of racism. When she took León to a ballet class one day, the girl was turned away at the door because the school did not permit students of color. At nineteen years of age and without knowing how to speak the English language, León made the trek to New York City on her own, where she landed her first job as a pianist for Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Company. As had always been the case with the women in her family, León followed in the footsteps of a “long line of strong working women who had a ‘tremendous zest for survival.’ ” As director of music for the Dance Company, León founded its music department, school, and orchestra. In the 1970s León engaged in the serious study of music under the tutelage of Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. Shortly thereafter she became the music director for the hit Broadway production The Wiz. Her career flourished, and León was invited to conduct her original compositions in Italy, Mexico City, and other
places that had seemed exotic to her as a child. Among her many appearances, León conducted the Phoenix Symphony, the Puerto Rico Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the Pasadena Orchestra, the Sadler’s Wells Orchestra, the John F. Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, and, most recently, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The little girl who had been turned away from ballet classes now commanded the stages of the world. A professor of music at Brooklyn College, León has been recognized for her achievements by the New York Council on the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, and the National Council of Women of the United States Achievement Award. León has published original pieces for solo guitar and solo piano and participates in numerous professional organizations. She is composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic and artistic advisor for the American Composers’ Orchestra concert series Sonidos de la Americas. León’s enormous talent has enchanted concert aficionados throughout the world. Perhaps her only regret is that her grandmother did not live to enjoy her accomplishments. León believes, “We are the fruit of the environment where we grow up. I’m disappointed that we are constantly in competition about whose culture is better. Human culture is what’s prevalent on this planet . . . and can be displayed in many ways.” SOURCE: Network of Educators on the Americas. 1995. Women of Hope: Latinas abriendo camino. New York: 1199’s Bread and Roses Cultural Project. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
LESBIANS “Latina lesbian” refers to a complex political and cultural identity adopted by a diverse community of women in the United States, as well as a political movement for social change that emerged nationally during the 1970s. The label “Latina lesbian” is employed by women in order to acknowledge difference and claim pride in that difference. The umbrella term “Latina lesbian” serves as an organizing tool to bring together women who share historical commonalities, as well as a sexual and ethnic identity. While women have organized under the umbrella term, this label encompasses a wide range of individual identities, experiences, and historical realities, as well as racial and cultural locations. Language, political views, regional identities, ethnic identities, gender and sexual expectations, economic class, race, and citizenship are among the factors that shape Latina lesbian identity. The heterogeneity of the Latina lesbian community mirrors that of the Latino community as a whole. Lati-
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Lesbians nas refer to themselves by their specific community (Chicana, for example), regionally (Tejana, for example), and by a variety of labels that reflect cultural differences. While Chicana and Mexican lesbians may call themselves tortilleras, other Latinas may use other terms such as patas or cachaperas or the Nahuatl term patlache. Women who are recent immigrants may not even use the term “lesbian,” feeling that it is not culturally appropriate for them or out of fear of harsh repercussions. Furthermore, the Latina lesbian community includes women along a vast generational spectrum from recent immigrants to those who trace their family histories to the Spanish colonial period or to indigenous roots. Because of these variations, the relationship to language and cultural attitudes differs greatly among women. Although the Latino community is composed of a variety of groups with differing historical relationships to the United States, within this heterogeneity there also exists a sense of collective identity based on shared cultural values, as well as historic exclusion and discrimination in U.S. society. Latina lesbians face multilayered discrimination as Latinas, as women, and as lesbians. For working-class or immigrant women, the obstacles become even more formidable. Lesbians immigrate to the United States for a variety of reasons, including economic ones, but many also immigrate in order to experience more visible and open lesbian lives. Emigrating from their countries may also lessen community surveillance and social pressures. Immigration is not a solution for homophobia. Before 1990 lesbians and gay men could be deported or denied entry into the United States on account of their homosexuality. Today, however, homosexuality is not a cause for deportation. In 1994 the U.S. attorney general ruled that lesbians and gay men could apply for asylum if they were persecuted in their home country because of their homosexuality. Despite progress within the legal system, other obstacles remain. Coming out and declaring themselves as lesbians, while simultaneously navigating an already feared bureaucracy, can inhibit lesbians from telling their stories to immigration officials. During the past thirty years Latina lesbians have come together in a political and cultural movement seeking racial, gender, and sexual equality. Although individual lesbians have participated in political organizing throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in the 1960s and 1970s a politicized group identity began to take shape in which Latina lesbians began organizing around issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The Latina lesbian movement gained momentum from the civil rights movement, feminism, the Chicano movement, the Chicana feminist movement,
and the emerging lesbian and gay movements. Historically, Latina lesbians have worked within a variety of organizations, including ones focusing on gay and lesbian issues, Latino community projects, human rights, immigrant rights, and health issues (to name a few). The gay and lesbian movement helped inspire Latina lesbian organizing. In the years following the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, which marked the beginning of gay liberation, Latinas and Latinos organized numerous gay and lesbian organizations in order to address their own unique issues. El Comité de Orgullo Homosexual Latinoamericano in New York City and the Gay Latino Alliance in San Francisco were two early groups. One of the earliest lesbian organizations was the Lesbianas Latinas Americanas in Los Angeles. Latina lesbians also belonged to nationalist movements that stressed cultural pride and self-sufficiency. These groups often emphasized maintaining “traditional” culture as a form of survival. A visible Latina lesbian presence within nationalist movements, such as the Chicano movement, provoked a range of responses. In some cases heterosexual women allied themselves with lesbians to address sexism. In other cases straight women allied themselves with heterosexual men who saw lesbianism as a threat to male privilege and their definition of traditional culture. Some women were physically assaulted. Others were verbally attacked as sellouts or vendidas, and their sexuality was characterized as a product of EuroAmerican culture. At the same time that Latina lesbians struggled within nationalist groups, they also began working within the gay and lesbian movement. Within predominantly white lesbian activist circles Latina lesbians experienced exclusion and racism. Often expected to place their lesbian identity above their Latina identity, Latina lesbians found working with Euro-American lesbians alienating because of racism and cultural insensitivity. They also resented their token status in the gay and lesbian movement. By the 1970s it became apparent to Latina lesbians that organizations focusing on the complicated intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality must be created in order to address issues faced by Latina lesbians and other lesbians of color. Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has written that she “experienced the racism of the Women’s Movement, the elitism of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, [and] the homophobia and sexism of the Chicano Movement.” Many other Latina lesbians shared these experiences. In 1981 Chicana lesbians Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa edited the groundbreaking collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which highlighted the work of many Latina lesbians. In 1987 Juanita Ramos edited Compañeras:
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“Letter from Chapultepec” Latina Lesbians, an Anthology, and in 1991 Carla Trujillo edited Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. These works provided a venue for Latina lesbians to create a shared voice and to begin writing and debating Latina lesbian politics and identity. After the National Lesbian Feminist Organization conference held at Santa Monica in 1978, women created Lesbians of Color (LOC) in Los Angeles in 1978 to speak to issues women of color faced in the United States. The group’s strategies included bringing Latinas and African American women together in order to discuss their commonalities and differences. LOC members, including many Chicanas and other Latinas, jointly organized the National Lesbians of Color conference in 1983. These gatherings were important because they empowered women, created a space where they could form networks and alliances, and often laid the foundation for future organizing. In the 1970s and 1980s lesbians and gay men also began establishing Latina/o organizations. In 1981 members of the Latino community in Los Angeles founded Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), out of which emerged Lesbianas Unidas (LU) in 1983. LU organized retreats, lobbied for community services for Latina lesbians, marched in gay pride parades, and created a space where Latina lesbians could be visible as Latinas and as lesbians. LU did much to lessen women’s isolation and to increase self-esteem. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s other Latina lesbians organized across the country, locally, regionally, and nationally. In 1981 Chispa (the Spanish word for spark) brought Tejano lesbians and gay men together in Austin, Texas. In 1985 Austin Latina/o Lesbian Gay Organization (ALLGO) began providing health and community services. One of its programs, Entre Ellas, brought together lesbians of color to address health, social, and educational issues. In 1987 Ellas, a statewide organization for Texas Latina lesbians, provided retreats for women, and in New York City las Buenas Amigas was founded. Lesbianas Latinas de Tucson organized social and educational events, as well as the Adelante con Nuestra Vision: First National Latina Lesbian Leadership and Self-Empowerment Conference in 1994, featuring workshops on lesbian health and creative writing, as well as spirituality and sexuality. Latina lesbians also participated in national organizations and activities and worked within community coalition politics. For example, in 1987 a group of Latinas, both lesbian and straight, founded the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Esperanza Center is a progressive grassroots cultural organization dedicated to the lives and struggles of people of color, women, lesbians and gay men, and the
working poor. Unlike earlier organizations that forced Latina lesbians to choose between being women, Latina, or lesbian, more recent organizations understand the importance of all three identities. Latina lesbian organizing has not been limited to the United States, and efforts have been made to form alliances with lesbians in Latin America as well. For example, Latina lesbians in the United States helped organize the Latina Lesbian Encuentro in Mexico City in 1987 and the second Encuentro, held in Costa Rica in 1990. While there existed clear commonalities, lesbians in Latin America lived in a different social milieu that Latinas from the United States needed to confront and understand. Latina lesbians continue to organize in Latina-only organizations, lesbian organizations, cogender lesbian and gay groups, and groups addressing broader issues. After three decades of activism there are more options for Latina lesbians today, and they do not encounter the hostility that earlier generations of activists endured. Although discrimination continues to exist, today there is a heightened awareness of the contributions and roles of Latina lesbians. SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1990. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute; Leyva, Yolanda Chávez. 2000. “Breaking the Silence: Putting Latina Lesbian History at the Center.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 3rd ed., ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 403–425. New York: Routledge; Luibhéid, Eithne. 2002. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press; Ramos, Juanita, ed. 1994. Compañeras: Latina Lesbians, an Anthology. New York: Routledge (reprint of New York: Latina Lesbian History Project, 1987); Trujillo, Carla, ed. 1991. Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Yolanda Chávez Leyva
“LETTER FROM CHAPULTEPEC” In 1928 women in Houston, Texas, gathered informally and founded el Club Femenino Chapultepec. Originally the organization served the community by providing social, athletic, and recreational activities. The women named the organization after the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City, where the niños heroes are remembered, the young cadets, who in defending Mexico City’s historic castle and major avenue, jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to U.S. forces during the U.S.-Mexico War. The women chose the title to commemorate pride in cultural heritage, bilingualism, and community. Three years later the group gained the support of the Young Women’s Christian Association
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Liberation Theology (YWCA) and grew to offer a number of services to the Tejano community. In addition, the organization planned and hosted celebrations of Mexican holidays such as Mexican Independence, and Diez y Seis de Septiembre. It sponsored art exhibits, dances, and comidas to bring the community together and raised funds to improve the barrio. Carmen Cortéz and Stella Quintanilla were among the original members of Club Femenino Chapultepec and often took on leadership roles. After a number of years of organizing community events, the women of Club Femenino Chapultepec turned their attention to the pressing social conditions they saw affecting Mexicanos in Houston. The issue of racism was one such concern. In 1934 Cortéz and Quintanilla drafted a letter titled “Letter from Chapultepec,” in which the women highlighted ten major problems affecting the Mexican population in Texas. Among the issues mentioned were denial of citizenship, substandard housing, dilapidated playgrounds, false criminal accusations, and derogatory namecalling. Demonstrating a keen level of awareness, the women presented their thoughts on national and ethnic identity. According to the Club Femenino Chapultepec, racist attitudes forced many Mexicans to deny their nationality and identify as French, Italian, or Spanish. Olive Lewis, the YWCA sponsor of the organization, co-signed the letter with Cortéz and Quintanilla. It was sent to Leona B. Hendrix, the representative of the National Business and Professional Girls Council, in Kansas City, Missouri. The women agreed to have the letter published in the Negro YWCA newsletter. Although the letter maintained a calm and even tone, the FBI, anxious about Communism, found the document threatening. As a result, women involved in the drafting of the letter were either fired from their jobs, as was Olive Lewis, or investigated by the FBI. Stella Quintanilla (who later became Estela Gómez) faced continuous harassments and visits by the FBI until 1942. The organization was censored shortly after the letter was released and was cautioned about expressing sentiments that could be interpreted as Communist. Although she faced the scrutiny of the FBI and censorship in her own community, Stella Quintanilla continued to denounce the social conditions that Mexicans in Texas experienced. In 1941 she was invited to speak at la Federación de Sociedades Mexicanas y Latinas Americanas de Texas. Luis L. Duplan, the Mexican consul, feared grievances of antiAmerican rhetoric and attempted to silence her by advising her not to speak. Disappointed by the act but not convinced that she was expressing any un-American sentiments, Quintanilla proceeded with her talk, de-
fended her statements, and exposed acts of inequality and injustice that Mexicans and Mexican Americans suffered in Texas. SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
LIBERATION THEOLOGY Liberation theology is the name given to a new approach toward the explanation of Christianity and its relationship to world events. Beginning in Latin America in the mid-1960s, partly as a result of the new openness generated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) within the Roman Catholic Church, liberation theology helped modernize Latin American religion, including Protestantism. Several principles characterize liberation theology. First, there is an approach to human history that sees nonchurch events as part of the forces that shape the Christian religion. This is a departure from previous theologies that treated human history as incomplete or unimportant to people of faith. As a consequence of this premise, advocates of liberation theology urged that the churches pay attention to social movements and governmental programs as part of ministry without demanding that such efforts be controlled by Christians. Second, in analyzing history liberation theology used some principles derived from Marxism. Institutions were scrutinized by their actual impact on material conditions and not merely by the ideological statements they proclaimed. The early Latin American efforts in this direction adopted many of the conclusions of a Marxian dependency theory of economics. In this approach political and social institutions in Latin America were examined for their linkages to capitalist economic systems. Church remedies for injustice were to be targeted not on isolated acts of charity that inevitably produced only superficial reforms, but rather on radical changes that redistributed both power and resources away from capitalist control. Third, liberation theology reanalyzed violent revolution as a legitimate application of the just-war theory. Christian theology since the time of St. Augustine in the fourth century had held that when attacked, a person or a society could defend itself with force equal to that used by the aggressor, but this just-war theory had been used to explain relations between nations and had not been systematically applied to civil rebellion.
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Líderes Campesinas Liberation theology gave Latin American Christians new concepts that interpreted exploitation under unjust economic structures as an attack that could be resisted even if violence resulted. Underpaid workers or peasant farmers denied just compensation for their crops had justification to defend themselves against corporations that had attacked them with the undeclared violence of an exploitative economic system. When Latinos and Latinas in the United States encountered liberation theology, they adapted it to their reality. Under the aegis of a church-sponsored series of meetings in the 1970s called “Theology in the Americas,” this adaptation developed new understandings of racial and ethnic discrimination. The poverty and cultural oppression of Latinos/as linked to racism and discrimination were interpreted in theological and biblical terms. From the efforts of Latino/a theologians, a liberation theology focused upon cultural mestizaje within the United States and the mujerista understanding of Latina women’s particular burdens has emerged. Mestizaje refers to the physical mixing of races and the evolution of a mestizo or mixed-blood population in Latin American history. As a theological concept, it refers to the confluence of cultural traditions that constitute the world of the U.S. Latino/a. Liberation theology empowers the Latino/a believer to affirm the elements of cultural and religious identity that would be submerged by the dominant society. Yet because there is mestizaje with aspects of life in the United States, the affirmation of Latino identity does not require destruction of Euro-American society, but rather reconciliation with Native American and Spanish components in a new and liberating synthesis. Mujerista aspects of liberation theology focus on the differences between the feminist movement among Euro-American women and the same sort of struggle for equality among Latina women. The mujerista approach recognizes the cultural differences of Latinas and develops a particular focus upon their special needs in contemporary society. In this type of theology lo cotidiano, or the day-to-day struggle of human existence, serves as a focal point. Liberation theology among Latinos/as has developed ecumenically, so that theology written by Roman Catholics is studied by Latino Protestants and vice versa. A professional quarterly, the Journal of Latino/Hispanic Theology, is regularly published under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Liturgical Press. Likewise Associacion para la Educacion Teologica Hispana, the Association of Hispanic Theological Education (AETH), with headquarters at the Protestant seminary in Austin, Texas, sponsors an interdenominational theological study program every summer, supported by many seminaries and universities in the United States.
See also Las Hermanas; Mujerista Theology; Religion SOURCES: Cadena, Gilbert R. 1989. “Chicano Clergy and the Emergence of Liberation Theology.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 11, no. 2 (May): 107–121; Díaz-Stevens, Ana María, and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. 1998. Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion: The Emmaus Paradigm. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Elizondo, Virgil. 1992. The Future Is Mestizo. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.; González, Justo. 1990. Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon; Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1971/1973. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Translated and edited by Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson from Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas. Lima: CEP; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María. 1996. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds. 1996. Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise. Minneapolis: Fortress Press; Maduro, Otto A. 1982. Religion and Social Conflicts. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; Peña, Milagros. 1997. “Border Crossings: Sociological Analysis and the Latina and Latino Religious Experience.” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 4, no. 3 (February): 13–27; Pérez y González, María Elizabeth. 2000. “Latinas in the Barrio.” In New York Glory: Religions in the City, ed. Anna Karpathakis and Tony Carnes, 287–296. New York: New York University Press; Pinn, Anthony B., and Benjamín Valentín, eds. The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theologies in Dialogue. New York: Continuum, 2001; Rodríguez, Jeanette. 1994. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women. Austin: University of Texas Press; Stevens-Arroyo, Antonio M. 1980. Prophets Denied Honor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Ana María Díaz-Stevens
LÍDERES CAMPESINAS (1992–
)
Established in 1992 by former farmworker Mily Treviño-Sauceda, Líderes Campesinas is a Californiabased, grassroots organization of Latina farmworker women that works to empower farmworker women and develop them as leaders who can be agents for change. In 1988 María Elena López-Treviño, a United Farm Workers (UFW) supporter from a farmworker family and a student at a local university, began a survey of Mexican farmworker women in the Coachella Valley. She enlisted the help of Mily Treviño-Sauceda, an organizer with California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), and recruited Mexicana farmworker women to conduct the survey. As they conducted the survey, the women shared the common problems they faced and their interest in working together for change. As a result, Treviño-Sauceda cofounded Mujeres Mexicanas in the Coachella Valley, composed primarily of farmworker women and a smaller number of paraprofessional Latinas. Within a few years the farmworker women decided that they wanted their own organization. In 1992 Treviño-Sauceda established the Farm-
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Líderes Campesinas worker Women’s Leadership Project under the auspices of the CRLA Foundation. This became Líderes Campesinas. Latina farmworkers face problems of pesticide poisoning, low wages, abysmal workplace conditions, racial discrimination, and ongoing troubles with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. As women, they also deal with domestic violence, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and attitudes that view Latina farmworkers as “less than” whites, men, or middle-class people. To promote self-empowerment and develop strategies to address such issues, only farmworker women belong to and run the organization. Supporters have assisted them by baby-sitting, cooking, and serving meals at events, and Líderes works only with consultants who support the selfempowerment of the Líderes membership. Líderes has encountered opposition from some men or social service workers reluctant to work with Líderes as equals. Organizer Mily Treviño feels that these attitudes are “a problem of class” and need to be tackled regardless of whether they come from social workers and bosses or from within their own communities. The organizers bring together small groups of farmworker women, many of whom have been active in farmworker unions and other groups, to talk about “their issues” as women. The house meetings usually open with a skit depicting a problem, such as health concerns, civil rights, working conditions, or, often, domestic violence. Women eagerly discuss the issues following the presentation, and organizers assist in working out solutions to these problems. Comfortable with the process, women often express a desire to join Líderes to help themselves and to organize others. In 1995 Líderes began to educate women on HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and pesticide poisoning. Its focus on domestic violence opened the often silenced problem. As Treviño points out, for many women it was “the first chance to talk about this in a public way, and to see it, not just as a personal problem, but as a human problem.” Líderes provided information and leadership skills, but more important, it offered a supportive environment. By 2002 key projects on working conditions, family violence, women’s health, and youths had become fullfledged programs. Líderes then added Tercera Edad, a program for older women, and the Institute for Paraprofessional Farmworker Women, an educational program. The institute encouraged women to learn English and pursue a high-school diploma and, for those interested, a university education. Poverty and farmwork made it impossible for many women to complete high school, and some had no formal education. Cofounder and organizer Laura Caballero, for example, was forbidden by her father to go to school. When she
disobeyed, he forced her to literally eat her pencils and paper. She became an organizer with Líderes and, while still unable to read or write, memorized information she heard and ultimately became a nationally recognized expert on pesticides. She sits on several boards of national environmental organizations and is learning to read and write. In 1996 Rufino Domínguez-Santos of the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional (FIOB) invited Líderes to work in California with indigenous women from Oaxaca, Mexico, to develop leadership skills. Several Mixtec women joined Líderes, establishing a base for future chapters of indigenous women. Under the auspices of the Rural Women’s Empowerment Project, Treviño and Líderes organizers accompanied others from the Mixtec area and met with women in three towns of rural Oaxaca. Líderes presented workshops covering domestic violence, leadership, and other issues. Despite their differences, the multiaged group of Mixtecas was inspired by Líderes to use these tools in their own communities. In a private conversation Olga Quiroz, a leader in Tlacotapec, Oaxaca, was overheard saying to Treviño in Spanish: “What was that word? What did you call it? Patriarchy. . . . MMMM. I like that word!” Over the years Líderes’ perspective has become increasingly international. It participated in the 1995 International Women’s Conference and attended the World Conference on Racism in South Africa. At these meetings women were struck by the fact that the majority of participants came from rural grassroots organizations. Laura Caballero participated in the International Forum on Social Justice in Brazil, and Líderes worked with a national Mexican network of groups helping women escape from domestic violence. By 2002 the organization had established twelve farmworker women’s chapters and twelve auxiliary groups of young women in the farming communities of the San Joaquin Valley, Ventura County, the Coachella Valley, and the coastal areas of California. Indigenous Trique, Mixtec, and Zapotec women have formed four chapters. Representatives from the indigenous women’s chapters advise Líderes on indigenous issues, needs, and organizing. Líderes estimates that it has reached more than 20,000 women per year. Farmworker women organizations in other states are using the group as a model to establish separate but allied organizations. With financial support and collaboration, Líderes is working with national groups like Family Violence Prevention Fund and the Office of Violence against Women to develop programs for farmworker women in seven other states.
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See also Environment and the Border; Labor Unions
Literature SOURCES: Street, Richard Steven. 1992. Organizing for Our Lives: New Voices from Rural Communities. Portland, OR: Newsage Press and California Rural Legal Assistance; Warrick, Pamela. 1996. “A Life of Their Own.” Los Angeles Times, June 7, sec., E1, E8. Devra A. Weber
LITERATURE Latina writers take pride and actively promote culture by reflecting their daily experiences, historical legacies, and family roots in their writing. They claim the right to redefine cultural roles, mourn social injustices, and celebrate what is politically empowering and aesthetically pleasing in their heritage. Latinas represent diverse national, class, generational, and artistic categories. What has remained constant in Latina literary production during the last two centuries is a desire both to connect to cultural ancestry and to foster new spaces for individual thinking and creativity. Therefore, Latina literature has always been stylistically eclectic, politically conscious, and community based. The earliest known writings by Latinas are often closely affiliated with labor activism, education, feminist issues, immigrant rights, cultural pride, and local, as well as transnational, politics. Considered the first known Latina/o novel written in English, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s romantic parody of the Civil War, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), criticizes U.S. racism and imperialism and women’s marginality. Her second novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885), offers a Californio perspective on Manifest Destiny and the subsequent corporate confiscation of Mexican lands in the Southwest. As a precursor to the literature of the Chicana/o movement, The Squatter and the Don speaks out against the treatment of people of Mexican origin who were promised, but not provided, equal rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). From the beginning of the nineteenth century Hispanic letters have helped create community among various Latina/o diasporas throughout the Americas. In 1808 the first Spanish-language newspaper in a U.S. territory, El Misisipí, began a tradition of Hispanic journalism that was characterized by anticolonialism and a critical view of U.S. imperialism. In particular, Spanish, English, and bilingual newspapers functioned as a forum for discussion among displaced, immigrant, and native Latinas/os within the newly acquired U.S. territories, as well as in Mexico. Likewise, they helped maintain a dialogue among Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionaries, who, while exiled in the United States, continued to advocate Caribbean independence from imperial Spain. After Mexican independence from Spain (1810) and its strict censorship laws, written
communication, publishing, and the circulation of various newspapers and journals increased in the American Southwest. As early as 1813 the printing press was introduced in Texas, and by the 1830s a governmentsponsored press was established in California, while privately owned presses were operating in the region of New Mexico. In 1848, when Mexican writing communities found themselves subject to the U.S government, publishing and circulation increased significantly in an effort to preserve Latina/o language and culture. Latina activists and intellectuals contributed to these newspapers, which featured not only information about local and international politics and commerce, but also serialized novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and speeches. Although nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mexicana writers shared an inheritance of a common Mexican culture, the particular ways in which their works addressed the issues of education, civil rights, and cultural preservation were shaped by local concerns and regional culture. When New Mexico was finally admitted as a state after sixty-four years as a territory, Nuevomexicanos protested the federal imposition of “English-only” laws on a predominantly Spanishspeaking community. At the forefront of this movement was the educator Aurora Lucero White Lea (1894–1965), whose speech “Plea for the Spanish Language” (1910) advocated the use of Spanish in the public school system. In addition to her journalistic and educational activism, Lucero White Lea collected early manuscripts of New Mexican folklore and wrote several historical plays. The slogan later adopted by the Chicana/o movement, “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” was suggested by many works of early Latina writers who refused to be separated from their family and culture south of the border. They found new ways to redefine and combine American and Mexican cultures, two conflicting social spheres that Latina writers felt equally entitled to as participants. Leonor Villegas de Magnón (1876–1955), Sara Estela Ramírez (1881– 1910), and sisters Andrea and Teresa Villarreal were local representatives of the Mexican Revolution in Texas whose writings and labor activism were featured in local newspapers. Villegas de Magnón organized a group of nurses, la Cruz Blanca, made up of Tejanas and Anglo women who crossed the border to support a hospital in Nuevo Laredo that served Mexican soldiers. Nicknamed “La Rebelde,” Villegas de Magnón wrote her memoir, The Rebel (1994), which, perhaps because of its disregard for conventional gender roles, was not published during her lifetime. Ramírez, best known for her poetry and her ability to motivate workers through her passionate speeches, was recruited as a schoolteacher from Mexico as part of Tejano efforts to protect
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Literature schoolchildren from discrimination and a segregated school system. Like “La Rebelde” and Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters developed their own kind of feminism by importing revolutionary sentiments from Mexico as a foundation for their U.S. feminist activism. This innovative syncretism of identity politics, labor activism, and feminist priorities was reflected in the journals they founded, El Obrero (1909) and La Mujer Moderna (1910–1919). Jovita Idar (1885–1946), whose family paper La Crónica featured the works of Villegas de Magnón, advocated educational and economic independence from men. Idar’s articles, such as “We Should Work” and “For Our Race: Preservation of Nationalism,” inspired and informed the community about Mexicana rights and reflected the feminist principles of Liga Feminil Mexicana, a group of U.S. Mexicanas. In addition to a public engagement with social causes, Latinas documented their personal experiences and domestic lives as well. Tejanas such as Adina de Zavala (1861–1955; History and Legends of the Alamo in and around San Antonio, 1917) and Jovita González (1904–1983; Caballero, 1996) and Nuevomexicanas like Cleofas Jaramillo (1878–1956; The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes: Potajes sabrosas, 1939), Fabiola Cabeza de Baca (1894–1991; We Fed Them Cactus, 1954), and Adelina Otero-Warren (1881–1965; Old Spain and the Southwest, 1936) produced a new kind of historical fiction by combining family stories with regional folklore. Latina political journalism and creative writing offered a feminine viewpoint that had been absent in the writings of their male counterparts. While some critics find these early writers problematic in that they portrayed an idealized, white, upper-class image of social circumstances, other critics maintain that their work defied Anglo-culture and patriarchal norms. For different reasons, the journalism of María Cristina Mena (1893–1965), one of the first Mexicanas to write for major U.S. women’s magazines such as Century, Cosmopolitan, Household, and American Magazine, has also been the subject of negative criticism. Like her fiction, The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena (1997), Mena’s editorial work has been critiqued for creating an exotic and stereotypical picture of Mexicana culture. Similarly, there are some critics who contend that the works of María Luisa Garza (1887–1990), La Novia de Nervo (1922), Los amores de Gaona, apuntes por Loreley (her pseudonym) (1922), Escucha (1928), and her weekly column “Crónicas Femeninas” in El Imparcial de Texas, portray a less-than-positive image of Mexicana femininity. Critics suggest that Garza unfairly advocated the education of women solely for the purpose of intellectual housekeeping. Moreover, Garza’s housekeeping tips were accompanied by the warning that a disregard for domestic responsibilities
New Mexico writer Cleofas Jaramillo (Mrs. Venceslao Martínez). Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Neg. no. 9919.
equaled a negative process of Americanization. Without discounting the critiques of these early works, what can be commended is the public forum they created for women to actively question and debate racial issues and gender roles. What is certain is that Latina writers were courageous insofar as their act of writing (typically a social privilege reserved for men) imagined alternative ways of living and kept record of the details they found important. These personal details, as well as the numerous volumes of folkloric documentation, offer an insight into American history that would otherwise have been lost. Moreover, Latina thinkers have been at the forefront of exploring the ways in which the sociopolitical circumstances of migration, war, poverty, and sexism affect the individual psyche and personal relationships between families, friends, and lovers. As precursors to the women’s movement of the 1960s, for each of these Latina literary activists, writing and feminism were natural extensions of their love and commitment to improving the socioeconomic conditions of their families and raza. On the East Coast, during roughly the same period, Puerto Rican and Cuban women were also finding new
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Literature
Writer Diana Ramírez Arellano (left) receiving an award in 1959. Courtesy of the Diana Ramírez Arellano Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
ways of transforming their concerns for their countries of origin into the creation of familia through their literary activities. In commemoration of the anniversary of Cuba’s first war of independence, Lola Rodríguez de Tío (1843–1924), a Puerto Rican political exile, recited her poem “Ode to October 10” (1896) to a community of Puerto Rican and Cuban expatriates. As a lectora in cigar factories, Luisa Capetillo (1876–1922) read newspapers, novels, and political essays to her peers as they worked. Known in Puerto Rico as the first feminist militant, Capetillo continued her literary labor activism after immigrating to the United States through her plays and political essays, collected in Influencia de las ideas modernas: Notas y apuntes (1916). Like Capetillo, Julia de Burgos (1914–1953), one of the most celebrated Puerto Rican poets, thought that labor activism and nationalism coincided with feminist principles. Her poem “Yo misma fui mi ruta,” published in Poema de veinte surcos (1938), begins with “Yo quise ser como los hombres quisieron que you fuese: un intento de vida” (“I wanted to be the way men wanted me to be: an attempt at life . . . ) and then traces the development of a self-constructed sense of identity. In “Adiós en Welfare Island” Julia de Burgos’s feminist interpretation of liberty takes into account acts of personal and national freedom aside from legal and civil rights. She values free movement, laughter, and a lightness of spirit that is not weighed down by the “ghost of despair.” The poetry, theater, and speeches of these early Caribbean women represent constant continuity in Latina writing: a dialectic relation between self and cultural renovation and a commitment to a transnational and multicultural worldview.
Following the anticolonialist traditions of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century political journalism, Chicana civil rights literary activists such as Bernice Zamora (1938– ), Lucha Corpi (1945– ), Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954– ), Nina Serrano (1934– ), and Estela Portillo Trambley (1936–1999) saw a direct connection between the U.S. mistreatment of people abroad and the unjust living conditions of U.S. people of color. Parallel to Chicana counterculture, which protested the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, celebrated the Cuban Revolution (1959), and drew heavily from indigenous mythology and a barrio aesthetic, Nuyoriqueñas like Nicholasa Mohr (1935– ), Sandra María Esteves (1938– ), and Esmeralda Santiago (1948– ) cultivated a Nuyorican performance poetry that integrated Afro-Caribbean roots, jazz and salsa rhythms and lyrics, and a bilingual ear for the everyday speech of street life and political activism. Esteves exemplified the performance aspect of the Nuyorican movement when she sang her poetry while accompanied by the musical group el Grupo; her recordings eventually became anthems for the Nuyorican movement for Puerto Rican independence. Like their Chicana counterparts, Nuyoriqueñas like Mohr (Nilda, 1973) created a corpus of various female narrators and leading protagonists that had previously been absent from the Latino imaginary. In her highly experimental theater Coser y cantar (1981), Cuban playwright Dolores Prida (1943– ) comically portrays the pressures Latina women face in playing the role of mediator between English- and Spanish-speaking cultures. In this one-act play Prida uses humor to explore the psychological experience of biculturalism. Two characters play the split self of a Latina: “She” is the English-speaking, Americanized half, and “Ella” speaks in Spanish and represents the Latina half of the same person. Whether as Californios displaced by western expanision, Nuevomexicanas concerned with preserving Hispanic culture, Tejanas fighting a segregated educational system, exiled Mexican revolutionaries, Puerto Rican and Cuban expatriates, or civil rights activists, Latinas have poetically and politically analyzed the circumstances of living in between cultures. Various events, such as the commercialization of el Teatro Campesino, interest in Spanish literature sparked by the Latin American “boom,” the founding of ethnic studies in the universities, the El Quinto Sol Literary Prize, and the journal Revista Chicano-Riqueña, helped create a place within mainstream publishing houses and the academy for U.S. Latino/a literature. However, the publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Cherríe Moraga (1952– ) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942– 2004), ushered in what is now termed the “Latina boom.” Hybrid in content and form, This Bridge anthol-
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Literature ogized various works by women of color that denounced the racism and class privilege of mainstream feminist movements and the sexism of maledominated ethnic movements, both of which practiced forms of discrimination that limited the publication, esteem, and circulation of “writings by radical women of color.” Moreover, part of the radical element of This Bridge was its theoretical and literary exploration of queer studies, a field of study in which Latinas like Moraga (Loving in the War Years, 1983) and Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987) can be considered pioneers. After the establishment of Arte Público Press (1979), the publication of This Bridge, and an entire generation of Latina creative writers, the 1980s saw an unprecedented growth in Chicana publications: Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, 1984; My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 1987), Ana Castillo (The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986; My Father Was a Toltec, 1989), Pat Mora (El Paso Chants, 1984; Borders, 1986), Helena María Viramontes (The Moths and Other Stories, 1985), Cecile Pineda (Face, 1985), Denise Chávez (The Last of the Menu Girls, 1986), and Mary Helen Ponce (Pacoima Taking Control, 1987; The Wedding, 1989). In addition to the continued publication of Chicana writers throughout the 1990s such as Roberta Fernández (Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories, 1990), Norma Cantú (Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, 1995), Graciela Limón (The Memories of Ana Calderón, 1994; Song of the Hummingbird, 1996), Montserrat Fontes (First Confession, 1992; Dreams of the Centaur, 1996), Yxta Maya Murray (Locas, 1997), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba (The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories, 1993; Sor Juana’s Second Dream, 1999), the Chicana boom opened the door for Latinas from other national origins. Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) was the first Cuban American novel to achieve mainstream success. Other ethnic “firsts” were Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer (Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, 1990), Chilean Isabel Allende (Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisíacos, 1997), and, from the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994). Moreover, projects such as Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (1990) recovered and republished many formerly inaccessible and unknown texts by early Latinas. The proliferation of Latina literature helped establish literary critics like María Herrera-Sobek, Rosaura Sánchez, Chela Sandoval, Carolina Hospital, Norma Alarcón, Aida Hurtado, and Tey Diana Rebolledo. Although it is yet to receive mainstream attention, readers can look forward to a Latina literary canon that integrates writers from Central America. Latinas have traditionally worked at the intersections of gender, class, and national categories and
therefore have developed various styles that, when contextualized as a whole, debunk a reified image of Latin identity. Contemporary Latina writers have been as influenced by the poetry of the Beat generation, African American autobiography, and the Black Arts movement as they have by the Latin American genre of crónica (a form of social commentary that combines journalistic reporting and personal narrative) and corridos (a type of Mexican [American] ballad that informs the audience of important sociohistorical events). The Latina combination of eclectic narrative forms, such as Lucha Corpi’s stylistic hybridization of the detective novel, autobiography, and historical fiction in Eulogy of a Brown Angel (1992), reflects the development of a mestiza aesthetic that refuses to embrace a singular genre, linguistic, or cultural alliance. Rather, a mestiza aesthetic is generally characterized by a free-flowing use of English, Spanish, and Spanglish, a resignification of traditional cultural and religious iconography as a form of a critical engagement with contemporary issues of sexuality, domestic violence, and racism, a combination of oral folklore and spoken word with traditional U.S. and Latin American literary forms, a syncretization of indigenous, Latin American, and U.S. Latina worldviews, and an eclectic fusion of poetry, political essay, theater, and novel. In contrast to mainstream and Euro-American feminism, the reclaimed status of the role of motherhood and religious faith as resources for female empowerment has often been the subject of Latina letters. Through various media and styles Latina literary production has explored the relationship between identity and language, the reproduction and transgression of gender roles, the power of cultural and personal memory to sustain the psyche and family in the face of social fragmentation brought about by migration and political exile, a critique of a U.S./colonial education, a strong sense of place, whether in geopolitical or domestic terms, and the parodying of cultural stereotypes such as the Latina sexual vixen and other mediaproduced images of Latina femininity. It is the task of Latina scholars not only to continue the recovery of early (and often silenced) literary figures, but to welcome less traditional forms of literary expression, such as the “do-it-yourself” punk aesthetic of zines (selfproduced and distributed magazines) and other literary media such as compact discs, which Marisela Norte (1955– ) used to distribute her collection of poetry Norte/word (1991). See also Journalism and Print Media; Theater SOURCES: Fernández, Roberta, ed. 1994. In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 2002. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. New York: Oxford Uni-
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Lobo, Rebecca Rose versity Press; Quintana, Alvina E., ed. 2003. Reading U.S. Latina Writers Remapping American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marcelle Maese Cohen
LOBO, REBECCA ROSE (1973–
)
As a girl growing up in Massachusetts, Rebecca Lobo dreamed of playing professional basketball. In fact, she once wrote a note to Red Auerbach, Boston Celtics president, saying she intended to be the first woman on his team. Meanwhile, she practiced in the backyard of her parents, five-foot-eleven Ruth Ann and six-footfive Dennis, whose father was Cuban. The Lobos, both school administrators, taught “Becca,” her brother Jason, and her sister Rachel to face challenges with confidence. In third grade Rebecca Lobo wanted to quit tap-dance lessons before a recital, but her mother would not let her. “My parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard,” she told People magazine. As a teenager, she played saxophone in the Southwick-Tolland Regional High School band and picked tobacco for five summers to build her physical and mental endurance. She also played for the school basketball team, scoring 32 points in her first game and 2,710 points in her high-school career, more than any other girl or boy in Massachusetts history. More than 100 colleges recruited her; she chose the University of Connecticut, a ninety-minute drive from home. There fans nicknamed their new six-foot-four center “LoboCop” for her invincibility. She was named Big East Conference Rookie of the Year in 1992, then became the school’s all-time leader in rebounding, with 1,286, and blocked shots, with 396. When she accepted the Big East Player of the Year award for 1994, Lobo said, “This is for my mother. She has been the real competitor this year, and this is for her.” What few people knew was that Lobo’s mother had breast cancer. In her junior year Lobo found solace in basketball. “Later, when I was a senior, I felt guilty,” she wrote in The Home Team, the book she coauthored with her mother. “I told myself that I hadn’t thought about what she was going through as much as I should have. . . . Basketball, unlike real life, allowed me to have problems and goals I had control over. Nothing I did back then, short of praying, could affect my mother’s battle with her cancer . . . and, for however brief a time, my mother also left her worries at the gate when she watched us play that spring.” As a senior in 1995, the year the University of Connecticut’s women’s team won the NCAA championship, Lobo was named Big East Player of the Year and Final Four Most Valuable Player. Among other honors, including earning a
Rebecca Lobo, a legend in professional women’s basketball. Courtesy of WNBA Intellectual Property.
bachelor of arts degree in political science and a Phi Beta Kappa key, she had made the dean’s list every semester but missed graduation because she was at the Olympic trials. Her mother recovered from surgery and chemotherapy. She and Lobo remain active in organizations supporting breast cancer research. In 1996 Lobo played on the gold-medal-winning team at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. She was not the star or even a starter. “I learn something new every day with this team,” she said. “The intensity level is so much higher [than in college].” When the Women’s National Basketball Association was created in 1997, Lobo was assigned to the New York Liberty as a forward. Young fans did their hair in French braids, like hers. Her popularity among teenage girls led the WNBA to give Lobo a corner of its website for an online newsletter in which she analyzed games and offered playing tips—and, after she was traded to the Houston Comets in 2002, offered tips on becoming an honorary Texan. She retired in 2003. Through her foundation, she provides a scholarship fund for African American and Latino students majoring in a health-related field. SOURCES: Lobo, Ruth Ann, and Rebecca Lobo. 1996. The Home Team: Of Mothers, Daughters and American Champions.
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Lone Star New York: Kodansha International; Telander, Rick. 1995. “The Post with the Most.” People, March 10.
Holly Ocasio Rizzo
LOMAS GARZA, CARMEN (1948–
)
Chicana artist Carmen Lomas Garza was born in 1948 to Mucio Barrera and María Lomas Garza and was raised in Kingsville, Texas. She comes from a family of five children, two boys and three girls. At the age of thirteen Lomas Garza recognized her desire to become an artist and committed herself to that dream by teaching herself the elements of drawing. She became aware of civil rights inequalities as a young child when her parents were involved in the GI Forum. Having experienced discrimination in both junior high and high school, Lomas Garza made it a point to fight inequalities wherever she found them. During her eighth-grade year, when only boys were allowed to take biology, Lomas Garza and her mother insisted that she would be in biology and not home economics. She received a B.S. degree from Texas A&I University at Kingsville (now Texas A&M), a master of education degree from Juarez-Lincoln/Antioch Graduate School at Austin, and a master of art degree from San Francisco State University, where she concentrated on lithography and painting in oil and gouache. Her works of art depict childhood memories of family and friends in a wide range of activities, from tamaladas to Tejano dancing. She encourages discussions about her artwork and the role it plays in maintaining a tradition: And what I like of the effect that my artwork is doing is that it’s bringing it to the forefront for discussion among the same family members. So it opens it up for discussion. And once it’s opened up for discussion there is that process of passing on the history to the younger generation. And by passing on the history you have a building of the person, you have the building of the character, you have the building of the base, which you need to have in order to survive. Without culture you’re nothing. So I very calculatingly have been doing this kind of . . . this artwork for a specific purpose.
Pedacito de mi corazón/A Piece of My Heart, at Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, which traveled to several galleries and museums, including the El Paso Museum of Art, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, and the Oakland Museum in California. Garza’s paintings, prints, paper and metal cutouts, and installations for Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead have been featured in several traveling group exhibitions, including Art of the Other Mexico, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago; C.A.R.A.: Chicano Art; Resistance and Affirmation, Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles; and Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 1984 Garza completed a commission of eight paintings on the history of the use of northern California water for the San Francisco Water Department. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the California Arts Council. Lomas Garza was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996 as the recipient of the International Artist in Residence grant from the Mexican arts agency Fondo Nacional para Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) to reside in Mexico for two months. See also Artists SOURCES: Carmen Lomas Garza, Chicana Artist. http:// carmenlomasgarza.com (accessed review October 19, 2002); Karlstrom, Paul. 1997. “Oral History Interview with Carmen Lomas Garza, in the Artist’s Studio in San Francisco, April 10, 1997.” Smithsonian Archives of American Art. http:// artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/lomas97.htm (accessed October 19, 2002). Mary Ann Villarreal
LONE STAR
Although her artwork reflects her culture, she avoids using labels such as “folk artist” or “artist on the fringes,” which would pigeonhole her work. Lomas Garza has had several one-person shows in museums in the United States, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Smith College Museum, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Mexican Museum, San Francisco. In 1991 she had a major one-person exhibition,
The film Lone Star (1996), directed by John Sayles, has been celebrated as a refreshing alternative to Hollywood’s representations of Chicanas and Chicanos. Unlike other films about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Lone Star depicts the region as multicultural and features Chicanas and Chicanos as central players in history. But the process of racial and gender “othering” common in dominant culture continues to inform the film’s multicultural vision of the borderlands. Lone Star is set in Frontera (literally, “border”) Texas and details the story of Rio County sheriff Sam Deeds’s (Chris Cooper) investigation following the discovery of skeletal remains on the outskirts of town. The remains are believed to be those of Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson), a racist and corrupt sheriff, who mysteriously disappeared in 1957 after waging a campaign of bigotry and terror against the local Mexicana/o and black communities. Sam Deeds’s father, the legendary sheriff
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Lone Star Buddy Deeds, Charley Wade’s former deputy, becomes Sam’s prime suspect. In the course of his investigation Sam rekindles an interracial romance with his teenage sweetheart, Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Peña). Capturing the complexities of the region, Lone Star reads like an application of Chicana/o borderlands theory, especially in its perspective on race relations on the border. In the words of director John Sayles, “There’s a kind of racial and ethnic war that has continued. That continuing conflict comes into the clearest focus around the border between Texas and Mexico.” For John Sayles, Lone Star is a “film about borders,” and the border operates as the signifier for the borders of everyday life: “In a personal sense . . . a border is where you draw a line and say ’This is where I end and someone else begins.’ In a metaphorical sense, it can be any of the symbols that we erect between one another—sex, class, race, age.” Sayles absorbed Chicana/o studies cultural critiques and border theories, reading Americo Paredes’s With a Pistol in His Hand, screening Robert Young’s film adaptation The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, listening to border corridos, and studying their lyrics closely. Like many border narratives written by Chicanos/as, Lone Star is set in the borderlands region—the 2,000-mile strip of land, roughly twenty miles wide, separating Mexico from the United States. Sayles portrays the region as a contact zone, a third country that is neither Anglo nor Mexican but rather multilingual, intercultural, and multiracial. The film renders literal and figurative border crossings and cultural and social relations of accommodation and negotiation within and between the inhabitants on the borderlands. Exploring the racial, cultural, economic, and familial conflicts on the borderland, Lone Star candidly depicts tensions between Texans and Tejanas/os, Anglos and blacks, and Mexicanos on this side of the border and on the other side, as well as the relations of complicity between the Texan-Anglo and the Tejano-Mexicano power elite. For example, Mercedes Cruz (Miriam Colón) is a successful restaurant owner who calls the Border Patrol upon seeing desperate Mexican immigrants run across her yard. In another scene she requests that her immigrant employee speak English: “In English, Enrique. This is the United States. We speak English.” Jorge is a member of the Frontera elite, and Ray is a Tejano deputy who plans to run for sheriff in the next election with the support of the local power structure. In many ways Sayles portrays race relations in terms of an exercise of race and class power: Anglos and Mexicanos, Tejanos and Texans figure as both agents and subjects of domination and complicity. The film’s revision of Texas history goes beyond its documentation of Anglo-Mexicano complicity in power structures, for Lone Star also reflects the filmmaker’s
perspective on the history of multiculturalism in this country: “As I said, [the U.S. is] not increasingly multicultural, it’s always been so,” Sayles explains. “If you go back and turn over a rock you find out, for example, that maybe a third or more of African Americans are also Native Americans and a much higher percentage of African Americans are also white Americans.” Indeed, the film reads like an alternative lesson in Texas history. Lone Star appears to celebrate a new social order, painting a tapestry of interracial, postcolonial Texas, reviving a textured story of racial entwinement and complexity on the borderlands—a pluricultural contact zone comprised of Native Americans, blacks, Tejanos, and Anglos. The Mexico-U.S. borderlands in Sayles’s universe are hybrid and multilingual; his is a tutored and refined view that diverges substantially from the prevalent “black-and-white” paradigm about race relations in the United States. However, despite the film’s critique of monocultural and ethnocentric constructions of the nation, upon closer inspection Lone Star’s overture to multiculturalism is driven by a deeply colonialist and masculine project. Genuine multiculturalism involves the redefinition of the nation, a rearrangement of center-margin power relations, by insisting upon the interplay of multiple and plural identities. An earnest subversion of the border requires that one interrogate the boundary markers of race, class, gender, and sexuality, for when the nation is recast as multicultural, its center is no longer defined by the myth of racial purity, sameness, and singularity, but rather by hybridity, difference, and plural identifications. If Sayles’s multiculturalist project is to truly represent a new social order and make a dent in the predominant monocultural, ethnocentric vision of society, it must decenter whiteness and masculinity. Even though multiculturalism always involves relations of power, neither whiteness nor maleness nor heterosexuality nor Europeanness function as universals in a multicultural world. However, as Sayles makes evident, maleness is the key, privileged signifier of the narrative: “For me, very often the best metaphor for history is fathers and sons. Inheriting your cultural history, your hatreds and your alliances and all that kind of stuff, is what you’re supposed to get from your father in a patriarchal society.” A masculine-centeredness therefore permeates the film. Although its border figures as the symbol for multiculturalism, crossings, intercultural exchanges, and hybridity, history is made legible only through a patriarchal patrimony. On the surface Lone Star attempts to rewrite the social order to encompass difference for a multicultural nation; however, the white-father–whiteson structure keeps the center intact and multiplicity at the margins of the story world. By reinscribing the cen-
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Lone Star trality of the oedipal narrative and the voice of white racial privilege, the film reaffirms the masculine borders of whiteness, containing difference and regulating the disruptive aspect of otherness. Not only is the plot driven by the son’s, Sheriff Sam Deeds’s, own search for truth, but the son is motivated by a repressed hatred for his father, the legendary, benevolent patriarch of Rio County, Sheriff Buddy Deeds. Like westerns and border genre films, Lone Star literalizes the symbolic structure of the “law,” rendering the father and son as the embodiments of “civil law” since both are county sheriffs. The narrative reproduction of patrimony pivots around the oedipal structure insofar as the son, Sam, assumes the place of the father, Buddy, literally as the sheriff of Rio County, but also symbolically, in the order of the phallus, the law of the father. This typical oedipal scenario is accentuated even more in the text by the father-son conflict generated within the film: the son is driven by a desire to kill the father, not literally, since Buddy is already dead, but figuratively, for he is the prime suspect in the murder investigation. In other words, rather than honor his father’s name, the son’s investigation camouflages an obsessive desire to prove his father’s culpability, to taint his father’s reputation and thus destroy his name. As in the best mystery thrillers, the plot twists and suspense of Lone Star yield a surprising and unexpected resolution to the murder investigation. Whereas all the evidence pointed to the father as the prime suspect, Sam discovers that the murder was in fact committed by Hollis Pogue, the current mayor of Frontera, who was not only the fledgling deputy of the notorious Wade, but also the horrified witness to Wade’s racist atrocities. Narrated in a seamlessly edited flashback, the murder of Charley Wade plays a pivotal role in the film’s revisionist project: Wade is murdered by the young deputy Hollis to prevent the murder of Otis Payne, the owner of Big O’s Roadhouse and mayor of Darktown. Emblematic of a white benevolence on the Texas frontier, the murder of one white man by another white man to save a black man’s life rewrites race relations in Texas, positioning blackwhite cooperation on center stage as resistance to and collusion against white racism. Despite this revisionist endeavor, narrative closure around the son’s discovery of the father’s innocence further reinforces and consolidates whiteness, as well as the patriarchal structure of the film. It is precisely this patriarchal structure of the oedipal narrative that contains as much as it facilitates the emergence of Tejana and Tejano subjectivities and points of view. Although the structuring of information within the film positions Sam Deeds as the center of consciousness and the filter for narrative information, in other ways the filmmaker provides characters with
psychological depth through the flashback—a technique used for stitching present events with past memories. While both Pilar’s and her mother, Mercedes’, subjectivities are constructed through this mode, only Mercedes’ memories are autonomous; through seamless editing Pilar’s are linked to Sam’s flashback about their teenage rendezvous. Thus, with the exception of Mercedes’ flashback, each of the seven flashback sequences is mediated by the presence of the main white hero, forcing the memories of interracial conflict to be structurally folded into the son’s quest to dethrone the “legend” of the father. The unearthing of Texas’s racist past and the revision of a multicultural social order are always already subsumed and contained within the point of view of whiteness and masculinity that is privileged in the narrative. For ultimately it is the son’s attempt to slay the father that grants authority to other points of view. As the main vehicle for racial discourse, the white masculine subject further circumscribes the parameters of racial memories of conflict and collusion, marking thus the impossibility of a Tejana and Tejano psychical interiority and points of view outside of the framework of an oedipalized white masculinity. For example, whiteness represents the mediating term for interracial contacts, both between people of color and between the sexes. Whites have meaningful interactions with blacks, whites interact with Mexicans, but contact between racial groups does not exist outside of whiteness. Even though the whiteness privileged in Lone Star is no longer the white racist masculinity that dominated race relations in a previous era, a new benevolent patron, an amigo of Mexicans and blacks, is figured in the personas of Buddy and Sam Deeds. The film ends with Pilar’s final comment: “We start from scratch—? Everything that went before, all that stuff, that history—the hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo” (emphasis added). Even as this story comes to its final resolution, the film’s colonial and patriarchal structures of knowing and seeing remain firmly in place. Narrative resolution takes place in an abandoned drive-in theater, reminiscent of another film, The Last Picture Show (1971). It is at the eroticized site of the Vaquero Drive-in—that weathered relic to the 1950s, now overtaken by Johnson-grass weeds and the turbulent memories of Pilar and Sam’s adolescent rendezvous—that Sam divulges the truth of his and her existence, namely, that they share the same father. Since the nineteenth century the Texas myth of origins has been saturated with the racial politics of exclusion and a discourse of racial purity that denied social relations between the races. In fact, the identity of Texas is shaped by a deliberate repression of interracial political, social, and sexual relations. However, with the final revelation about Buddy’s long-term illicit
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Lone Star affair with Pilar’s mother, the filmmaker disturbs the white Texan disavowal of Tejano/a-Texan entwinement. In the process the film makes evident the ways in which sexuality is as much a transfer point of power as it is of history and social relations. One is left with the deep realization that transborder “contact zones” are not simply linguistic, cultural, and social, but are marked as well by sexual crossings and mixings. By unearthing the hidden history of miscegenation, a repressed history of interracial social and sexual relations, Lone Star appears to rewrite the new social order on the borderlands as racially mixed at its core, differing substantially from the Anglo Texan imaginary that constructs citizenship and membership in the Texas “nation” in terms of racially pure subjects. Yet despite Sayles’s commitment to a new, more enlightened vision of race relations, the discovery of this illicit love affair between an Anglo male and a Mexican female serves to reaffirm colonialist masculinity. In this respect the film is structured by a very old racial narrative, the story of miscegenation as a model of social reproduction, whereby the white man’s access to the brown woman’s body is naturalized, and the nation is grafted and etched onto the body of a woman. There is a long tradition in Western thought of fixing the body of a woman as an allegory for land and nation, and it is by reading the motif of “forbidden love” in the film through this form of embodiment that viewers can gauge the significance of interracial love and sibling incest for cultural politics. The notion of the nation as “mother country” engenders the nation as female and further naturalizes woman in her reproductive role as mother. In the nation-building project women’s bodies mark the allusive boundaries of the nation, the race, and the family, especially since the patriarchal imaginary utilizes women’s bodies symbolically and literally to shape national, racial, and familial identities. Lone Star, however, dramatically alters feminine representation by supplanting white femininity’s role as embodiment with a new mestiza (mixed-race woman). Even though the reunited lovers symbolize Mexican and Anglo race relations, the reality of Pilar and Sam sharing paternity rather than maternity recodifies race relations in Texas yet again in patriarchal terms. The siblings derive the truth of their existence from the same father lineage—from patriarchal patrimony. Although the film attempts to render the truth of the entwinement of Mexicans and Anglos through this allegorical brother-sister relationship, it is a partial and mystifying truth, privileging the father while rendering the mother invisible in the reproduction of Texas history. In so doing, the film envisions sexuality as a transfer point of masculine power, grounding miscegena-
tion in the patriarchal colonialist fantasy that authorizes and privileges the white man’s access to brown female bodies. It is white men who cross racial borders of gender, as in Buddy’s illicit affair with Mercedes Cruz. Women in this narrative universe represent the subjects of hybridity, mixing, and sexual crossings on the borderland. To the degree that Lone Star’s story excludes and denies the history of other forms of sexual relations, namely, those outside of the white male/woman of color paradigm, Lone Star reaffirms white supremacy’s interdiction against mixedrace unions between racialized men and white women. In the history of race relations antimiscegenation laws were aimed primarily at nonwhite men in the guise of protecting white femininity from these “sexual predators.” In other words, legal statutes against miscegenation were designed to ensure the racial purity of the white nation. Sayles contradicts his own claim that the nation is “not increasingly multicultural, it’s always been so” by reproducing white masculine privilege and maintaining whiteness intact. Not only does the depiction of Sam as racially white minimize the value of race mixture in multiculturalism, but it confirms as well white supremacists’ myth of racial purity. Sayles’s discovery that “maybe a third or more of African Americans are also Native Americans and a much higher percentage of African Americans are also white Americans” is curious for what it omits: the racial mix of white Americans. By doing so, the film affirms white anxieties about miscegenation. For one effect of the slippage on the part of Sayles is to stigmatize race mixture and ultimately continue the “othering” process prevalent in national formations, especially because the nation is inscribed onto the body of multiracial Pilar, who harbors the social stigma of miscegenation. Although Lone Star is the first film to represent the complexities of postcolonial Texas with some verisimilitude, much more is at stake than the film’s agreement with a preexisting truth. The film ostensibly engages in historical revisionism, allegedly rewrites the primal myth of the nation, and outwardly rejects the absolutism of the myth of pure and authentic culture and of racial binaries. However, this project also betrays its serious limitations insofar as the patriarchal and colonialist structures of knowing and seeing undermine the fictional representation of multiculturalism and of a new social order in the film. This “new social order” that critics are celebrating as the “genesis of a new mestizo mainstream” positions women of color in a troubling location. Yet the work of creating a more just and humane future demands, not a denial or an erasure of the past, but its reimagination. While the film works to revision and reconstruct the white man’s past so that he may enter a multicultural present and future,
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López, Lillian the racialized woman enters history as a blank slate. Ultimately Pilar, as the embodiment of the new multicultural nation filtered through white patriarchy, is left without her matrilineage, without paternity, and, most significantly, without the history lessons necessary to guide her into the future. At this moment in history, when the violence (experiential and symbolic) of white supremacy reasserts its dominance over the multicultural nation, she (we) cannot simply afford to “forget the Alamo.” SOURCES: Burton-Carvajal, Julianne. 2003. “Oedipus Tex/Oedipus Mex: Triangulations of Paternity, Race, and Nation.” In Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1998. “Recycling Colonialist Fantasies on the Texas Borderlands.” In Home, Exile, Homeland Anthology: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge; Limón, Jose. 1998. American Encounters. Boston: Beacon Press; West, Joan, and Dennis West. 1996. “Borders and Boundaries: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 22, no. 3:14–17. Rosa Linda Fregoso
LÓPEZ, LILLIAN (1925–2005) One of the first Puerto Rican librarians in the city of New York, Lillian López was born in Salinas, Puerto Rico, in 1925. López spent her early childhood in Ponce. In 1935 she left Ponce with her widowed mother and a younger sister for New York City. There they were reunited with an older sister, Evelina, who had arrived two years earlier. Joining a growing number of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City, they settled in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem). In keeping with a family tradition of activism, they became involved in the political life of El Barrio. As teenagers, Lillian and Evelina joined the Young Communist League. They both remained active in social causes throughout their lives. Evelina became a fiery community organizer, while Lillian worked for change as a professional librarian. After graduating from Washington Irving High School in 1944, López postponed college in order to work to help support her family. In 1952 she enrolled at Hunter College, attending evenings or days, depending on her financial situation, and earned a B.A. degree in 1959. While she was in college, she worked in private industry and labor unions, but finally decided to pursue a library science degree from Columbia University. She applied for a job as a trainee at the New York Public Library (NYPL), but because she had worked with union Local 1199 and participated in strikes and the organization of workers, she feared that she would not be hired. Nonetheless, in 1960 she began her first job as a
Elva, Lillian, Emelina (their mother) and Evelina López in 1969. Courtesy of the Lillian López Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
library trainee and remained with the NYPL system for twenty-five years. López quickly moved up to become the first Puerto Rican to hold important supervisory administrative positions, which allowed her to help set policies and change the way the library related to minority communities. From the start she was an advocate for better library services to the Spanish-speaking residents of New York City. She says in an interview that her role was to get the library to “come down to earth and serve the needs of the everyday person.” She labored to recruit bilingual library staff and to attract young Latinos into the library profession. Early on she managed to get the branches that served large numbers of Latinos in Manhattan and the Bronx to acquire sizable collections of books and other materials in Spanish so that the “young should neither lose nor forget their roots.” In 1967 she was instrumental in establishing the innovative South Bronx Project and became the administrator of this model library outreach project. “The goal of the project,” she explained, “was to break down barriers between the library and the community.” The project operated in nine neighborhoods that had become predominantly Latino. Spanish, English, and multilingual programs of diverse types were presented to people in all kinds of settings—schools, churches, playgrounds—what López called “taking the library outside its walls.” The programs were carefully geared to the cultural and social needs of each group being served. López believed that “all people should have access to information, whether the information is cultural, technical or simply survival.” After five years with the project López became the coordinator of the Special Services Office, which allowed her to implement programs like the South Bronx
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López, María I. Project throughout the boroughs. In 1979 she became Bronx Borough coordinator with responsibility for the thirty-three branch libraries in that region and worked toward strengthening the role of libraries in concert with the revitalization of the area. For much of her library career Lillian López was critical of national organizations such as the American Library Association (ALA) for their lack of response to the needs of Latinos and believed that it was her professional responsibility to do something about it. She became involved and held positions in both ALA and the New York Library Association. Between 1980 and 1982 she was appointed to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science’s Minorities Task Force. She retired from the NYPL in 1985, and in 1986 the National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish Speaking (REFORMA) honored her for her contributions to the New York Latino community. When asked once what she considered her most important contribution, López responded simply, “Helping people.” SOURCES: Ayala, Maria S. 1978. “Lilian [sic] López Interview.” Wilson Library Bulletin (November): 249; Guereña, Salvador, and Edward Erazo. 2000. “Latinos and Librarianship.” Library Trends 49, no. 1 (Summer): 138–181; Josey, E. J., and Kenneth E. Peeples. 1977. Opportunities for Minorities in Librarianship. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press; López, Lillian. 193?– 1998. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; ———. 1997, 2001. Oral history interviews by Nélida Pérez; Mapp, Edward. 1974. Puerto Rican Perspectives. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Nélida Pérez
LÓPEZ, MARÍA I. (1953–
)
Superior Court judge of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts María I. López was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1953. She came to the United States with her parents in 1961, leaving behind the revolutionary turmoil of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. After a brief stay in Miami López’s family relocated to Connecticut. She attended a Catholic high school in New London, where her father, Raúl López, worked as a cardiologist. In 1975 López completed her undergraduate studies at Smith College, majoring in government. She studied law at Boston University Law School from 1975 to 1978. Upon graduating from law school López worked as an attorney for Greater Boston’s Legal Services providing legal representation to the city’s poor. In 1980 she became the first Latina ever to serve in the Massachusetts’s District Attorney’s Office as an assistant attorney general. Since then, becoming the “first Latina in Massachusetts” to accomplish something related to the legal profession has become somewhat of a trademark in López’s career. After serving in the District At-
torney’s Office, López became the first Latina selected as a district court judge in Massachusetts in 1988. She served in the Chelsea District Court until 1993. At that point López was appointed to the Massachusetts Superior Court by Republican governor William Weld, again becoming the first Latina in the commonwealth ever to achieve that distinction. After her confirmation as a superior court judge López was assigned Demoulas v. Demoulas, a case that was to become the longest and costliest civil litigation in the history of Massachusetts. The Demoulas case was a messy, ten-year legal battle among family members over the estate of supermarket magnate George Demoulas. This high-profile litigation brought intense media attention and scrutiny to the newly appointed judge and despite efforts to taint her reputation by the attorneys of one of the plaintiffs, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2000 exonerated her of any wrongdoing or bias in the case. López was initially attracted to becoming a judge while serving as an assistant district attorney. At the time many of her colleagues were being tapped for judgeships, and López considered that such a career change offered the opportunity to be a more effective catalyst for transformation within the legal system. Judge López is known for her direct and approachable style on the bench. She believes that her experiences as both a woman and a Latina have left a mark on her legal philosophy. She continued to serve as superior court judge until 2003. During the late 1990s López became more involved with promoting legal and humanitarian exchanges between her native Cuba and the United States. Initially she concerned herself with Cuba-related projects through Boston’s Catholic Charities. After the Elián González custody crisis in Miami in 2000, López helped organize a legal conference between Cuban and U.S. judges in Havana to discuss the similarities and differences between the two legal systems. Since 1990 López has served as adjunct professor of trial advocacy at Boston University Law School. She is an active member and past president (1997–1998) of the George Lewis Ruffin Society, which promotes better understanding between minority communities and law enforcement agencies. She is also a board member of the Boston Ballet and WGBH, Boston’s public television station. Judge López is currently married to Boston publisher Stephen Mindich and is the mother of two children. SOURCES: Boston Globe. 2000. “Cellucci, Legislator Turn Up Heat on Judge.” September 12; Boston Magazine. 1999. “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?” 91, no. 10 (October): 84–89, 142–150; Ellement, John. 2000. “SJC Upholds lower court rulings, apparently ending Demoulas battle.” Boston Globe, July 31, B2.
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Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
López, Rosie
LÓPEZ, NANCY MARIE (1957–
)
The first Latina professional golfer, Nancy Marie López is considered one of the best ever to play the game. She found her calling at age eight when her father placed a golf club in her small hands for the first time. Born to Domingo López and Marina Griego in Torrance, California, Nancy López grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, and by the age of twelve she was winning statewide tournaments in New Mexico. Her victories continued: two U.S. Girls’ Junior titles, three Western Junior titles, and, in 1975, second as an amateur in the U.S. Women’s Open. During her collegiate career from 1976 to 1978 at the University of Tulsa, López also won her school’s award as female athlete of the year and a National Collegiate Athletic Association title. In 1978 she turned professional and won five consecutive tournaments, as well as the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Championship. She quickly became one of the most popular players on the LPGA tour, known for her quick smile, dancing eyes, and grace under pressure. López attracted galleries of fans, dubbed “Nancy’s Navy,” a play on “Arnie’s Army,” the fans of Arnold Palmer, a leading champion in the 1950s and 1960s. Among her fans was Tim Melton, a television sportscaster. He was assigned to interview her at a tournament in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and they married six months later, in 1979, on López’s twenty-second birthday. She struggled to find a balance between marriage and career, but the couple divorced three years later. “There were times when I was home and I wanted so much to be on the golf course, and yet I wanted to be with my husband,” she revealed to a reporter for the New York Times in 1982. After her divorce the five-foot-five self-admitted longtime junk-food addict, especially to Big Macs and french fries, lost thirty pounds. She lived in Houston and began dating a neighbor, Ray Knight, a third baseman for the Houston Astros. She and Knight were married in 1982. Thirteen months later they became the parents of Ashley Marie. Their family grew with the births of Erinn Shea in 1986 and Torri Heather in 1991. The children toured with López. In the words of writer Bob Drum, “She had to win tournaments while the kids were taking a nap.’ ” She did win tournaments—so many, in fact, that by age thirty she had won the number required to qualify for the LPGA Hall of Fame. When she was inducted in 1987, she had been LPGA Player of the Year three times and three times had won the Vare Trophy for best scoring average. Her 1985 average, 70.73, was an LPGA record. In 1989 she was admitted into the PGA World Hall of Fame. López’s game remained strong through the early 1990s. In 1997 she finished second in the U.S. Women’s Open Championship although she had fired rounds of
A legend in golf, Nancy Marie López. Courtesy of LPGA.
69-68-69-69, the only woman in U.S. Women’s Open history to shoot four rounds in the 60s. In 2000 the Chick-fil-A Charity Championship added “hosted by Nancy López” to its name, and she announced creation of the Nancy López Award, to be presented annually to the world’s outstanding female amateur golfer. Her father, who owned an auto-body repair shop, remained her only coach until his death in 2002. A month earlier López announced her farewell from the full LPGA tour. The Professional Golfers Association of America gave her its 2002 First Lady of Golf Award. “I am not walking away from golf,” López stated. “I am at the beginning of a brand new chapter in my golf career.” She and her family currently live in Albany, Georgia. According to the LPGA website, she is considered “one of the most influential women in sports and culture over the last quarter century.” SOURCES: Díaz, Jaime. 1992. “Lopez Would Love U.S. Open in Her Cap.” The New York Times, July 23; Ladies Professional Golf Association. “Nancy Lopez.” www.lpga.com/ player_results.aspx?id=500 (accessed July 16, 2005); López, Nancy. 1979. The Education of a Woman Golfer. New York: Simon and Schuster; ——— and Don Wade. 1989. Nancy López’s The Complete Golfer. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing Group; Murray, Jim. 1990. “Hombres Cannot Keep Up.” Los Angeles Times, September 23. Holly Ocasio Rizzo
LÓPEZ, ROSIE (1939–
)
Born in Santa Monica, California, Rosie López moved to South Phoenix with her family at the age of three.
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López, Yolanda Aspiring to become an educator, she enrolled at Arizona State University (ASU) in the 1960s. She married Joe Eddie López, a sheet-metal worker who eventually supervised numerous contracts for his employer and then became a union official at the pipe fitters’ local. The young couple seemed to be fulfilling the American dream; upwardly mobile and confident of raising their children in a secure environment. After all, Rosie had grown up with poverty and discrimination, and now it seemed that she could leave this behind. But such a trajectory was not to be. Instead, the marriage with Joe Eddie transformed into a lifelong partnership intensely striving for social reform. The advent of the Chicano movement influenced Rosie López and other Mexican American students. Almost instinctively these young people recognized that personal success would not eradicate the problems their people and immediate families still faced. In 1968 Rosie López helped organize the Mexican American Student Organization (MASO), which militantly pressed the university for accountability to the needs of the Chicano community. Along with fellow MASO members, López took social activism into the Phoenix community after graduation. She became a bilingual education teacher, while her husband left the security of his job to advocate for educational reform and economic development in the Phoenix barrios. Intense social activism permeated the López household. For Rosie López, however, teaching did not in itself bring about the social change she desired. In the 1970s she became involved in the boycotts promoted by farmworker leader César Chávez and in numerous other social causes of the period. In electoral politics López was part of a core group of an unsuccessful but extremely politicizing campaign to recall Governor Jack Williams, a politician who was blatantly hostile to social reform. The election of fellow Latinos to political office consumed much of her energy as well, and in particular she contributed her developing political talents to the campaigns of Raúl Castro, the first Mexican American governor of Arizona, and to those of her husband. Joe Eddie López won a seat on a school board and later on the county board of supervisors and in the state legislature. This activism led Rosie López to become a crucial social and political force in Arizona without ever holding public office. When Willie Velásquez brought the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project to Arizona in the late 1970s, Rosie López took on the responsibility of directing its activities in the Phoenix area. Voter registration drives resulted in the election of Arizona Latinos to the U.S. Congress, including Representatives Ed Pastor of Phoenix and Raúl Grijalva of Tucson. This unselfish commitment to change spurred Rosie López
to organize the Arizona Hispanic Community Forum in 1985, a vehicle that embraces a myriad of civil rights and discrimination causes, most of which have had positive outcomes. When issues remain unresolved, López has learned and profited from unfulfilled battles. From 1996 to 2000 López directed the Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program at ASU, a project that guides and promotes college-bound aspirations in Hispanic girls and their mothers. They are mentored from grade school to college. López has also risen to great heights in the Democratic Party. A precinct committee head in the 1970s, she was selected as a member of the state party committee in 1992 and chairs the Maricopa County Democratic Party. López’s leadership abilities resulted in her directing the Gore-Lieberman campaign in Arizona in 2000. In 2002 Rosie López unsuccessfully ran for the Phoenix City Council, but emerged from this experience stronger and more energized. A grandmother, she heads the Hispanic Forum and led the Democrats in a crucial electoral redistricting battle. López continues to live in the same innercity home that she and Joe Eddie López bought more than forty years ago—a testament to her willingness to sacrifice material success for social justice. See also Chicanos Por La Causa SOURCES: Luckingham, Bradford. 1994. Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Luey, Beth, and Noel J. Stowe, eds. 1987. Arizona at Seventy-five: The Next Twenty-five Years. Tempe: Arizona State University Public History Program and the Arizona Historical Society; Navarro, Armando. 2000. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1997. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press. F. Arturo Rosales
LÓPEZ, YOLANDA (1942–
)
Born in San Diego, California, and raised by her mother and her maternal grandparents, artist Yolanda López is the eldest of three daughters. Artistic expression came early to López, who claims, “I was drawing as I emerged from the birth canal.” After she completed high school, a maternal uncle encouraged her to move to the San Francisco Bay Area for undergraduate studies. She attended the College of Marin, where in 1965 she received an A.A. in art. Involved in neighborhood organizing efforts in San Francisco’s Mission District, López directed her artistic talents toward community organizing, creating posters and handbills announcing demonstrations, meetings, and cultural events. López
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López, Yolanda recalls, “The streets of San Francisco were my gallery.” During this period she also served as a court artist for the trial of los Siete, seven Chicanos indicted and acquitted of killing a police officer. In 1975 López completed a B.A. in fine art with an emphasis on painting and drawing at San Diego State University. When she was requested by a group of high-school Chicanas to serve as technical advisor when they painted a mural in Chicano Park, she agreed. In homage to the vibrant artistry and powerful imagery of Mujeres Muralistas, a San Francisco–based collective of Latina artists, López named the young women muralists Mujeres Muralistas de San Diego. López continued her studies, earning an M.A. in visual art from the University of California at San Diego in 1979. Graduate training permitted López to develop and expand her creative expression in a wide range of media, including installation, lithography, painting, videography, and illustration. As a result, her artistry resists facile categorization. Defining representational elements of López’s work include her depiction of Chicanas as agents of social change. Her best-known works are vivid examples of connecting private and public articulations of her own Chicana heritage. Her charcoal-and-conté-crayon-on-paper triptych Three Generations of Mujeres: Victoria F. Franco, Margaret S. Stewart, and Portrait of the Artist (1977) and the oil pastel-on-paper triptych Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother, Grandmother, and Portrait of the Artist (1978) exemplify López’s affirmation of her grandmother and mother’s influences and her acknowledgment of the maternal spirit as symbolized by repeated use of the syncretic figure of Tonantzin/Coatlicue/la Virgen de Guadalupe. When art historians describe the evolution of the Chicana/o art movement, López’s work is invariably cited as exemplary of the representational complexity found in the highly accessible genre of poster art. Her offset lithograph Who’s the Illegal Pilgrim?, created in 1978 but printed in 1981, stands as an outraged reminder that indigenous people resided in the Americas long before Plymouth Rock. Accusatory finger pointed toward his audience, the Aztec warrior evokes and inverts the popular image of Uncle Sam recruiting soldiers to wage war in the third world. Not content to work solely in two-dimensional media, López created the video When You Think of Mexico (1986), which deconstructs the institutionalized racism inherent in popular images of Mexicans and Mexico. Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams: Media Myths and Mexicans (1988), López’s one-woman installation exhibition, received acclaim at La Galería de la Raza. She creates in multimedia as well; among her recognized pieces is the digital print Women’s Work Is Never Done: El trabajo de las mujeres no termina nunca:
Portrait of visionary artist Yolanda López with work titled My Mexican Bag, acrylic on canvas, 2003. Photograph by Rio Yanéz. Courtesy of Yolanda López.
Homenaje a Dolores Huerta (1995). López says of her intended viewer, “Over the years as I have created my art, I have tried to address an audience, a Chicano audience, specifically a California Chicano audience.” López is an art instructor and a curator. She has taught at the University of Arizona, Stanford University, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses. Her son with René Yañez, Río, continues in the family tradition of community artist. See also Artists SOURCES: Barnet Sánchez, Holly. 2001. “Where Are the Chicana Printmakers?” In ¿Just Another Poster? ed. Chon Noriega. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum; Chabram Dernersesian, Angie. 1993. “And, Yes . . . the Earth Did Part: On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity.” In Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera. Berkeley: University of California Press; LaDuke, Betty. 1992. Women Artists: Multicultural Visions. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press.
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María Ochoa
López Córdova, Gloria
LÓPEZ CÓRDOVA, GLORIA (1942–
)
Born in Cordova, New Mexico, Gloria López Córdova hailed from a distinguished family of artists. Her father, Rafael López, was the son of renowned wood carver José Dolores López, the artist credited with initiating the “Córdova style” of wood carving. This style, which began in the early part of the twentieth century, is distinguished from other New Mexican Santero/a art by the use of unpainted wood, usually cottonwood and cedar, embellished and sculpted with chip-carved design elements. Surrounded by this work, Gloria López Córdova, as a child, helped her father, Rafael, and her mother, Precidez (Romero), finish their carvings. Although she learned the Córdova-style carving techniques, she did not immediately follow in her family’s artistic footsteps. She attended school and in 1961 married José Herminio Córdova; they had three children, Evelyn, Gary, and Rafael. It was not until 1973 that she set up her own shop in the village of Cordova. Today bold signs announce her business and lead the way to her home and shop just off the High Road to Taos, New Mexico. In much the same manner in which she helped her parents with their art, her family, including her husband, Herminio, contributes carving, finishing, and decorative elements
to this version of Córdova style. Although many of the santos and animals are the result of a group effort, Gloria López Córdova has received most of the artistic recognition for their work. Her individual style can be discerned in the ornate and delicate carved design elements of each piece. Once López Córdova began selling her work, artistic recognition came rapidly. She won major prizes at the Spanish Market in Santa Fe in 1975 and 1976. In 1981 López Córdova’s work was the focus of a one-woman show at Washington State University. More accolades followed, including articles in the New York Times and postcards of her work produced by the Library of Congress. In 2000 López Córdova received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in the state of New Mexico. She continues to sell her masterpieces at the annual summer and winter Spanish Markets sponsored by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in Santa Fe. Examples of her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in Santa Fe, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as in many private collections.
Noted New Mexico wood carver Gloria López Córdova and her granddaughter. Courtesy of Gloria López Córdova.
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Lorenzana, Apolinaria See also Artists SOURCES: Briggs, Charles L. 1989. The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic “Revival.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Pierce, Donna, and Marta Weigle, eds. 1996. Spanish New Mexico: The Spanish Colonial Arts Society Collections. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.
Tey Marianna Nunn
LORENZANA, APOLINARIA (1793–?) The first mission of Alta California was founded in 1769. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century the government of New Spain was still sending men, women, and children north from Mexico to settle the region. Apolinaria Lorenzana was one of those sent to help build the colonial settlements in the California frontier. Born in Mexico City, Lorenzana was part of a group of orphaned children and young women who were brought north in 1800 for placement in Californio homes or marriage with presidio soldiers. They were taken by land to the Pacific coast, where they boarded the frigate Rey la Concepción at San Blas. When they arrived at Monterey, Alta California, the orphans were distributed among settler families in various pueblos, including Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. Although the orphans were given the last name Lorenzana, after their benefactor the archbishop of Toledo, Apolinaria later became known as Apolinaria la Cuna (the foundling) and Apolinaria la Beata (the pious). Lorenzana was first placed at the home of Lieutenant Raymundo Carrillo, commander of the Santa Barbara Presidio, and his wife, Tomasa Lugo. When she was approximately twelve or thirteen years old, the colonial authorities reassigned Carrillo, now a captain, to the San Diego Presidio. Carrillo took his family, including Apolinaria, to his new post. After a few years Lorenzana moved in with Sergeant Mercado and his wife, Doña Josefa Sal, in San Diego. At this home Lorenzana became sick from an undisclosed illness that caused temporary paralysis of her left hand, for which she was taken to the San Diego Mission to recuperate. She later returned to the mission to train as the mission’s nurse for the women’s infirmary. Lorenzana was taught to read as a young child at the orphanage in Mexico and began teaching other children in Santa Barbara. However, she always had a desire to learn to write and did so, teaching herself with books available to her and practicing at every opportunity by using cigarette wrappings and scrap paper as writing material. She was largely responsible for a school owned by a Californio widow where children
were taught a variety of skills, including reading, sewing, and cooking. Although Lorenzana never married, she was well liked and respected in the region and was asked numerous times to godparent children, including two daughters and a son of Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper of Mission San Gabriel. She was madrina (sponsor to children in the sacrament of religious confirmation) of Californio and Indian children alike—anywhere from 100 to 200 children in all by her own account. She was the recipient of two government land grants, Santa Clara de Jamachá in 1840 and Buena Esperanza de los Coches (or Cañada de los Coches) in 1843, both located near San Diego. Lorenzana later bought a ranch in the southern region of Alta California, Capistrano de Secuá. Lorenzana made her living sewing and embroidering until her early illness, when her hand was incapacitated for almost three years, during which time she supervised the care of patients in the mission infirmary. Her increasing responsibilities at the mission ranged from being a teacher for Californio children to supervising the nursing of the sick and aged at the mission infirmary, training and supervising the nurses therein, overseeing the sale of foodstuffs to Indians and soldiers and the distribution of rations to the presidial soldiers and indigenous mission workers, and training Indian women to sew and launder the church linens. Lorenzana also had permission to board the ships that came to port and supervise the purchase of goods for the mission. She had the authority to select goods that were not included on the list prepared by the missionaries if she deemed the items necessary for the mission. Eventually Lorenzana took on the duties of head housekeeper, or llavera, while she continued the task of teaching children to read and write and giving them religious education. Her reminiscences, documented in the H. H. Bancroft interviews of the late 1800s and titled “Memorias de doña Apolinaria Lorenzana, ‘la Beata,’ ” include descriptions of the regimented daily work and prayer schedule of the mission’s indigenous population, a rigid schedule that served one of the mission’s projects—to exploit the labor of the neophytes (mission Indians). Not unlike Eulalia Pérez, the head housekeeper at San Gabriel, Lorenzana also played a role in the mission’s attempt to transform the indigenous population of the San Diego area into Spanish subjects, and, like Pérez, Lorenzana sometimes lamented the harsh treatment of the indigenous population by the missionaries when they were judged to have committed some infraction. But Lorenzana’s greatest grievance was associated with the arrival of U.S. troops. Not only was she a witness to American invasion and indigenous uprisings, but she suffered the fate of many Californios as a
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Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Strike consequence of American domination: the loss of her property. Lorenzana was at San Juan Capistrano when Commodore Robert Stockton and General Stephen Watts Kearney’s troops passed by on their way to Los Angeles. Since she was unable to be in San Diego, she had entrusted the care of her ranches to an acquaintance (to whom she would later be related), Juan Forster. Forster informed her that a captain of the U.S. army (Magruder) had requested use of her Jamachá ranch for the cavalry horses. Lorenzana never received payment for this use, and although the U.S. Army continued to use her ranches, and Magruder later asked to purchase the ranch, she never sold her ranches but was also never able to reclaim them. In the end Lorenzana was living in Santa Barbara, blind, penniless, and a charge of the county. She is, however, now remembered as a true example of the high level of authority and respect achieved by some mestiza (mixed-race) women of the California frontier. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Lorenzana, Apolinaria. 1878. “Memorias de doña Apolinaria Lorenzana ‘La Beata’ dictadas por ella en Santa Bárbara en marzo de 1878 a Thomas Savage, Bancroft Library 1878.” Manuscript, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Padilla, Genaro M. 1993. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Sánchez, Rosaura, Beatrice Pita, and Bárbara Reyes, eds. 1994. Nineteenth Century Californio Testimonials. Crítica: A Journal of Critical Essays. Critica Monograph Series, University of California, San Diego, Spring. Bárbara O. Reyes
LOS ANGELES GARMENT WORKERS’ STRIKE The first weeks of October 1933 witnessed a remarkable strike action of between 2,000 and 3,000 garment workers—overwhelmingly Mexicanas—in the new, but expanding, Los Angeles women’s clothing industry. The International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had conducted a monthlong organizing drive that culminated in the strike. The strike holds significance for a number of reasons. Among these, the activities and militancy of the unionists contradicted assumptions about women’s roles in general, Mexican women’s roles in particular, and about successfully organizing such women into unions. The establishment of the ILGWU proved crucial in breaking Los Angeles’ infamous “open shop” (the de facto prohibiting of unions), exposed the iniquities of the contract system, and provided a modicum of justice in the shops. Through the ILGWU Mexican women were now involved in Los Angeles in New Deal labor politics and European-style social democracy.
The strike began on September 27 when Los Angeles dressmakers, largely Mexicanas and 1,500 strong, met in Walker’s Orange Grove Theater and voted unanimously for a general strike if employers refused the demands that the local branch of the ILGWU had drawn up. The workers insisted upon union recognition, the thirty-five-hour workweek, a guaranteed minimum wage, a shop chair and price committee elected by each shop, elimination of homework, and a grievance procedure. These demands spoke to the harsh work situation in which Mexican women labored in la costura, as they called the garment trade. The structure of the industry determined many of the conditions under which the women labored. It was a ruggedly competitive industry in which employers sought to underprice one another and undercut profits and wages. Thus it was an unusually volatile industry in which demand for products was seasonal and unstable, and shops (the places where the sewing was done) went out of business and new ones opened up with some rapidity. Most of the “labels,” as the different name brands of clothes are called, contracted out much of their work to “jobbers,” who, since they had a fixed price for their product, made their money by squeezing their labor costs. The outcome for the Mexican garment workers was “piecework,” that is, getting paid for each article sewed rather than an hourly wage; periodic unemployment and underemployment when a shop or label went out of business, demand was low, or styles changed; cheating workers out of wages or promised work when the market drove the value of the clothing below the cost of production; and unscrupulous employers who saw no need to treat their workers fairly, simply because of their immigration status, ethnic identity, or gender. Wages in 1935 averaged between $13.00 and $17.00 per week when the state minimum wage was $18.90 per week. It was against these practices that Mexican and other women organized into the ILGWU and struck against their employers, most notably in 1933 and 1936. Participants in the organization drive described the work situation this way: There was the “open-door system,” in which, according to Rose Pesotta, the ILGWU organizer sent out from New York City, “Women hunting jobs were given ’the freedom of the building.’ Doors leading to staircases were left unlocked, so that they could take the elevator to the top floor, ask at each shop if there was work, walk down to the next floor, and repeat the performance until, if lucky, they found a few days employment for the price offered.” Garment worker María Flóres related how “I come in the morning, punch my card, work for an hour, punch the card again. I wait for two hours, get another bundle, punch card, finish bundle, punch card again. Then I wait some more the whole day that way.” Employers argued that
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Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Strike the functioning of the competitive market in the garment industry compelled these labor practices, but to María Flóres it was inhumane—in her words, “what the boss makes us do.” “Garment factory owners,” the union organizer noted, “regarded their employees as casual workers, in the same class as migrants who harvested fruit and vegetable products.” The energy for the strike came from the largely Mexican rank and file, but the ILGWU provided the leadership and the organizational structure and expertise. The leadership of the union, headquartered in New York City, was mostly male eastern European Jews, drawn from the skilled garment trades. They simultaneously sought power for the ILGWU within the garment industry and to ameliorate the working conditions of women workers such as those described earlier. To further complicate the context in which Mexican women organized and struck the garment industry in 1933, that year also saw the passage of the centerpiece of early New Deal legislation, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). It affirmed labor’s right to organize into unions, but provided no enforcement procedures. The ILGWU functioned solidly within the New Deal coalition, and the leadership constantly asserted that “the union must provide information and guidance in matters of health, social security, family, housing, and political matters.” The ILGWU had broadened its vision of security to accord with government leadership of the economy. “It is therefore our duty, in the interests of the workers we represent, to concern ourselves with every phase of our industry and to do everything in our power to put it on a sound and solid basis,” declared the joint board of the ILGWU. The leaders of the 1933 general strike stated the short-term goals of this action as union recognition so that the union could police the industry and see that evaders came to terms and that everyone abided by the (NIRA) code. The bosses were schlemiels (a Yiddish word that, roughly translated, means tontos or fools), and if they would not cooperate, then a strike would force them to rationalize the industry and treat their Mexican workers fairly. The capriciousness of the market and the shortsighted foolishness of the employers yielded a volatile industry. The ILGWU would bring higher wages and profits, as well as stability, to the benefit of all. It sought to keep the system working through the cooperation of workers, capitalists, and the national government. It was the essence of social democracy come to the Mexican seamstresses of Los Angeles. The social democrats of the ILGWU were not the only ones who sought to organize the disinherited of the earth in general and Mexican women in Los Angeles in particular into industrial unions. The Communists also tried to attract women workers to their Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union. Their theory
and practice in the years before 1935 favored revolution and challenged the ILGWU’s gradualist strategy. Completely opposite them were the efforts of the Associated Apparel Manufacturers of Los Angeles, which strengthened its organization and urged its members to stand firm or else “be forced to strictly adhere to the minimum wage laws of California” and even lose their open shop. The Los Angeles Police Department prepared itself to counter any union or strike efforts. This was not a simple union drive that would strike to achieve its goals regarding wages, hours, and working conditions. It was an intense cauldron of political and economic passions in which world and local politics, justice, assumptions about Mexican women’s proper place, and the simple concerns about subsistence all boiled over into a series of remarkable labor strikes. In open-shop Los Angeles, though, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) board, in spite of its stated pretensions, cooperated with the employers who began discharging workers for union activity. An ILGWU rank-and-file movement steadily mounted, with Mexicanas in the leadership of Local No. 96. Factory owners locked out several shops entirely, and by October 8 there was a genuine strike in progress. Local No. 96 now officially called for a general dressmakers’ strike, which the AFL Central Labor Council sanctioned, on October 12. The strike call brought an immediate response from the workers. The ranks of 2,000 to 3,000 strikers held firm despite many arrests. They sang and chanted on the picket lines in front of the dressmaking shops. Parades of unionists and supporters, huge quantities of food, and union label propaganda all assisted in the stirring effort. The massive numbers on the union picket lines made an employer injunction against picketing ineffectual. Rose Pesotta and the Mexican women strikers exuded character and vitality. The ILGWU sponsored short broadcasts on a Mexican cultural radio program until it was shut down after a few days. Mexican union women facilitated the purchase of time on a Tijuana station, el Eco de México, and each morning at 7:00 A.M. Los Angeles’ Spanish-speaking workers learned of the strike’s progress. The leadership also produced a four-page, semiweekly newspaper, The Organizer, in Spanish and English. The “Spanish Branch” of the ILGWU had Halloween parties for the children, adult parties featuring professional Mexican singers, and two-for-twenty-five-cents-admission parties “to have members of all unions, regardless of their classification, come and make friends with the Spanish speaking members.” Photographs of a Labor Day parade later in the decade show those on the ILGWU’s Spanish Branch float clad in Mexican costumes. Within two weeks the ILGWU accepted an arbitra-
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International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, Spanish-language branch, 1936. Courtesy of Douglas Monroy.
tion proposal from the local NRA office. However, the employers, unable to see the carrot of cooperation dangling on the NRA stick, did not. On November 4 the “impartial” board granted little and called off the strike, to the chagrin of the ILGWU leadership. The settlement called for technical recognition of the union at best, NRA minimum wages, and an equal distribution of work in slack periods. Somehow the membership ratified the agreement by a five-to-one majority. While most of the ILGWU leadership found the decision of the arbitration board less than satisfactory, the strike efforts of 1933 laid the foundation for a dressmakers’ union in Los Angeles. In 1934 Local No.96 continued to gain strength in individual shops. The following year several quick strikes or mere work stoppages strengthened the union and technically achieved the closed shop. By 1936 the ILGWU had established itself firmly as the representative of the dressmaking industry’s workers. Ricardo Hill, the Mexican consul, sanctioned the ILGWU leadership, recommended which Spanishspeaking organizers be hired, and exhorted the Mexicano workers of the ILGWU to accept its leadership. On August 5, 1936, 3,000 workers engaged in another general strike with accompanying picketing and arrests. The ILGWU signed agreements for 2,650 workers in fifty-six firms, gaining a weekly minimum wage of $28 for women and $35 for men on a three-year contract, though lack of full-time work often lowered this amount considerably. The general volatility of the garment industry, migrant workers from the South and the Midwest, and the continuing resistance of the intensely competitive factory owners still threatened the ILGWU. Despite all this, it had nearly managed to establish a closed shop. The union had a membership of about 3,000 when it joined the CIO in 1936. It rejoined the AFL in 1940.
The women in la costura won the strikes and established the union. Industrial capitalism had drawn them out of the patriarchal home and into the public world where they earned a wage and a sense of independence. Their wages allowed them to challenge patriarchy through new ways of being and brought them new expectations about personal autonomy. See also International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union; Labor Unions SOURCES: Durón, Clementina. 1984. “Mexican Women and Labor Conflict in Los Angeles: The ILGWU Dressmakers’ Strike of 1933.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 15 (Spring): 145–161; Laslett, John, and Mary Tyler. 1989. The ILGWU in Los Angeles, 1907–1988. Inglewood, CA: Ten Star Press; Monroy, Douglas. 1999. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. Berkeley: University of California Press; Pesotta, Rose. 1945. Bread upon the Waters. New York: Dodd, Mead. Douglas Monroy
LOZANO, ALICIA GUADALUPE ELIZONDO (1899–1984) Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo was born in Lampazos, Nuevo León, Mexico, in 1899. During the 1930s she was a prominent civic leader in Texas, a woman who merged Mexican nationalism (“el Mexico de afuera”) with women’s benevolent reform. In 1922 she married Ignacio Lozano, founder of the influential Spanishlanguage newspaper La Prensa. Ignacio Lozano had started this San Antonio daily in 1913, and for decades La Prensa was the only Spanish statewide newspaper in Texas. In 1926 he and his wife Alicia expanded their reach to Los Angeles, where they founded La Opinión, today the largest and most influential Spanishlanguage daily in the United States. The couple had two children, María Alicia and Ignacio Jr.
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Lozano, Emma Alicia Lozano founded the Sociedad de la Beneficencia Mexicana, a women’s mutual-aid society that blended patriotism toward Mexico with social reform in the United States. Primarily a middle-class Mexican immigrant women’s organization, this mutualista spearheaded efforts to establish Clinica de la Beneficencia Mexicana, the first public health care clinic established and in large measure operated by Latinas. Founded during the Great Depression, the clinic served San Antonio’s impoverished Mexicano residents well into the late 1940s. In addition, Lozano served as a cultural broker, a woman of means and education who moved in both Mexican and European American circles. Alicia Lozano belonged to the Pan American Round Table, a statewide organization composed of both middle-class Mexican and European American women who were dedicated to fostering goodwill between the United States and Latin America. In addition to family and civic activities, she also worked with her husband in the family’s growing newspaper business. When Lozano’s husband died in 1953, she managed La Prensa with the assistance of Leonides González, the father of Congressman Henry B. González. Although she wore the traditional black mourning garb typical for widows of her generation, she proved an astute businesswoman, especially since she had always been involved in the family newspaper business. In 1959, at the age of sixty, she sold the newspaper. Upon retirement she traveled extensively in the United States and Europe. A devout Catholic, she met Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican on her eighty-fifth birthday. She died of cancer in 1984 at the age of eighty-five. Today her granddaughter Monica Lozano carries on the tradition of the family newspaper business, serving as president and chief operating officer of La Opinión, one of the nation’s major newspapers. See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Garcia, Richard A. 1980. “The Making of the Mexican-American Mind, San Antonio, Texas, 1929–1941.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine; Olvera, J. Montiel. 1939. Primer anuario de los habitantes hispano-americanos de Texas/First Year Book of the Latin-American Population of Texas. San Antonio: Mexican Chamber of Commerce. Nettie Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo de Lozano.” In New Handbook of Texas, 4:318. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
LOZANO, EMMA (1953–
)
Perhaps her own family led Emma Lozano into a life dedicated to social justice and a world without borders. Though she was born in Texas, she and her family resided in Hammond, Indiana. Within weeks of her
birth she and her mother joined the rest of the family in Indiana. In 1958 the family moved to Chicago, the city Emma Lozano has called home since she was five. Lozano’s community activism began when she agreed to work as a volunteer with her brother Rudy in the organization known as Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (Center for Autonomous Social Action, CASA). Originally founded in Los Angeles in 1968 by veteran organizers Bert Corona and Chole Alatorre, CASA provided assistance and information to undocumented workers who needed help with immigration issues. Historian Marisela Chávez, herself a child of CASA, notes that by 1975 it had become “the selfproclaimed vanguard of an ethnic Mexican class based revolution,” as Chicana/o students and young professionals led the mutual aid organization with a MarxistLeninist ideology. CASA believed in a world without borders and, in addition to immigrant services and study groups, was also committed to trade union work. Emma Lozano was just a teenager, but Rudy involved her in political and union organizing. Rudy’s assassination in 1983 had a profound influence on her, pushing her to continue the work he had started. She created a commission to monitor the criminal investigation surrounding her brother’s murder, but the case was never solved. Education, workers’ rights, and independent political activism became the primary focus of Lozano’s efforts. She worked for the election of Mayor Harold Washington and served as aid to Alderman Jesús García. Lozano ran for an alderman position in 1987 in order to deepen the base of independent Latino political involvement. Even though she lost the election, her political influence in the community continued to grow. She served on the mayor’s task force on education reform, creating a process for electing local school councils that ensured representation of parents. In 1987 Emma Lozano founded Centro sin Fronteras in an area of the city that had few organizations or services for immigrant Mexicans, particularly for undocumented families. The first issue addressed by Centro sin Fronteras was the overcrowding of the local elementary school, in which 1,200 children were jammed into a facility built to accommodate only 400 students. Five and a half years later, through hunger strikes, demonstrations, marches, and arrests, a new elementary school named after her brother, the Rudy Lozano School, was built at a cost of $6 million. The organization has taken on issues of bilingual education, lead poisoning, housing, police brutality, library services, youth employment, and gentrification. The Centro identifies problems, trains volunteers, and mobilizes communities. The Centro has an international mission, addressing U.S. policies in Central America and supporting
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Lozano, Mónica Cecilia movements for social justice in Mexico. It also provides exchanges with communities in Santo Domingo, El Salvador, Cuba, and Mexico. Lozano led a delegation to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to stop weapons testing in the area. Lozano is a survivor of an abusive first marriage and of breast cancer. The mother of five children, she considers women the backbone of many community organizations and thus has worked to ensure that women play vital leadership roles in Centro sin Fronteras. Poor, undocumented women with little formal education receive the leadership training they need to be effective advocates for themselves and their families. Centro sin Fronteras is a grassroots organization predicated on respect for and empowerment of women. Emma Lozano is one of the most visible Latina leaders in the Midwest, and Centro sin Fronteras provides a model of community self-help and self-determination. See also Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) SOURCES: Chavez, Marisela. 2000. “ ‘We lived and breathed and worked the movement’: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo–Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA-HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications; Cordova, T., G. Cardenas, and C. Sierra, eds. 1993. Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender. Austin: National Association for Chicano Studies, University of Texas at Austin; Martínez, Elizabeth. 1998. De Colores Means All of Us: Latina views for a Multi-colored Century. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
with her grandmother, Alicia Elizondo Lozano, founded the newspaper La Prensa in San Antonio in 1913 and La Opinión in Los Angeles in 1926. In 1953 her father Ignacio became publisher of La Opinión. Unlike her brothers and sisters who worked for the newspaper, Mónica Lozano decided to go her own way. In an interview with Shirley Biagi of the Washington Press Club, she stated, “I didn’t want to follow in anybody’s footsteps. I had never seen that as part of my personality.” Raised in Newport Beach, California, Lozano attended Catholic schools until she graduated from high school. In 1974 she entered the University of Oregon and studied political science. She relocated to San Francisco in the late 1970s, attended San Francisco City College, and received a degree in printing technology. Also in San Francisco Lozano worked at a small community bilingual newspaper called El Tecolote and ran a graphic arts printing company. In 1985, however, Lozano’s family asked her to return to Los Angeles and to join the family business. After being involved in student organizations and in the San Francisco community in grassroots organizing and publications, Lozano realized that La Opinión was the best method for her to both serve her community and put her talents to use. As she stated in an interview with Marisela Chávez, “If I was interested in mak-
Virginia Martínez
LOZANO, MÓNICA CECILIA (1956–
)
As president and chief operating officer of La Opinión, Mónica Cecilia Lozano heads the nation’s largest and fastest-growing Spanish-language daily newspaper. Published in Los Angeles and with a daily readership of almost 700,000, La Opinión occupies a vital position as the major vein of print news information for southern California’s Spanish-speaking population. Since 1985, when Lozano joined the managing staff of La Opinión, the newspaper’s readership, its influence in Los Angeles and on the national scene, and its financial footing have grown. Lozano’s entry into La Opinión did not happen haphazardly. Lozano comes from a long line of newspapermen and women. She was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1956 to Ignacio E. and Marta (Navarro) Lozano. Her grandfather, Ignacio Lozano, Sr., along
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Mónica Lozano, president and chief operating officer of La Opinión. Courtesy of La Opinión.
Lucas, María Elena ing a difference, there was nothing more important, or at least, more accessible, than La Opinión.” Thus in 1985 Mónica Lozano became managing editor of La Opinión, and in 1991 she became editor. In 1995 she rose to the position of associate publisher, and in 1999 she became the president and chief operating officer. Lozano is also vice president of Lozano Communications, the parent company of La Opinión. Since she joined La Opinión, Lozano has led the newspaper in new directions. In her role as editor and within the realm of public service work, she has developed series on AIDS and prenatal education that won La Opinión several journalism awards. Lozano and her brother José have changed the philosophical approach of the newspaper. They envision La Opinión not just as a Spanish-language newspaper, but as a major metropolitan daily and as an integrated media company. Yet this change in vision did not alter the fundamental guiding principles of La Opinión, connection to Latino communities and a commitment to the issues that these communities face. Since 1995 Lozano has pushed La Opinión’s growth as an integrated media company. Under Lozano’s dayto-day direction of the newspaper, which includes management of the advertising, marketing, editorial, circulation, production, and operations sections, La Opinión has grown in both advertising and circulation, has instituted home delivery, and maintains partnerships with Spanish-language television and radio. La Opinión has also launched its own website and the La Opinión news syndicate, which sells the content of the newspaper both nationally and internationally. In addition to her work in the newspaper, Lozano remains very close to her family and is active in community, education, business, and political groups. She has two children, Santiago Centanino, born in 1987, and Gabriela Centanino, born in 1989. She sits on the boards of the Walt Disney Company, Union Bank of California, the National Council of La Raza, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Fannie Mae Foundation. Since 1991 she has served as a trustee of the University of Southern California and chairs the board’s Public Affairs Committee. She also serves as a trustee for Sun America Asset Management Corporation. In 1998 Lozano was appointed to the California State Board of Education and in 2000 was elected its president. As a newspaper publisher and businesswoman, Lozano views her role as publisher of La Opinión as a tool to educate and empower the Latino community in Los Angeles and beyond and to serve as a bridge between the Latino community and the larger society. In this way she continues the philosophy of the generations of Lozanos in the newspaper business. “We’re
here to defend the rights of the underprivileged, the underclass, and the underserved.” See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Herndon, Doug. 2000. “A Conversation with Monica Lozano.” California Schools Magazine (Fall): 13–15, 31; Lozano, Mónica Cecilia. 2001. Interview by Marisela R. Chávez, August 4; National Press Club, Washington Press Club Foundation. 1994. “Women in Journalism Oral History Project, Mónica Lozano.” http://npc.press.org/wpforal/loz.htm (accessed July 22, 2005). Marisela R. Chávez
LUCAS, MARÍA ELENA (1941–
)
Born on March 22, 1941, in southern Texas, María Elena Lucas was the first of seventeen children of two Mexican migrant workers. At five years of age María began to work the streets selling items and scavenging the garbage for nonperishable food items to feed the family. When she was a child, her parents neglected her, and feeling trapped in dire poverty, she began to write as a way to express her frustrations and anxieties. Lucas recalls that her three years of formal education were spent with coloring books and crayons because of teacher indifference, apathy, and inability to communicate with her. Because of her father’s controlling demeanor, Lucas had to assume complete responsibility not only for her younger siblings, but for domestic tasks as well. Consequently, at age sixteen she married her neighbor to escape the abuse she received at the hands of her father. Two weeks into the marriage Lucas began to endure physical and emotional abuse from her controlling husband. “After Andrés would hit me or beat me, he’d continue to punish me by not talking to me . . . , and anything I had to say wasn’t appreciated.” Her in-laws were aware of the abuse and refused to help her. In order to provide food for her seven children, Lucas returned to working in the fields. Defying her family and their traditions, Lucas left her husband and moved to Ohio with her seven children in order to work in the agricultural fields. In Ohio she became part of larger groups of women in California and the Midwest affiliated with the United Farm Workers, not just as members but also as social service volunteers who operated day-care centers, health clinics, and migrant social services. The Founder of the first center operated by the UFW in the Midwest, Lucas described the day-to-day challenges and the personal toll exacted. “And I worked such long hours, during the nights and on the weekends. . . . Sometimes I’d have thirteen or fourteen people waiting for me to do different things for them.” Referring to the advice she re-
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Lucas, María Elena
Farm labor organizer and author María Elena Lucas displaying her artwork. Courtesy of María Elena Lucas.
ceived from legendary UFW leader César Chávez, she said, “César told me, ‘It’s not good to play Santa Claus to the people’ . . . and I started getting to the point where I understood . . . I was burning out.” Historian Vicki L. Ruiz in her book From out of the Shadows profiled María Elena Lucas’s contributions as a charismatic labor organizer as follows: “Frustrated by the UFW’s reluctance to organize migrant laborers . . . , Lucas became an organizer in 1985 with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) led by Baldemar Velázquez. Joined by four of her compañeras, including her own daughter . . . Lucas helped organize over 5,000 Midwestern farm workers and orchestrated a successful union election and contract.” Although, as Ruiz notes, Lucas became a vice president of the FLOC, she “expressed a feeling of powerlessness with regard to decision-making within the union board.” She also found that male organizers had more support both within the union hierarchy and within their own families than women. In her oral history Forged under the Sun: Forjada bajo el sol, edited by
Fran Leeper Buss, María Elena Lucas “gives unvarnished testimony to the oppression and abuse women face in the fields and at times in the home and union hall.” María Elena Lucas’s vocation as a labor organizer ended when she and her older son were poisoned by the criminally negligent application of pesticides in a midwestern field. Having left the Midwest, she currently resides in Brownsville, Texas, where she continues to fight for the rights of impoverished migrant workers, especially women. She continues to write poems, plays, and essays and composes corridos on a variety of social justice issues. See also United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: Lucas, María Elena. 1993. Forged under the Sun/Forjada bajo el sol: The Life of María Elena Lucas. Ed. Fran Leeper Buss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Virginia Martínez
M q MACHUCA, ESTER (1895–1980) Born in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico, on October 10, 1895, Ester Nieto Machuca was a pioneering Latina feminist who pushed open the doors for women in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Her parents were Juan and Carolina (Rodríguez) Nieto. She had an upper-middle-class upbringing in Mexico because her father was a lawyer and civil engineer. She married Juan C. Machuca, and they had one son, Louis. It is not known when they immigrated to the United States or if they became citizens. Machuca founded Ladies LULAC Chapter No. 9 in El Paso, Texas, in 1934 and served as its treasurer. Two years later, as a form of protest, this Ladies Council quit LULAC because national officials, all men, decided to ignore women’s correspondence. A year later she helped reorganize the chapter and began to spread the idea of women’s councils outside of western Texas. Appointed Ladies Organizer General, she established chapters in Laredo, Dallas, and beyond Texas in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. Her friend and feminist ally Alice Dickerson Montemayor remarked, “She has proven that the office of Ladies Organizer General is not an honor to be used for ostentation, but by untiring efforts and constructive planning as she has done. This office is one of the most important posts in the organization.” Machuca organized these chapters at her own expense because LULAC, as an all-volunteer organization at the time, did not reimburse her for her many travels. As a married woman with a family, she traveled on her own, experiencing a degree of autonomy and mobility not typical for Latinas during the 1930s. In 1939 Machuca conceived the idea of a special issue of LULAC News edited and written by women. To this day it is the only issue produced entirely by women and one of only two issues dedicated to the theme of women. This special issue, a hefty sixty-eight pages, was edited and produced by Machuca; members of the LULAC Ladies Council in Las Vegas, New Mexico, wrote most of the articles. During a time when women were scorned for joining LULAC and received little sup-
port from male members, Machuca believed that women could be a major power base within the organization. A vocal feminist, she worked tirelessly for women’s recognition and leadership within LULAC at the local, regional, and national levels. During the 1980s Ladies LULAC Council No. 9 was the only women’s council that remained because most women members preferred integrated LULAC councils. In addition to serving as president of the local Ladies LULAC Council in 1968, Machuca was actively involved in the Catholic Daughters of America, the American Legion Ladies Auxiliary, St. Anthony’s Altar Society, and St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Ester Machuca died on January 26, 1980, at the age of eighty-four. See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCES: LULAC News. 1979. “First Ladies’ Organizer General.” March. Nettie Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin; Orozco, Cynthia E. “Ester Nieto Machuca.” In New Handbook of Texas, 4:410. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
MADRID, PATRICIA A. (1946–
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Patricia Madrid, New Mexico’s first woman attorney general and the nation’s first Hispanic woman attorney general (1998 and reelected in 2002) is a native New Mexican whose roots extend deep into the southern part of the state. The Madrid family still owns a small farm in the Mesilla Valley on land that has been in the family for generations. A graduate of the University of New Mexico, Madrid received a bachelor of arts degree in English and philosophy. She received her juris doctor from the University of New Mexico Law School in 1973, where she served as an editor of the New Mexico Law Review. Madrid became a partner in the Albuquerque law firm of Messina, Madrid and Smith. Her practice focused on commercial trial litigation. In 1978 Madrid was the first woman to be elected a district court judge
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Madrigal v. Quilligan in New Mexico. Fellow judges elected her chief presiding judge of the Second Judicial District, the state’s largest judicial district. During her six years on the district court bench, she presided over a court of general jurisdiction hearing felony criminal cases and business, tort, malpractice, workers’ compensation, probate, and domestic relations cases. Madrid received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women in 1993. During that same year she was honored by the New Mexico Hispanic Bar Association for her dedication to the preservation of civil rights. In addition, Madrid received the New Mexico Hispanic Quincentennial Award for Political Achievement. In 1994 she was recognized for her outstanding service to the Hispanic community by the national organization of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Madrid was awarded the Latina Lawyer of the Year Award in 2001 by the Hispanic National Bar Association. She received the First Annual Elected Official Award for Work on Behalf of Crime Victims from Mothers against Drunk Driving and was honored by the New Mexico Commission on the Status of Women with the 1999 Trailblazer Award. In 2002 she was selected to serve on the Latino Public Broadcasting Board. Madrid has served as the honorary chairman of the Law Enforcement Torch Run to benefit the Special Olympics and as cochair of the Emmy Award–winning television special “Mothers against Drunk Driving, State of the State Town Hall on Underage Drinking.” In addition, Madrid served as cochair of the Fifteenth Annual Imagen Awards ceremony, which recognizes individuals who strive to portray the Latino community in arts and entertainment in an accurate and positive light. During the last ten years Madrid has served New Mexico in a number of ways. She sat on the Governor’s Crossroad Commission that studied and recommended funding and legislation for the New Mexico Correctional and Penitentiary System. In addition, she was program leader of the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce Leadership Development Program. Madrid has served on a number of boards, including the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Advisory Board, the Association of Commerce and Industry, the Women’s Bar Association, the Fechin Art Institute, the American Automobile Association of New Mexico, the New Mexico Judicial Council, and the New Mexico Hispanic Women’s Council. Additionally, she was selected to serve on the National MALDEF Board. Madrid has received numerous honors for her contributions. She has been included in Who’s Who in American Law since 1984 and was a member of the International Women’s Forum for nine years. She has ap-
peared in the Directory of Significant Minority Women in America since 1981. Madrid was named Business and Professional Woman of the Year by the Albuquerque Downtown Business and Professional Women. The mayor of Albuquerque, the chief of police, and the Optimist Club presented Madrid the Respect for Law Commendation in 1979. During the same year she was given the Honorary Civilian Commander Award by the U.S. Air Force. In 2004 she received The Woman of the Year in Government Award from the Capital Business and Professional Women of Santa Fe. SOURCE: Madrid, Patricia. 2002. Biographical profile. August 15. New Mexico Attorney General Patricia A. Madrid. www.ago.state.nm.us/index.htm. New Mexico Attorney General, 2004. Sam Thompson
MADRIGAL v. QUILLIGAN In 1975 ten Chicanas brought a class-action suit against the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center (County Hospital) for unauthorized or coerced sterilization surgery. The case revealed a new trend in involuntary sterilization practices: consent was obtained through deception and coercion while the patient suffered from the duress of labor, lay sedated, and was confined to the delivery room. A brief look at each woman’s experience illustrates that they did not enter the facility with the intent of becoming sterilized. Rather, it was the wish of the doctors and nurses that they become sterilized that led to the irreversible surgery. Dolores Madrigal refused several offers by the doctor to receive sterilization surgery. While she was in labor, she was presented with consent forms and ultimately consented on the misinformation that the operation could be easily reversed. María Hurtado was under such heavy sedation that she did not remember signing consent forms for sterilization surgery. At her postpartum checkup the doctor informed her that the procedure had been done. Jovita Rivera was intimidated into signing consent for sterilization by a doctor who believed that her children were a burden to the taxpayers. María Figueroa refused the operation several times until the doctor wore her down. She gave a verbal agreement to sterilization only if she delivered a boy, because she already had a daughter. She delivered a girl but was nevertheless sterilized. Helena Orozco attempted to avoid consenting for sterilization by asking for birth-control pills as her method of choice. The pressure of the medical staff and a misunderstanding of “tying” the tubes led her to ultimately consent to the procedure. After the traumatic delivery of a stillborn child, the doctor, angry with Guadalupe Acosta’s comportment
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Madrigal v. Quilligan during the ordeal—she hit him in distress—unilaterally decided to sterilize her. When she returned to the County Hospital to request birth control pills, she was informed of the sterilization surgery. Georgina Hernández also found out about her sterilization surgery weeks after the delivery of her child. She refused sterilization despite the doctor’s claim that as a poor, Mexican woman, she could not properly care for and educate any additional children. Worry about her own physical well-being led Consuelo Hermosillo to consent to sterilization surgery. The doctor misinformed her that delivering her third child by cesarean section would make a fourth delivery life threatening. Estela Benavides also feared that a subsequent delivery would place her life in jeopardy and consented to sterilization. Rebecca Figueroa intended to deliver at Santa Marta Hospital until she began to bleed profusely. Her emergency delivery required a better-equipped facility. At the County Hospital the staff informed her that sterilization surgery was needed, and only after a confusing telephone call to her husband where the nurse intervened did she consent to the surgery. Two women named in the suit escaped the procedure by a twist of fate. Laura Domínguez consented to the surgery after the nurses accused her of burdening the taxpayers with her children. A uterine infection spared her from sterilization surgery, and she went on to have more children. Blanca Durán was lucky enough to encounter a doctor at the hospital who respected a patient’s right. She gave verbal consent to surgery on the condition that she delivered a boy. When she delivered a girl, the doctor did not sterilize her. Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, a young resident physician at the County General Hospital, is credited for “blowing the whistle” on doctors who performed tubal ligation surgery on low-income minority women. Rosenfeld acknowledged outrage at the disregard for patients’ wishes and their lack of knowledge about sterilizations performed on them during the delivery of their babies. He contacted several legal aid offices and activist organizations, including Model Cities Center for Law and Justice, a Los Angeles–based legal aid center, in order to bring a halt to this kind of abuse and win compensation for the plaintiffs. Antonia Hernández, a recent graduate from UCLA Law School, worked at the center and immediately saw the importance of the case—as a civil rights attorney, as a woman, and as a Chicana. Two other lawyers, Georgina Risk and Richard Navarette, also participated in the litigation of the case. The lawsuit started with a list of names of women who had been sterilized at the County Hospital. It was Hernández’s job to find the women. “Sometimes we had addresses and sometimes we didn’t. I spent
months going up and down East Los Angeles, knocking on doors, trying to find these women.” Some of the women did not know that they had been sterilized until Hernández arrived at their door. She became the messenger of terrible news who also had the task of convincing them to come out in public with this very personal abuse. Not all the women approached were willing to come forward for fear of how their husbands would react to their sterility. In other cases the statute of limitations had expired, preventing their case from being heard in court. Some of the women with the most recent dates of involuntary sterilization were redirected to attorney and activist Richard Cruz for Andrade v. Los Angeles County, a civil suit for private cause of action. The circumstances of their case offered the possibility that they might receive greater compensation for their injuries. The lawyers at the Center for Law and Justice were more concerned with a class action. They wanted tougher federal guidelines on sterilization to ensure the protection of Latinas and built-in safeguards that would mandate Spanish consent forms understandable at any level. Madrigal v. Quilligan represented only a handful of the Latinas forcibly sterilized at the County Hospital during the 1970s. In formulating the class-action suit, the Center for Law and Justice determined that it needed a class plaintiff other than the plaintiffs—a larger group of women who used the hospital for their medical care. The feminist organization Comisión Femenil Mexicana came to mind as a group of women who could represent a class of Latinas. While the Comisión had chapters in San Jose and other cities, the majority of its membership resided in Los Angeles. The lawyers held a meeting at the Center for Law and Justice and presented the leadership of the Comisión with the facts of the case. Until this point the Comisión had not known that these violations were taking place. Comisión President Gloria Molina recalled that the group felt appalled that this kind of abuse was occurring at its community hospital. After the issue was brought to the larger organization, Comisión members agreed that “those were the kinds of things that we wanted to challenge about the system.” As president of the Comisión, Gloria Molina worked closely with Hernández, familiarizing herself with the literature on involuntary sterilization and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare guidelines. She also participated in gathering the plaintiffs’ affidavits, but there was not much she could do on the legal end but prepare herself for possible testimony. Instead, she used her knowledge of the case to educate other organizations and government agencies about this abuse. Community education about involuntary sterilization would be one of the major victories of this case. Sterilization abuse at the County Hospital during the
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Madrigal v. Quilligan 1970s coincided with the rise to power of the Chicano generation in California. Politicization about race discrimination and possession of a university education allowed activists like Gloria Molina and Antonia Hernández to challenge injustice in their communities within arenas other than street protest. Hernández believes that there might not have been litigation had not she and Georgina Torres Risk—two educated, Chicana feminists—worked for the Center for Law and Justice. They spent the day working on other cases and then the evening searching for the women. Gloria Molina led the publicity campaign, and Chicano anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibañez was brought into the case to serve as a “consulting cultural anthropologist.” His task was to assess the effects of involuntary sterilization for any “possible cultural and social ramifications.” Professor Vélez-Ibañez undertook an anthropological field study of the women and the circumstances of their sterilization. The study included participant observation, oral interviews, and a questionnaire. Through his research he found that the women’s social environment and gender identity were built around childbearing. Coming from small, rural towns, the women adopted beliefs different from those of urban, career-oriented Mexicans and Chicanas. Their life cycle centered on the rites of passage related to the Catholic family: marriage, childbearing, baptism, communion, and confirmation. This continued with the marriage of their children. Through these rites of passage a host of compadrazgo (co-parenting) relationships were built. Professor Vélez found that becoming sterile physically also left the women sterile culturally. They no longer felt like una mujer, a woman. One of the plaintiffs lamented that she could “no longer be a companion for my husband.” The research findings proved a revelation for the anthropologist and the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Coming from urban settings and participating in the emergence of a Chicano movement and Chicana feminism, they did not fully grasp for themselves why the women were so pained by the sterilization. They displayed classic symptoms of severe clinical depression: sadness, crying, low energy, insomnia, low self-esteem, and little hope for the future. Hernández remembered feeling that despite the surgery, “they were still women; they were still wonderful human beings.” The women themselves felt differently; they now felt “como una mula,” useless, like a mule. Professor Vélez developed his testimony around these cultural differences in order to illustrate the severity of the women’s suffering from the abuse. The case was filed in June 1975, but did not reach the courtroom until May 1978. The attorneys spent four years preparing their case for what became a two-and-one-half-week trial. The litigation was based
on the testimony of the women, which the lawyers believed stood for itself. In support of this testimony they offered the eyewitness account of Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld. As an insider, he saw “various forms of actual physical abuses used to force women in labor to consent to sterilization. A syringe of pain reliever would be shown to a woman in labor and she would be told, ‘we will give you this and stop the pain if you will sign.’ ” As expert witnesses the attorneys solicited the testimony of Dr. Don Sloan, an internationally known gynecologist and obstetrician, Dr. Terry Kuper, the plaintiffs’ psychiatrist, Professor Vélez, and a handwriting expert. Dr. Sloan addressed the issue of “informed consent,” arguing that given the circumstances surrounding the procedures, the women could not have understood fully the consequences of the procedure. He believed that while the doctors may have had consent forms in hand, having signed them while in the throes of labor invalidated the contract. Dr. Kuper provided testimony about the psychological damage of the plaintiffs—he diagnosed each one as clinically depressed—and the long periods of psychotherapy that would be needed to help them heal. The handwriting expert examined the plaintiffs’ signatures on the consent form and offered testimony about their state of mind at the time of signing the forms. He argued that each signature revealed that the women suffered “great distress and stress” at the time they signed. Before the testimony of Professor Vélez the judge, clearly illustrating his bias, made disparaging remarks from the bench, stating that he did not see what an “anthropologist was going to say that would have any bearing on damages. We all know that Mexicans love their families.” Nevertheless, he gave Professor Vélez the opportunity to present the findings of his field study. Outlining the cultural background of the women, Professor Vélez demonstrated the high value that the women and their community placed on the woman’s ability to reproduce. He showed that the severity of their pain and suffering was directly related to the meanings that they attached to childbearing. Whether or not the women wanted to have more children was not at issue; it was the fact that they no longer felt like women, una mujer, after sterilization. To everyone’s shock and surprise the judge ruled in favor of the County Hospital and its doctors, based in part on the evidence that Professor Vélez provided to illustrate damages done to the “social and cultural systems” of the women. In his deciding remarks Judge Jesse W. Curtis concluded that “the cultural background of these particular women has contributed to the problem in a subtle but significant way. It is not surprising, therefore that the staff of a busy metropolitan
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Maldonado, Amelia Margarita hospital which has neither the time or the staff to make such esoteric studies [as the one Professor Vélez conducted] would be unaware of these atypical cultural traits.” Blaming the cultural background of the women and their high value of fertility for their own pain and suffering disregarded the defendants’ legal and moral responsibility as certified medical practitioners. Judge Curtis disregarded the testimony of the women’s experiences in favor of the testimony of the doctors who claimed that it was not their “custom and practice” to suggest a sterilization unless a patient asked for it. Once she did, they would ensure that she understood its irreversible result. Citing their language difference, Judge Curtis stated in his ruling that miscommunication between the doctors and the women, rather than malice, resulted in the sterilizations. In the words of his final comment, the judge stated, “One can sympathize with them for their inability to communicate clearly, but one can hardly blame the doctors for relying on these indicia of consent which appeared to be unequivocal on their face and which are in constant use in the medical center.” Model Cities Center for Law and Justice lost the case, but as Antonia Hernández eloquently stated, “I lost the case in court, but I won the case of public opinion.” She and the Chicana activists from Comisión Femenil held the position that in addition to monetary compensation for the unauthorized sterilizations, “for Chicanas, the critical issue is the assurance that their right to procreate is respected and safeguarded.” Because of the Los Angeles episode the California Department of Health reevaluated its sterilization guidelines to ensure the right of informed consent and issued an informational booklet in both English and Spanish that discussed sterilization and its consequences. The booklet warned the reader of possible misunderstandings in terminology, asserting that “some people call sterilization tying the tubes. But don’t think the tubes can be untied! They can’t.” It reminded the reader that “only YOU can make up your mind to be sterilized” and alerted readers not to “let anyone push you into it.” SOURCES: Espino, Virginia. 2000. “Woman Sterilized As Gives Birth: Forced Sterilization and Chicana Resistance in the 1970s.” In Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications; Hernández, Antonia. 1976. “Chicanas and the Issue of Involuntary Sterilization: Reforms Needed to Protect Informed Consent.” Chicano Law Review, 3–37, no. 3: Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G. 1980. “The Nonconsenting Sterilization of Mexican Women in Los Angeles. Issues of Psychocultural Rupture and Legal Redress in Paternalistic Behavioral Environments.” In Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women, ed. Margarita Melville. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby Co. Virginia Espino
MALDONADO, AMELIA MARGARITA (1895–1988) Born on July 27, 1895, Amelia Margarita Maldonado became a pioneer in bilingual education, teaching in English and Spanish as early as 1919. A thirdgeneration native of Tucson, Arizona, Amelia was the youngest of three sisters born to Francisco and Josefa Maldonado. The Maldonados considered education a “sacred honor” and encouraged their daughter to aspire to college. Amelia Maldonado was one of the first Latinas to graduate from the University of Arizona in 1919. She immediately went to teach at Drachman Elementary, a school located in the heart of the barrio. At a time when most Latino children were placed in a “sink-or-swim” (English-only) environment, Maldonado validated the use of Spanish when she worked with her pupils to gain fluency in English. Like many Mexican American women schoolteachers of her generation, she never married. Her students became her life. During the Great Depression she realized that many of her pupils came to school hungry. Arriving several hours before classes commenced, she used the school kitchen to bake corn muffins, boil a pot of beans, and prepare hot chocolate, a simple but hearty breakfast for her charges. Indeed, decades later, former students remembered her not only as a teacher who set high standards, but one who rewarded them at the end of the day with a snack of milk and cookies. Amelia Maldonado taught kindergarten and first grade for more than forty years at Drachman Elementary School. Although she was approached numerous times for administrative positions, she preferred to stay in the classroom. A former student perhaps best encapsulated her legacy. Recounting his first day of school in 1942, he referred to the fears he and his friends felt as they approached Drachman Elementary, but from that first day Amelia Maldonado made all the difference. “She took us by the hand and we crossed that bridge to that other culture, helping us see the best in that world and then at the end of the day, she took our hands again and we crossed that bridge to the culture that we came from.” He remembered her words: “Don’t forgot your culture, your language, your ancestry.” Or, as expressed by a former student, “She knew our problems. She knew our lives.” Indeed, when the school nurse set out to make home visits, she was often in the company of Maldonado. As a groundbreaking educator, Amelia Maldonado did not theorize about bilingual education, but lived it every day for more than forty years. At the age of ninety-two in 1987, she attended the dedication of Amelia Maldonado Elementary School in Tucson, a school where bilingual education remains an integral part of the curriculum for all students, regard-
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Maquiladoras less of nationality. Amelia Maldonado died the next year on November 1, 1988. Her niece and nephew Joan Brady Martínez and Francis Brady have endowed an undergraduate scholarship in her name at the University of Arizona. As stated on the University of Arizona School of Education website “This scholarship provides funds for elementary education students of Mexican descent who are U.S. citizens and graduates of Arizona high schools.” See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: “Amelia Maldonado Elementary School Dedication” (1987). videocassette (courtesy of Francis Brady), November 18; Francis Brady. 2004. Conversation with Ruiz, Vicki L., August 18; 2001. The Link 18 (Summer), University of Arizona School of Education alumni newsletter. Vicki L. Ruiz
MAQUILADORAS When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, the Mexican government embarked on the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) to create an alternative source of employment. One of the chief aspects of the BIP was the maquiladoras, mostly foreign-owned assembly plants. Originally the Mexican government restricted foreign ownership of maquiladoras by limiting the amount of the stock ownership and requiring foreign investors to rent the necessary land from Mexico. In 1971, however, the Mexican government lifted those restrictions to encourage foreign investment. Foreign owners gained increased control over the maquiladoras, and American corporations were openly courted by the Mexican government. The maquiladoras offered investors incentives such as lower wages, a longer workday, more relaxed environmental regulations, and little or no unionization. In the United States there was a backlash against the program because many believed that maquiladoras took jobs away from Americans, and the media tended to focus on the impact it would have on the U.S. economy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the effects the industrialization program has had on the people of Mexico. The Mexican government hoped to create jobs on the border and strengthen the national economy, but the types of jobs that moved to Mexico targeted mostly women. The work was gendered, and it was argued that women were more suitable for maquiladora labor because they had smaller hands that allowed more precise assembly work. They were better at repetitive tasks, more docile, and less likely to unionize. While no scientific proof exists for these arguments, the myths about female labor led to mass female employment. Patricia Fernández-Kelly estimates that in the
early maquiladora years approximately 85 percent of the jobs went to female laborers. The industry’s current gender distribution has become more balanced, but women remain relegated to entry-level positions. In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened the door to further industrialization on the border. Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and other border cities grew substantially. Juárez experienced major industrial growth from a handful of maquiladoras in the early 1970s to more than 300 in 2001. Located across the border from El Paso, Texas, the city provides the industry easy access to U.S. markets. Despite fewer factories, Juárez employs the most maquiladora labor of any Mexican border city. In 2001 Tijuana had 800 maquiladoras and employed 177,000 workers, while Juárez’s 300 maquiladoras employed more than 250,000 laborers. Mass migration of workers to the border for job opportunities is one of the effects of NAFTA and the BIP. The population of Juárez swelled from 400,000 to 1.3 million over three decades and grows at a rate of 40,000 to 50,000 per year. Rapid migration has resulted in a surplus of labor that has made maquiladora workers easily replaceable and allowed the industry more control in dictating working conditions and wages. Women are particularly exploited and positioned precariously in the maquiladora setting. Factories pay female laborers meager wages because women’s earnings are viewed as supplementary income. Often hired on the basis of appearance and youth, many women, away from caring family and community, are easily exploited. Classified as unskilled labor in mostly entry-level positions, women are forced to work in poor conditions where sexual harassment at the hands of their male supervisors is a common experience. Among the most disastrous consequences of rapid growth and industrialization in Juárez has been the impact on the rights and lives of women. Since 1993, 269 Juárez women have been murdered, 93 of which are classified as serial murders. In all, more than 400 women are missing. The numbers are often disputed, but according to Julia Monárrez Fragoso, 22 percent of the victims of the serial murders were maquiladora employees. While many of the other murdered women were not directly associated with the maquiladoras themselves, industrialization is blamed for creating a dangerous situation for women and a climate of slackened and slow justice. The government acknowledges the problem but has been quick to blame the victims, claiming that they were killed because they frequented bars, hung out with bad men, were out late at night, or wore inappropriate clothing. Since 1994 police have arrested several suspects, but the crimes continue. Several women’s groups have organized to mobilize government and the local and international com-
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Mariachi munities. Organizations like Casa Amiga, la Red Ciudadana contra la Violencia, and Voces sin Eco advocate for women’s rights and the victims of violence. They work to ensure that the murders are acknowledged and publicized, and that the victims are not forgotten. Local organizations have formed transnational coalitions with other groups interested in eradicating violence against women in Juárez, such as the Coalition on Violence against Women and Families on the Border. In the United States several conferences organized by Chicana and Latina activists and academics, in conjunction with Mexican counterparts, have addressed the violence in Ciudad Juárez and the exploitation of maquiladora women. The maquiladora industry and the Border Industrialization Program have not only changed the economic structure of Mexico, but as the largest employer on the border has also drastically altered social and cultural structures. See also Domestic Violence; Environment and the Border SOURCES: Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and June Nash, eds. 1983. Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Albany: State University of New York Press; Iglesias Prieto, Norma. 1997. Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Austin: University of Texas Press; Monárrez Fragoso, Julia. 2002. “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juárez, 1993–2001.” Debate Feminista 12, no. 25: 279–305; Peña, Devon. 1997. The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas at Austin; Tiano, Susan. 1994. Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender, and Ideology in the Mexican Maquila Industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Irene Mata
MARIACHI The mariachi is an instrumental ensemble (it also sings) that originated in the western region of Mexico. The ensemble can consist of four to twelve musicians. The most common types of instruments used are vihuela, guitar, guitarrón, violin, trumpet, and, on occasion, harp. The mariachi ensemble gained acceptance in Mexico City during the 1930s due to a combination of factors, including live play on radio stations and the evolution of the recording industry and the film industry in Mexico and the United States. The success of canción ranchera pioneer Lucha Reyes, who was among the first of Mexico’s superstars to perform and record with mariachis, also encouraged the proliferation of singers accompanied by mariachis. Even though Reyes herself was never a mariachi, in Mexico she is affectionately known as la Reina de los Mariachis. Due to a lack of documentation, it is difficult to de-
termine with absolute certainty which group was the first all-female mariachi ensemble since many groups in Mexico claim that title. However, the earliest known documented all-female mariachi, las Coronelas, directed by Carlota Noriega, formed in Mexico during the 1940s. During the 1950s two other all-female mariachis started performing in Mexico City: Mariachi las Adelitas, directed by Adela Chávez, and Mariachi Michoacano. In the early 1960s Lupita Morales formed Mariachi Estrellas de México. Female mariachis found initial success in Mexico City but, like other ensembles, were unable to secure enough work solely by playing music. A combination of factors, including marriage, childbearing, lack of familial support, and the economic instability of Mexico, led to the demise of all three groups. Unlike their male counterparts who adopted the equestrian or charro outfit favored by wealthy southern Mexican landowners of the nineteenth century, female mariachis alternated their stage attire between the traditional folkloric dresses that were a variation of the china poblana style and the full-length charro skirt ensemble. The china poblana consisted of a rebozo or shawl/wrap, a white blouse (not always), with short sleeves, decorated with vivid colors (usually the colors of the Mexican flag), and petticoats with black designs made from sequins. The female charro ensemble included the equestrian jacket, white shirt, bow tie, and full-length skirt. During the late 1950s, however, the full-length charro skirt ensemble fell out of favor for female performers. During the 1970s the rise of the second wave of feminism and the burgeoning civil rights movements in Mexico and the United States led to the creation of music programs that sought to reclaim Mexican and Latino/Chicano heritage. The proliferation of mariachi classes and Chicano/Latino studies classes enabled many students to learn about the mariachi heritage. The formation of mariachis at public schools K–12, colleges, and universities, as well as community groups and churches, also encouraged the participation of women and non-Latinos in the mariachi tradition. By 1976 Maria Elena Muñoz formed las Generalas in Los Angeles, California, the first known all-female mariachi in the United States. The members of las Generalas were also the mothers and wives of mariachi musicians. In 1977 Teresa Cuevas and Consuelo Alcalá formed the second known all-female ensemble, Mariachi Estrella in Topeka, Kansas. This ensemble stayed together from 1977 to 1981. Unfortunately, the group suffered devastating losses when four of the six members were killed during a performance when the internal walkways inside a multistory building collapsed in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to las Generalas and Mariachi Estrella,
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Mariachi Estrella de Topeka two other musicians deserve recognition for their contributions to the evolution of women in mariachis, Rebecca González and Laura Sobrino. These two women were the first females to join the most successful mariachis and previously all-male ensembles. Rebecca Gonzáles joined Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano in 1975 and Mariachi Cobre in 1984–1985. Laura Sobrino joined Mariachi los Galleros de Pedro Rey in 1979 and in 1986 became head violinist for the Mariachi Sol de México de José Hernández. Currently the two most prominent all-female mariachi ensembles in the United States are Mariachi Mujer 2000 and Mariachi Reyna. Laura Sobrino is Mariachi Mujer 2000’s musical director and was the original musical director for Mariachi Reyna. A partial listing of female mariachis that exist or have existed in the United States includes the following: Mariachi las Tejanitas (The Little Texans), Austin, Texas Mariachi Paloma (Dove), from Del Valle (El Paso, Texas) High School Mariachi Femenil Sol Azteca (Female Mariachi Aztec Sun), Phoenix, Arizona Mariachi Femenil Erendira Xochitlan (Erendira is a proper name; Xochitlan is the name of a city), San Antonio, Texas Mariachi Angeles del Cielo (Angels from the Sky/Heavens), San Antonio, Texas Mariachi las Golondrinas Viajeras (The Traveling Swallows), El Paso, Texas Mariachi las Alondras (The Skylarks), El Paso, Texas Mariachi Femenil las Aguilas (Female Mariachi the Eagles), Sacramento, California Mariachi las Altenitas, San Fernando, California Mariachi las Adelitas (Derivative of Adela, a proper name), Los Angeles, California Mariachi Flores Mexicanas (Mexican Flowers), El Paso, Texas Mariachi Rosas del Cielo (Roses from the Sky/Heavens), San Angelo, Texas Mariachi Azahares del Valle (Orange Blossoms from the Valley), Edinburg, Texas Mariachi Divas (Divas), Los Angeles, California SOURCES: Harpole, Patricia, and Mark Fogelquist. 1989. Los Mariachis! Danbury, CT: World Music Press; Hermes, Rafael. 1983. Origen e historia del mariachi. Mexico: Katún; Islas Escarcega, Leovigildo, ed. 1992. Diccionario y refranero charro. Mexico: Edamex; Jáuregui, Jesús. 1990. El mariachi: Simbolo musical de México. Mexico: Banpais; Kevin, Jeff. 2002. Virtuoso Mariachi. Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Sobrino.Net. (national mariachi website). “A History of Women in Mariachi Music,” http://www.sobrino.net/mpc/ womenmariachi/ (accessed July 22, 2005). Antonia García-Orozco
MARIACHI ESTRELLA DE TOPEKA Among the first all-female mariachis in North America, Mariachi Estrella de Topeka is recognized as one of the oldest mariachi groups in the midwestern United States. Mexican Americans Teresa Cuevas and Connie Alcalá (d. 1981) founded the ensemble in 1977 with original members Dolores Carmona, Dolores Galván, Isabelle Gonzáles, Linda Scurlock, and Rachel Galván Sangalang. Originally an outgrowth of their church choir at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Topeka’s Oakland neighborhood, Mariachi Estrella began performing professionally in 1979. It played a repertoire of traditional Mexican ballads and popular American tunes by heart. The rare ensemble rapidly gained regional popularity, performing in Kansas and Missouri and at the grand opening of the Kansas Expocentre in April 1981. The mariachi’s extraordinary survival, however, testifies to the power of dreams and faith. Cuevas began playing the violin at age eight and always imagined becoming a mariachi despite the lack of female role models. On July 17, 1981, her life and dream nearly ended when four of the group’s seven members died in an accident at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri. As six of the seven members crossed the hotel’s second-floor skywalk just before a performance, a fourth-floor walkway collapsed onto them, plunging them several stories into the hotel lobby and killing Alcalá, thirty-two; Carmona, thirty-five; Galván, twentysix; and Scurlock, thirty-six. Sangalang, then twentytwo, survived with a broken ankle and bruises; Cuevas, then sixty-one, also recovered from crushed vertebrae, a concussion, and severe bruising. Gonzáles, the seventh member, had stayed home to care for her two young children. A year later Cuevas reorganized a new ensemble as a tribute to her deceased compañeras, and the mariachi has continued during the last two decades with several generations of young women and men from Topeka, including Cuevas’s teenage granddaughters Teresa “Tess” and María “Ria” Elena, who have played with the group since they were each eleven. In 2001, twenty years after the accident, the Topeka City Council honored Mariachi Estrella by dedicating a ten-foot bronze statue of a female mariachi singer in traditional attire with sombrero in hand outside the Topeka Performing Arts Center. Sculpted by Denver artist Emanuel Martínez, the statue sits atop an eight-foot granite base that also features a second bronze bas-relief of the four fallen members. The accident and memory of the original Mariachi Estrella rallied the Chicano community to commemorate the women. In the 1990s friends and relatives formed the committee that raised $70,000 for the art installation and continues to sponsor a Mariachi Estrella de
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Marianismo and Machismo Topeka Scholarship Fund to assist young Hispanics interested in keeping the art form alive. Bonnie Alcalá, a relative of several original members, described the mariachi as “an extension of the community and a wholesome, beautiful way of saying we are proud of our heritage.” Cuevas always believed in the mariachi as a form of cultural preservation and regularly tells audiences the importance of this artistic expression. “My music tells me who I am and where I come from.” In her eighties, Cuevas still performs with the group on occasion. SOURCES: Blankenship, Bill. 1999. “HOLA! KC: Mariachi Spectacular moves to Kansas City from Topeka to hasten goal of erecting a monument to Mariachi Estrella de Topeka.” Topeka Capital-Journal, October 31; ———. 1998. “Statue will keep memory of mariachi band members alive.” Topeka Capital-Journal, November 30; Sobrino.Net. (national mariachi website). “A History of Women in Mariachi Music.” www.so brino.net/mpc/womenmariachi (accessed July 22, 2005). Natasha Mercedes Crawford
MARIANISMO AND MACHISMO The term marianismo was coined by political scientist Evelyn P. Stevens in 1973 in her essay “Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America,” which appeared in Ann Pescatello’s edited work Female and Male in Latin America. Marianismo derives from the worship of the Virgin Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. Stevens endows marianismo with a historical pedigree that extends back to prehistory and antiquity by citing several fertility goddesses from the Indus civilization, the Fertile Crescent, Crete, and Jewish and Christian cosmology. While the Judeo-Christian cultures successfully eliminated goddesses in the pursuit of patriarchal monotheism, powerful female figures survived and thrived. Early medieval Christianity endorsed the figure of Mary as the mother of Christ at the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. Her growing popularity throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern history of Europe set the stage for a cult that has been dubbed “mariology” by those who support it and “mariolatry” by those who criticize it. Stevens defined marianismo as a secular construction affecting women’s behavior and made a distinction between the religious cult of Mary and the secular stereotypes that she claimed were common to all Latin American countries. The transition between a religious worship and the adoption of the religious concept to the secular level remained unclear in her essay. In the secular world marianismo means that all women are perceived as possessing qualities of “semidivinity, moral superiority, and spiritual strength.” The blend of these variables endows women with self-abnegation, humility, and the will-
ingness to sacrifice themselves for their children and tolerate the imperfections of their husbands, to whom they remain submissive. Marianismo extends to sexual behavior, and Stevens claimed that it supported the cult of virginity and premarital chastity in women as desirable moral and physical attributes. She echoed popular-culture male attitudes about female behavior during coitus and sexual practices appropriate for each sex that allowed men to have more sexual freedom and boast about their generating abilities. Stevens also endorsed the view that women themselves help to perpetuate these values in their roles as socializers of young boys. While marianismo apparently helped create a negative social atmosphere for women, Stevens argued that by adopting and showing these behavioral characteristics, women gained moral authority and respect that permitted them to exercise spiritual leadership at home and in society. Women could choose models of myth, religion, and ethical norms offered by marianismo, surrounded and protected by its cultural “security blanket.” By adopting marianismo in their behavior, women suffered fewer problems of “personal identity” and were able to cope successfully with some social problems. For example, they could handle male infidelity by being wrapped in their “saintliness” or work outside the home as an act of self-sacrifice or as a choice that did not endanger their motherhood duties. The latter was supported by the availability of servants, a result of the economic imbalances of the region. In sum, marianismo was the counterpart of machismo and a “reciprocal arrangement” receiving “considerable impetus from women themselves.” Written in the early 1970s and based on personal information and heavy dependence on Mexican sources, Stevens’s essay looks superficial and outdated for the twenty-first century. Indeed, it did not necessarily reflect values prevalent in Latin America at the time of its publication and was more an interpretation than a verifiable reality, applicable to some but not all sectors of society. Stevens claimed that among Indians who had preserved their cultural “purity” marianismo and machismo were irrelevant. Stevens acknowledged that marianismomachismo constraints could be circumvented by personal choice. The adoption of marianismo by all women was highly questionable. Despite its apparent methodological and interpretive weaknesses, marianismo gained wide popularity and acceptance among academic and popular-culture circles as a theoretical model for understanding the social and personal traits of women and their history in Latin America. Marianismo was somewhat aided by Elsa Chaney’s popularization of the concept of supermadre, the extension of the role of mother to the public arena and especially politics. Women, she argued, use
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Marshall, Guadalupe their role of mothers (with all the spiritual values attached to it by marianismo) to carve for themselves a public persona when activism in politics demands it. Both the marianismo and the supermadre concepts implied the projection of female characteristics into social behavior accepted by tradition and acceptable to both genders. The surge of feminist movements and groups in Latin America since the late 1970s has challenged Stevens’s marianismo concept as sketchy at best, and in need of more solid research. A wealth of more finely tuned historical, anthropological, and sociological studies have explored the structural characteristics of patriarchal ideology throughout centuries and the intersection of class, race, sexual orientation, education, and religion in the definition of gender as a social construct. Using a variety of tools, contemporary analysts suggest that the stereotyping of male and female roles in society is a process that responds to a variety of circumstances and, therefore, is historically sensitive. Legislation, education, and economic development affect the roles of women and men in society. Icons of femininity and masculinity are not homogeneous or perpetually hegemonic. Women may achieve authority and power within male-oriented societies and resist patriarchal modes of domination. Equally, not all men wish submission in women. Nonetheless, maternal roles encouraged in women by church and state have been, and remain, relevant in the discussion of socioeconomic and political issues, in the shaping of state policies, and in the mobilization of women themselves. “Maternalismo” is preferred to “marianismo” in defining the ideologies that still sublimate the role of women as mothers and paragons of distinctive female values. While maternalism may not be the ultimate nomenclature for these phenomena, it avoids the pitfalls in the original definition of marianismo by avoiding its religious connotation. The original definition of marianismo necessitated a counterpart in terms of male behavior, and by the 1970s machismo had begun to receive continental attention as a Latin American cultural trait. According to Stevens, machismo was a set of values and behavior that existed prior to marianismo but in essential symbiosis with it. She succinctly defined machismo as “the cult of virility.” Following sociologist Samuel Ramos’s interpretation of Mexican culture, Stevens argued that machismo was a degeneration of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century upper-class attitudes brought to the New World by the conquistadores and gaining in strength and validity throughout time. Mid-twentiethcentury sociological and psychological studies defined it largely as a behavioral expression of values held by lower-class men. More recent analyses defined machismo as a universal expression of male authority
and domination applicable to all men who show similar behavior. Among machismo’s assumed variety of behavioral signifiers are the desire to prove sexual potency and male strength through boastful enforcement of power, aggressiveness toward other men and women, expectation of female submissiveness, and the belief in the superiority of men over women. A strong critic of such generalizations, Puerto Rican sociologist Rafael Ramírez has suggested that such traits are “acts of behavior that manifest class positions and are survival mechanisms used by the least powerful men in class societies” and ignore the special social and historic context in which they are expressed. The study of machismo should be replaced by the study of masculinity as a complex set of values inculcated since childhood, culturally and class specific, and not always or exclusively oriented toward women. Latin American ideals of masculinity should not be stereotyped as simply machista, because they include positive values of responsibility. National, regional, and even racial or ethnic variations of masculinity can be expected, as well as changes in its definition throughout history. In his study of contemporary gender culture in a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, Matthew C. Gutmann explored male and female self-perceptions of masculinity and femininity, fathering, mothering, and sex and raised doubts about stereotypes long held as truisms by uncritical writers. He argued that machismo is a recent cultural construct, partly of foreign origin and undermined by constant challenges from within. Despite these criticisms, machismo in its variety of definitions continues to be used as an analytical tool implying negative values and behavior in men. Pathological machismo may be under indictment, but patriarchal values still shape Latin American societies. As a key to understanding cultural gender traits, marianismo and machismo, despite their questionable value, continue to be used and abused as analytical tools. SOURCES: Chaney, Elsa. 1979. Supermadre: Women in Politics in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press; Gutmann, Matthew C. 1996. The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of California Press; Ramírez, Rafael L. 1999. What It Means to Be a Man: Reflections of Puerto Rican Masculinity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Stevens, Evelyn P. 1973. “Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America.” In Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello, 89–102. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press. Asunción Lavrin
MARSHALL, GUADALUPE (1906–
)
In May 1937 Guadalupe (Lupe) Marshall, a Mexican labor activist in Chicago, wandered dazed through a crowd of steelworkers on strike, strike supporters, po-
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Martí de Cid, Dolores lice, and the media. She was bleeding from her head after being clubbed by a policeman sent to break up the strike in South Chicago. What began as the “Little Steel” strike had devolved into the Memorial Day massacre. After some three years of organizing steelworkers around the country, union leaders finally got U.S. Steel (known colloquially as “Big Steel”) to sign a contract with them. Republic Steel in South Chicago, however, like other smaller steel companies (known colloquially as “Little Steel”), refused to do so. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), many of whose members Lupe Marshall knew, was also affiliated with the CIO. In early May 1937 it called a strike against Little Steel. On Memorial Day supporters and sympathizers from all over Chicago assembled at Sam’s Place, a local restaurant and SWOC’s headquarters during the strike, to hear speeches and rally to the cause. The group, then several hundred strong, included Lupe Marshall and decided to parade to Republic Steel in a public show of support for the strikers. Just shy of the gates marchers and strikers clashed with police. Many were injured, clubbed by police, and ten were killed by police bullets. Among the injured was Guadalupe Marshall. She was carted off to jail in a paddy wagon. The extreme police brutality was captured on film by news media representatives from Paramount Studios. After news of the episode and the evidence revealed on the newsreels hit Washington, D.C., the U.S. Senate convened a subcommittee to look into the incident. Headed by prominent Senator Robert La Follette, the subcommittee was entrusted with investigating the incident, along with the obvious violations of free speech and the rights of labor. Lupe Marshall and several other witnesses testified before the subcommittee and described the day’s events. Marshall explained that while she stood dazed and bleeding, she watched as another policeman clubbed a man who kept trying to get up. “When the man finally fell so he could not move, the policeman took him by the foot and . . . started dragging him. . . . the man’s shirt was all blood stained. . . . so I screamed at the policeman . . . ‘Can’t you see he is terribly injured?’ And at that moment . . . somebody struck me from the back again and knocked me down. As I went down . . . a policeman kicked me on the side here.” She described bodies being thrown on top of other bodies next to her after she had been thrown into the paddy wagon. All were injured, a few gravely. She tried to help them as best she could and even held one man’s head as he died in her lap. Such experiences only fueled her commitment to support the rights of workers. During the 1930s Lupe Marshall supported several strikes and worked closely with the Popular Front. In 1936 she even headed a branch of the Frente Popular (“el Frente”)/Popular Front that met at Hull-House in
Chicago. At some point during her activism of the 1920s and 1930s she apparently became involved with the Communist Party (the CPUSA), for she, along with many others who supported pro-labor and progressive causes, faced deportation in the postwar years. Reportedly with the help of friends, she ultimately fled to Jamaica. SOURCE: Vargas, Zaragosa. 2004. Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth Century America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Gabriela F. Arredondo
MARTÍ DE CID, DOLORES (1916–1993) Dolores Martí de Cid was a specialist on Latin American theater and literature and an academic. She was born in Spain on September 6, 1916. As the daughter of a Cuban diplomat, she was raised and educated in several countries, including Spain, Portugal, and Hong Kong. She earned her doctorate in philosophy and letters in 1943 from the University of Havana and pursued postdoctoral work at universities in Rome and Buenos Aires. In 1939 she married Cuban playwright José Cid Pérez. She taught at the University of Havana. Together with her husband she documented Latin American theater and amassed a personal library that was considered to be one of the largest collections of books, pamphlets, and other materials on the subject— some 25,000 volumes. When she and her husband decided to leave revolutionary Cuba in 1960, most of this personal library was burned by fanatic supporters of the regime. In the United States Dolores Martí de Cid taught at the University of Kansas and Purdue University, where she continued lecturing and publishing on Latin American theater in several languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, and French. She was also versed in Portuguese, Latin, Greek, Nahuatl, and Quechua. Among her books are Tres mujeres de América, Teatro cubano contemporaneo, Teatro indio precolombino, and Teatro indoamericano colonial. She was one of the first scholars to write about pre-Columbian performance art. Dolores Martí de Cid became the first woman to achieve the rank of full professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at Purdue University. She is listed in the British anthology Two Thousand Women of Achievement. She died in New York City in May 1993. SOURCES: Cid Pérez, José, and Dolores Martí de Cid. 1973. Teatro indoamericano colonial. Madrid: Aguilar Editores; “Dolores Martí de Cid.” Vertical Files, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
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María Cristina García
Martínez, Agueda Salazar 102 in Medenales, New Mexico. Her descendants include 10 children, 77 grandchildren, 149 greatgrandchildren, and 59 great-great-grandchildren.
MARTÍNEZ, AGUEDA SALAZAR (1898–2000) Born in Chamita, New Mexico, “Doña Agueda,” as she later became known, began weaving mostly rag rugs when she was twelve years old. Six years later, at the age of eighteen, she learned how to weave Chimayóstyle blankets and rugs from Lorenzo Trujillo, a Chimayó weaver and merchant. During the depression Martínez sold her works for fifty to seventy-five cents to individuals, as well as to shops and other outlets. The 1930s and 1940s marked an important artistic period in New Mexico’s history because of the major focus on reviving rapidly vanishing art forms, especially the “traditional” Hispanic arts. Martínez often wore her favorite baseball cap when weaving on a typical treadle or “Spanish” loom. Her weavings embody traditional designs that combine Native American, Mexican, and Spanish elements, all components of her own mixed Navajo and Spanish ancestry. She prided herself on never having used the exact same rug design twice. This prolific artist was often quoted as saying that weaving kept her focused and her mind strong. Not only did Doña Agueda weave masterpieces that allowed her to have a small income, but also, after separating from her husband, whom she had married when she was eighteen, she raised and supported her ten children by growing vegetables, wheat, alfalfa, and flowers. Parts of her crops became sources for the natural yarn dyes that she applied to her hand-carded wool for her weavings. As Martínez became known for her mastery of woven textile arts, her artistic influence and cultural contributions began to expand. One of the most important components of her artistic legacy is her influence on and mentoring of other weavers, including her daughters Eppie Archuleta, a National Heritage Fellow, and Cordelia Coronado, who continues her mother’s teaching legacy. Renowned contemporary weaver Teresa Archuleta-Sagel also studied closely with Martínez. Doña Agueda inspired generations of weavers, many of whom have become award-winning artists in their own right. Accolades and recognition came to Martínez in a variety of forms. In 1975 Martínez received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. In 1977 Agueda Martínez: Our People, Our Country, a short documentary film about her life that was produced by Montezuma Esparza, received an Academy Award nomination. Throughout her long life she received many prize ribbons for her weavings. Her works are in many prominent public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. In June 2000 Doña Agueda passed away at the age of
See also Artists SOURCES: Fisher, Nora, ed. 1994. Rio Grande Textiles: A New Edition of Spanish Textile Tradition of New Mexico and Colorado. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press; Lucero, Helen R., and Suzanne Baizerman. 1999. Chimayó Weaving: The Transformation of a Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Rebolledo, Tey Diana, ed. 1992. Nuestras mujeres: Hispanas of New Mexico, Their Images and Their Lives, 1582–1992. Albuquerque: El Norte Publications. Tey Marianna Nunn
MARTÍNEZ, ANITA N. (1925–
)
Named after her mother, Anita Nañez was born and raised in “Little Mexico,” the original and once the major barrio in Dallas, Texas, in 1925. Her parents, José Franco Nañez and Anita Treviño Mongaras Nañez, raised their children in a conservative Catholic household. Anita was the fifth of six children born to the Nañez family. Her other sisters and brother in the order in which they were born were Ninfa, twins Joe and Olivia, Tommie, and Beatrice. Except for Joe, the Nañez children lived long productive lives. He was killed in World War II. Joe did not have to serve in active duty but decided to do it. His exempt status was supported by the fact that he was the sole male in the Nañez family and the father of two children. Anita recalls that her brother’s early death “aged my mother more than anything.” Anita’s mother was an exceptional person in her own right and was influential in the lives of Anita and her sisters. The elder Anita T. M. Nañez became arguably the first Mexican American woman in Dallas’s Little Mexico to open her own business—a beauty salon—in 1924. She did so against her husband’s wishes. Circumventing tradition, she opened the beauty salon in their home. The Nañez home burned in 1930 or 1931 when Anita was about six years old. Her mother presumably rescued not only her children but some of the equipment needed to practice her trade as a beautician. The family relocated to another address in the barrio. These were early lessons for Anita while she was growing up in her parents’ home. Both parents owned and operated small businesses. Their daughter Anita acquired important leadership skills and a will to match. In addition, she married into a noted Mexican business family in the Dallas area and established her own reputation in the areas of politics, business, and charity fund-raising and general cultural leadership in Dallas’s Mexican American community during the 1960s and 1970s.
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Martínez, Anita N. Anita Nañez married Alfred Martínez, whose family owned the El Fénix restaurants, which are still a thriving business in northern Texas. Her sister Olivia was a great friend of Alfred’s own big sister, Tencha, and it was she who introduced them one day at one of the Martínez’s restaurants. At the time Anita was fifteen years old and Alfred was only seventeen. He trained at Tonkawa, Oklahoma, to become a pilot. Alfred joined the air force and during World War II flew a B-29 bomber. Anita and Alfred waited until World War II ended to marry. Their wedding took place on January 27, 1946. Anita had begun working in a civil service job as an executive secretary for Colonel Crim in the Ordnance Department at the Eighth Service Command in Dallas. Once they were married, however, Alfred insisted that she give up her job. She and Alfred then had four children in four years, Alfred Joseph, René, Steve, and Priscilla. Before the war, as a fourteen-year-old, Anita canvassed the barrio to secure signatures for a petition to be submitted to the city to pave Pearl Street, the street she lived on. During the war Anita served as a Red Cross dietician’s aide at Parkland Hospital. These volunteer experiences led to many more for Anita Martínez in the post–World War II decades. In the 1950s her dedication to working for Mexican American youth in the Dallas barrios grew. For instance, she served as a Red Cross swimming and lifesaving instructor. In the 1950s she also undertook extensive continuous volunteer activity through the YWCA, the Dallas Independent School District, and private and parochial schools. She also volunteered with the Women’s Auxiliary of the Dallas Restaurant Association, as she puts it, “in support of her husband’s profession.” In 1969 Anita Martínez ran as a candidate for an atlarge seat on the Dallas City Council. The city’s white establishment supported her candidacy through its Citizens’ Charter Association. She won her first electoral contest with 52 percent of the vote. This made her the first Mexican American ever to hold an elected position in the city of Dallas. She was also the only woman on the council at the time. She served two terms until 1973. A political moderate, Anita Martínez was sometimes at odds with Mexican American activists. The Chicano movement was in full swing nationwide. Still, she proved to be concerned about issues that were important to the Mexican American community in Dallas and elsewhere, including health care, recreation opportunities for inner-city youths, and libraries. In the wider state and national context Martínez was one of the few elected Mexican American women politicians. Before and after her election Martínez’s civic activities were many. In 1968 she served as president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Dallas Restaurant Associa-
Texas civil rights advocate and elected official Anita N. Martínez. Courtesy of Anita N. Martínez.
tion. She launched and led the first “Taste of Dallas,” which raised funds for several private schools and youth recreation centers in West Dallas, site of a growing Mexican barrio. In 1973 she was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon to a three-year term with the National Voluntary Service Advisory Council. She was also named along with five other persons to conduct an evaluation of the Peace Corps. She traveled abroad extensively. In 1976 she and others delivered to President Gerald Ford a copy of their Peace Corps report. In 1975 the Dallas City Council validated her work on behalf of the city’s youth by approving the building of a recreation center in West Dallas named in her honor. By 1985 the Anita N. Martínez Recreational Center was the most used recreation center in the city. She led an effort to have voters approve a $1.96-million city bond campaign. Eventually these funds were used to renovate and enlarge the West Dallas recreation center. Her other major achievement on behalf of Dallas’s Mexican American youths came in 1975 when she established the first Mexican professional folklórico dance group in Dallas. Named in her honor, the Anita N. Martínez Ballet Folklórico has appeared nationally and internationally and has performed on national television in both the United States and Mexico. This is still a thriving cultural group, and she remains its leading fund-raiser even after fourteen years as its full-time volunteer president and managing director. Since the late 1980s many different local, state, and national entities and organizations have bestowed awards in recognition of Martínez’s longtime service on behalf of youths, the arts, and the greater Dallas area’s Latino community. In 2003 she received Southern Methodist University’s Maura Award “Women Helping Women,”
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Martínez, Demetria the LULAC President’s Circle of Excellence Award for Arts Leadership, an Appreciation Plaque from the newly established Latino Cultural Center (in Dallas), and the Republican Congressional Gold Medal—Salute to America’s Business Leaders. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Martínez, Anita N. Personal archive. Dallas Public Library; ———. Personal file provided by Anita N. Martínez. Roberto R. Calderón
MARTÍNEZ, DEMETRIA (1960– ) Demetria Martínez was born in 1960 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Inspired by her grandmother, a Mexican immigrant who was a born-again Christian, Martínez has drawn on this family legacy of spirituality throughout her writings. Martínez grew up as a shy and somewhat overweight girl, but at the age of fifteen she began to keep a journal of her thoughts. Martínez excelled in high school and left her native New Mexico for an Ivy League education. In 1982 she graduated from Princeton University’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs with a B.A. in public affairs. However, she could not envision herself in either the corporate world or the federal bureaucracy. In her words, “Life is too short to work at a job that requires hose, heels, and forty hours a week. Why settle for a career when one might have a calling.” For six years Martínez was involved with the Sagrada Art School, a community of artists in Albuquerque that nurtured her own creativity. In 1987 she published her first collection of poems, Turning. Little did she realize that the acclaim she would receive as a fresh new voice in Chicano literature would bring unwarranted scrutiny and federal prosecution. Just one year after the publication of Turning Martínez was indicted for allegedly smuggling two Salvadoran immigrants into the United States as part of the Sanctuary Movement, a group dedicated to providing refuge to Salvadorans eager to escape the chaos of civil war that plagues their homeland. The U.S. attorney went so far as to use one of her poems, “Nativity, for Two Salvadorian Women,” as evidence of her guilt. Martínez is one of the few people in the United States to be indicted for a crime based on her fictional writings. Martínez soon felt as though the United States had gone back to the 1950s when McCarthyism and redbaiting had reached their zenith. However, she was acquitted on all charges on First Amendment grounds— that is, her writings were inadmissible as evidence. Yet the stigma of her indictment remains. Although she is
Author and columnist Demetria Martínez. Photo by Douglas Kent Hall. Courtesy of Demetria Martínez.
a major Latina writer, she has remained relatively unknown until the last few years. Demetria Martínez continues to fight for social justice as a journalist, creative writer, and citizen. She has worked as a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, a progressive newsletter. Attending a Chicano poetry festival in Chicago, Martínez was inspired by a reading given by Sandra Cisneros to write her first novel, Mother Tongue. Her best-known work, Mother Tongue was published in 1997 and received the Western States Award in Fiction. That same year she published her second collection of poetry, Breathing between the Lines. In 2002 she published The Devil’s Workshop. Her poetry combines a passion for social justice with gentle plays of irony and warmth. The poem “First Things” in the literary journal Ploughshares offers a sample of her unique voice. Demetria Martínez continues to experiment as a creative writer and is active in various writing workshops. She teaches at the annual writing workshop at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A resident of Albuquerque, her childhood home, Demetria Martínez is active in Enlace Comunitario, a group dedicated to protecting the rights of Spanish-speaking victims of domestic abuse. SOURCES: Demetria Martínez online. http://demetria Martinez.tripod.com/ (accessed September 14, 2004); Martínez, Demetria. Mother Tongue. New York: Ballantine, 1997; Ploughshares, the Literary Journal at Emerson College. “Demetria Martínez.” http://www.pshares.org (accessed September 14, 2004); University of Minnesota. “Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color: Demetria Martínez.”
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Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland “Betita” http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/authors/MARTINEZdem etria.htm (accessed September 14, 2004).
Daniel Ruiz
MARTÍNEZ, ELIZABETH SUTHERLAND “BETITA” (1925– ) The most recent book by Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-colored Century, is dedicated to “La juventud, the youth, and their revolutionary vision,” reflecting the passion and lifelong commitment of “Betita,” as she is known to friends. A Chicana activist extraordinaire, she is widely recognized as a fighter, a builder, and a scholar. For youths and women in particular, she has often been a mentor and role model. Born in Washington, D.C., to Dr. Manuel Guillermo and Ruth Phillips Martínez, a university professor and a high-school teacher, respectively, who both taught Spanish, Martínez grew up hearing her father’s animated stories of the Mexican Revolution and Emiliano Zapata, along with criticism of U.S. imperialism. She was thus inspired early in life with the spirit of resistance and hope for a better world. The first Latina to graduate from Swarthmore College, Martínez received a bachelor of arts degree with honors in history and literature in 1946 and was awarded an honorary doctor of law degree in May 2000. She sought her first job out of college at the United Nations, hoping to help end the horrors of war. As a researcher in the Secretariat (1948–1953), she learned much about the effects of colonialism on Africans and Pacific Islanders. Martínez became an editor at Simon and Schuster just as the black civil rights movement exploded in the United States, and she soon became a supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her first contribution was convincing Simon and Schuster’s management to publish The Movement, a powerful photographic depiction of the civil rights movement, with royalties going to SNCC. By 1963 she had become books and arts editor of the Nation magazine. That year, however, four young black girls were killed when Klansmen bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, and it became impossible for Martínez to do anything after that except work full-time in the movement. As one of two Chicanas on the SNCC staff, she directed its New York office. She traveled to Mississippi for the historic 1964 Summer Project and edited the book Letters from Mississippi, a collection of writings by civil rights volunteers in the project. An internationalist from her youth, Martínez traveled to Cuba in 1959 and witnessed the profound transformations that were oc-
curring shortly after the Cuban Revolution. She has returned there six times. She also traveled to the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and later China to witness the changes that occurred as people struggled to transform their societies. At home she joined the New York Radical Women in the early days of the women’s liberation movement. Invited to start a newspaper in New Mexico for the militant land-grant movement, she ended up moving there and pursuing her raza roots. She cofounded and edited the movement newspaper El Grito del Norte (1968–1973) and later cofounded the Chicano Communications Center. The center, a barrio-based organizing and educational project, created guest speaker forums, a political theater, and publications, including two bilingual histories in comic-book format about Latin American revolutionary heroes. Determined to tell the untold story of Chicano repression and resistance, Martínez edited 500 Years of Chicano History, a bilingual pictorial volume published by the center. Later she coproduced a corresponding hour-long documentary, Viva La Causa! Today, after more than thirty years, teachers still relate how this book changed the lives of young Chicanos/as by providing a liberating way of looking at history and selfrespect that counteracted the racism students encountered in the educational system and elsewhere. In New Mexico she continued to advance a feminist perspective that aimed to develop young women’s skills and leadership. Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976, she joined a socialist organization notable for its feminist leadership. She later joined the Women of Color Resource Center as a board member and in 2001 was a delegate to the nongovernmental organization session at the United Nations World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa. An instructor in ethnic and women’s studies, Martínez is an adjunct professor at California State University, Hayward, and has lectured at hundreds of universities and colleges. In 1982 she was the first Chicana on the ballot for governor of California, running on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. In 1997 she cofounded the Institute for Multi-racial Justice, a resource center to help build alliances among peoples of color and to combat divisions, while recognizing the central role of women in this process. As director, she edits its newsletter, Shades of Power. An editor of the national bilingual newspaper, War Times, Martínez has been active in organizing people of color against the war since the fall of 2001. This continues her commitment that began at the United Nations and grew with her 1970 trip to North Vietnam as the first Chicana antiwar activist to go there, as well as her work on the historic August 29, 1970, Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam war in Los Angeles.
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Martínez, Frances Aldama pueblo chicano. 2nd ed. Albuquerque: Southwest Organizing Project; ———. 1998. De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-colored Century. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Melanie E. L. Bush
MARTÍNEZ, FRANCES ALDAMA (1912– )
Chicano Movement leader, lifelong community activist, and writer, Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez at a book signing, Capitola, California, 1995. Courtesy of Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez.
Elizabeth Martínez has received numerous honors, including the Women’s “E-News” Honor for “21 Leaders for the 21st Century,” 2002; Scholar of the Year 2000, National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies; La Raza Centro Legal, San Francisco, 1999, Lifetime Achievement Award; and the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) 1995 National Conference Lifetime Achievement Award. Formerly married to novelist Hans Koning, Martínez has one daughter, Tessa Koning-Martínez, an actress who lives in San Francisco. In her seventies, Martínez remains famous for working around the clock to advance the worldwide struggle for the human rights and dignity of poor and working-class people. Her tenacity and exuberance serve as an inspiration to several generations of people who join in believing that a better world is possible. In 2005 Martínez was among one thousand women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. See also Chicano Movement; Feminism SOURCES: Martínez, Elizabeth, ed. 1965. Letters from Mississippi. New York: McGraw-Hill (reissued, Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2002); ——— . 1989. The Art of Rini Templeton: Where There Is Life and Struggle/El arte de Rini Templeton: Donde hay vida y lucha. Seattle: Real Comet Press, and Mexico, D.F.: Centro de Documentacion Gráfica Rini Templeton; ——— . 1991. 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures/500 años del
Mexican American activist Frances Aldama Martínez was born a fighter. When her mother fell down the stairs, Frances was born premature and fought to survive while her mother hemorrhaged and died. Two years later she accompanied her aunt from Durango, Mexico, to Los Angeles, California, and subsequently settled with family relatives in the small agriculturalindustrial town of Corona, where she grew up to become a dedicated and fiercely independent Mexican American political activist. At a young age Martínez learned to be more independent while attending St. Mary’s Parochial School in Los Angeles. From sixth to eighth grade she lived in an all-female rooming house and walked to Catholic school. At school she met students from different ethnic backgrounds, learned English, and excelled in music and dance. During nonschool hours she fondly remembered “hanging around La Placita and riding red streetcars all over East L.A.” When she returned to Corona, she effectively used her musical talents for the benefit of the Mexican community. She played the piano at funerals and weddings at the Catholic church and performed musical scores for silent movies at the local Mexican theater. She was also the only female pianist in a jazz band that performed at community benefit dances. Martínez’s independent spirit, however, often ran into conflict with her strict aunt. After high-school graduation she defied her aunt’s wishes and eloped to marry a former boxer from New Mexico. While she was living with her husband in Guadalupe, New Mexico, she was influenced by her mother-in-law’s community activism and Spanish-speaking women politicians. She recounted how her mother-in-law stood up against racial discrimination. “She refused to sit in the Mexican section of the local theatre and challenged the ushers to remove her from her seat.” When Martínez moved back to Corona in the late 1930s, she found a “sleepy town with nothing happening politically.” Corona’s Mexican community faced few job opportunities outside agriculture and racial discrimination in schools, housing, and recreational facilities. As the president of the Washington School PTA, she witnessed the separation of schoolchildren on the basis of race and nationality. “No matter where you lived inside or outside of town if you were Mexican you went to Washington School.” Martínez decided to
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Martínez, Vilma S. “stir things up” and led a group of parents to school board meetings to protest the school’s discriminatory policy. Facing strong resistance from school board members and white parents, she pressed the American-born generation to use its political power at the ballot box. “We knew the Mexican Americans were not registering to vote, so we started a registration campaign. After I got my registrar’s license I registered about 300, shortly after that, our votes were effective in the school board campaign.” With four children and clipboard in hand Martínez walked house-to-house to register American-born Mexicans. “If you didn’t vote, you couldn’t complain” became her motto. Her efforts began to pay off when Mexican Americans were elected to the school board, city council, and city commission boards. Martínez proudly recalled, “We were there to back them up.” To expand their political influence into other arenas, Martínez helped organize los Amigos Club, the city’s first Mexican American civil rights organization. Modeled after the Unity Leagues in Pomona Valley, los Amigos fought for civic improvements, public housing, and recreational resources. When community projects were short of funds, Martínez effectively organized party fund-raisers that included amateur talent shows, Cinco de Mayo queen contests, and community dances called tardeadas that featured Lalo Guerrero and Mexican American musicians. She was nicknamed “Sacafiestas” for her successful fund-raising events. In the early 1960s Martínez extended her political activism to the state and national levels by campaigning for Democratic Party candidates. Along with former los Amigos members she organized the Corona chapter of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) to defend the Mexican community against police brutality, urban renewal projects, and political dis-
Frances Martínez with John Tunney and Ted Kennedy. Courtesy of the Corona Public Library Heritage Room.
enfranchisement. She understood the importance of outside support to increase their political clout at the local level. “Bert Corona came out here to give us advice on how to get a chapter going. [Corona] talked about using community power, and non-violence means to get La Raza elected.” Martínez also campaigned for Democratic Party senators Ted Kennedy and John Tunney, who sought votes from the Mexican American community. With fierce determination, effective organizing and artistic abilities, and family support, Frances Martínez helped transform Mexican Americans into a powerful political force at the local level and struggled to obtain and secure representation and resources for the Mexican and Mexican American community. SOURCES: Esquibel Tywoniak, Frances, and Mario García. 2000. Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press; Pardo, Mary S. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. José M. Alamillo
MARTÍNEZ, VILMA S. (1943–
)
In 1973, only six years out of law school, Vilma Martínez became the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the nation’s most important organization dedicated to the protection of civil rights for Mexican Americans. When Martínez became the head of MALDEF, it had been in existence for only five years and, during those years, had relied primarily on a $2.2million grant from the Ford Foundation for its budget. In 1982, when Martínez stepped down as president and general counsel, MALDEF’s budget, largely through Martínez’s skills and efforts as a fund-raiser, had grown to $4.9 million per year. Of this growth, Martínez stated, “The opportunity to help build MALDEF, then a fledgling civil rights organization which had started with a foundation grant, into a nationally significant Latino institution was very important to me in large part because of my own experiences with discrimination in my home state of Texas.” Martínez’s personal experiences with discrimination influenced her to pursue a career in civil rights law. Born in 1943 in San Antonio, Texas, to Salvador and Marina Martínez, she grew up in San Antonio. As Mexican Americans, Martínez and her family were forced to sit in specific sections (usually the back) in movie theaters and were not allowed into certain city parks. In junior high school Martínez’s counselor at-
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Martínez, Vilma S. tempted to persuade her to attend the vocational high school instead of the academic high school. Yet Martínez’s resolve to attend college won out, and after graduating from the academic high school in San Antonio, she went on to the University of Texas, Austin. Even at the University of Texas discrimination did not cease. Martínez’s college counselor tried to dissuade her from attending law school because, according to the counselor, law school would be too difficult. Again, Martínez managed to steer ahead and, after graduating from the University of Texas in 1964, entered Columbia University School of Law, from which she graduated in 1967. After law school Martínez jumped right into civil rights law. Her first job was as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she worked on cases involving Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1970 she joined the New York State Division of Human Rights as an equal employment opportunity counsel in New York City. In 1971 she became a litigation associate for Cahill, Gordon and Reindel in New York City. At the same time Martínez had been involved with MALDEF as a member of the board of directors and as a member of the fund-raising committee. Against the advice of friends and co-workers, when the position of president and general counsel for MALDEF became open, Martínez lobbied for it. The same friends and co-workers told her that it would not
be the right time for a woman to head this growing organization. Again, Martínez held fast to her goal and secured the position in 1973. From 1973 to 1982 Martínez served as president and general counsel of MALDEF. In those nine years Martínez proved a leader in and out of the courtroom. In 1975, in large part through MALDEF’s work, Congress expanded the 1965 Voting Rights Act to include Mexican Americans. The original act had only applied to African Americans and Puerto Ricans. In 1982, also under Martínez’s direction, MALDEF won the case Plyer v. Doe, which guaranteed the right to a public school education for undocumented children. In addition to these legal victories, Martínez is credited with putting MALDEF on a firm financial footing. Under Martínez’s direction MALDEF became an important American institution. After leaving MALDEF, Martínez joined the Los Angeles law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson. She specializes in federal and state court litigation, including cases of wrongful termination and employment litigation. In 1994 the Los Angeles Unified School District hired Martínez to challenge the portion of California Proposition 187 that denied public education to undocumented immigrants. She won a restraining order against the initiative. Soon MALDEF and other civil rights groups filed a case in the federal courts, Gregorio v. Wilson. Because of this suit and Martínez’s groundbreaking efforts almost all provisions of Proposition 187 were declared unconstitutional in 1998. In recognition of Martínez’s efforts and success, she has been awarded the Margaret Brent Award from the American Bar Association, the Medal for Excellence from Columbia Law School, the Mexican American Bar Association’s Lex Award, and the Jefferson Award from the American Institute for Public Service, among many other awards. Martínez is also involved in community and public service outside her profession. She is a board member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the Anheuser-Busch Companies, Shell Oil Company, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation. From 1976 to 1990 she served on the University of California Board of Regents, of which she was chair from 1984 to 1986. She has also served on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project. To this day Martínez continues the struggle against the discrimination she experienced as a child. She states, “Discrimination in many forms and against many groups has not yet disappeared. You should oppose it. I encourage you to develop ideas or strategies of your own to fight it.” See also Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)
Civil rights leader and prominent attorney Vilma Martínez. Courtesy of Vilma Martínez.
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McBride, Teresa N. SOURCES: Cigarroa, Marisa. 1998. “Latina Activist Discusses Strategies to Fight Discrimination.” Stanford Report, April 29; Dewey, Katrina M. 1992. “Profile: Vilma S. Martinez: She Carries Fire Inside.” Los Angeles Daily Journal, January 6, 1, 10. Marisela R. Chávez
MARTÍNEZ SANTAELLA, INOCENCIA (1866–1957) The contributions of committed activist Inocencia Martínez Santaella to the nineteenth-century expatriate Antillean separatist movement have not been properly acknowledged. This is perhaps because of the historical prominence primarily given to the movement’s male leaders, including her spouse, print journalist and typographer Sotero Figueroa, and the overall undermining of women’s participation in nineteenthcentury revolutionary efforts. Martínez Santaella was born and grew up in the southern town of Ponce, Puerto Rico. She married Figueroa in 1889, and shortly thereafter the couple left Puerto Rico for New York. Upon their arrival in New York, the couple became involved, along with many other Latin American political émigrés living in the United States, in activities supporting independence for Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spain’s only remaining colonies in the Americas. Martínez Santaella’s husband established a printing press that published several separatist newspapers, including Patria, founded by Cuban patriot José Martí. The couple developed a close friendship with Martí, who was living in exile in New York, trying to unify the separatist movement and raise funds to support revolutionary insurgence in Cuba. When Martí founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) in New York in 1892, Figueroa started the Club Borinquen to organize the support of Puerto Rican émigrés for the separatist cause, while Martínez Santaella initiated the first women’s association of the PRC, the Club Mercedes de Varona. This club arranged numerous fund-raising activities and promoted the unity of the Antillean movement. Puerto Rican separatists shared the belief that a victory for Cuba against Spain would also bring independence to Puerto Rico. The efforts of many Puerto Rican men and women separatists culminated in the creation of the Sección de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Section) of the PRC in 1896, several months after the beginning of the second Cuban war for independence (1895–1898) and Martí’s death on the battlefield. That same year Martínez Santaella joined Puerto Rican poet and militant separatist Lola Rodríguez de Tió and Aurora Fonts, wife of the Puerto Rican general Juan Ríus Rivera, who was commanding troops fighting in the Spanish-Cuban war, in the founding of the
Club Hermanas de Ríus Rivera (Sisters of Ríus Rivera Club). In addition to fund-raising activities the club collected clothing and medicine to assist the ongoing war effort. Martínez Santaella and Figueroa left New York to live in Cuba in 1899 and divorced in 1907. They both remained in the neighboring island until their respective deaths, confirming the devotion shared by many Antillean separatists to the two islands and to a unified independence struggle, a sentiment captured in poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió’s famous verse “Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pájaro las dos alas” (Cuba and Puerto Rico are the two wings of one bird). See also Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party SOURCE: Ojeda Reyes, Félix. 1992. Peregrinos de la libertad. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Edna Acosta-Belén
MCBRIDE, TERESA N. (1961–
)
Born in the small New Mexico town of Grants, Teresa N. McBride started her business career working in a restaurant in her hometown. She attended the University of New Mexico and in 1986, at the age of twentyfive, founded her own company, McBride and Associates. This firm eventually became a nationally recognized company specializing as a provider of information technology products and services. McBride has always run her company by herself. She told one interviewer that this can be a very isolating environment, but “it’s the nature of the position. . . . You have the freedom to make decisions, which is an advantage, but the disadvantage is the same thing. . . . I couldn’t have done it differently.” According to McBride, the key to a successful executive is not the ability to take risks but rather to accept challenges and overcome them. In addition, she stresses the need to be focused. She considers this quality an important factor in her success in the business world: “I try not to procrastinate, which goes with focus. Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘The fields of our country are filled with the bones of the people who were waiting. They stood waiting, they sat waiting, they lived waiting, and they died waiting.’ ” Teresa McBride’s business philosophy, combined with her leadership skills, business acumen, and dedication, resulted in her company rising quickly above many of its competitors. McBride characterizes her business style as high-energy with a strong commitment to employees; she quickly recognized the importance of maintaining excellent employer-employee relations. McBride and Associates has been rated the number one company for customer satisfaction among federal
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Mederos y Cabañas de González, Elena Inés service and product providers. In addition, McBride believes that a company must be ready to meet everchanging business challenges. McBride has received recognition for her outstanding entrepreneurial leadership and skills. Her company has been ranked as one of the nation’s 100 fastestgrowing companies by the publication Hispanic Business and was ranked as one of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies by the business journal Inc. Magazine. One of Teresa McBride’s most outstanding accomplishments was being named the U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Minority Small Business Person of the Year in 1989, the youngest business owner to be so honored. McBride was also honored by the Business Women’s Network and National Foundation for Women Legislators, which named her Entrepreneur of the Year 2000. Teresa McBride has distinguished herself in serving on the boards of numerous government agencies, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the U.S. Department of Education Board for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, the U.S. Senate Task Force on Hispanic Affairs, and the University of New Mexico Hospital Board. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum, the National Association of Women Business Owners, and the National Hispana Leadership Institute. Teresa McBride founded the McBride Foundation, whose many community projects include the administration of its College Bound Program. This program was established for underprivileged elementary-school children to encourage them to pursue a college education. The College Bound Program uses college students as mentors for elementary-school children. The goal is provide the children with the encouragement and practical skills to prepare them for college and to reduce dropout rates. McBride provides the following summary of the College Bound Program: “One of the Foundation’s founding principles is that education is a lifelong commitment and we help children make education a way of life.” Teresa McBride resides in North Bethesda, Maryland, with her son. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCE: Hendricks, Paula. 1996. “Top of the Top: New Mexico Woman, May.” Paula Hendricks online. http://www .ph-webnet.com/ph_a/articles/duval-10.htm (accessed September 14, 2004). Alma M. García
MEDEROS Y CABAÑAS DE GONZÁLEZ, ELENA INÉS (1900–1982) The life of Cuban American feminist Elena Mederos spanned most of the twentieth century and ended in
exile in Washington, D.C. Hers was a life of purpose and dedication to human causes, first in Cuba as a feminist and social activist and then in the United States as a staff member of UNICEF and the Cuban American organization Of Human Rights. Elena Inés Mederos y Cabañas was born in 1900, just after Cuba gained independence from Spain, during the U.S. military occupation, and before Cuba’s becoming a nation as a U.S. protectorate. Members of her family had given their lives fighting for Cuba Libre as early as 1869. Her father, Leopoldo Mederos, was the treasurer of a revolutionary club in New York, a subsidiary of the Cuban Revolutionary Party that fought for independence (1895–1898). In 1899 Leopoldo Mederos and his wife Inés Cabañas brought their young family to Havana and invested in a tobacco-procuring business and a clothing store. Elena, their youngest child, was born and lived most of her life in Havana City until the family made its fortune and moved to Nuevo Vedado, a newer section of greater Havana. Initially educated by an American nanny and in a missionary elementary school, she completed secondary school at the prestigious Colegio Sánchez y Tiant and graduated from the University of Havana in 1920 with a doctorate in pharmacology. Her ascent into womanhood coincided with the emergence of the Cuban women’s movement. Her aunt, Rafaela Mederos, had been both a fighter for independence and an advocate for women’s rights, especially the right to vote. Following Rafaela’s example, Elena and her cousin Lillian Mederos joined various women’s organizations. Leopoldo Mederos was one of the first men to take advantage of the 1917 property law that allowed him to bestow sizable properties on Elena and her sister, saying that he never wanted them to marry for reasons of financial dependency. Elena Mederos married Hilario González for love in 1924 and approximately ten years later had a daughter, María Elena Mederos y González. In 1928 she was elected treasurer of the newly organized Alianza Nacional Feminista and in the same year participated in the Sixth Pan American Conference Auxiliary meeting of women in their demand that the Pan American Union incorporate a women’s division to oversee hemispheric women’s rights. In 1930 she was the Cuban delegate to the Inter American Commission of Women of the Pan American Union, a position she held until 1953. By 1930 President Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship, combined with the worldwide depression, had convulsed the island into civil unrest. The Mederos’s home became a meeting place for dissidents from various ideological persuasions. Three years later Elena Mederos participated in public demonstrations until Machado was overthrown in August and women won
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Mederos y Cabañas de González, Elena Inés the vote in September. For her, the modern state, democracy, social justice, and women’s rights were integral principles, each deficient without the other. Between 1931 and 1961 Mederos put democracy into action as founder and president of the Lyceum Lawn and Tennis Club. She upheld the club’s values “to teach women to share a collective spirit, to foster cultural, social, and philosophical activities, to serve others, and to maintain democracy in a community of equals.” While political unrest closed institutions of higher learning, the Lyceum opened its public library, held open forums with speakers of all political views, provided scholarships for women, exhibited international and national art, and hosted concerts. Mederos headed the Lyceum’s Social Assistance Division, established in 1933, which altered the way Cuban society understood national responsibility for community and social problems. She transformed the island’s social welfare programs from individual charity to state-funded and professional services that addressed matters of public health, poverty, illiteracy, home economics education, family health, and hygiene education. She helped bring social reform into women’s prisons and children’s reformatories. The Lyceum started a certified night school for women. By 1943 the Lyceum’s Social Assistance Program had grown in sophistication and importance such that the University of Havana created the School of Social Welfare, with Mederos as supervisor of programs. Finally, in 1945 she was appointed a board member of the National Corporation of Public Assistance, which focused most of its attention on abandoned and disabled children. Cuba’s fifty-year-old democracy, dominated by the United States, corrupted by gangsters, and attacked by political dissidents, finally succumbed to Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état in 1952. Mederos refused to serve a dictatorship, so she resigned her post as Cuba’s representative to the Pan American Union and focused her attention on the School of Social Welfare. Despite grief over her husband’s death in 1954, she carried her political protest to international forums, where she argued that Cuba had to return to constitutional government. Within a year opposition groups formed against Batista. Mederos joined the Sociedad de los Amigos de la República (SAR), which claimed no political affiliation and desired a peaceful end to dictatorship, a return to the 1940 constitution, and a general election. By 1953 she was the vice president of the organization and helped preside over negotiations with the Batista regime. Opposition groups and Batista, without the support of the Popular Socialist Party and the 26th of July Movement, agreed to hold an election in 1958. When Batista’s party won the election by open fraud,
Mederos could not justify a neutral stance. Despite her repugnance for violence, she joined a branch of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, the Civic Resistance Movement. That group practiced sabotage and sought the violent overthrow of the Batista dictatorship. When the revolution took control of the island on January 1, 1959, most Cubans were optimistic that the 1940 constitution would be reinstated and that social justice would be a high priority for the new officials. One of Castro’s first acts was to announce a Ministry of Social Welfare, and much to her surprise, he nominated Elena Mederos as its minister. She accepted the post, believing that she could make a contribution to the well-being of the people of Cuba. For six months she cooperated with massive economic reforms, including signing the Agricultural Reform Act, which nationalized her family’s wealth. Very soon, however, political disorganization, fidelismo, and summary executions convinced Mederos that she should resign, which she did in June 1959. She left for exile on September 18, 1961. At sixty-one, an age for contemplating retirement, Elena Mederos had to find a job. Since 1948 she had worked with UNICEF, which qualified her for a modest three-month contract in Bogotá, Colombia, interceding on behalf of disabled or orphaned children. She also coordinated worldwide nongovernmental organizations concerned with the plight of women and children, work that lasted two and a half years. In April 1964 she joined her daughter María Elena in New York City, where she continued allying nongovernmental organizations through the United Nations. Her work took her to Africa and Latin America, and she oversaw the publication of La infancia y la juventud en el desarrollo nacional de Latinoamérica (México City, 1966). Yet Mederos could not forget the nondemocratic character of the Cuban government or the treatment of political prisoners, one of whom was her nephew, José Pujals. In 1969 Mederos retired from her post at the United Nations, although she remained active as an emeritus staff member and continued with responsibilities, most notably as an observer at the First International Women’s Year Conference celebrated in Mexico City in 1975. She moved to Washington, D.C., and there her devotion to human rights converged with Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy and the organization of Cuban Americans around the issue of political prisons in Cuba. Mederos reinvigorated her work with the Lyceum, the women’s organization she had helped found in Cuba. The Lyceum had quietly functioned in Cuba and with some aid and communication between the original leaders in the United States and Cuba. In 1968 Raúl Castro closed the Lyceum, leaving only the exile community to continue its mission. Mederos called upon Lyceumistas to go beyond their work to
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Media Stereotypes Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898– 1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
K. Lynn Stoner
MEDIA STEREOTYPES
Feminist and political activist Elena Mederos, circa 1981. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
preserve Cuban culture and advance women’s education and to join her in the human rights campaign. In 1974–1975, much of the world was loath to criticize Fidel Castro for his government’s treatment of political prisoners. Credible information about them was difficult to acquire. For many, U.S. belligerences explained Castro’s intolerance for political dissent. In this atmosphere an objective hearing on political repression required diplomacy and respectability, qualities Elena Mederos had. She founded and headed Of Human Rights, a small group in Washington, D.C., that lobbied the Carter administration and published reliable information about Cuban prisons. Elena Mederos dedicated her young life to democracy, women’s rights, and social justice. At middle age she signed away her own wealth as an official of the Cuban Revolution, hoping to elevate the welfare of all Cubans and most especially women and children. In the last years of her life she worked, despite her failing health, for democracy and political freedom in Cuba and for the rights of women and children throughout the world. She dignified the Cuban American woman through her leadership in the Lyceum, both in Cuba and the United States. Her values never wavered, but the circumstances surrounding her did, causing her to continually test the depth of her convictions and her strength to live them. Mederos died in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 1982. SOURCES: Guerrero, María Luisa. 1991. Elena Mederos: Una mujer con perfil para la historia. Washington, DC: Of Human Rights; Stoner, K. Lynn. 1991. From the House to the
There are many theories about how and why stereotypes come into existence. In simplest terms stereotypes are standardized mental pictures and opinions that people develop to make sense of the world. Often the connotations that accompany these oversimplified pictures are negative and are held in common by members of one group about another group to accentuate the differences between the two. The problem arises when people come to see individual members of a group through these generalized pictures without taking into consideration their individual differences. In the media characters are also created that often reflect these simplified, hardened categories. One of the saddest aspects of stereotyping is that members of the out-group sometimes come to view themselves in negative stereotypical terms. The very idea that there is a “Latin look” is an example of a stereotype. It may not be a negative stereotype, but it does suggest that there is a certain “look” into which all (or “genuine”) Latinas/os fit. A quick review of the wide diversity in Latino communities makes clear what an oversimplification this is. All groups are stereotyped and have stereotypes. Films are an important arena where stereotypes are projected. Six major Latino stereotypes have been identified, three of which are male, each with a female counterpart. One is “el bandido,” first begun in the westerns of the early silent film era and slightly modified for today’s urban films. The female counterpart here is “the half-breed harlot,” whose persona has similarly altered over time, becoming perhaps more sexualized and urban in contemporary films. Next is “the male buffoon,” a Sancho Panza–type character whose female equivalent is “the female clown.” Both Carmen Miranda and Lupe Vélez played such roles in many of their films. Next is the well-known “Latin lover” stereotype that many Latino and non-Latino stars have played. The female parallel to this stereotype is “the dark lady,” who is often described as mysterious, virginal, inscrutable, aristocratic, cool, distanced, reserved, and opaque and is often contrasted in films with the Anglo woman, who is direct, boisterous, and transparent. Some of Dolores Del Río’s early roles personified this characterization. Stereotypes differ from “types” in that they are often simple, one-dimensional characterizations that do not have depth, interest, or complexity. A good example of a Latina type who is not a stereotype is the female protagonist in the film Salt of the Earth (1953). Played by
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Media Stereotypes Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, she was not a stereotypically and heavily made-up, sexually enticing, Hollywood spitfire, but was portrayed as a Latina woman who reflected the 1950s Hispano mining community in which she lived. In this role she projected a resolute strength and a timeless beauty that seemed to be grounded in simplicity. Many movie images had their roots in the popular press, classic literature, and best-selling pulp romances, in legitimate theater, vaudeville, peep-show nickelodeons, and music halls, and in both “serious art” and American popular entertainment. Scholars find that the entry of Latino stereotypes into entertainment media, most notably motion pictures, drew upon the immense popularity of the dime novel at the end of the nineteenth century and, subsequently, Buffalo Bill stories. These novels were replete with bandidos whose features and traits still characterize the contemporary Hispanic criminal stereotype, that is, long greasy hair, scruffy mustaches, grotesque dialect, dark complexions, and cowardly behavior. Early films, including D. W. Griffith’s epic films, extended and reinforced already established popular misconceptions in the movies. The dual stereotypical images of Latinas as, on the
one hand, hot-blooded, sexually enticing spitfires and, on the other hand, virtuous Virgin Marías are, to a degree, women’s images. Women have historically been portrayed as one-dimensional good girls or bad girls and as extensions of, and subordinate to, men. There has also been and continues to be a scarcity of good, fully developed roles, especially for older women. What has made stereotypical images of Latinas in contemporary films different from the images of women in general is that the portrayals have been narrower. There have been fewer Latina characters and actresses, and the images have been more consistently of lower-status characters. This has unfortunately been typical for a number of decades, and some changes are just now beginning to occur as new actresses such as Michelle Rodríguez, Penelope Cruz, Jennifer López, Salma Hayek, and others take on central roles that have more than just sex appeal written into their characters. However, there is still a long way to go before movies portray in more abundance the everyday women, the abuelas (grandmothers), teachers, sisters, students, school-crossing guards, secretaries, professors, lawyers, judges, and corporate trainees—the common but nonetheless complex and interesting
My Afro-Mexican Queen. Sheet Music, 1903. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Sheet Music, 1859–1920. Digital Scriptorium Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University (Plate no.: 5489-4).
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Medicine
I’ll see you in C-U-B-A. Sheet Music Created by Irving Berlin, New York, 1920. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Sheet Music, 1859–1920. Digital Scriptorium Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
women who are not stereotypes. Paradoxically, it is these women who populate and are more prevalent in all levels of Latino communities, but it is the Latina prostitutes, junkies, transvestites, crack-addicted mothers, and welfare and child abusers who tend to be more often seen on screen. It is important to note that alternative filmmakers and, in particular, Latina documentary filmmakers have sought to deconstruct these images and construct new images and spaces that are by, for, and about the Latino community, and that document and give voice to Latinas’ own silenced reality, culture, and perceptions. Their films represent a creative response to issues of exclusion, discrimination, and stereotyping. Many contemporary filmmakers are concerned with how they can continue to create alternative images and integrate more Latinos into the media and yet avoid creating and perpetuating stereotypes, both old and new. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Movie Stars SOURCES: Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1993. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press; Kanellos, Nicolás. 1998. Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Image in American Culture. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing; Kotz, Liz. 1997. “Unofficial Stories: Documentaries by Latinas and Latin American Women.” In Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, ed. C. Rodríguez, 200–213. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Ramírez Berg, Charles. 1997. “Stereotyping in Films in General and of the Hispanic in Particular.” In Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media ed. C. Rodríguez, 104–120. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Clara E. Rodríguez
MEDICINE For as long as there have been Latinas, they have been involved in medicine. Whether they practiced as midwives, herbalists, nuns, or general-practice caregivers, Latinas were experts in a practical medicine that preceded therapeutic advances in medical science. In fact, they often played a larger role than their male counterparts not only in medical treatment for the poor, but also in the development of beneficent institutions such as hospitals and sanitariums for tuberculosis patients. Despite their work, with the advent of professional li-
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Medicine censing, Latinas shared the fate of many competing practitioners. Anglo males practicing allopathic medicine quickly displaced other practitioners and dominated medical school admissions, training, and medical licensing boards. Thus institutional access became the largest obstacle to Latina visibility and legitimacy as professional medical practitioners. While policy makers and activists have taken up the issue of access, they have focused on Latinas as patients rather than as professionals. If they spoke Spanish, Latinas/os’ were turned away from medical treatment, institutionalized and isolated within medical facilities, and often misdiagnosed. By the late 1960s Latinos/as recognized that institutional discrimination and lack of access to medicine were reproduced by Latinas/os‘ lack of representation within the medical profession. Drawing on gains made by the civil rights movement, particularly related to affirmative action, Latinas increased their representation in medical schools. Among their earliest priorities were medical student recruitment and retention. They also established organizations that furthered their general representation in medical and health professions. The National Chicano Health Organization produced leaders who sub-
sequently organized La Raza Medical Student Association, the Mexican American Medical Association, and the Boricua Health Organization. By 1990 these and other organizations took on a national character. A few osteopathic student organizations emerged in the early twenty-first century with a Latino/a focus. Latinas played a critical role in this effort, as exemplified by physicians like Elena Rios and Margie Beltrán, who worked to establish the National Network of Latin American Medical Students. Latinas’ increased representation in the medical professions aided their efforts to address discrimination in Latina/o medical service delivery. Helen Rodríguez-Trias, a physician who made significant improvements in service delivery for Latinas, was also a founding member of both the women’s (1971) and Hispanic (1973) caucuses of the American Public Health Association. Pat Pulido Sánchez, as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s vice-chairperson, began using public policy to address medical care for Latinas/os. During the 1970s other organizations such as the Coalition of Spanish Speaking Mental Health Organizations and the Hispanic Health Council also worked at national and community-based levels to address discrimination in medical care for Latinos/as. In 1994 Latinas played
Nurse Beatrice Amado Kissinger looks over the shoulder of a G.I. in Arizona, 1942. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Medina, Esther decreased in 2003. Ironically, while more U.S. Latinas applied and were accepted by medical schools than Latinos in both 2002 and 2003, Latinas’ matriculation rate decreased by slightly more than that of their Latino counterparts in 2003. These rates suggest that Latinas may face greater difficulty than their Latino counterparts in actually attending medical school, despite their academic and professional achievements that lead to medical school acceptance. See also Health: Current Issues and Trends; Scientists
Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias, headed the Pediatric Department at Lincoln Hospital. Courtesy of the Helen Rodríguez-Trias Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
a critical role in establishing the National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA). Since that time NHMA has represented Hispanic physicians working with policy makers and other physicians to improve health care delivery and reduce disparities in health outcomes for all Hispanics. Despite these gains in service delivery and at organizational levels, Latinas in medicine have benefited only marginally from the civil rights and women’s movements. In 2002 U.S. Hispanics constituted less than 7 percent of matriculating medical school students. Both U.S. Latina and Latino matriculation rates
SOURCES: Association of American Medical Colleges. Data Warehouse, Applicant Matriculant File as of November 6, 2003. http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2003/2003sumyrs. htm (accessed July 13, 2004); National Hispanic Medical Association. History. http://www.nhmamd.org/history.htm (accessed July 13, 2004); Rios, Elena. 2004. Personal communication with author, February 1; Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books; Trujillo-Pagán, Nicole. 2003. “Health beyond Prescription: A Post-colonial History of Puerto Rican Medicine at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
MEDINA, ESTHER (1936–
)
Born the youngest in a family of eight children at a lemon pickers’ camp in a Ventura, California, Esther Medina traveled as a young child with her parents, Leondra and Gregorio Medina, to pick crops whenever they ripened: olives, walnuts, peaches, cherries, and string beans. Even after the family settled in San Jose when she was four, Medina and her brothers and sis-
Doctor’s office in New York, 1957. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Meléndez, Concha ters worked all summer. “We were poor, but we didn’t know it,” she said. “We didn’t have a TV or many toys, so we made our own fun. In a big family, you have your own cheering section.” After graduating from San Jose High School, she cared for her aging parents. She also became a hairstylist, opening a salon in a well-to-do neighborhood. At the same time she enrolled in community college classes, studying business administration, psychology, and sociology. She added a supper club and a liquor store to her businesses. Though her ventures thrived, she did not. “When you’re poor and think money and material things will make you happy, and when you have them and they don’t make you happy, you worry that you’re crazy,” she said. She sold the businesses in the 1970s. Divorced and with two children, Cameo and Derek, she discovered social work. For $700 a month Medina investigated discrimination cases for the Santa Clara County Commission on the Status of Women. She styled hair on weekends to make ends meet. By late 1982 she became deputy director of Economic and Social Opportunities, Inc. a nonprofit organization that helped low-income women. Then the directors of the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) asked her to turn around this once-thriving nonprofit agency, which had shrunk to one and onehalf employees and a $27,000 annual budget. MACSA had been formed in the mid-1960s to help San Jose’s growing Latino population address issues such as discrimination, police brutality, and inequality in education and access to public services. She agreed to take the helm, quit her job, and never looked back. About the same time she married Juan San Miguel, a fellow social worker. MACSA came back to life, and while Medina attributed this success to local policy makers looking out for the agency, MACSA staff credited Medina’s leadership. She is a charismatic Latina, unafraid to ask questions or to pick up the phone and request support, financial or political. “It’s important never to let anything get in the way of what you want to do, to see a barrier as a challenge,” she said. “If you believe hard enough and work hard enough, you’ll reach your goals.” Sometimes she worked so hard that she forgot to eat, so San Miguel bought her a refrigerator to keep under her desk at work. Under Medina’s direction MACSA earned a reputation for mentoring local Latino leaders. Furthermore, it operated an adult day-care center, three subsidized apartment projects for seniors, a lowincome family housing project, and youth programs at schools, libraries, and community centers throughout Santa Clara County. In 1990 the California legislature named Medina Woman of the Year. In 1999 Santa Clara University awarded her an honorary doctorate of public service.
“What’s mattered most to me is seeing the people I’ve mentored become mayors, county supervisors and council people who come back to help the community,” Medina said. “I feel like I have so many children around the community. I’ve been so blessed to be part of their lives.” SOURCES: Emmons, Mark. 2000. “The Quiet Power of Esther Medina.” San Jose Mercury News, August 20; Ludwig, Marcia A. 1991. “Esther Medina: ‘Quiet Waters’ Type Runs Deep in Community.” San Jose Business Journal, April 29. Holly Ocasio Rizzo
MELÉNDEZ, CONCHA (1895–1983) A scholar, poet, and teacher originally from Caguas, Puerto Rico, Concha Meléndez started writing, reciting, and even having her own poetry published at the age of twelve. Her parents, Francisco Meléndez-Valero and Carmen Ramírez de Meléndez, moved to Río Piedras, then a suburb of San Juan, when Concha was seven years old. Meléndez worked as a secondary-school teacher while she completed her undergraduate degree, which she obtained in 1922 from the University of Puerto Rico. Two years later she went to Madrid, where she did graduate work at the Centro de Estudios Históricos. In 1925, when her alma mater decided to establish a Department of Hispanic Studies, she was sent, along with another gifted student, Antonio S. Pedreira, to Columbia University in New York City. They returned in 1927. Pedreira, who himself was destined to become one of Puerto Rico’s best-known writers, became head of the new department, and Meléndez became one of the first professors. In 1931 Concha Meléndez went to the National University of Mexico, the oldest establishment of higher learning on the North American continent, where she became the first woman ever to receive a doctorate in literature. Her doctoral dissertation was published under the title La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica (The Indian Tradition in the Hispanic-American Novel). Her first book, published by Columbia University Press, was a study of Amado Nervo in which she examined both the writing and the man, his viewpoint, outlook, and humor, and how all of these affected his work. She was a prolific writer of prose and poetry, but she is probably most renowned internationally for her profound literary criticism. She wrote about almost all the influential authors of Latin America, including Alfonso Reyes of Mexico, Rubén Darío of Nicaragua, Pablo Neruda of Chile, Andrés Bello of Venezuela, Enrique Laguerre, José de Diego, Luis Muñoz Rivera, and Luis Palés Matos of Puerto Rico, José Martí of Cuba, and her colleague Antonio Pedreira.
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Meléndez, Sara Her collected writings are heterogeneous in nature and amount to five volumes that include many of her lectures and remembrances of her childhood, a collection of Latin American poetry, including the work of Darío, Neruda, Muñoz Rivera, and Palés Matos, conversations with friends and people close to her, and book reviews. The last volume comprises the poetry of Alfonso Reyes with introduction and comments. Among her many works are Psiquis Doliente (1923), Amado Nervo (1926), La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica (1832–1889) (1934), Pablo Neruda: Vida y obra (1936), Signos de Iberoamérica (1936), El arte del cuento en Puerto Rico (1961), Literatura hispanoamericana (1967), Poetas Hispanoamericanos diversos (1971), and Moradas de posesía en Alfonso Reyes (1973). During her lifetime Meléndez received numerous honors, including awards from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature, the Puerto Rican Athenaeum, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the Mexican Academy of Language. She had the distinction of being the first woman member of the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española (Puerto Rican Academy of the Spanish Language). In 1965 she was the recipient of the gold medal from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture; in 1971 she was honored as Woman of the Year in Puerto Rico by the Association of American Women. In 1980 Meléndez retired because of declining health, but she continued writing and pursuing her hobby of collecting the work of other writers. She died in San Juan in 1983.
titled to benefits as a student, the family lived on Social Security benefits paid to her siblings and her $25-aweek part-time job as a clerk typist. Their total income was $275 a month, so Meléndez found full-time work, transferred to night school, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York “because it was free.” Meléndez often observes that poor students now have a tougher time funding their educations because CUNY institutions now charge tuition. Meléndez was awarded a fellowship to study for her master’s degree in education at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, which she received in 1974. She moved to Connecticut and directed a program that tutored poor children from minority backgrounds. In order to have a greater impact on the quality of education provided to inner-city students, Meléndez continued her education. She received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and later a Danforth Fellowship to pursue doctoral studies at Harvard University. Despite her awards, Meléndez’s education reflected her humble background. She had married after college, divorced soon afterwards, and took her young son to class when a baby-sitter was unavailable. As a divorced mother, she both studied and worked part-time jobs. One semester she held four jobs to provide for her son. She completed her degree in 1980 and speaks proudly of her son’s helping her proofread and edit her doctoral dissertation. Meléndez’s life and education were reflected in her career. After teaching at the University of Hartford and
SOURCES: Melón de Díaz, Esther M. 1972. “Concha Meléndez.” In Puerto Rico: Figuras del presente y del pasado y apuntas históricos, 116. Río Piedras: Editorial Edil; Newlon, Clarke. 1974. “Concha Meléndez, Writer and Critic.” In Famous Puerto Ricans, 128–133. New York: Dodd, Mead; Ryan, Bryan, ed. 1991. Hispanic Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, 309–310. Sarramia, Tomás. 1991. “Concha Meléndez, escritora y educadora.” In Nuestra Gente, 125–126. San Juan: Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas. Luis G. Gordillo
MELÉNDEZ, SARA (1948–
)
Born in Puerto Rico, Sara Meléndez migrated to New York City in 1948 and lived in tenement buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In that way Meléndez shares a background with millions of other Puerto Ricans. Her single mother, who had a third-grade education and worked as a seamstress, headed the family. When her mother died of cancer at the age of thirty-nine, an eighteen-year-old Meléndez, then a senior in high school, took over her mother’s role and became the guardian and sole support of her younger brother and sister. Because no one told Meléndez that she was en-
Dr. Sara Meléndez receives the Presidential Medal at Brooklyn College, CUNY. From left to right, Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Sara Meléndez, and former president of Brooklyn College Vernon E. Lattin. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
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Méndez, Consuelo Herrera serving as vice-provost and dean of arts and humanities at the University of Bridgeport, she was elected president and CEO of the Independent Sector (IS) in 1994. IS is a “nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of more than 700 national organizations, foundations, and corporate philanthropy programs” whose “mission is to promote, strengthen, and advance the nonprofit and philanthropic community to foster private initiative for the public good.” For Meléndez, the nonprofit sector realizes democracy because it addresses basic human needs in society, reflects human diversity, and provides an opportunity for civic involvement and a voice for the powerless and voiceless. The nonprofit sector promotes free speech, a grassroots approach to community building, and opportunities for all citizens to shape their own lives and futures irrespective of their social class, race, ethnicity, or gender. The nonprofit sector has become increasingly important not only because it promotes citizens’ engagement in the democratic process, but also because governments have been downsizing and privatizing many of their functions. Since 1970 nonprofit groups have grown four times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. The nonprofit sector employs about 8 percent of the labor force and contributes about 7 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). In order to promote the development of the nonprofit sector and its role in social change, Meléndez advocates cross-sector partnerships with the government and the business sector. In 2002 Meléndez resigned from IS to become a professor of nonprofit management at the School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University. There she conducts research on ways to strengthen nonprofit organizations serving the Puerto Rican/Latino community, including the National Puerto Rican Forum and ASPIRA of Connecticut. In an interview in which she discussed her career change, Meléndez said that she wanted “to take the time now to share the experience and knowledge I’ve gained in my career with emerging leaders and growing institutions that are important to me in a special way.” SOURCES: Licamele, Greg. 2003. “Fostering Philanthropy: National Leader in Nonprofit Management Joins Faculty.” By George! Online, January 21. www.gwu.edu/%7Eby george/012103/melendez.html (accessed June 22, 2003); Meléndez, Sara. 1997. “An ‘Outsider’s’ View of Leadership.” In The Leader of the Future, ed. Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckland. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons; ——— . 1998. “The Nonprofit Sector: The Cornerstone of Civil Society.” Issues of Democracy (USIA Electronic Journal) 3, no. 1 (January). http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0198/ijde/melendez.htm (accessed June 22, 2003); ——— . 2002. “Out of Bounds.” Association Management 54, no. 11 (November): 32–38; Newsroom. 2002. “IS President Announces Plans to Step Down at Year’s End: Dr. Sara Meléndez to Join Faculty of George Washington University.” August 2.
www.independentsector.org/media/melendez2pr.htm cessed October 28, 2003).
(ac-
Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
MÉNDEZ, CONSUELO HERRERA (1904–1985) Born in San Marcos, Texas, Consuelo Herrera Méndez taught for more than forty-five years and was a leader in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Her father was a schoolteacher, and her mother owned a bakery and worked as a seamstress. She grew up in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Austin High School in 1923, an unusual feat for a Mexican American, especially a woman, during this time period. She was denied a teaching position in Austin because she was Mexican American but found teaching positions in Bay City and Taft, Texas. In 1927 she returned to Austin and began teaching at Comal, the segregated Mexican school. Yet even though she taught at a Mexican school, the superintendent hired her with great reluctance. At the age of thirty-nine Consuelo Herrera married attorney Patricio Méndez in 1943, and both became active in educational and civic affairs in the Austin area. Although they did not have children, they founded several parent-teacher associations (PTAs) at local Mexican schools. Consuelo Méndez also translated the state PTA newsletter into Spanish, authored several articles for it, and testified in an Austin school desegregation suit. On a day-to-day basis she made a difference in local Mexican schools by purchasing materials for underfunded classrooms and participated in fund-raisers. After many years of attending summer school, she earned her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1956. Consuelo Méndez was also active in civic and political affairs. She served as president of LULAC Council No. 202 and chaired the state LULAC convention in 1962. She and her husband participated in poll tax drives and voter registration initiatives from the 1940s into the 1960s. Patricio Méndez had political aspirations and ran for the Austin City Council in 1951, the first Latino to do so. Like most spouses of political candidates, Consuelo Méndez worked tirelessly during the campaign, and reportedly, school officials exerted pressure on her to curb her involvement. Although Méndez was not elected, the family remained engaged in politics at the local and state levels. Méndez retired from teaching at the age of sixtyeight in 1972. She belonged to the Texas State Teachers Association, the Austin Association of Teachers, the Association for Childhood Education, and the National Education Association. The PTA honored her in
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Méndez, Olga A. 1962 and 1981. Several years before her retirement one principal noted, “Mrs. Méndez is a very fine teacher who seems to grow stronger through the years. She is now nearing retirement but this doesn’t show in her zeal to be an outstanding teacher.” She died in 1985 at the age of eighty-one, and two years later the Austin Independent School District dedicated a school in her honor. See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCES: Austin Light. 1985. June 21; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Consuelo Herrera Méndez.” In New Handbook of Texas, 4:618. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
MÉNDEZ, OLGA A. (1925?–
)
Dynamic politician Olga A. Méndez began to advocate for poor Puerto Rican families almost immediately after arriving in New York City. She recalls an incident that happened while she waited to see a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan: “A very poor, humble Puerto Rican woman with a sick baby was in anguish because she could not speak English; the clerk was treating her very badly. When I spoke for the woman there were tears of relief and gratitude in her eyes. My social conscience was raised. If I would have walked out, I would not be the Olga Méndez I am now.” Thus the stage was set for Méndez’s career as an activist. Olga Arán Méndez was the first Puerto Rican woman elected to a state legislature in the continental United States and the longest-serving Latina in New York state government. A feisty and shrewd politician, she represented the Thirtieth Senatorial District of New York State since 1978, more than a quarter of a century. This legislative district encompasses parts of the Bronx, Washington Heights, and Spanish Harlem. A charismatic woman in her mid-seventies, Méndez is also a breast cancer survivor and a staunch advocate of education, early detection, and medical responsibility on that subject. Méndez was born and raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Educated on the island, she received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Puerto Rico. Soon thereafter she came to New York City, claiming that life for a single woman was easier in the city than in Puerto Rico. In New York Méndez earned a master’s in psychology from Columbia University Teachers College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Yeshiva University in 1975. Married to Tony Méndez, the son of a New York Puerto Rican family with strong ties to Democratic Party politics, Olga Méndez became immersed in the city’s political scene. Her father-in-law, Antonio Mén-
dez, was a key Tammany Hall political figure in East Harlem. Based in the Caribe Democratic Club along with Méndez senior, Olga’s brother, Freddie Arán, was also a Democratic Party district leader. Olga Méndez also had academic credentials. Her extensive teaching background included directing the Puerto Rican Studies Department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and helping create the Committee for a Fair Education in response to threats against bilingual education in the Brentwood, Long Island, public schools. Involved in both educational and political issues, Méndez created the first Spanish branch of the League of Women Voters, was vice president of the Puerto Rican Association of Women Voters, and launched numerous national voter registration drives. Much of Méndez’s volunteer work promoted electoral participation and good government. In 1978 Méndez was elected state senator in a special election, winning 89 percent of the vote. She was reelected in twelve consecutive elections with equally impressive percentages. Her standing committee assignments in the New York State legislature include service on Commerce, Economic Development and Small Business, Consumer Protection, Education, Finance, Health, Housing, Construction and Community Development, Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, and Rules. She is particularly supportive of legislation that eliminates discrimination and gender-, racial-, and minority-based barriers and has served on the Senate Minority Task Force on Women’s Issues, the Women’s Legislative Caucus, the Executive Board for the Center for Women in Government, Harlem Community Development, the Task Force for Women in the Courts, the Senate Task Force on Affordable Housing, the Legislative Commission on Science Technology, and the Child Care 2000 Task Force. In March 1989 Senator Méndez was honored by her peers when she was chosen to chair the Senate Democratic Puerto Rican and Hispanic Task Force. Health problems of Puerto Rican, Latina, and black women became a major crusade for Senator Méndez as a result of her own experience with breast cancer. A cofounder with Joseph Mercado of the group the First Saturday in October, Méndez strives to increase awareness of the disease through this organization. Self-examination for early detection, free mammograms, education, and information are the tools used by the organization to fight the disease. For her efforts Méndez was presented with a Humanitarian Award for outstanding contributions in breast cancer awareness by the Latino Coalition for Fair Media. The recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation, she also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Puerto Rican
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Méndez v. Westminster
Olga Méndez campaigning for the New York State Senate. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
and Hispanic Task Force. The Good Government Leadership Award from the Fiorello La Guardia Good Government Committee honored Senator Méndez for placing government before party politics. In December 2002 Méndez grabbed headlines throughout the state when she announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party and joining the Republicans because she was disillusioned by the Democratic Party’s inability to meet the needs of her senatorial district. In 2004 Méndez faced her first electoral campaign as a Republican and was defeated by José Serrano Jr. See also Politics, Electoral. SOURCES: Hispanic America. 1995. “Senator Olga Mendez.” Special edition. 1, no. 1 (May): 10; Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1984. “Olga A. Méndez.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, ed. Louis Reyes Rivera and Julio Rodríguez, 69–70. New York: IPRUS Institute; New York State Senate online. “Olga A. Mendez, 28th District,” www.senate.state.ny.us/ Docs/members/Mendez.html (accessed September 14, 2004). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
MÉNDEZ V. WESTMINSTER Méndez v. Westminster (1946) was a cornerstone case in the history of school desegregation. The legal arguments used by the plantiffs’ attorney, David Marcus, and by Judge Paul McCormick foreshadowed Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in several areas, including the judicious use of social science research and the application of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, Thurgood Marshall was a coauthor of the amicus curiae brief filed by the NAACP in Méndez v. Westminster.
In 1944 Latinos in Orange County, California, organized to confront the segregation of their children into “Mexican” schools. William and Virginia Guzmán joined other Mexican American parents at a Santa Ana school board meeting, and in Westminster Gonzalo Méndez pressured the board to provide integrated educational facilities. School districts had drawn boundaries around Mexican neighborhoods to ensure de facto segregation. Furthermore, Mexicans who lived in “white” residential areas were also subject to school segregation, as the Ayala family found out when eighteen-year-old Isabel was turned away when she tried to enroll her younger siblings at their local school in Garden Grove. All of these incidents came together in this landmark court case. In March 1945 Gonzalo Méndez, William Guzmán, Frank Palomino, Thomas Estrada, and Lorenzo Ramírez, with the help of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), sued four local school districts—Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena. Segregation was prevalent throughout Orange County during the 1930s and 1940s. In Santa Ana Mexicans could sit only in the balcony of local movie theaters. Mexican American residents of Orange County who came of age during World War II, like their peers elsewhere in the Southwest, remembered signs in retail stores and restaurants that declared, “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” Children of blended European American and Mexican American heritage were not necessarily cushioned from discrimination. As the preeminent commentator on California life Carey McWilliams stated, “Occasionally the school authorities inspect the children so that the offspring of a Mex-
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Méndez v. Westminster ican mother whose name may be O’Shaughnessy will not slip into the wrong school.” Before Gonzalo Méndez, a naturalized Mexican citizen, and his wife Felícitas, a Puertorriqueña, sought legal redress, they organized other parents. Then they persuaded the school board to propose a bond issue for building a new, integrated school. The measure failed, and the school board refused to consider other options. At a board meeting in January 1945 the minutes referred to the matter of school segregation with the oblique phrase “the problem of the complaint from the Mexican speaking peoples was discussed at length.” The board, however, voted to admit to the white school Japanese American children returning from the internment camps. Gonzalo Méndez hired David Marcus, an attorney who also represented the Mexican consul. Members of the Los Angeles LULAC Council, such as Manuel Viega, took an early interest in the case. Well known as a middle-class civil rights organization in Texas, LULAC had spread to California, and the Méndez case itself later spurred the creation of Santa Ana Council No. 47, cofounded by Méndez plaintiff Frank Palomino. Southern California LULAC members went door-to-door encouraging their neighbors to show their support and attend fund-raisers, raffling off at one event a shiny new refrigerator. LULACers also persuaded Mr. Ayala to permit Isabel Ayala to testify. During the trial superintendents repeated well-worn stereotypes. “Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability and in their economic outlook.” Youngsters needed separate schools, given their lack of English proficiency; they “were handicapped in ‘interpreting English words because their cultural background’ prevented them from learning Mother Goose rhymes.” Superintendent James L. Kent of Garden Grove recited a laundry list of hygienic problems peculiar to Mexican children that warranted, in part, their segregation, including “lice, impetigo, tuberculosis, generally dirty hands, face, neck, and ears.” When David Marcus asked if all children were dirty, Kent answered, “No sir.” Marcus questioned the constitutionality of educational segregation and called in social scientists who challenged the supposed need for separate schools. Fourteen-year-old Carol Torres took the stand to counter claims that Mexican children did not speak English. The testimony of Felícitas Méndez perhaps best encapsulated the hopes of Latino parents. “We always tell our children they are Americans.” In his 1946 decision Judge Paul McCormick “ruled that segregation of Mexican youngsters found no justification in the laws of California and furthermore was a clear denial of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The school districts filed an
appeal. Realizing the importance of McCormick’s decision, the following civil rights organizations filed amicus curiae briefs: the American Jewish Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the NAACP. California attorney general Robert W. Kenney composed his own supporting brief. When the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1947 upheld McCormick’s ruling, the Orange County school districts decided to desegregate and drop the case, dashing any hope that this would be the test case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Méndez v. Westminster assumes national significance through its tangible connections to Brown v. Board of Education in four related areas, in addition to Thurgood Marshall’s involvement. First, the Méndez case influenced a shift in NAACP legal strategy to include “social science arguments”; historian Rubén Flores calls the links “clear and unmistakable.” Second, Judge McCormick relied not just on legal precedent, but also on social science research. Third, “it was the first time that a federal court had concluded that the segregation of Mexican Americans in public schools was a violation of state law” and unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment because of the denial of due process and equal protection. Last, as the direct result of the Méndez case, the California legislature passed the Anderson bill (1947), a measure that repealed all California school codes mandating segregation and was signed into law by Earl Warren, then governor of California. Seven years later he presided over the Brown case as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Méndez v. Westminster was a crucial case in the multiple struggles for school desegregation and forecast the rationale of the Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education. See also Education SOURCES: Flores, Rubén. 1994. “Social Science in the Southwestern Courtroom: A New Understanding of the NAACP’s Legal Strategies in the School Desegregation Cases.” B.A. Thesis. Princeton University; McWilliams, Carey. 1947. “Is Your Name Gonzales?” Nation 164 (March 15): 302; Reporter’s Transcript of Proceedings, Gonzalo Méndez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County et al. File Folders 4292-M, Box #740, Civil Cases 4285–4292. RG 221, Records of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of California, Central Division, National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, CA; Ruiz, Vicki L. 2003. “ ‘We Always Tell Our Children They Are Americans’: Méndez v. Westminster and the California Road to Brown.” College Board Review 200 (Fall): 20–27; ———. 2004. “Tapestries of Resistance: Episodes of School Segregation and Desegregation in the U.S. West.” In From Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Exploration of Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, ed. Peter Lau. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Wollenberg, Charles. 1976. All Deliberate Speed: Segregation
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Mendieta, Ana and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855–1875. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Vicki L. Ruiz
MENDIETA, ANA (1948–1985) The life and work of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta are noteworthy for innovative spirit, courage, and vision. Born in Havana, Cuba, on November 18, 1948, Mendieta emigrated from her homeland to the United States at the age of thirteen and spent the next years of her life in a succession of foster homes. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1972. She returned to Cuba for the first time as an adult in 1980 and again in 1981 for a one-month stay at the Escaleras de Jaruco with Cuban Ministry of Culture support. Nevertheless, her connections to Cuba remained as strong as her need to connect to the earth as a primal source. There is no single way to label Mendieta’s artistic expression. Her work transcends singular classification in a particular style or medium. The one constant factor within her work is her relentless investigation of the female body imaged as the connection between matter and spirit. Mendieta approached this investigation through performance, earthworks, sculpture, drawing, ritualistic acts, and photographic documentation of works created on site. Mendieta incorporated her Cuban roots into her artistic work through the study of Santería, a blend of Roman Catholicism and the African Yoruba religion found in the Caribbean. An example of her integration of Santería is the site-specific sculpture she created in Miami in 1982. She adorned a ceiba tree, used by the santeros, with human hair. Soon afterward locals adorned the tree with myriad offerings. Her work focuses on the transformative property of places and nature, as in the alteration of an ordinary tree into a ritualistic site and experience. Mendieta’s identification with nature and its cycles can also be seen in her Tree of Life works (1976–1977), which were part of the Silueta series where she imprinted silhouettes of her own body in the landscape. She visually merged her body with a tree by covering her naked body with mud, leaves, and dry grass, thus identifying herself with nature and the cycles of nature. The breakthrough performance piece that brought Mendieta national attention was her Body Tracks series, first performed in Iowa from 1974 to 1977 and again in 1982. Mendieta covered her arms in blood and slid them down a white surface, leaving their imprints on a fabric attached to the gallery wall. In addition to using blood mixed with tempera paint, Mendieta had herself covered in blood, bound in cloth strips, and
Portrait of Ana Mendieta in Italy in 1985. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection. Galerie Lelong, New York.
buried in mud and rock. In another performance work titled Death of a Chicken (1972), she stood holding a beheaded bleeding chicken splattering blood over her naked body, once again invoking the rituals associated with Santería. The idea of the coexistence of opposites obsessed Mendieta as she focused on the inseparable relationship between birth and death and between creation and destruction. Working with various elements, Mendieta transmuted them, imbuing them with symbolic meaning that transcends their physical embodiment. Her labyrinthine floor sculptures are a mixture of earth and water, and in the Fireworks Silueta series Mendieta worked with the interplay of fire and air. Anima is a sculptural female form created from a bamboo armature that was lit with fireworks. Ana Mendieta died in an unexplained fall from her husband’s apartment window on September 8, 1985, in New York City. Her husband, sculptor Carl André, was tried and later acquitted of her death. She had no children. She has left a legacy of groundbreaking images and performances that have had a lasting effect on the contemporary art world.
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Mendoza, Lydia See also Artists SOURCES: Barreras del Rio, Petra, and John Perreault. 1987. Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cruz, Carlos A. 1998. “Ana Mendieta’s Art: A Journey Through Her Life.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. ed. New York: Oxford University Press; Jacob, Mary Jane. 1991. The “Silueta” Series, 1973–1980. New York: Galerie Lelong.
Jackie Morfesis
MENDOZA, LYDIA (1916–
)
Born in Houston on May 13, 1916, into a musical and entertainment-oriented family, Lydia Mendoza received a great deal of support from her parents, Leonor Zamarripa and Francisco Mendoza. Her dream of following a life in music was formed by the age of four. In 1926, when she was ten, her first public performance was at her father’s birthday party. The Mendoza family’s first recording as el Cuarteto Carta Blanca with OKeh Records in 1928 netted them $140. Although she was thrilled to make ten records, Mendoza sheds light on the other reality: “The truth is that they paid us very little, but what did we know about these things? To us, $140 was a fortune.” Shortly after their first recording the Mendoza family moved to Detroit, where they found an audience among migrant workers. In the early 1930s she toured with her family throughout the Southwest and Midwest, singing at migrant farm labor camps, on street corners, and in church halls. She recalls that “[Plaza de Zacate in San Antonio] was precisely where a man [Manuel J. Cortez] who had a radio program heard me sing. He took me to the radio station. . . . He then entered me in a contest sponsored by Pearl Beer Company.” This led to live appearances on radio. The contest was broadcast as a half-hour program, La voz latina, from the Teatro Nacional. After an overwhelmingly positive public reception, Cortez “pleaded with Lydia’s mother for a repeat performance.” He even secured her a spot for her own radio performance, which eventually led to a contract with RCA Victor’s Bluebird Record Company. Her radio spots also included singing advertisement jingles, such as one for Iron Tonic Vitamins. In 1933 she recorded her first solo hit, “Mal hombre,” which catapulted her into a solo career. She married her first husband, Juan Alvarado, in 1935. Together they had three daughters, Lydia (1935), Yolanda (1937), and María Leonor (1941). They were married until he died in 1961. Three years later, while performing in Denver, Colorado, she married her second husband, Fred Martínez. World War II put a temporary end to both Mendoza’s recordings and tours, but by this time Mendoza had recorded more than 200 songs. A government ra-
tion on shellac required that record companies limit the number of records they produced, and a shortage of rubber did not allow for new tires on vehicles, which in turn affected Mendoza’s touring. In 1947 Mendoza and her family resumed their variety show on the road, with Mendoza as the main attraction. The death of Mendoza’s mother in 1954 led to the demise of the show, but Mendoza’s solo career continues to take her throughout North America. Mendoza recorded with numerous record labels, including Falcón, Ideal, RCA Victor, and Columbia. Her travels have taken her on international tours, and she has acquired many titles along the way, from “la Alondra de le Frontera” to one of the two “Texas Greats.” Because of poor health she ended her career in the early 1980s. Today Mendoza lives in San Antonio, having enjoyed a career that spanned six decades, from the 1920s through the 1980s. In the latter part of her career she earned many awards, including membership in the Tejano Conjunto Hall of Fame (1991), the Tejano Music Hall of Fame, the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Tejano Roots Hall of Fame (2002). She received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 1999. She has said that singing is her life and that she will be singing when she dies: “I’ll be somewhere singing and my day will come. That’s when God will say: ‘This is it. It’s over.’ ” SOURCES: Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. 2001. Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music: Norteño Tejano Legacies: La historia de Lydia Mendoza. New York: Oxford University Press; Burr, Ramiro. 1991. “Play Honors Legendary Singer.” Houston Chronicle, November 4, Star edition, Houston, 1; ———. 2001. “Lark of the Border Celebrates 85th Birthday.” San Antonio Express News, May 25, S.A. Life, 1F; Strachwitz, Chris, and James Nicolopulos. 1993. Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography. Houston: Arte Público Press. Mary Ann Villarreal
MENDOZA, MARÍA ESTELLA ALTAMIRANO (1948– ) Politician María Estella Altamirano Mendoza, “Stella,” was born in California in 1948. Stella Mendoza’s Mexican immigrant parents settled in Brawley’s segregated East Side. Manuel, her father, was a farm foreman. In the summertime the family traveled north to harvest crops. They lived in tents, and her mother cooked for up to ninety workers. Stella Mendoza attributes her independence to her mother, María Estella, “a very strong woman.” When Mendoza entered school, she did not know English. After high school she worked for Russell Jones, an optometrist, for twenty years. At night she attended community college and earned an associate’s
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Mendoza, María Estella Altamirano
María Estella Altamirano Mendoza. Courtesy of María Estella Altamirano Mendoza.
degree in social science with honors. She married Ernie Mendoza, a deputy sheriff, and had three sons. Before retiring, Jones urged her to become a realtor and run for public office. In 1988 Mendoza, a Republican, was elected to the Brawley City Council. She received the most votes and became the town’s first Latina mayor. Shortly thereafter breast cancer forced her to have a mastectomy. Battling cancer made her “more assertive, more aggressive.” She thought, “The hell with it, people are going to know how I feel.” Mendoza joined civic and service organizations and was the first woman president of the county’s oldest Mexican club, the Hidalgo Society. In 1994 the Southern California Association of Governments elected her its president. After two terms on the town council she ran for county supervisor representing Brawley’s West Side. Pro-farmer, white voters predominated, and she lost in the primary; two years later her husband lost an election for sheriff. In 2000 Stella Mendoza became the first woman elected to the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) Board of Directors. Located in the southeastern corner of California, the IID, a water and electricity public utility with 1,100 employees, is the nation’s largest irrigation district. It holds water rights to 70 percent of California’s allotment from the Colorado River. The Imperial Valley is a blistering desert with a $1-billion agribusiness economy, but Imperial County is the state’s poorest county, with an unemployment rate fluctuating from 22 percent to 34 percent. Most farm owners are white, and most farmworkers are Mexican. Although Latinos make up 72 percent of the population, only three of ten
are elected to county government seats. Stella Mendoza is the only elected female county official. When Mendoza ran for IID director, she told power customers that she would represent every one of them, not just the farmers. She was also against a proposed water transfer to San Diego. She defeated a farmer, the son of a former congressman, who spent $90,000 to her $17,000 and had the local newspaper’s endorsement. Her tenure began with her assemblyman selecting her as Woman of the Year from his district. She quickly clashed with farmers by demanding that the water department pay an equitable share of information technology costs, prompting two farm organizations to vote “no confidence” in the board. Mendoza and the board were criticized for not conducting an efficiency study, for not hiring an in-house legal counsel, and for excessive travel expenses. Farmers were so angry that they sued to revoke the board’s water trusteeship. The most important issue facing the board was a forty-five-year proposal to transfer water to San Diego. Drought and urban growth prompted the federal government to demand that California live within its river allotment. Studies predicted dramatic environmental and socioeconomic consequences from the transfer. The main sticking point was the Salton Sea, a lake that subsists on field drain water and provides a flyway for hundreds of endangered birds and fish. Environmentalists complained that the transfer would concentrate salinity and destroy the sea’s ecosystem. As president of the board in 2002, Mendoza drew the wrath of state and federal politicians for opposing idling land and diverting water to stabilize the Salton Sea, which would have resulted in the loss of 2,000 jobs. Residents were indignant that farmers were to be paid for not farming, and they feared that a receding shoreline would expose dust and toxins. When the board rejected a long-term transfer, the Interior Department cut the district’s water order, and the state threatened to take the IID’s water or dissolve the district. Mendoza refused to back down, prompting a reporter to dub her the “water warrior.” Negotiations resulted in the largest agriculture-to-urban water transfer in U.S. history. It was approved despite Mendoza’s “hell no” vote. A coalition with deep pockets backed a male Democratic Mexican American to oppose her reelection in 2004, but this time she received the local newspaper’s endorsement: “Mendoza is tough and fearless and, yes, sometimes salty. But she is no phony, and she does care about the common folks in this Valley.” She won handily. SOURCES: The Daily Transcript. 2002. “For residents of Imperial Valley, water is all they have.” San Diego. December 12; ———. 2003. “Stella Mendoza, a water warrior for Imperial
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Mendoza v. Tucson School District No. 1 Valley.” San Diego. (January 15.); Imperial Valley Press. 2002. “Decree: IID’s Water cut by 10%.” (December 28); ———. 2003. “IID board votes 3–2.” October 3; ———. 2004. Editorial: “Mendoza for IID division 4.” February 27; Mendoza, María Estella (“Stella”) Altamirano. 2004. Interview by Benny Andrés Jr., January 16. Tape recording. Brawley, CA.
Benny Andrés Jr
MENDOZA V. TUCSON SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1 Segregation in U.S. public schools is often thought of as a problem historically affecting African Americans. Mexican Americans, however, also experienced segregated and inferior schooling in Texas, California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. From the late 1890s through the 1970s local and state administrators supported policies that justified placing Mexican-origin students in separate schools or classrooms in order to meet their “special needs” based on linguistic and cultural “differences.” Some school districts, however, simply barred Mexican children from attending regular public schools solely because of their ethnicity and established separate schools, commonly referred to as “Mexican schools,” that were inferior in construction, curriculum, teaching materials, and facilities and were poorly funded. Policies and practices that promoted a segregated or substandard education did not go unchallenged. With the assistance of organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the American GI Forum, la Alianza Hispano-Americana, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), Mexican American parents filed numerous lawsuits between 1930 and 1978 that successfully challenged segregation and discriminatory policies. Some important cases include Méndez v. Westminster (1946), Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948), and Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970). Like other parents in the Southwest, Mexican American parents in Tucson also challenged policies and practices that promoted educational inequality in their neighborhood schools. In the early 1970s parents, especially mothers, complained of problems they observed as school volunteers such as low reading ability, inferior teaching materials, dilapidated facilities, an inferior and culturally insensitive curriculum, the lack of bilingual education services and teachers, and the lack of academic preparation for college. Mothers also alleged that west-side schools, which served predominantly Mexican-origin students, were being used as “elephant graveyards,” that is, dumping grounds for elderly Anglo teachers who were close to retirement,
which led to apathy and low expectations among teachers. After consulting with community groups, Mary Mendoza, Terry Trujillo, Albert Sánchez, and other parents filed a lawsuit, with the assistance of MALDEF, against Tucson School District No. 1 (Mendoza v. Tucson School District No. 1) in October 1974. This lawsuit coincided with one filed by African American parents charging the district with de jure segregation. Like other lawsuits, it alleged that the district maintained a “triethnic” segregated school system, tracked minority students in a discriminatory manner, provided an inferior curriculum and facilities to minorities, lacked bilingual information for parents, and did not promote minorities in a fair and equitable manner. Although the court did not find de jure segregation, it did find that the district promoted de facto segregation through its redistricting practices, the building of new schools, and assigning large numbers of African American and Mexican American students to certain schools, creating “minority” schools on the city’s west side. While the court ordered the district to implement a desegregation plan for several schools, it did not address concerns raised by Mexican American parents regarding the quality of education their children received. According to local activist Nellie Bustillos, the court’s ruling also called for the closure of several neighborhood schools that were either too old, were beyond repair, or had low enrollment due to city growth patterns. This decision prompted a group of women to mobilize and organize other parents, especially mothers, around the court’s order and other educational issues following the lawsuit’s adjudication in 1978. Under Bustillos’s leadership Gloria Limón, Irene Echeverría, Juanita Cortéz, and other parents rallied community support through grassroots activities to save their schools and promote bilingual education. With the help of other local activists they developed informational workshops to educate parents on their rights and how to assert those rights, the importance of bilingual education, Title 1 funds, preserving local neighborhood schools, many of which were historic buildings that reflected Tucson’s cultural past, and improving the quality of education for Mexican American students. Other strategies included door-to-door solicitation, speaking on local radio programs, distributing leaflets and flyers, negotiating with Anglo parents regarding the fate of certain schools, picketing and protesting at the main district office, and obtaining the support of local Chicana/o public officials. Ultimately they succeeded in persuading the district to keep and renovate several neighborhood schools, establish and integrate bilingual programs into the
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Mercado, Victoria “Vicky” elementary- and middle-school curriculum, and persuade the University of Arizona to establish a bilingual education teacher program in the College of Education. The fight for educational equality did not end there, however. Bustillos and seven women who called themelves “those women” filed another lawsuit in the early 1980s demanding that three “minority” high schools be brought up to standard to better prepare students for higher education by implementing an advanced curriculum and renovating physical facilities. See also Education SOURCES: Donato, Rubén. 1997. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era. Albany: State University of New York Press; Getz, Lynne Marie. 1997. Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; González, Gilbert G. 1990. Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation. Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press; Pardo, Mary. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; San Miguel, Guadalupe, Jr. 1987. “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981. Austin: University of Texas Press; Sánchez, George I. 1951. Concerning Segregation of Spanish-Speaking Children in the Public Schools. Austin: University of Texas, Austin. Maritza de la Trinidad
MERCADO, VICTORIA “VICKY” (1951–1982) The second oldest of five children, Victoria Mercado was born on March 25, 1951, in Salinas, California, to Esther Blend and Fabio Mercado. When she was three years old, her parents divorced, and Vicky Mercado moved with her mother to Watsonville, California, to live near her mother’s extended family. Watsonville is a large agricultural community, and Blend worked in the canneries, eventually becoming a federal inspector. In a May 2002 interview Blend offered the following thoughts about her daughter: “She was always for the underdog. And she was friends with people from all cultures. She believed in that.” In these formative years Mercado went to work in the canneries during the summer because she wanted to save enough money to buy a car. She was appalled at how people were treated, and how hard they had to work. On a trip to Mexico she was deeply affected by the poverty and suffering she witnessed. Giving away all of her clothes, she returned home with virtually no possessions. After her graduation from Watsonville High School in 1968, Mercado traveled to Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade to help with the sugar harvest. She came home an inspired activist committed to
progressive social change, especially for Chicano/ Latino people. In the Brigade Mercado met Fania Davis, a young African American student and activist originally from Birmingham, Alabama. When Fania Davis’s sister Angela was arrested in October 1970, Mercado joined the staff of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. Davis, charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy arising from an attempted prison escape, was acquitted on all charges in June 1972. Mercado worked tirelessly on the Free Angela campaign, helping build an international movement in Davis’s defense. Mercado spoke widely and was particularly influential in the Chicano/Latino community in San Jose, California, where the trial was held. After the trial Mercado traveled extensively. She accompanied Angela Davis on a European tour in the summer of 1972, where they met with activists from all over the world as part of an international movement to free political prisoners. In June 1973 she attended the founding convention of the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression held in Chicago. Mercado enrolled at San Francisco State University in the fall of 1969, pursued an interdisciplinary major in the social sciences with an emphasis in Chicano/ethnic studies, and graduated in June 1976. She thought seriously about attending law school. She worked with the United Farm Workers union in the mid-1970s, marching with farmworkers from Santa Cruz through Watsonville and down to Salinas in support of the strawberry workers who were seeking union recognition. She joined the Brown Berets and participated in a variety of civil rights struggles in San Francisco, especially against police violence in the barrios. Charismatic, energetic, witty, and brilliant, she became a consummate political organizer. In the late 1970s Mercado settled in Oakland, California, and went to work in a warehouse, becoming an organizer for the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). She was stalwartly committed to winning equality for women workers in their job classifications, wages, and working conditions. She railed against manipulation of job classifications so that women who did exactly the same work as their male counterparts were put in a different classification and thus received lower pay. Mercado maintained her close ties with Angela and Fania Davis, and she also frequently returned home to Watsonville. She became interested in her family’s history and recorded the oral histories of her mother’s five sisters. Victoria Mercado was murdered in front of her home on May 23, 1982, by a man who had come ostensibly to purchase her car. Seriously wounded in the attack, her partner survived. Hundreds came to pay
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Mesa-Bains, Amalia tribute to Victoria Mercado at her funeral, held at St. Patrick’s Church in Watsonville. SOURCES: Aptheker, Bettina. 1976. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Blend, Esther. 2002. Interview by Bettina Aptheker, May; Watsonville Register-Pajaronian. 1982. Obituary for Victoria Mercado, May 24. Bettina Aptheker
MESA-BAINS, AMALIA (1943–
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Amalia Mesa-Bains was born in Santa Clara, California, into a migrant farmworking family. During the Mexican Revolution her father, Lawrence Escobedo Mesa, left Mexico for the United States with his mother and brothers, forming part of a large, undocumented family of farmworkers who traveled throughout the Southwest. Her mother, Marina Gonzáles, crossed the El Paso/Juárez border with her mother on day passes to clean houses on the American side. Consequently, Mesa-Bains’s life was marked by the immigrant experience from a very young age. The second of three children, Amalia Mesa-Bains descended from generations of folk artists. From infancy Mesa-Bains observed her mother and grandmother’s home altars. Her grandmother’s altar displayed photographs of her son, who had died during World War II, family pictures, saints, and personal objects. She also kept a shrine in her yard, and MesaBains helped maintain it by pulling grass that grew around it. In Mesa-Bains’s words, “I come from a long line of inventors with patents and I was taught to use my artistic and creative skills to fix things that were broken; to use whatever was available to solve problems.” Mesa-Bains attended Foothill Junior College before transferring to San Jose State University. Unaware of the difference between a bachelor of arts degree and a bachelor of fine arts degree, Mesa-Bains enrolled in all the art courses offered in the curriculum. Her determination was rewarded in 1966 when she received a bachelor of arts from San Jose State University with a concentration in painting. After graduation her artistic career expanded. She was included in the Phelan Awards exhibition that recognized California-based artists. Her work during this time introduced new media and materials, such as metal flake sprays from the Chicano low-rider car influence. Historically the low-rider car serves as a major component of the American southwestern cultural scene. In the 1960s Mesa-Bains connected with the Chicano movement. She participated in the first Chicano art show in Delano, California, during the farmworkers strike. This momentous event took place on February 15, 1968, when César Chávez began his twenty-five-
day fast to build morale among the United Farm Workers and to discourage threats of violence among his followers. In 1971 Mesa-Bains earned her first master’s degree in interdisciplinary education from San Francisco State University. Her efforts then turned to defining the Chicano experience in the United States. From 1971 to 1983 Mesa-Bains was a bilingual educator with the San Francisco Unified School District and produced several academic videos in multicultural education and English as a second language. She remained active as an exhibiting artist and was associated with the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. Mesa-Bains became interested in the Teacher Corps and met Yolanda Garfias Woo, her teacher and mentor. Woo was a woman of Oaxacan descent whose many occupations included weaver, teacher, artist, and cultural leader. She introduced Mesa-Bains to the Mesoamerican tradition of Day of the Dead, a national holiday in Mexico. The ofrendas, offerings used to honor the memory of the ancestors, were an essential part of the celebrations. Mesa-Bains’s understanding of these traditions strengthened a cultural base that eventually allowed her to reclaim her past and become a vital artistic force. Key exhibitions at the Fifth Sun Show at the University Museum at Berkeley in 1977 included pieces associated with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. In conjunction with other Chicano artists, Mesa-Bains organized another exhibition to honor Kahlo at Galeria de la Raza in 1978. Her résumé soon expanded to include numerous critical writings and curatorial activities. The completion of a second master’s and a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Wright Institute occurred between 1977 and 1983. Her artistic career also entered the spectrum of public art, and her evolving work fused artistic elements from the ofrenda, altar, and yard shrine traditions. Mesa-Bains produced several pieces that paid tribute to specific individuals, including Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She began to exhibit outside Chicano art galleries. A turning point in her artistic career was her association with Inverna Lockpez, director of the INTAR gallery in New York, who organized a solo exhibition in 1987. The exhibit was recognized as one of the best shows in alternative spaces for that year by Art in America. After this incredible success her work received international recognition when it was included in the famous European traveling exhibition titled Le demon des anges. By the 1990s Mesa-Bains moved from the collective art of honoring women to more allegorical works that examined ritual space. Many of these pieces were installations representing private, domestic, and feminine spaces and focused on women’s place in society
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Mestizaje
Celebrated Chicana installation artist Amalia MesaBains. Photograph by Idaljiza Liz Lepiorz. Courtesy of Amalia Mesa-Bains.
as defined by the Catholic Church, such as Venus Envy Chapter One (1993). In other pieces Mesa-Bains presented a series of personal memories, autobiographical pieces that included personal items like photographs and clothing. These unique installations allowed Mesa-Bains to share her search for identity. She now exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, at Philip Morris and was associated with the gallery that eventually represented her, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery of New York (now located in Miami). Scholarly art journals included her work, and she exhibited abroad in Turkey, Denmark, and Latin America. A major work from this period is Altar for Dolores del Río, purchased by the Smithsonian for the Museum of American Art and included in the traveling exhibition Arte Latino, Treasures of the Smithsonian. Mesa-Bains has embarked on the exploration of glass as a representative form and the incorporation of digital prints. Her work has taken another step from installations to sculptural pieces. A recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, Mesa-Bains continues her cross-cultural career defining the Chicano and Latino aesthetic in the United States and Latin America. Currently she is the director of the Visual and Public Art Institute of California State University at Monterey Bay. Of her life she states that her greatest achievements are “maintaining my mar-
riage, sustaining my family, being loyal to my comadres.” See also Artists SOURCES: Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Ivonne Yarbro-Bejarno. 1991. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery; Mesa-Bains, Amelia. 1995. “Domesticana Chicana Rasquachismo.” In Distant Relations: Cercanas Distantes, Clann I GCein: Chicano, Irish, and Mexican Art and Critical Writing, ed. Trisha Ziff. New York: Smart Art Press; ———. 1992. “The Real Multiculturalism.” In Different Voices: A Social, Cultural and Historical Framework for Change in the American Art Museum. New York: Association of Art Museum Directors; Ochoa, María. 2003. Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. María de Jesús González
MESTIZAJE Mestizaje means the mixing of the races. This was a biological fact from the very beginning of the colonization process in the New World. Throughout the process of conquest, settlement, and eventual colonization Spanish and Portuguese settlers had few inhibitions about having sexual relations with indigenous or African women. Children born of these relationships were the first mestizos, a name that most often desig-
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Mestizaje nated the admixture of Indian and European or white of European descent. In Brazil mestizos were known as mamelucos. The admixture of African and European was a mulatto. In a broader sense the term mestizaje may also be applied to the various forms of mixture among nonwhite peoples. The conquest of the indigenous peoples involved women and sexual relations in various degrees of consent. It should not be assumed that such unions were always the product of violence, but the latter cannot be denied. In the first Caribbean settlements sexual abuse was general and resented by the natives. The same resistance was found among many of the Central American indigenous groups. On the other hand, in certain towns of Mesoamerica and northern South America Spaniards were welcomed with “gifts” of women by indigenous leaders interested in forming kinship or political alliances. The well-known offering of a group of women to Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, by the cacique of Tabasco, as narrated by Bernal Díaz, had unforeseen consequences, since among them was the well-known Malintzin (La Malinche). The reality of sexual liaisons between Indian women and Spanish conquistadores was not foreseen or planned by the Spanish Crown. However, before her death, Queen Isabella of Castile advocated the marriage of male Spaniards to female indigenous people. This policy was supported by the powerful advisor to the Crown, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, in 1516 in his recommendation to the Hieronimite friars in Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). The goal was to have Spaniards marry the daughters of local rulers to inherit their realms. It was a legal solution with political objectives in which race was of no concern. It assumed that the Spanish hidalgo (of distinguished lineage) would be marrying his equal and reaffirmed the validity of Spanish legislation on marriage to the new subjects. Marriage among equals was also observed among the indigenous societies. It was assumed that Spanish men would marry Indian women, and not the other way around. This attitude prevailed throughout time. The encouragement of intermarriage was not followed through as policy, but it was made irrelevant by the generalized practice of concubinage with Indian women. It was common for men of the first and second generation of conquistadores and settlers everywhere in Spanish America and some areas in Brazil to have one or even several Indian women as concubines. When African women began to arrive in the New World, whether free or slave, they shared the same fate. Slave women of all races were considered property, and therefore, sexual services were either ex-
pected or demanded. While this situation of moral looseness was against the laws of church and state, neither clergy nor Crown was able to control it anywhere. Loose liaisons and concubinage resulted in the biological mingling of the races that became typical of the settlement and population of the New World. The addition of mestizos and mulattoes to the population created a multiplicity of prototypes that by the seventeenth century had their own identities and received different names. For example, lobo and zambo were the admixture of Indian and African, and coyote was the result of Indian and mestizo. By the midseventeenth century the term casta was used to designate a heterogeneous population whose lineage included either two or three of the primary races mixed in various proportions. The product of these mixtures was assumed to be a different product from the parental sources. A mulatto was not to be confused with a black African, nor a mestizo, with an Indian. They were different and distinct categories. The process of mestizaje favored racial fragmentation and social balkanization. There was a social, as well as an economic, distance between members of the castas and the social elite, who continued to be of European descent. Among the latter the distinction between those born in the Iberian Peninsula and those born in the American continent began to have social connotations by the early seventeenth century. Variously called americanos europeos or criollos, the members of the social elite born in the New World tried to maintain their social legitimacy from the fact that they had cleanliness of blood (limpieza de sangre) and had not mingled with either Indian or African. Typically, newcomers from Spain or Portugal married white women of American birth to maintain their elite status and their cleanliness of blood. Clear distinctions among members of the elite were difficult to trace until they became politically charged at the end of the eighteenth century. However, both categories had one thing in common: they claimed to be racially clean of admixtures. This does not mean that some members of the elite did not have some mestizo antecedent that had been absorbed by the elite of Spanish descent. Given the mobility of the first generation, the mestizo offspring was often left in charge of his or her Indian mother while men pushed ahead, a case the more common the lower the social status of the indigenous woman. On the other hand, liaisons with Indian women of the highest class, while not necessarily leading to marriage among some of the most exalted conquistadores, gave their children a special category within the nascent colonial society. Francisco Pizarro,
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Mestizaje the conqueror of Peru, selected the daughter of Inca Huayna Capac. Her name was Quispe Cusi, and she was fifteen years old. He was fifty-six. Their daughter, born in 1534, was baptized as Francisca and had three Spanish women as godmothers. Pizarro had her legitimized by the Crown in May 1536. The couple also had a son. Francisco Pizarro’s brothers Juan and Gonzalo also took Indian women as unmarried partners. Gonzalo demanded Inca Manco’s full sister and wife, Cura Ocllo. Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s partner in the conquest, took the daughter of Huayna Capac, MarcaChimbo, as his concubine. Other original conquistadores and first settlers in the Andean area followed suit. The best-known offspring of the Andean conquistadores was Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, the son of Captain Garcilaso de la Vega, who was active in the eastern areas of the empire (present-day Cochabamba), and a niece of Inca Huayna Capac. Her name was Chimpu Ocllo, and she was baptized as Palla Isabel Yupanqui. Garcilaso Inca de la Vega was born in 1539. His father married a Spanish woman and did not assume his paternal role. Garcilaso Inca was educated as a Spaniard but remained in his mother’s house. He left for Spain in 1560, one year after his father’s death. There he became a distinguished Renaissance historian and scholar. The degree of mestizaje varied across the continent. The geographically more accessible and more densely populated areas of central Mexico were more permeable than the highlands of the Andean regions, and mestizaje was more widespread there than in other areas. Cities anywhere, as targets of internal migration by all racial and ethnic groups, facilitated mestizaje. Nomadic tribes in the peripheries of the Spanish settlements experienced less mestizaje. Tropical plantation areas where African slave labor predominated produced white-black mestizaje. Crossing among Africans, Indians, and their offspring was frequent in the coastal areas of the Viceroyalty of Peru and the Audiencia of Quito and the east and west coastal areas of Mexico. As European women began to arrive in larger numbers in the Spanish colonies in the late sixteenth century (this was not the case in Portuguese Brazil), more white women became available for legitimate unions. Their offspring also added to the population of Spanish descent. These women broadened the choice of partners among Europeans and their descendants, making marriages among themselves more endogamous and less prone to mestizaje. The legitimate offspring of these marriages enjoyed the protection of the law for all inheritance and had special social prerogatives. Encomenderos (holders of rights to tribute and labor) preferred to marry within their own race because en-
comiendas could not legally pass to their mestizo children. Legal marriages of Spaniards and their descendants to Indian, mestiza, or black women took place throughout the colonial period, but they were less frequent among the social elite Maintaining the lineage free of racial admixtures ensured access to prerogatives enjoyed only by the Europeans and their descendants. Social and legal bars to protect racially unmixed individuals began to be erected by the late sixteenth century. University education was essential to become a professional (largely lawyers) or an ecclesiastic. It was barred to mestizos and castas. The church hierarchy was also of European descent. By the mid-sixteenth century the church had decided officially to close its doors to mestizos and Indians. The regular orders followed a similar policy, but there were always exceptions to the rule, and notable mestizos are found among the regular orders. For example, in Mexico Diego Valadés, a mestizo was admitted to the Franciscan order and became a distinguished Latinist. By the end of the eighteenth century some of the poorer, smaller, or more remote parishes had mestizo or Indian priests. One example is José María Morelos, the rebel leader of southern Mexico, clearly a product of mestizaje. While it is true that endogamic marriages and legal bars protected the privileges of the Europeans and their descendants, the established sexual practices to which they had been accustomed made the definition of race porous and negotiable and far from a closed concept. The European model was placed at the top of the social hierarchy, but in climbing to it, slipping into a different racial category was possible. The closer persons were to the ideal of “whiteness” represented by the Europeans, the higher their chances to eventually revert to the Spanish or American Spanish racial group. In this category were the castizos, the result of a combination of Spanish and mestizo. The offspring of a castizo and a Spaniard reverted to pure Spanish or European. Passing from one racial or subracial rank to another was also possible. Parish priests in charge of registering births made decisions according to the phenotype of the children. The choice of partner could also affect the racial classification of the individual. A woman held as mulata in one parish could marry an Indian and reappear as mestiza in another. Last, the Crown itself granted passage from one category to another to mixed-blood individuals who under exceptional circumstances had become educated or enriched and had gained social prominence. Wanting to secure a higher status for their progeny, they could request a gracia al sacar, an official document that declared one legally “white” to all effects and purposes. These permits were costly and required a long legal
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Mestizaje process in which the petitioner had to argue his case as being socially justified. Gracias al sacar were mostly sought by mulattoes or lighter admixtures of Africans and whites. They were not easily granted, however, and the numbers of those favored with it were limited. While mestizaje is one of the key demographic processes of the sixteenth century, it was changed by another demographic process: the decline of the indigenous peoples as a result of the pandemics that reduced their numbers to nine-tenths of the original populations by the early seventeenth century. While there is no consensus on the number of peoples inhabiting the Americas before 1492, most scholars agree that the diseases brought by the conquest wiped out vast numbers of them. While the indigenous populations declined, the mestizos increased and sustained the process of race mixture. The result was that by the mid-seventeenth century the heterogeneous nature of the racially mixed population had created a largely urban mass of people known as castas. The indigenous populations began a demographic recovery by the late seventeenth century, and by the end of the eighteenth century they had recovered their position as the predominant racial group in many areas of the continent. In the seventeenth century parish priests began to register some of the racial varieties, a tacit recognition of the irreversibility of the process of mestizaje. This in no way granted the result of racial mixtures a higher social status. The hardening of official attitudes toward castas in the seventeenth century was reflected in official statements from the bureaucracy. Spanish officials considered them lazy, shiftless, and untrustworthy. Yet they formed the bulk of services and manual laborers in urban areas. Full-blooded Indians—or those recognized as such—were more numerous in the rural areas but were also present in the cities and their environs and in the mining towns, especially in South America. Both Indians and castas paid the bulk of head taxes in the colonies. In the seventeenth and even more so in the eighteenth centuries, Indians of high social status were given due consideration as “natural lords” (señores naturales) and were regarded as a category apart from that of their commoner counterparts. When the Franciscan convent for Indian nobles or daughters of principal lords of Corpus Christi was founded in Mexico City in 1724, only women of caciques (natural lords) and principal Indian lineage were admitted. This distinction was upheld by the Indians themselves, who wished to keep their social distance from mestizo and Indian commoners. An Indian class of natural lords endured through the end of the eighteenth century. They were landowners and maintained their social and economic prestige in their own communities, acting as intermediaries between the commoners and the Spanish
authorities. The fact that they were exempted from paying the taxes owed by all castas and common Indians kindled their desire not to mix with any other racial group. Despite this precaution, among the indigenous towns of Mexico, for example, many of their elected leaders were not full-blooded Indians, but they succeeded in being held as such by their contemporaries. In the eighteenth century the complexities of mestizaje daunted the imagination of a new generation of travelers and social observers, as well as that of the royal bureaucracy. In 1776 the Crown attempted to regulate what could become an unchecked legal situation: the marriage of people with limpieza de sangre to castas. In that year royal legislation known as the Pragmática Sanción de Matrimonios established that minors of Spanish descent had to receive parental permission to marry members of mixed parentage. Full-blooded Indians, regarded as an unmixed and noble race, were also included in this legislation. Any objection by either parents or offspring had to be argued in court. The objective was to control downward mobility of the elite. This legislation was theoretically enforced through the end of the colonial period. Its effectiveness, however, has been questioned. The number of legal suits was small in comparison with the total number of people of Spanish descent, and judges showed some leniency in the appeals. A pictorial genre depicting the many possibilities of mestizaje in the eighteenth century gained popularity after midcentury. Known as Tablas or Cuadros de mestizaje, the fifty-odd series of paintings unearthed so far purport to categorize the variety of racial mixtures. Most of the examples were painted in Mexico, although a few come from South America. The nomenclature applied to the many expressions of castas is quaint and not scientific or even trustworthy as an indication of the reality of race mixing. Some historians see value in these paintings as expressions of the social consciousness of the existing diversity and the preoccupation of the ruling elite with the encroaching nature of mestizaje. Demographic data from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are indexes of the degrees of mestizaje in several parts of the continent. Census data are only partial and somewhat unreliable for the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are limited to a few cities. Nevertheless, they reveal that true mestizos were not a large percentage of urban areas until the mid-seventeenth century. In places like Paraguay many people known as Spaniards were biologically mestizos. Surprisingly, in 1614 there were more people of African descent and its admixtures in some cities, for example, Lima, than Spaniards or mestizos. By the end of the eighteenth century the population of Spanish descent in Peru was estimated at 13 percent, the
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Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund castas at 27 percent, and the Indians at 56 percent. In the early nineteenth century Mexico’s mixed population was estimated at 22 percent, that of Spanish descent at 18 percent, and Indians at 60 percent. These figures are approximate, and there were many regional variations. The indigenous population had, in fact, retained its dominant presence in the two key areas of the Spanish colonies. In slaveholding societies such as Brazil, in the sugar-producing areas and the rich mines of the interior the population of African descent was the vast majority. Regional variations notwithstanding, the weight of these figures indicates that the process of mestizaje constitutes one of the most distinctive characteristics of colonial Latin America and gave its population an idiosyncratic nature not found in the North American colonies. See also Race and Color Consciousness SOURCES: Americas Society Art Gallery. 1996. New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America. New York: Americas Society Art Gallery; Cope, R. Douglas. 1994. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Marcílio, María Luiza. 1984. “The Population of Colonial Brazil.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethel, 2:37–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Moreno Navarro, Isidoro. 1975. Los cuadros del mestizaje americano: Estudio antropológico del mestizaje. Madrid: José Porrúa Turanza; Morner, Magnus. 1967. Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown; Schwartz, Stuart. 1995. “Colonial Identities and the Sociedad de Castas.” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1:185–201; Seed, Patricia. 1982. “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753.” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4:569–606. Asunción Lavrin
MEXICAN AMERICAN LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND (MALDEF) (1968– ) For more than a century substandard wages, rundown schools, gerrymandered voting districts, and brutal treatment by law enforcers were the common lot of people of Mexican origin in the United States. In 1968 Mexican American attorneys in San Antonio, Texas, brought together counterparts in other southwestern states to form the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Launched with Ford Foundation support, the nonprofit agency sought to assert the legal rights of Mexican Americans and to foster more Chicano/a lawyers by offering law school scholarships. In the early years of the civil rights movement MALDEF responded to the ferment of Chicano/a grassroots protests and growing community pride. A small staff of attorneys in San Antonio and Los Angeles ob-
jected to expulsions from school of Chicano/a student protesters. MALDEF launched class-action lawsuits that challenged school segregation, job discrimination, and other barriers that kept Chicanos/as from voting and running for public office. In an effort to strengthen the community, MALDEF petitioned law school scholarship holders to spend at least one year serving Mexican Americans. In 1970 MALDEF moved its headquarters to San Francisco and launched a more measured and national approach toward issues affecting Mexican Americans and other Latinos. The board of directors identified education, employment, and voting rights as prime issues. In June 1970 the first women took seats on MALDEF’s board. With offices in several southwestern states, MALDEF added another in Washington, D.C., to foster communication with federal legislators and agencies. Asserting that undocumented immigrants enhance the U.S. economy and therefore should have legal rights, MALDEF made immigration a fourth focus. In 1980 a Chicago office began representing the midwestern Latino/a community. For more than three decades MALDEF won significant legal victories. Lawsuits ended the exclusion of Latinos from juries in Texas and California. Legal actions in Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, and Wisconsin began dismantling school segregation and asserting the rights of Latino/a students. A 1972 victory in the New Mexico case Serna v. Portales provided strong legal support for bilingualbicultural education for Latinos/as nationwide. A landmark 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Doe v. Plyler, declared a Texas tuition requirement for undocumented children unconstitutional and established their right to education. In 1991 more than two years of litigation culminated in the election of the first Latina to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and the first Hispanic in 115 years. MALDEF lawsuits won access to better jobs and wages for Latinos/as in banks, canneries, fire departments, and elsewhere. MALDEF research, publications, negotiations, and public policy analyses played as important a role in community advancement as did the lawsuits. In 1975 MALDEF testimony helped extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act to Latinos/as. Using the act’s provisions, MALDEF helped halt at-large election systems and other schemes that diluted the Latino/a vote. MALDEF charged the Census Bureau with undercounting Latinos/as. The agency also fought police brutality and racial profiling and sought access to equal health care and public services. To assure that legal victories translated into concrete changes, in the 1980s MALDEF began placing more emphasis on raising Latino/a awareness of their rights and how to exercise them. “Yo Cuento!” (I
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MALDEF attorneys Joseph Berra, Leticia Saucedo, Selena Solis, and Nina Perales at the Texas Supreme Court. Photograph by José Sánchez. Courtesy of MALDEF.
count!) was the rallying cry for MALDEF’s first major community education endeavor. Speaking before community groups, MALDEF staff showed how accurate 1980 census numbers could mean more money for schools, job training, and other services. MALDEF urged Latinos/as distrustful of government agencies to fill in census forms. The agency designed leadership development programs to train professionals and grassroots leaders to be effective spokespeople, then helped them gain posts on policy-making boards and commissions. In the 1990s MALDEF lawsuits continued winning victories, and education programs taught Latino/a parents of public school pupils how to better support and guide their children. Parents, teachers, principals, and community leaders learned to analyze the performance of public schools and advocate for better educational practices. After the 2000 census MALDEF trained community leaders to take part in the redrawing of voting-district lines on the basis of census numbers. As the century changed, so did MALDEF. Responding to growing numbers of Latinos/as in southeastern states, MALDEF opened an office in Atlanta, Georgia. The agency increasingly used mass communications to teach Latinos/as about their rights. MALDEF bus posters and public service announcements brought thousands of Latino/a registrants to California’s Healthy Families Program. MALDEF radio spots featured Spanish-speaking characters working through job, tenant, and other dilemmas common among immigrants, and MALDEF began offering communications scholarships. By 2002 the agency had nine offices
in seven states and a seventy-five-member staff, including twenty-two attorneys. MALDEF efforts had important consequences for Latinas. In the 1970s and 1980s a Chicana Rights Project targeted women’s issues directly. The project improved access to federal job-training opportunities, opened up nontraditional jobs, and addressed issues of sexual harassment and involuntary sterilization. Women have led MALDEF for most of its existence. Attorney Vilma Martínez was president and general counsel from 1973 through 1982. Antonia Hernández has held that post since 1985. Latina leaders such as federal Community Service Administration director Graciela Olivarez and Los Angeles County supervisor Gloria Molina were among many Latinas who served on MALDEF’s board. Because many MALDEF legal, community education, and other positions have been held by women, the agency has become an important proving ground for Latina professionals. MALDEF has significantly advanced the civil rights of U.S. Latinos/as through its work and its presence as a successful and sophisticated legal force. In the words of Carlos Cadena, the first chair of MALDEF’s board, “The principal effect that MALDEF has had is creating in the Mexican people the knowledge that you can fight City Hall. . . . It’s ‘us’ against them and they’re more powerful; but if they try to take legal action, we have an organization that can defend us.” SOURCES: Cadena, Carlos. 1977. Oral interview by Annette Oliveira. MALDEF. Legal papers, correspondence, news clippings, annual reports, newsletters, and other material. MALDEF Collection (M0673), Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA; Oliveira, Annette. 1978. MALDEF: Diez Años, Expanded 1977–1978 Annual Report of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. San Francisco, CA: MALDEF. Annette Oliveira
MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S NATIONAL ASSOCIATION (MANA) (1974– ) With an acronym that alludes to sisterhood, the Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA) was established in 1974 by a group of Mexican American women living in the Washington, D.C., area. Many of these women represented that very small percentage of Latinas who had a college education. Many of its founders had come to Washington, D.C., as government interns, graduate students, civil service workers, and holders of other private and public-sector jobs. As a result of various informal meetings this small group of Mexican American women became aware of their relative isolation from each other. As early as 1970 many felt the need to create an organization to foster
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Mexican Mothers’ Club, University of Chicago Settlement House mentoring and leadership skills that would build a strong sense of community among themselves. In 1974 this informal group of Mexican American women organized one of the first national groups of Mexican American women, the Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA). The founders of the organization had the foresight to envision a national organization that reached beyond their own social and economic situation. Although these professional Mexican American women recognized the importance of establishing a strong network and communication system to assist them in not only surviving but thriving in the high-powered and ruthlessly competitive environment of Washington, D.C., they decided to expand MANA to include Mexican American women from all socioeconomic backgrounds. MANA set out to promote leadership and organize mentoring networks among Mexican Americans throughout the United States, and soon after its creation, it had members in sixteen states. The founders of MANA believed that their national organization needed strong regional chapters in order to develop as an efficient, democratic organization. MANA’s organizational philosophy changed when it expanded its focus to include all Latinas, not just Mexican American women. This change met with some internal opposition that was never resolved and caused some members to break away from MANA. MANA’s national recruitment efforts clashed with a California-based organization of Mexican American women, Comisión Femenil Mexicana, established in southern California in 1970. MANA and the Comisión engaged in a contentious dispute that was ultimately settled with the Comisión concentrating its efforts on California. MANA adopted various methods to accomplish its goals. It organized an annual conference that attracted a large cross section of women who attended various leadership and networking workshops. Members took on the responsibility of researching various vital issues, such as education, employment, poverty, housing, and child care, that affected the everyday lives of Mexican American women. MANA produced position papers on these and other issues related to Mexican American women, and these papers were then distributed to local and national politicians and the mass media. Between 1977 and 1979 MANA developed its reputation as one of the major umbrella organization for Latinas under the leadership of its national president, Elisa Sánchez. MANA experienced a major organizational confrontation in the spring of 1980 during the National Hispanic Feminist Conference held in San Jose, California. Many problems plagued this conference from the very beginning, including the confrontation between MANA and the Comisión Femenil of Los Angeles. The
conference left unresolved issues among all the participants. MANA stands out as an important organization in Latina history because of its role as an early professional organization and advocate for women’s equality and leadership development. Its leaders shattered the long-held stereotype that Latinas are passive and docile women. MANA demonstrated the ability of women to organize for the promotion of women’s rights. The organization continues to thrive. On March 11, 2005 Evangeline Elizonda was elected chairperson and Belda Garza was elected to the Board of Directors. SOURCES: García, Alma M., ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; Gonzáles, Manuel G. 1999. “The Chicano Movement, 1965– 1975.” In Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States, ed. Manuel G. Gonzáles, 191–222. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alma M. García
MEXICAN MOTHERS’ CLUB, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SETTLEMENT HOUSE (1930–1940) The Mexican Mothers’ Club at the University of Chicago Settlement House began to meet regularly in the early 1930s. The club members were Mexican women, presumably also mothers, given the club’s name, living in the Back-of-the-Yards Packingtown neighborhood that was served by the settlement house. Membership fluctuated during the decade of its existence, with estimates ranging from as few as seven individuals to as many as fifteen. Shifting work schedules, child-care responsibilities, money problems, and conflicting group meetings affected the group’s fortunes. Most of the women also belonged to the Culture Club, a group that worked to foster Mexican culture through plays, parties, and holiday celebrations. In June 1933 the club demonstrated a political bent by inviting labor activist Guadalupe Marshall to help it organize. Settlement House workers, however, discouraged this type of organizing and proceeded to refocus the group’s efforts on other kinds of activities like picnics and summer camps for their children. Accordingly, in November 1933 the club wrote and performed a successful play about giving antitoxin serum to a large number of the Mexican children in the neighborhood. Written as an informational drama, the play helped publicize the needs of the area’s children and services available for them. Disagreements over how to spend membership dues and other funds plagued the group during much of 1934. An agreement to vote on an external use for the funds came in early summer when several mem-
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See also Americanization Programs SOURCES: Arredondo, Gabriela F. 2003. “Mexicanas in Chicago.” Illinois History Teacher (Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Springfield, IL), Fall, 57–62; Dávalos, Karen Mary. 1993. “Ethnic Identity among Mexican and Mexican American Women in Chicago, 1920–1991.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University; Kerr Año Nuevo, Louise. 1976. “The Chicano Experience in Chicago, 1920–1970.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Gabriela F. Arredondo
MEXICAN REVOLUTION (1910–1920) In November 1910 uprisings throughout Mexico signaled the beginning of the major movement against long-term dictator Porfirio Díaz. Díaz had come to power in 1876 at the forefront of a liberal revolt, proclaiming “effective suffrage and no re-election,” and then proceeded to hold on to power, usually as president, until 1911. The movement against him, led by wealthy northerner Francisco Madero, brought together Mexicans of all social classes who had been excluded from power and resources by the Díaz government, particularly in the regions that bordered the United States. Madero himself was largely interested in political reform; his followers had a much broader social movement in mind. His Plan of San Luis Potosí of October 1910 was actually issued in San Antonio, Texas, where he fled to avoid the wrath of the Díaz government. It called for an end to tyranny, a system based on the rule of law, and an armed movement to begin on November 20. A number of small local revolts began on that date, particularly in the northern state of Chihuahua, but Madero, discouraged because no armed force had met him as he came across the border, returned to the United States. The setback was temporary. In January 1911 Chihuahua rebels attacked and nearly destroyed federal troops sent after them. Their leader, Pascual Orozco Jr., was a man experienced in the northern regions; his business as a mule skinner placed him in the middle class and gave him contacts and resources. Madero finally returned to Mexico in February 1911, but displayed no military prowess. His victories were largely due to leaders like Orozco and Pancho Villa, a cowboy, miner, and bandit recruited into the revolution by Madero supporter Abraham González. A rebellion led by Emiliano Zapata and loosely associated with the northern one emerged simultaneously in the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City. The revolutionary factions reflected varied sources of discontent within Mexico, which led to cross-class alliances. Widespread dispossession of peasant communities in favor of large landowners had caused seri-
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inauguration he declared the Plan of Ayala, laying out an agrarian program that would return land and water to the villages. Armed conflict ensued and spread from Morelos to surrounding states and even into the federal district of Mexico City. Orozco also took up arms. Cleavages ripped the revolutionary coalition asunder, leading to five more years of desperate violence. Attacked not only by popular forces but also by supporters of the former president such as General Bernardo Reyes, Díaz’s nephew Félix, and the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, Madero turned the army over to General Victoriano Huerta, a fatal mistake. Huerta soon arrested the president and had him murdered, probably with the knowledge and complicity of U.S. Ambassador Wilson. Huerta then assumed the presidency, but forces from around the country gathered under the leadership of First Chief Venustiano Carranza, who proclaimed his Plan of Guadalupe from the northern state of Coahuila in the weeks after Madero’s death. Zapata remained in rebellion in Morelos, and his movement was still only tenuously associated with the much larger northern front heading toward Mexico City under Alvaro Obregón in the Northwest, Pancho Villa in Chihuahua, and Pablo González in the Northeast. Villa and Carranza were uncomfortable allies at best, and after Huerta was forced from office in July 1914—he left for Europe, as Díaz had—the revolutionary coalition quickly fell apart. The Convention of Aguascalientes sought in vain to maintain revolutionary unity. Forces loyal to Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata split with those led by Venustiano Carranza. Still, the new factions continued to include members of all classes, because leaders and followers sought to join what they thought might be the factions that would ultimately prevail. Carranza was joined, most importantly, by revolutionary general Alvaro Obregón, who proceeded to defeat Villa in a series of battles in the Bajío region north of Mexico City.
Jovita Idar and Leonor Villegas de Magnón nursing the wounded during the Mexican Revolution, circa 1914. University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. No. 084-0597. Courtesy of A. Ike Idar.
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Women shrouded in shawls march on foot with federal soldiers, circa 1915. Photograph by Agustín Victor Casasola. Courtesy of Foteca del INAH.
Villa was driven to the north, where his army degenerated into a group of guerrilla bands. One of these raids crossed the U.S. border into New Mexico and attacked the town of Columbus, provoking John Pershing’s punitive expedition in March 1916. Despite the problems caused by the presence of U.S. forces in northern Mexico, the Carranza government was able to control the major part of the country. It established a constitutional convention in Querétaro at the end of 1916, and Carranza became president. The Constitution of 1917 contained three extremely important provisions that embodied the major goals of the revolution: Article 3, which limited the role of the Roman Catholic Church in education; Article 27, which declared the subsoil to be the property of the state and established that land might be redistributed according to the needs of society; and Article 123, which listed specific workers’ guarantees. These articles set the basis for the realization of the major revolutionary goals: the establishment of a clearly secular state; economic nationalism, particularly in regard to the resources of the subsoil; land reform; the protection of workers in the industrializing nation; and the more equitable distribution of power and resources within society. A final successful revolt in 1920 drove Carranza from office when his attempt to eliminate Obregón as a candidate led to an uprising under the Plan of Agua Prieta. Carranza was killed fleeing Mexico City. After new elections Obregón succeeded to the presidency (1920–1924). These years saw the end of most organized violent activity in the country, with only a brief rebellion in late 1923 and early 1924, led by Obregón’s
secretary of finance, Adolfo de la Huerta. Obregón was succeeded in office by his close collaborator, Plutarco Elías Calles. Because the revolution was a popular uprising rather than a clash of well-financed military forces, it is not surprising that women participated extensively in the struggles. The Zapatistas, for example, were referred to by observer Rosa E. King as a “people in arms.” Wives and partners—called soldaderas—traveled with their men, often on top of the railroad cars that carried troops and arms. These women provided the logistical support for revolutionary troops, foraged for food, cooked meals for their men, and cared for the injured. Women served as nurses, as well, in the hospital cars that traveled with Obregón’s and Villa’s troops. Sometimes women were abducted from their home communities, while others went willingly to care for their loved ones; still other women went out of conviction to struggle for the revolutionary cause. Popular songs known as corridos, inluding “La chinita Maderista” (Little Maderista girl) and especially “La Adelita” and “La Valentina,” recounted their loyalty and passion for their men and for the revolution. Women even fought in revolutionary battles; Coronela María Quinteras de Meras fought with the Villista army from the earliest years of the revolution. Yet Villa was probably the least sympathetic of the revolutionary leaders to the women who traveled with his troops. He is reported to have felt that they hampered his troop movements, and he tried to eliminate them from his forces. It is even said that he massacred eighty to ninety Carranzista soldaderas and their children at
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A young woman boards a train with federal soldiers, circa 1915. Photograph by Agustín Victor Casasola. Courtesy of Foteca del INAH.
Santa Rosalía, Chihuahua, when a shot from the group of captured women went through his hat. In other areas of the country women were more readily accepted and participated from the beginning of the resistance. In Puebla Carmen Serdán fought alongside her male family members. Margarita Neri, from southern Mexico, has become a figure of legend. Neri, thought to be a Dutch-Maya from Quintana Roo, led a troop of men through Tabasco and Chiapas in the early phase of the revolution against Díaz’s forces and was famous for her valor and her spirit, as well as her exuberant dancing ability. It was claimed that she had vowed to decapitate Díaz herself. Among the Zapatistas women from the region were joined by female fighters and intellectuals from elsewhere. These included ideologists Elisa Acuña y Rosetti, Dolores Jiménez y Muro, and Juana Gutiérrez de Mendoza. Acuña published an anti-Huerta newspaper, La Guillotina (The Guillotine) and remained active after the revolution as a champion of women’s rights. Jiménez wrote an introduction to Zapata’s famous Plan of Ayala in 1911 and served later as an emissary between Zapata and Obregón. Gutiérrez edited a series of newspa-
pers and became a colonel in the regiment Victoria, which she herself organized and commanded. Unfortunately, despite the enormous contributions of women to the success of the revolutionary effort, their rights were not strongly pursued by the delegates at the Constitutional Convention of 1917, particularly in the area of suffrage. The report brought forward on the issue by the radical deputy Luis Monzón of Sonora followed a tediously traditional argument: women had not yet developed a political consciousness, having been restricted in the past to home and family, and were not yet ready for the vote. Remarkably, more conservative members of the convention, particularly Carranza supporter Félix Palavicini, supported women’s suffrage, though Carranza himself did not. Women did not win the right to vote in all elections in Mexico until almost four decades later. It is likely that the real reason for the resistance had to do with concerns among the radicals that women would be too heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and thus favor conservative social programs and the politicians who espoused them. Other women and their children were forced by fears for their safety and economic dislocation to leave Mexico entirely. The violence of the revolutionary decade led hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to flee across the border to the relative safety of the United States. They came as legal immigrants, temporary workers, refugees, or simply in an undocumented status. Probably 1.5 million Mexicans spent a significant period in the United States during the revolution, and many remained after the violence was over. By far the largest influx came into the states of Arizona and particularly Texas. Only legal Mexican immigrants, that is, Mexicans who entered and declared their intention to stay permanently, indicated a destination; 71.1 percent of all of these said that they were headed to Texas, while 12.4 percent were bound for Arizona. Less than 10 percent went to California; the largest influx into that state came in subsequent decades. Throughout these years between 40 and 50 percent of the migrants indicated that they had “no occupation.” It seems likely that most were women and children. Through the end of the decade the numbers of self-declared unskilled workers entering the United States increased, while the number of nonworking family members declined. These figures seem reasonable, given the decrease in violence, which would have made it safer to leave women and children in Mexico while men resumed prerevolutionary patterns of migration. Still, it was only the proportion that changed; families and even single women and widows continued to move north. Terrible economic conditions in Mexico caused still more Mexicans to seek survival in the United States
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Mexican Revolution, Border Women in and increased their numbers in the U.S.-Mexican border region labor force, since migrants in dire need sought work in developing agricultural regions, such as the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the Imperial Valley of California. Some of these came for temporary work and joined a migrant stream that came early in the spring and stayed until the fall. The railroads usually paid to bring the Mexicans north and used them to do repair work on the tracks until it was time to work on the crops. Then farmers and ranchers employed them at slightly higher wages. The migrants then went north as the weather warmed still further and doubled back toward Mexico as the weather worsened. The institution of the Immigration Act of 1917 complicated this situation significantly. The new restrictions included a literacy test and a head tax of $8.00 and repeated the seldom-enforced prohibition against contract labor. In effect, this law removed the migration from the control of the Immigration Service, because Mexicans began to come in through nonofficial channels or not at all. On the one hand, these prohibitions led to a stigmatizing of the migrants as “illegal” on the other, they caused immediate problems for U.S. growers, already suffering from a loss in potential laborers because American men were being conscripted and sent to fight in World War I in Europe. At the same time Mexicans, desperate for work, continued to arrive at the border, which led to a thriving business in smuggling them onto the U.S. side. Complaints to the national government quickly led to an exemption that permitted Mexicans to enter on a temporary basis, an exemption that was eventually extended until 1921. SOURCES: Hall, Linda B., and Don M. Coerver, 1988. “The Refuge: Mexican Migration to the United States, 1910–1920.” In Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910–1920, ed. Linda B. Hall and Don M. Coerver. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Macías, Anna. 1982. Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Poniatowska, Elena. 1999. Las soldaderas. Mexico City: Foteca Nacional del INAH; Salas, Elizabeth. 1990. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Soto, Shirlene. 1990. Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman: Her Participation in Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910–1940. Denver: Arden Press. Linda B. Hall
MEXICAN REVOLUTION, BORDER WOMEN IN The Mexican-U.S. border was a staging ground for rebellions and revolutionary movements from the 1890s through the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. The border provided a refuge, fraught with spies and intrigue, and a base for armed incursions into Mexico by
one faction or another of revolutionary forces. The revolts, strikes, and insurrectionary movements that culminated in the revolution were responses to EuroAmerican takeover and capitalist expansion in both the United States and Mexico and took several forms. One involved the ongoing resistance to Euro-American takeovers of Mexican land in the American Southwest, especially on the Texas border, where conflict often reached the level of guerrilla warfare with the Texas Rangers. Another form of this conflict included strikes by railroad workers, farmworkers, and miners of the Mexico-Arizona–New Mexico mining triangle. A third included revolts by indigenous peoples along the border in response to dispossession of their lands. Finally, the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910. Mexicanas were integral to all of these conflicts. Mexicans in southern Texas had fought EuroAmerican interlopers since before 1848. Beginning with the Texas Revolution of 1836, Mexican communities were uprooted, the land base of the Mexican population was decimated, and Mexican merchants lost business to Euro-American newcomers. By the late 1850s Mexicans constituted a dispossessed underclass in southern Texas. The Texas Rangers, the armed guard of Euro-American occupation, destroyed livestock and terrorized Mexicans with lynchings and killings. Violence and competing claims to land and animals led to an ongoing state of virtual war between Mexicans and the Rangers. Juan Cortina led the first organized revolt in 1859–1860 with a force of 500 to 600 men. The conflict resurfaced in the 1870s in fights between Euro-American cattlemen and Mexican shepherds. During the revolution, the insurrectionary movement behind the Plan de San Diego hoped to retake the area for Mexico. The case of Gregorio Cortez, who had killed a southern Texas sheriff, became a symbol of resistance to the Rangers and EuroAmerican encroachment. Little is written about women, yet women belonged to dispossessed families who took on the Rangers in a fifty-year fight over land, animals, and sovereignty. The southern Texas conflict heightened a sense of class and national conflict along the border. Women also played a role in the strikes that erupted in the mining triangle of Arizona, northern Mexico, and New Mexico and helped lead to the revolution. Miners who migrated across the border seeking work in different mines helped spread revolutionary ideas against the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, as well as organizing strikes against Euro-American mineowning allies. In the early twentieth century mining strikes erupted from Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, to Cananea, Mexico, and involved the Western Federation of Miners and, on both sides of the border, the allied anarcho-syndicalist groups, the Industrial Workers
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Mexican Revolution, Border Women in of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). As part of mining families, women supported these strikes, which helped spur the Mexican Revolution. Although the revolution formally began in 1910, it can be argued that in Chihuahua the revolution began in the 1890s with the indigenous revolt in Tomochic. Indigenous groups along the border, such as the Yaquis, organized revolts against land expropriations supported by Porfirio Díaz. They organized under the banner of a mestiza curandera (healer), Teresa Urrea, who had condemned Díaz’s land polices. Díaz persecuted Urrea, and she fled to the U.S. border area, where she continued to draw huge crowds until her death in 1906. Yet the Indians, buoyed by Urrea’s presence and her powers, made her the symbol of their revolutionary armies along the border. The Plan Restaurador y Reformista de la Constitución, which circulated in Arizona in 1896, advocated armed revolution. The signatories of the most radical doctrine in Mexico for its time included seven women and sixteen men, suggesting indigenous women’s role as leaders and strategists. Women fought in some of the revolts, often taking up arms after their husbands were killed, and were among the thousands forcibly removed to Yucatán when the revolts failed. Women represented a vital presence among Mexican anarchists and socialists in the border areas and the mining triangle encompassing Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Many worked with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), founded in Mexico by Ricardo Flores Magón and originally a liberal party critical of Díaz. The Magónistas traveled to the United States in 1904 and by 1908 were headquartered in Los Angeles. By 1910 the organization’s ideology shifted, and the PLM called for violent revolution, class conflict, and economic and political liberty. It worked closely with the Industrial Workers of the World in both Mexico and the United States and by 1910 and 1911 organized armed incursions to retake Baja California for Mexican revolutionary forces. The PLM was one of the few organizations that publicly condemned the subjugation of women under capitalism. As historian Emma Pérez notes, the PLM as a group condemned feminism, yet women proved crucial to the organization. They helped shape its ideology, contributed as writers, polemicists, and orators, smuggled weapons, and took up arms. María Talavera, the compañera of Ricardo Flores Magón, was his intellectual partner and a guiding influence in his ideological development. Along the Texas border Sara Estela Ramírez, poet, teacher, and journalist, established two radical newspapers, Corregidora and La Aurora. Juana B. Gutiérrez de Mendoza and Elisa Acuña y Rosete founded Vesper, and Andrea Villarreal and her sister
Teresa established La Mujer Moderna in 1910 in San Antonio (the first feminist newspaper in Texas) and later the newspaper El Obrero. Isidra de Cardenás founded a weekly women’s radical newspaper, Voz de la Mujer, and published articles in the PLM newspaper, Regeneración. When the U.S. federal government arrested PLM members on charges of violating neutrality laws, the women, such as Francisca J. Mendoza, were the backbone of a national movement to raise funds for their defense. Hundreds of petitions were circulated across the country, and these lists include the names of individual women and groups of women in small towns from Texas to Arizona, Montana, Colorado, and California. In Los Angeles Concha Rivera organized in the Mexican community and appeared every day at the Placita in downtown Los Angeles, where she denounced the arrests, raised money, and urged Mexicans to attend the trials. Other women of the PLM sold newspapers, spoke, and raised money. The teenaged Josefina Arancibia, daughter of a Baja merchant, sang revolutionary songs penned by Magón and remembered the Russian IWW woman with the “little tiny glasses” Emma Goldman, who joined these rallies. Many Latinas across the country supported the PLM, as suggested by the names of women and women’s groups that appeared on hundreds of petitions circulating across the country to protest Magón’s imprisonment. Some, such as Juana de Fernández de Gamboa, organized branches of the semisecret Hijas de Cuauhtémoc in Chihuahua and worked closely with the PLM. Moving to El Paso, she helped form a women’s group in 1909. Gamboa’s house became a central meeting place where the women collected money, medicine, arms, and messages and hid Magónistas fleeing federal officers. Mexican troops arrested her for smuggling compatriots into Mexico, and she stopped her own assassination by seizing one of their rifles. The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910 and profoundly changed the lives of thousands of women across Mexico. When men went off to fight, thousands of women fed and defended their families and fought against and fled from factions of the revolutionary troops that devastated Mexico. Contrary to standard academic opinion, Vicki Ruiz and other scholars have found evidence that many women traveled on their own or with other women, often taking care of children or younger siblings. Facing these hardships of war, hunger, and devastation, women developed strategies to survive. Women played a critical role in the revolution. Women’s participation was fluid, depending on the necessities of the moment. Some were forced to leave home after devastating battles or perhaps a rape left
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Mexican Schools Among the Magónistas the best-known woman soldier was Margarita Ortega from Baja California. Her husband, inspired by her politics, had led a Magónista guerrilla group. When he was killed, Ortega assumed command of the guerrilla forces and served as the liaison between the Magónistas and revolutionary forces in Mexicali. Her daughter, Rosaura Gotari, joined her. Ortega, an expert shot and horsewoman, smuggled dynamite, food, and ammunition to her soldiers. Following the death of her daughter after a forced march across the desert without food or water, Ortega began to organize revolutionary forces in northern Sonora. In 1914 she was captured. She endured four days of torture as Huerta’s troops tried to extract information from her. Finally, when it became clear that she would not talk, they took her into the desert and executed her. Women ferried messages, spied, and smuggled arms, food, and ammunition. They hid arms and ammunition in baby carriages that they rolled across the Mexicali-Calexico border. They strapped loops of bulky bandaleros under their voluminous skirts, in batches weighing up to seventy-five pounds. They dismantled Winchester rifles and carried them across the border, also hidden under their long skirts. Some, such as Juana de Gamboa, smuggled fighters across the border. Whether as fighters, caregivers, smugglers, soapbox speakers, or survivors, border Mexicanas played vital roles in the Mexican Revolution.
On their own! Mexican women arriving in El Paso, 1911. Courtesy of the Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, Las Cruces.
them with few options. In the days before armies provided food or care for soldiers, women attached themselves to men and fed, nursed, and cared for them. These soldaderas remained an integral part of the armies and were crucial to their survival. They moved with the troops and also could take up arms. There were distinctions, however, between soldaderas and women soldiers. Women soldiers were recognized as fighters, and some of them became strategists and officers in the various factions. Like men, women died in battle and faced firing squads. Between 1910 and 1912 both women and men in the northern armies fought and provided food. Although Francisco “Pancho” Villa and other leaders disliked soldaderas, complaining that they slowed down troop movements, women continued to fight well into 1913 and 1914. According to historian Elizabeth Salas, Villa would order the soldaderas to leave the battlefield, but as soon as he was out of sight, they returned and “continued their firing.” When in 1914 Mexican federal troops crossed into Texas and were captured, they included 1,256 soldaderas and 3,557 men. Some younger “men” turned out to be women soldiers dressed in men’s clothes.
See also Journalism and Print Media; Mexican Revolution; Soldaderas SOURCES: Gamio, Manuel. 1971. The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant: Autobiographic Documents. New York: Dover Publications; Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. 1977. Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magón y el Partido Liberal Mexicano. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications; Hart, E. H. 1988. “Peasant Rebellion in the Northwest: The Yaqui Indians of Sonora, 1740–1976.” In Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Perez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanus into History, 141–175; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Salas, Elizabeth. 1990. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History, Austin: University of Texas Press; Turner, E. D. 1981. Revolution in Baja California: Ricardo Flores Magón’s High Noon. Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books. Devra A. Weber
MEXICAN SCHOOLS (1877–1954) During the period of Jim Crow practices from 1877 to 1954, public school districts across the Southwest separated children of Mexican heritage from white children in segregated classrooms or buildings known as “Mexican schools.” The United States did not have spe-
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Mexican Schools cific federal “separate but equal” laws for Mexican Americans, as it did for African Americans, nor did it mandate educational separation for Mexican American children, as it did for American Indian children who attended U.S. Department of the Interior boarding schools. Instead, common social practices and state legislative powers provided public school districts with the authority to employ de jure and de facto segregation of Mexican American children in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and other states with recognizable Mexican-descent populations. Mexican school segregation reflected and reproduced existing patterns of social inequality in political participation, housing, and employment already predominant in many southwestern communities, a division that resulted from the U.S.-Mexican War. In most southwestern states education laws allowed local school boards wide latitude in determining how public schools should be conducted, and school boards used this authority legitimately to segregate and, in some cases, to bar admission to Mexican American pupils. In Texas and Arizona legislatures passed laws in 1870 and 1899, respectively, that required public schools to use English for classroom instruction. Since most Mexican American children spoke only Spanish upon entering school, administrators applied these language laws to separate all Mexican-descent children, regardless of their language ability, from white children and justified this segregation by pedagogical reasons, as opposed to the racist underpinnings of Jim Crow. In some states, such as Arizona, California, and Texas, “quadrilateral” systems of school segregation divided white children from Asian, black, Mexican, and Indian children—each group was assigned to its own
Children attending a segregated school in San Angelo, Texas, 1949. Courtesy of Lee (Russell) Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Neg. no. 14233-27.
state-sponsored or federally subsidized school. In urban communities, especially those with sizable Mexican American populations, such as Los Angeles or Denver, Mexican schools operated as status quo neighborhood schools serving barrio populations. Smaller districts operated “Mexican rooms” within mixed schools that served white and Mexican children separately. In racially and ethnically diverse communities children of color also found themselves merged into “Mexican” or “foreign” classrooms. In El Monte, California, and Phoenix, Arizona, for example, Mexican and Japanese children shared rooms. Students usually attended these segregated schools or classes through the third grade, sometimes through the sixth or eighth grade, before entering an integrated junior high or high school. Similarly, voluntary night schools geared toward adult immigrants and non-English speakers mirrored segregated youth education, and their classes were often taught in the same Mexican schools. School districts created Mexican schools to serve various purposes, most notably to teach Spanishspeaking children the English language. These schools usually offered standard, state-approved curricula modified to emphasize language preparation and acquisition. The curriculum combined Americanization components, such as citizenship training, with vocational education to transform foreign, non-Englishspeaking children into English-speaking, American workers. English-language acquisition began in the first and second grades, where Mexican American children had to demonstrate English fluency before advancing to intermediate grades. Often Mexican American children spent several years in the first grade learning how to speak English. Texas schools, for example, required Spanish-speaking children to enroll in “pre-primer” before advancing to first grade. In Arizona Mexican American children began school in the “1C” immersion program, advancing from 1C to 1B to 1A over the course of several years before entering the second grade. These practices contributed to the school failure of Mexican American children. Because children consistently repeated lower grades, many dropped out of school before reaching their teens, often with less than a sixthgrade education. According to Euro-American school officials, Mexican schools helped solve the “Mexican problem” and the dilemmas of inferiority, underachievement, poverty, and disease that they believed Mexican Americans posed. In Colorado, for example, educators segregated Hispano children to prevent their chronic absenteeism from hindering the academic progress of white students. Many Mexican American children regularly left school to work, often in tandem with agricul-
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“Pedro Hop.” A segregated Mexican American class of elementary students in Tempe, Arizona. Courtesy of the Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
tural cycles, to help support their families. School officials, who usually ignored compulsory school laws in favor of local economies, perceived such choices as indicators that Mexican American parents devalued education. In Texas and Arizona some school officials generally agreed that public education did not benefit Mexican American children, while employers, especially farmers and growers, feared the potential impact of educating them. Mexican schools, however, emphasized industrial education as a solution to the high dropout rates that characterized Mexican American enrollment across the Southwest. Vocational lessons such as sewing, housekeeping, handicrafts, or woodshop, along with countless drills in manners, dress, and deportment, provided children with skilled training for future occupations such as farm and domestic work thought to suit their abilities. Hygiene lessons, from forced bathing to medical inspections for lice and for diseases such as tuberculosis, also taught children about cleanliness. Often this instruction extended beyond the classroom to the children’s homes and parents. In Laredo, Texas, and Los Angeles, California, homeschool teachers provided domestic science lessons to daughters and mothers alike, while in El Paso, Texas, one school offered parental education on personal hygiene and child care. Despite the limitations of Mexican schools, Mexican American parents supported public education for their children and actively sought to improve educational conditions. Throughout the Jim Crow era they pursued legal remedies to end educational segregation. In the earliest known case, Romo v. Laird (1925), Adolpho “Babe” Romo sued the Tempe, Arizona, public schools for refusing to admit his children to the new Tenth Street School intended for white children. Although the Romo children won the right to attend the new school, the lawsuit did not eliminate the Mexican school or
school segregation. Parents in Texas and California lodged similar, unsuccessful complaints throughout the 1930s. Finally, in 1947, with the legal support of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mexican American parents in Orange County, California, won a federal school segregation challenge in Méndez v. Westminster. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court ruling that Mexican schools denied Mexican American children “equal protection,” a guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. This national victory became the death knell for Mexican schools across the Southwest because it set precedent for desegregation cases in Arizona and Texas and became a prelude to the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. See also Education SOURCES: Darder, Antonia, Rodolfo D. Torres, and Henry Gutierrez, eds. 1997. Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader. New York: Routledge; Donato, Rubén. 1999. “Hispanic Education and the Implications of Autonomy: Four School Systems in Southern Colorado.” Harvard Educational Review 69, no. 2 (Summer): 117–149; González, Gilbert G. 1990. Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation. Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press; Muñoz, Laura K. 2001. “Separate but Equal? A Case Study of Romo v. Laird and Mexican American Education.” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (Winter): 28–35; San Miguel, Guadalupe. 1987. “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910– 1981. Austin: University of Texas Press; Wild, Mark. 2002. “ ‘So Many Children at Once and So Many Kinds’: Schools and Ethno-racial Boundaries in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.” Western Historical Quarterly 33 (Winter): 453–476. Laura K. Muñoz
MIGRATION AND LABOR Latinas have figured prominently in the migrations from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Latinas were dis-
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Migration and Labor placed by economic change and political turmoil in their countries of origin, and they came to the United States in search of a better life. Because they were contributors to their household economies, Latinas’ migrations were part of household strategies and social networks. Mexican and Puerto Rican women also came as labor migrants, recruited as a source of lowwage workers by U.S. employers. Many Cuban women came as political refugees who left the revolutionary political and economic changes that transformed Cuba after 1959. Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban women confronted the challenges of adjusting to a very different society and played important roles in meeting the needs of their households and their communities. Mexican American communities were formed first by conquest and then by continuing immigration. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War. The treaty recognized the earlier U.S. annexation of Texas and ceded another onethird of Mexico’s territory to the United States, adding a total of one-half of Mexico’s territory to the United States. An estimated 75,000 to 100,000 Mexicans were living in the areas that became New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Women contributed to family and community life before and after the border moved. As the oral histories in Patricia Preciado Martin’s Songs My Mother Sang to Me reveal, women contributed to their households through arduous chores, informal economic activities, running boardinghouses, taking in laundry, and being midwives and healers. Women helped create a distinctive border culture, based on family, cultural traditions, religious faith that permeated everyday life, and communal identity. Mexican immigration increased steadily after 1890. The land policies of dictator Porfirio Díaz displaced peasants, and economic change in the Southwest created a demand for low-wage labor, especially for the railroads, mining, and agriculture. Migrants were mostly adult men seeking work, but women were also employed in the Southwest. With the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, even greater numbers fled the political and economic turmoil of war, and more migrated as family units. With the exception of nuns fleeing religious persecution and of high-school and college students, women rarely migrated as single women. Indeed, after the passage of the 1917 Immigration Act, women traveling alone were stopped at the border because they were perceived as unlikely to fill job vacancies and more “likely to become a public charge.” In the 1920s, however, family migration accounted for a larger proportion of the migrant stream because some agricultural employers sought to stabi-
lize their workforce by hiring entire families or by establishing a system of family tenant farming. Family immigration also fostered more permanent and more urban settlement patterns. Between 1890 and 1929 an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Mexican immigrants came to the United States. Despite the labor recruitment of the 1920s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported when the United States entered the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1937 an average of almost 80,000 people were repatriated each year, with estimates ranging from 350,000 to 600,000 for the depression decade as a whole. Women and children were among the undocumented immigrants, legal permanent residents, and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent who were encouraged, pressured, or forced to leave their homes. The U.S. pattern of labor recruitment followed by deportation based on its own perceived labor needs devastated Mexican families and communities. Nevertheless, by the decade’s end Mexican and Mexican American women had become firmly established in the cannery and garment industries and were participating in labor struggles to improve conditions at work, as well as for their families and communities. During and after World War II labor recruitment resumed and migration increased. Initiated as a bilateral labor agreement in 1942, the Bracero Program had brought 220,000 farmworkers to the United States by 1947. Despite its origins as a wartime emergency program, it was extended until 1964, by which time nearly 5 million labor contracts had been issued. Undocumented immigration also increased, caused by the same underlying factors that encouraged emigration from Mexico to the United States and facilitated by social networks. While attention focused on men who were recruited for farmwork through the Bracero Program or who entered the United States undocumented, women also crossed the border as labor migrants. Mexican women continued earlier patterns of crossing the border to work as domestics by the day or by the week. In 1953 Anglo housewives in El Paso, Texas, formed an organization to advocate a bracero-type contract labor program for their Mexican domestics. Though their request was denied, their practice of hiring undocumented domestic workers continued. A period of labor recruitment was again followed by massive deportations when the Immigration and Naturalization Service undertook Operation Wetback in 1954, deporting an estimated 1 million people before the year’s end. With the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, both legal and undocumented immigration increased, a greater proportion of women and entire families migrated, and permanent settlement communities con-
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Migration and Labor tinued to proliferate in diverse geographic areas. Between 1960 and 1980 more than 1 million Mexicans immigrated legally, and by 1980 an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million undocumented Mexican immigrants lived in the United States. In 1965 Mexico implemented the Border Industrialization Program, which opened the border region to U.S. investment in the hope of providing jobs for male agricultural workers facing the end of the Bracero Program. Instead, the new industries in electronics and the garment industry overwhelmingly employed young women. Women migrated to the border region, and despite jobs in the maquiladoras, unemployment persisted. Women also migrated to the United States. One study conducted from 1981 to 1982 found that almost 60 percent of the 184 women interviewed had worked in Mexico before migrating to the United States, and almost two-thirds had worked in the industrial or maquila sector. In the United States most of these undocumented women found their first jobs in domestic services, and by the time of the survey 49 percent still worked in the services sector, while 24 percent worked in light industries, 13 percent in agriculture, 10 percent in commerce, and 4 percent in construction. Undocumented women relied on kin and friendship networks, since women already settled helped new arrivals by serving as employment contacts. Several scholars have argued that rather than ameliorating unemployment, the Border Industrialization Program has failed to provide sufficient employment to male agricultural workers or to rural migrant women and has instead exacerbated migration, population growth, unemployment, and underemployment
in the border region. Meanwhile, economic restructuring in the United States created low-wage servicesector and manufacturing jobs, and employers turned to Mexican immigrant women as a source of low-wage workers. Like Mexican communities, Puerto Rican communities were shaped by conquest and migration. In 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico and has retained sovereignty ever since. Before 1898 Puerto Ricans came to the United States as political exiles, struggling to end Spanish colonialism in Puerto Rico and Cuba; as merchants; and as workers. After 1898 the U.S. occupation and subsequent U.S. investments transformed Puerto Rico’s economy, displacing workers, especially in the tobacco industry. Since 1917 Puerto Ricans have migrated as U.S. citizens, because the U.S. Congress declared all Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens in that year. Economic change in Puerto Rico affected Puerto Rican women who were concentrated in declining sectors. At the same time U.S. employers recruited Puerto Rican women to work in the United States, especially because European immigration was restricted. In 1920 the American Manufacturing Company recruited 130 Puerto Rican women to work in its Brooklyn rope factory. Other women found factory jobs, especially in the garment industry, or took in home needlework. They also contributed to their households by taking in lodgers and providing child-care at home. As migration increased after World War I, most Puerto Ricans settled in New York City, forming a vibrant community. By 1930 an estimated 44,908 Puerto
Women in the garment industry. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United State. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Migration and Labor Ricans lived in New York City, accounting for 81 percent of all Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Historian Virginia Sánchez Korrol notes, “Women held a special place in the early Puerto Rican settlements of New York City, often providing links between the island and mainland enclaves. Pivotal in retaining ethnicity through the transmission of language, customs, and cultural traditions within familial settings, women also functioned as part of an informal informational network.” Although most were working class, middleclass women were among the migrants and sometimes played visible roles in community organizations. The post–World War II era was the peak period of Puerto Rican migration. The population grew from 70,000 to 226,000 during the 1940s alone. The mainstays of Puerto Rico’s economy—agriculture, agricultural processing, and the home needlework industry— declined, and the industrialization program known as Operation Bootstrap failed to replace the lost jobs. Puerto Rican women, facing fewer ways to sustain rural household economies, migrated to urban areas, where they were sought as a source of low-wage labor for U.S. industries. Migration to the United States offered another alternative that was encouraged by the governments of the United States and Puerto Rico via contract labor programs. In 1947 a governmentsponsored contract labor program was initiated to bring Puerto Rican women to the United States to work as live-in domestics. While some came with labor contracts, many more Puerto Rican women traveled through informal networks and found manufacturing jobs in New York City and Philadelphia, especially in the garment industry. Policy makers turned their attention to a contract labor program to bring Puerto Rican men to work in agriculture. By 1970, 810,000 Puerto Rican migrants and another 581,000 mainland-born Puerto Ricans lived in the United States. In the postwar era Puerto Ricans increasingly settled beyond New York City. By 1970 Chicago’s community had grown to 79,000, Philadelphia’s to 14,000, and those of cities in New Jersey, Connecticut, and California to more than 10,000. Yet by the 1960s Puerto Ricans in many inner cities were confronting the challenges caused by economic restructuring. As employers left the inner cities in search of lower wages, Puerto Rican women lost a disproportionate share of the jobs because they were concentrated in those industries most likely to relocate, such as the garment industry. In New York City alone, Puerto Rican women’s labor-force participation declined from a high of 39 percent in 1950 to 29 percent in 1970. Puerto Rican women continued to contribute financially to their households and to play important roles in meeting the needs of their communities through their active participation in religious, social, and civic organiza-
Homework was a way of life for many poor women as represented by this Texas woman identified only as a mother of eight. Courtesy of Lee (Russell) Photograph Collection, The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin, Neg. no. 14233-55.
tions, as well as by serving as advocates in educational and social service institutions. Like the early Puerto Rican migrants, Cuban immigrants in the late nineteenth century were mostly political exiles and tobacco workers. Cubans settled in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Key West, Tampa, Jacksonville, and New Orleans. In New York City and elsewhere Cubans and Puerto Ricans joined forces to end Spanish colonialism in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Women were active in these political struggles and formed their own organizations, such as the Hijas del Pueblo in New Orleans and the Junta Patriótica de Damas de Nueva York. In 1892 José Martí announced the establishment of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano. Women’s clubs proliferated, and membership approached 1,500 by the end of 1898. With the end of the war in 1898, most clubs dissolved, but Cuban women remained active in improving conditions in their communities, many through labor struggles in the tobacco industry. In the 1860s Cuban cigar manufacturers began moving their shops to Florida to avoid the political turmoil on the island. Workers soon followed. By 1870 more than 1,000 Cubans lived in Key West, and nearly 80 percent of those fourteen years of age or older worked in cigar factories. Women made up 9 percent of the cigar work force in Key West by the 1870s, and by 1890 women accounted for one-quarter of hand rollers in some Tampa factories, an indication that they had entered more skilled tobacco occupations that had previously been the purview of men. Labor struggles began in the 1870s, were halted from 1895 to 1898 so that workers and the community could focus on supporting the war effort, and then resumed with a major strike in 1899
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Migration and Labor and additional strikes in 1901, 1910, 1920, and 1931. Women tobacco workers struck with male workers in support of better wages and benefits, as well as union recognition, while women in the community supported the strikers in a myriad of ways. Although immigration continued, responding largely to political changes in Cuba, the Cuban Revolution in 1959 triggered a dramatic increase. From 1959 to 1962 and 1965 to 1973 more than half a million Cubans immigrated to the United States, and another 125,000 came in 1980. These three periods constituted the major waves of immigration, but almost 100,000 Cubans came between waves, either traveling through third countries or by boat through the Florida Keys. During this period Cuban immigration was shaped by the cold war because the Cuban Revolution increasingly instituted socialist reforms and because U.S. refugee policy was defined by anti-Communism. Cuba’s upper classes dominated the first wave of immigrants and constituted a significant proportion of the second wave, as well. Fulgencio Batista’s political and military supporters, those most threatened by the government’s redistribution policies, and professionals left in large numbers. Because the Cuban government prohibited the emigration of men of military age, certain skilled technicians, and political prisoners, women and the elderly constituted a significant portion of those who came. The U.S. government welcomed Cubans as refugees fleeing Communism, and the federal government established the Cuban Refugee Program to provide comprehensive and unprecedented assistance with emergency relief checks, food distribution, medical care, education, job training, and loans, as well as a resettlement program to distribute the population beyond Dade County, Florida, where the overwhelming majority had settled. The third wave more closely resembled the Cuban population as a whole, with a higher proportion of blacks and mulattoes, as well as more diversified class and occupational backgrounds. The migrants were also overwhelmingly male, 70 percent, younger by an average of about ten years, and included a significant number of gay men. The new arrivals were less welcomed by both the United States and the Cuban American community. The Cuban government was perceived as dumping its “undesirables” in the United States, and the U.S. media labeled them as criminals and exaggerated their numbers and the nature of their “crimes.” The U.S. government granted them a temporary “entrant” status instead of declaring them refugees and eligible for comprehensive assistance. Women and children might have had an easier time finding sponsors to aid in their settlement than their male counterparts.
As the first two waves settled in the United States, Cuban women entered the workforce in much higher proportions than they had in Cuba. Women were motivated by economic necessity and the desire to help their households regain their socioeconomic status. The growing economic enclave in Miami provided women with garment-industry jobs, while threegeneration households meant that grandmothers could provide child care. In contrast to the political and labor activism of Cuban women at the turn of the century, women were largely excluded from the anti-Castro exile organizations that dominated the community’s political life. Women provided the community-based support for these organizations and established some women’s auxiliaries to support the work of the major organizations. Women were more active in efforts to free political prisoners in Cuba, defining the issue as one of human rights and family reunification. By the 1970s a younger generation of women, especially college students, advocated an open “dialogue” with the Cuban government, family visits, and the release of political prisoners. For the women who arrived in 1980, the transition was perhaps less dramatic, because they were already accustomed to balancing household and paid employment, as well as participating in political life in Cuba. Many also encountered well-established networks to ease settlement and help them find jobs. The scholarship of the past two decades has brought new attention to Latinas’ roles in the migration histories that have shaped their communities. Whereas they were once rendered invisible or portrayed merely as passive followers, it has become increasingly clear that Latinas are displaced from their countries of origin, and that they make decisions, often as members of households, to migrate to the United States. Indeed, with the globalization of labor-intensive industries that rely on the low-wage labor of Latinas, women are often recruited and then displaced both in their countries of origin and as immigrant workers in the United States. Nor are Latinas buffered from political turmoil or political violence. Latinas also form key components of the kin and social networks that facilitate migration and settlement. Once they are settled in the United States, their financial contributions to their household economies and their activities on behalf of their communities remain pivotal. See also Immigration of Latinas to the United States; Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) SOURCES: García, María Cristina. 1994. “Cuban Women in the United States.” In Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States Sociology, Vol. 3, 203–218, ed. Felix Padilla, Houston: Arte Publico Press; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press; Martin, Patricia Preciado.
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Military Service 1992. Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Ten Mexican American Women. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Ruiz, Vicki L., and Susan Tiano. 1987. Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Responses to Change. Boston: Allen and Unwin; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd edition; Whalen, Carmen Teresa. 2001. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Carmen Teresa Whalen
MILITARY SERVICE Latinas have been involved in every major American confrontation since the Civil War and have served with honor in all facets of operations from support staff to combat during peacetime and at war. An overview of Latinas in battle is very revealing, particularly when one considers that many trace a heritage that spans more than 500 years of history in the hemisphere. In the early nineteenth century the stirrings of Latin American independence drew women into the fray for political, economic, and personal reasons. Genderspecific propaganda openly recruited women to join the war effort as patriots prepared to sacrifice everything, including the lives of loved ones, for the national welfare. Women served as quartermasters, nurses, spies, and couriers, held clandestine meetings in their homes, sold their valuables to aid the war efforts, created supportive auxiliaries and organizations, secured weapons, rolled bandages, and prepared provisions. Some even fought in battle disguised as men. On a personal scale as wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters of men in action, women’s economic interests were subject to burdensome regulations, increased taxation, or property confiscation. Nonetheless, at war’s end women were expected to resume their positions as keepers of the home and hearth. In similar fashion, from the mid- to the late nineteenth century women openly participated in the war for Texan independence (1836), the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), the American Civil War (1861–1865), and the Cuban-Spanish-American War (1898). Francisca Alavez, companion of a Mexican officer, Telesforo Alavez, was known as the Angel of Goliad for saving American lives from Mexican slaughter at Goliad, Texas, in 1836. The Sánchez sisters of St. Augustine, Florida, Lola, Panchita, and Eugenia, spied for the Confederacy and provided information on Yankee troop movements during the American Civil War. While her sisters plied the Yankees with food and drink in the commandeered Sánchez hacienda, Lola overheard their attack plans, sped by horse and then by boat until she found the Confederate encampment, and gave
Captain Dickerson the critical information. Few women were as daring as the Cuban Loreta Janeta Velázquez, who enlisted in the Confederate army disguised as a man. She fought at Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh until she was discovered and then spent the rest of the war as a spy. At the end of the century Cuban and Puerto Rican women enacted legendary roles in the struggles for Antillean independence, the Cuban-Spanish-American War. Cutting across boundaries of class and race, women’s organizational support systems in southern Florida and New York were critical to the war effort. Attempts to integrate underrepresented minority women into the American armed forces during war and peacetime increased somewhat during the two world wars. Traditional culture and discrimination worked against Latina involvement during World War I, although the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) deeply affected the lives of women on the border who assisted on both sides of the conflict in a multitude of ways. However, vastly different conditions existed during World War II. On the home front everyone was directly or indirectly involved in the war. Research projects at the University of Texas, the U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation shed light on the multiplicity of roles played by Latinas in the military. It is estimated that from 250,000 to 500,000 Latinos
Group of military women at Daytona Beach, Florida, December 1942. Carmen Contreras Bozak is the last at the right. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Army recruiter pamphlet. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
served in the armed forces, participating in all the major battles of the war. Between 1940 and 1945 approximately 53,000 Puerto Ricans served in battle. Although military segregation was based on color rather than ethnicity, the Puerto Rican Sixty-fifth Infantry Regiment and the New Mexico National Guard boasted a heavily bilingual Latino representation. Language abilities were so important that 200 Puerto Rican women were actively recruited for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and countless other Latinas joined the war effort as nurses and support staff. The army sought bilingual women for assignments as cryptologists and in communications and interpretation. Carmen Contreras Bozak joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in 1942 and served in North Africa. Auxiliary units were in great danger if they were captured because they shared none of the protections of the regular army under international law. Sergeant Mary Castro was the first Latina from San Antonio to join the WAAC and served in the Southwest Pacific. She encoded radio messages and ultimately became a drill sergeant for the new Women’s Army Corps recruits. Assigned to a combat zone, Lieutenant María García Roach was a flight nurse with the Army Nurse Corps in the China-Burma-India theater. She received an Air Medal and two Bronze Stars for heroic deeds. Army nurse Carmen Salazar of Los Angeles served on a hospital train unit at the Presidio in San Francisco. Second Lieutenant Salazar tended for-
mer prisoners of war, veterans of the Bataan Death March. The Army Nurse Corps included thirteen Puerto Rican women recruited specifically to tend to Spanishspeaking wounded service personnel. The Marine Corps Women’s Reserve also included Latinas like Corporal María Torres Maes, who was stationed at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia. She was inspired to join by the recruitment slogan “Free a Man to Fight.” After World War II women were expected to resume domestic duties. When men returned from the front, women surrendered their industrial and military responsibilities. The political climate surrounding the Korean conflict encouraged fewer women to join the armed forces, but some did, like First Lieutenant Clelia Perdomo Sánchez, who was in the Army Nurse Corps since 1949. While stationed at 343 General Hospital in Japan, she nursed the wounded from Korea. In 1950 Julia Benítez Rodríguez-Aviles became the first Puerto Rican woman to earn the rank of captain. Lieutenant Colonel Nilda Carrulas Cedero Fuentes joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1953. She served on temporary duty training health professionals in a hospital in Nicaragua. Alicia Gutíerrez Gillians was a Wac in 1948 who received the Commendation Ribbon for Meritorious Service for rescuing a young boy from danger. A career marine, Rose Franco became one of only eleven women warrant officers in the Marine Corps. She was a chief warrant officer 3 when she retired in 1977. Highly decorated Colonel Dora Hernández from San
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Miller, Esther Antonio, Texas, received her flight nurse wings in 1968. During the Vietnam War Latinas also served in the military in small numbers. Among them were First Lieutenant Maryagnes Trujillo-McDonnell, Lieutenant Colonel Lupita Cantú Pérez-Guillermety, Major Aida Nancy Sánchez, and Cathleen Córdova. However, when the Department of Defense established the allvolunteer force, the numbers of Latinas who joined the armed forces increased dramatically. As of September 1977 some 3,640 Latinas were enlisted in the armed forces. Of these, 260 were officers. Overall, they represented 3 percent of all enlisted women and 2 percent of the female officers. As the Latino population in the United States increased, these figures rose considerably during the 1980s and 1990s and into the twentyfirst century. Some 20,000 Latinos/as served in Desert Storm. After the Gulf War approximately 6 percent of enlisted women in the military were Latinas, and 3 percent of them were officers. See also World War II SOURCES: Bellafaire, Judith. “The Contributions of Hispanic Servicewomen.” The Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. http://www.womensmemor ial.org/Educaton/History.html (accessed October 7, 2004); Docker, Amy. 2005. “Loreta Janeta Velázquez.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Pamela J. Marshall and Virginia Sánchez Korrol
MILLER, ESTHER (1922–
)
Born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City on August 17, 1922, Esther María Bonilla Miller represents a little-known and certainly poorly documented group: Latinas of the World War II generation who contributed to the war effort and later carried that strong spirit of service to their postwar work. From government counterespionage and cryptography work during the war, Esther Bonilla Miller moved to education and library work after the war, achieving success in each area. Esther Bonilla Miller’s childhood was strongly rooted in family. Her father, Francisco Antonio Bonilla, born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was a cigar maker who served in the U.S. Cavalry during World War I. The Bonilla household included Francisco Antonio Bonilla (until his hospitalization in 1930), his wife, Maria Teresa Jiménez de Bonilla, a native of Ponce, Puerto Rico, but a resident of New York City by the time she married, three children, Emma, Esther, and Francisco Jr., and two grandmothers. An army injury eventually caused Francisco Antonio Bonilla to become a paraplegic, and he lived the last twenty years of his life in
the Veterans’ Hospital. His family visited him in the hospital every Sunday, and his occasional visits home brought many friends and family members to the Bonilla household. One of the grandmothers, a voracious reader, taught the children to read before they began school. Newspapers and magazines in Spanish, copies of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest on loan from the Veterans’ Hospital, chapters of books rented from a door-to-door peddler, and books received as gifts from friends all contributed to the enrichment of reading in the household. After Francisco Bonilla was hospitalized, the family was supported by María Bonilla, who worked for a cosmetics factory. The packaging of the products could also be done at home, and the whole family worked together. According to Esther Miller, “It was a chance to spend time together, to socialize, and to feel that we were contributing to the family welfare.” María Bonilla insisted that all of the children enroll in college upon their graduation from high school. Both Esther and her sister were admitted to Hunter College. Esther Miller was a sophomore at Hunter College when World War II began in 1941. Her brother Frank (who later became a noted sociologist) was drafted into the armed forces from high school and later fought in the Battle of the Bulge; her mother served as an air raid warden; her sister worked as a riveter in a shipyard in New Jersey; and Esther, with her proficiency in languages, took a position with the Office of Censorship, attending college in the evening. Miller’s job involved reviewing mail from Latin America destined for Europe and searching for any secret codes, messages, or chips. From message analysis and secret inks, her work evolved to studying codes and ciphers, and she became highly effective at intercepting and deciphering codes and secret messages. After the war Miller worked briefly as a translator, but soon found a library position with the New York Public Library Aguilar Branch, working with the Spanish collection. Her job eventually included book selection, book talks and reviews, cataloging, interlibrary loan, and reference work, and she began study toward a master’s degree in library science. She married Albert Alexander Miller in 1958 but continued working as a librarian until 1959, when she retired to care for her newborn twins. When the children began the first grade of school, Miller began volunteering at their school. When they entered the fourth grade, she accepted a teaching position at St. Thomas the Apostle School in West Hempstead, Long Island, and taught for the next fourteen years. During that time she attended Hofstra University and earned a master’s degree in elementary education. She retired from teaching in 1984 and moved with her husband to New Mexico. Esther Miller claims that her childhood reading of
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Mining Communities the National Geographic “engendered a yearning for traveling and a curiosity about different cultures which [she was] fortunate to satisfy in some way.” Her husband worked for Pan American Airways, and one benefit of his job enabled them to travel to Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii, Tahiti, and Japan several times over the years. Soon after Esther Miller moved to Rio Rancho, New Mexico, she began volunteer work at the Rio Rancho Public Library. In 1987 she was offered a part-time job, which eventually became full-time. In 1992 she was selected as the first recipient of the city of Rio Rancho’s Employee of the Month Award for her work as adult services librarian. Miller also volunteered at St. Joseph’s West Mesa Hospital Emergency Room on Fridays, but a fall in 1998 at this job broke her hip, which forced her to curtail her work at the hospital and at the library. On January 26, 2000, Esther Miller retired— again—from library work. That day was declared Esther María Miller Day by the mayor of Rio Rancho in honor of “Esther’s many years of exemplary service to the citizens of Rio Rancho.” SOURCES: Miller, Esther. 2002. Autobiographical notes. April; Mumbower, Kim. 1992. “Memorandum: Employee Recognition Nomination, Esther Miller, Esther Bone Memorial Library of Rio Rancho, New Mexico.” April 27; Walsh, Larry. 1999. “Code Breaker Found Secrets of Success.” West Side Journal (Albuquerque), December 10, 1, 7. Laura Gutiérrez-Witt
MINING COMMUNITIES In the popular imagination descriptions of mining usually consist of the California gold rush, images of “western”—mostly white—men panning for gold, and the myth of striking it rich. Such images provide an incomplete portrait of the importance of mining in the economic development of the southwestern United States. In reality the coal, copper, and iron-ore industries were equally responsible for western development, and it was predominantly, though not exclusively, Mexican labor that extracted the raw ore needed to develop a burgeoning U.S. economy. In 1849 the search for gold brought European American and European immigrants to California in the hope of striking it rich, along with the Chinese, Mexican miners from Sonora, other Latin Americans, and finally the Japanese. The influence of people of color, particularly the Chinese, provoked the California legislature to pass the foreign miner’s tax. Levied on a monthly basis, this tax (twenty dollars per month) was so steep that immigrant miners would never profit from the fruits of their labor. The legislators ignored the technological contributions of the Sonoran miners. These Mexican miners introduced many of the tech-
niques of placer mining (e.g., panning for gold) to the California gold country. Although gold and silver mining were perceived as male dominated, it was quite clear from the beginning that the copper, coal, and iron boom would be a family affair. The emphasis on gold and silver extraction from the 1850s to the 1880s was replaced with a focus on steel for construction, electrical power, and mineralbased sources of energy. The early twentieth century was an important period in the development of mining towns that relied on Mexican labor. In Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado the burgeoning copper, iron-ore, and coal-extraction industries established many common practices that shaped the Mexican labor force. The extraction of raw materials connected the urban and rural Southwest through smelting and refining plants located in cities such as El Paso, Texas, Pueblo, Colorado, and Douglas, Arizona. Many financiers and large corporations that controlled the smelters and mines (such as Guggenheim, PhelpsDodge, Rockefeller, and Anaconda) also owned the rural land where mining towns were constructed. The Anaconda Corporation eventually expanded its empire to hydroelectric power and irrevocably altered the rural landscape of the Southwest to provide fuel and power for the growing cities of the entire United States. The census of 1930 listed some 16,668 Mexicans engaged in the extraction of copper, iron ore, and coal in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. Mining operations altered the landscape of the Southwest because rural Mexican American villages were displaced by the arrival of mining towns, and with these new towns came specific forms of discrimination that shaped European American and Mexican relations in the early twentieth century. The single feature that dominated the shared experience of Mexican American workers in the mining industry was the dual wage structure. As Mexican miners soon realized, the safest working conditions with
A Phelps-Dodge mine. Courtesy of Ronald L. Mize.
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Mining Communities the best pay were held by Europeans and European Americans only. As Carey McWilliams noted, as late as 1944 inexperienced Mexicans were hired and classified as “common laborers” and paid $5.21 for a shift, but Anglo-Americans with no experience were hired as “helpers” and paid $6.36 per shift. The major focus of union organizing and strikes by Mexican miners was specifically to dismantle the discriminatory wage structure. Separate and unequal wages ensured that Mexican families remained at a lower standard of living in the mining towns. In the fields Mexican miners were overwhelmingly concentrated in dirty, dangerous, and undesirable facets of the mining process. Underground mining, by nature a very dangerous occupation that involved working with explosives and extracting minerals to the surface—coupled with the threat of cave-ins—placed all miners in similarly situated risky endeavors, but the proximity to the most dangerous aspects of mining seemed to be reserved for Mexican miners. The systematic job-task delegation thus became another major issue of contention between Mexican laborers and mine operators. The families of miners were required to live in company-provided housing as a precondition for work. Differential treatment was indicative in the company housing provided to Mexican families. Historian Sarah Deutsch notes the role played by southern Colorado coal-mining towns in displacing the rural Mexican American pueblo or village structure. Whether centered on copper mining in Arizona or coal mining in Colorado, company towns exhibited many of the same characteristics. Towns tended to be segregated on the basis of race and ethnicity, and homes were rented by mine workers and lost when recalcitrant workers were fired or expelled. When labor demand was greater than the company housing provisions could meet, the erection of tent colonies became all too common. Designed as temporary structures, these tents were the only protection from the widely varying natural ele-
ments. Housing was almost always substandard, and normal amenities of the time (running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, window screens, and heat) were usually found in the brick homes of mine managers, but rarely in the wood-frame, ramshackle homes that mine workers occupied. Along with the mine companies’ monopoly of housing and land options, the development of company stores provided another means of profit for the mining companies. Because of the geographic isolation of many mining operations, workers rarely had access to larger cities to buy products or to small farms to buy fresh produce, and it was thus extremely difficult to self-subsist. However, women often tended small gardens around their modest homes. Some took in boarders in order to make ends meet. The monopoly of the company store was further augmented by two means: wage payment in scrip and the extension of credit. Frequently scrip was good only at the company store, and credit operated at the discretion of the store managers. Moreover, companies also automatically deducted rent, mining equipment, fuel to heat homes and cook food, water, and other provisions from paychecks. At times paychecks would amount to zero after company deductions. Miners often found themselves in a consistent pattern of debt peonage. Mexican families often struggled to afford the basic necessities, which were often available only at the company store, and were cut off from other means of subsistence and distanced from urban amenities. The mining companies often calculated their profit not only in metals, but from high-interest credit repayment and price gouging in a sales scheme unfettered by competition. The system of debt peonage locked workers into a web that limited their ability to resist deplorable working and living conditions and hampered their capacity to exercise other options. In addition to encountering a discriminatory dual wage system and segregated housing, Mexicans had to deal with racist attitudes expressed by fellow European
Empire Zinc strike picket line, 1951, Hanover, New Mexico. Courtesy of Clinton Jencks Collection, Los Mineros Photograph Collection, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Miranda, Carmen American workers and their families in the mining towns. Early attempts to organize miners by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) were restricted to European Americans only. It was not until the CliftonMorenci Strike of 1903 that the WFM organized workers on the nominal pretense of racial inclusion. Mining companies also scrutinized Mexican families on their dietary habits, dress, housekeeping, language usage, and socialization of children. The focus of Americanization policies fell squarely on the children to ensure that the next generation of miners and housewives all conformed to “American” ways of living. If one were to travel to central Wyoming today, it would take more than a few turns down the roads less traveled and special permission to find the ghost town associated with what was the largest open-pit iron-ore mine in the world. The ore had to be separated from the massive deposit of red hematite, and the mine gives the appearance of a forty-four-acre wound ripped and carved into the earth. Sunrise, Wyoming, followed the mixed development pattern witnessed in southern Arizona and southern Colorado. The sugarbeet industry was the main attraction that brought Mexicans from northern New Mexico to central Wyoming. Women and children worked in the sugar-beet industry during the summers. With a Great Western Sugar refinery in nearby Wheatland, many families from northern New Mexico followed the enganchadores’ (labor contractors) promises of high wages and steady work through the beet fields of Colorado to their eventual destination. The Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) claimed a deposit of iron ore in the nearby Eureka valley, and the mining town of Sunrise was born. Like many other mining towns, the community was segregated by race/ethnicity/ class, with the mine managers living in the largest brick-constructed houses (known as brick row), closest to amenities; white ethnic mining families lived closer in wood-based homes but were separated into their own ethnic enclaves; and the Mexican mining families lived farthest from the company-owned store, YMCA, school, electrical lines, and sewage system. Many Mexican families lived without running water and electricity in the most poorly constructed homes. Differential treatment was integral to the everyday practices in a town defined by corporate ownership. The mine-owned school enforced a rule that speaking Spanish was strictly forbidden, and Mexican students met with corporal punishment if they spoke their native language. From 1900 to the present Mexican miners have protested their deplorable conditions and the inequitable wage structures. After World War II Mexican
Americans, many of them veterans, established strong unions under the International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers and the United Mine Workers. These unions ended the dual wage system and fostered an identity as miners and union members that crossed racial/ethnic lines. SOURCES: Almaguer, Tomás. 1994. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: University of California Press; Deutsch, Sarah. 1987. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an AngloHispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940. New York: Oxford University Press; Galán, Hector, director, and Paul Espinosa, writer. Los Mineros. The American Experience, originally aired on PBS. Galán Productions. Color. 55 minutes; Gordon, Linda. 1999. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; McWilliams, Carey. 1990. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger. (Orig. pub. 1948). Ronald L. Mize
MIRANDA, CARMEN (1909–1955) Known throughout the United States as the “Brazilian Bombshell,” entertainer Carmen Miranda (Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha) was born in Portugal in 1909. Two years later her family immigrated to Brazil. In 1928 Miranda moved the popular samba beyond the venue of carnival and into her first performance at the National Institute of Music. With musical hits like “Prá você gostar de mim” and film appearances in A voz do Carnaval (1933), Alo, alo Brasil (1935), Estudantes (1935), Alo, alo Carnaval (1936), Banana da terra (1939), and Laranja da China (1940), she became popular throughout Brazil. In 1939 Miranda made her first trip to New York under contract with Lee Shubert for his Broadway show. While Miranda’s early life as an immigrant may not have posed significant problems, her adult life as a domestic and international performer thrust her into a set of complex negotiations. In her Rio de Janeiro performances Miranda incorporated stereotypes of a popular samba driven by black talent but scorned by the Brazilian elite. Her outfits emulated those of Bahia, a northeastern state where poor black women sold fruit while wearing turbans and bangles and exposed their midriffs. She became involved in President Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo program to cultivate a national image of Brazilian culture. In the United States Miranda performed a similar role as a goodwill ambassador under U.S. president Herbert Hoover’s Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America. She is perhaps best remembered for her U.S. performances as the “lady in the tutti-fruitti hat” because she often wore a basket of fruits on her head and popularized images of a tropical Brazil for U.S. audiences in theater and nightclubs and
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Mistral, Gabriela on films and television. Miranda also interpreted a variety of Latin American caricatures by performing songs that made places like Puerto Rico and Cuba seem more palatable to U.S. audiences. Miranda’s role as a cultural mediator did not absolve her from public criticism and scorn. In her first return to Brazil, in 1940, audiences criticized her limited characterization of Brazil for the entertainment of U.S. audiences. In her second and last Brazilian performance during that stay, she sang “Disseram que eu voltei americanizada” (They say I’ve become American), in which she defended herself against claims that she was Americanized by emphasizing her “Brazilianness.” When she returned to the United States, Brazilians continued to criticize Miranda for joining Twentieth Century Fox and making films that strove to substitute Latin American audiences for European markets lost during World War II. Her contract with Twentieth Century Fox got her roles in the films Down Argentine Way (1940), Weekend in Havana (1941), That Night in Rio (1941), Springtime in the Rockies (1942), The Gang’s All Here (1943), Four Jills in a Jeep (1944), Greenwich Village (1944), Something for the Boys (1944), Doll Face (1946), and If I’m Lucky (1946). She was among the first Latin American artists to inscribe her hands, feet, and signature in the Hall of Fame at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with the inscription “Viva! à Maneira Sul Americana.” By 1945 her contract ranked her among the highest-salaried women and highestsalaried Hollywood performers in the United States. When a post–World War II Hollywood lost interest in “south-of-the-border” musicals, however, Miranda also struggled (unsuccessfully) to move beyond caricature roles, leaving Fox for more serious roles with United Artists in Copacabana (1947), MGM’s A Date with Judy (1948), and Nancy Goes to Rio (1950). Her inability to move beyond her stereotype as the “Brazilian Bombshell” is demonstrated in her last film, Scared Stiff (1953), in which Jerry Lewis mimics her platform shoes and fruit-laden headpieces. In later years her performances often took the form of nightclub engagements. Although she was said to suffer from depression, biographers and cultural critics note that Miranda was nonetheless a talented artist and costume designer and a generous contributor to charities that aimed to reduce poverty in South America. Taking her physician’s advice, she returned to Brazil in 1954. The trip seemed to have a positive influence on her depression. On August 5, 1955, however, she collapsed during a live dance appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show and died of a heart attack that evening. By the mid-1990s performers, biographers, and cultural and music critics in both Brazil and the United States began revisiting Miranda’s life and cultural contributions. Documentaries such as Bananas Is My Busi-
ness (1995) and Carmen Miranda: A&E Biography (2000) portray Miranda as a complex individual who negotiated a world of limited options. In 1998 Hollywood reconfirmed her contributions by naming the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive “Carmen Miranda Square.” In 2001 a museum opened in Rio de Janeiro to “preserve, conserve, and disseminate a collection on Carmen Miranda who constitutes a symbol of joy, movement and life in the repertoire of Brazilian culture.” Miranda’s music has also been reissued in several musical compilations. SOURCES: Diretoria de Museos. “Museo Carmen Miranda.” http://www.sec.rj.gov.br/webmuseu/carmen.htm (accessed September 14, 2004); Gil-Montero, Martha. 1989. Brazilian Bombshell. New York: Donald I. Fine; Morris, Gary. 1996. “Carmen Miranda, Bananas Is My Business.” Bright Lights Film Journal, no. 16 (April). http://www.brightlights;film.com/16/ carmen.html (accessed September 14, 2004). O’Neil. Brian. 2005. “Carmen Miranda: The High Price of Fame and Bananas.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
MISTRAL, GABRIELA (LUCILA GODOY ALCAYAGA) (1889–1957) The first Latin American woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945) and Chile’s Premio Nacional in poetry (1914), Lucila Godoy Alcayaga was born in 1889 in Chile’s remote northern Andean village of Vicuña to a rural schoolteacher, Petronila Alcayaga, and an itinerant poet, Jerónimo Godoy Alcayaga Villanueva. Of mixed Indian, Jewish, and Basque ancestry, she and her sister Emelina grew up in a singleparent household in Montegrande, because her father abandoned the family when Lucila was only three years old. From nine to twelve years of age Lucila attended the local public school, but she completed her education at home under the guidance of her mother and sister, who was also a teacher. Her love of poetry and her earliest writings stem from this early period of her life. Influenced by the work of French poet Frédéric Mistral and the Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, Lucila adopted the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral. In 1905 Mistral became a teachers’ aide in La Cantera and was able to support her mother on her salary. A troubling, tragic love affair (the young man committed suicide) motivated Mistral to write Sonetas de la muerte (Sonnets of Death), and thus began an impressive creative writing career aroused by the personal events of her life. Gabriela Mistral became a public figure in literary and intellectual circles when her poems soon appeared in such Venezuelan newspapers as La
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Mohr, Nicholasa Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo. Although her laurels rested on the written word, Mistral was also an innovative educational reformer, feminist, administrator, ambassador, and university professor. Mistral earned a diploma in education from the Santiago Normal School in 1912 that enabled her to teach high school. Six years later, in 1918, Mistral was appointed director of a prestigious rural school for girls in Punta Arenas, the inspirational site for a collection of poems, Patagonian Landscapes. Until 1923, when she was recognized as “Teacher of the Nation” by the Chilean government, Mistral traveled to foreign countries, including Europe and the United States, studying pedagogical methods and techniques. During this period major innovations in education as related to nation building took place throughout the Americas. Vibrant literary movements included the emergence of distinguished figures like her compatriot and future Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, and nationalistic social reform issues permeated academic intellectual circles. Invited by the Mexican minister of education, José Vasconcelos, to develop programs for the poor, Mistral moved to Mexico in 1922, where she established mobile libraries and educational programs to increase access to literature in rural regions. She continued to write and publish her own work, expressing views on nature, religion, childhood, birth and motherhood, death, and women’s concerns. A particular focus on cradle songs and poems about maternity reflect Mistral’s preoccupation about having children. Although she never married, she adopted a child who later died. In 1922 Mistral’s collection of poems Desolación (Desolation) appeared in print, followed by the childhood-inspired Ternura (Tenderness) in 1925, Questions in 1930, and Tala, poems on children and maternity, in 1938. She also wrote fables and children’s poems and edited Readings for Women, a collection of prose and poetry. Intolerance for injustice also marked her writing, as well as a deep sense of religiosity. In later life Mistral joined a lay order of Franciscans, which inspired her to create poems like “Motivos de San Francisco” and “Elogios de las cosas de la tierra.” Mistral lived abroad for almost thirty years, settling finally in the United States, and as an esteemed visiting professor of Spanish literature, taught classes at the University of Puerto Rico and Middlebury, Vassar, and Barnard colleges. Internationally acclaimed, Mistral became a cultural emissary for her country of origin, formally appointed by the Chilean government as ambassador-at-large for Latin American culture. She worked with the League of Nations, the United Nations, and various foreign consulates, including those of Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the United States. Among the most prominent people of the day to cross her path were writers, statesmen, entertainers, and in-
ternational figures like Marie Curie, Henri Bergson, Pablo Neruda, and the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Mistral held honorary degrees from Guatemala and Florence and honorific membership in numerous cultural societies in Chile and the United States. Despite the many years she lived away from Chile, Mistral never forgot her indigenous origins. The words uttered in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1945 speak volumes about her self-perception and role as an international figure: “At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.” Thus she crafted a heritage that emanated from the “noble tongues” of the Iberian Peninsula to the diversity of the Americas. Mistral retired and spent the last years of her life in poor health living in New York. She continued to write but on January 10, 1957, lost her battle against cancer. Her impact on Latin American and American literature has been monumental, and her work continues to inspire. Langston Hughes translated some of Mistral’s verses before she died, and the Gabriela Mistral Prize was created in 1979. Administered by the Organization of American States, the prize was given in 2001 to the British rock star Sting for his tribute to the mothers of the disappeared under the Pinochet regime. See also Literature SOURCES: Arce de Vázquez, M. 1964. Gabriela Mistral. New York: New York University Press. Books and Writers. “Gabriela Mistral.” http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gmistral.htm (accessed September 14, 2004); Distinguished Women of Past and Present. “Gabriela Mistral.” http://www.distinguished women.com/biographies/mistral.html (accessed September 14, 2004). Virginia Sánchez Korrol
MOHR, NICHOLASA (1935–
)
The experiences of growing up as a Puerto Rican female in New York City’s Spanish Harlem, also known as El Barrio, were introduced to an English-speaking readership in 1973 by Nicholasa Mohr in her award-winning first novel, Nilda, a work that reflects details of her early life. Born in New York during the final years of the Great Depression, Mohr had to overcome harsh difficulties in order to develop her talents as an artist and writer. Her father died when she was eight years old. She lost her mother, who was frequently ill, when she was in junior high school. Upon completing her high-school studies at a specialized school in Manhattan where courses in fashion illustration honed her skills in drawing, Mohr attended the Art Students League and City College while supporting herself at various jobs. After a brief marriage that ended in annulment, Mohr traveled to Mexico City, where she studied at the
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Mojica-Hammer, Ruth Taller de Gráfica Popular and became acquainted with the work of such artists as Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, who, she claims, greatly influenced the direction of her creativity: “In a profound way their work spoke to me and my experiences as a Puerto Rican woman born in New York.” Upon returning to the United States Mohr enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where she met Irwin Mohr. The couple was married in 1957 and had two sons. In the late 1950s Mohr continued her fine-arts studies at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Pratt Center for Contemporary Printmaking. She worked as an art teacher in several schools, and her innovative style began to draw the attention of New York art circles and led to the position of artist-in-residence in New York City public schools in the early 1970s and exhibitions of her work. At this juncture Mohr’s vivid imagination turned to literary expression. At the suggestion of a publisher Mohr wrote briefly about some of the painful events of her life. Expecting a tale similar to the gritty story narrated in Piri Thomas’s highly successful 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets, the publisher found the piece too tame: it lacked the hard drugs and crime, what Mohr has referred to as the “stereotypical ghetto person,” that was anticipated. Undeterred, Mohr presented her vignettes to Harper and Row in lieu of an art commission for one of its books. Its enthusiasm for her writing led to a contract for what would become Nilda, a work written and illustrated by Mohr that received the Outstanding Book Award in Juvenile Fiction from the New York Times in 1973 and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1974. Having discovered her literary voice, Mohr published a second book in 1975, El Bronx Remembered, a collection of short stories set in New York during the postwar years 1946 to 1956 that delve into the hopes and disillusionments of the “American dream” from a multicultural perspective. In this work Mohr expands the narrative viewpoint from the single speaker in Nilda to the many and diverse neighborhood characters that Puerto Ricans encountered as they settled into the decaying environment of the South Bronx. Mohr describes the challenges to their values, loyalties, and resiliency in a frank yet compassionate style that garnered her yet more accolades, among them the Best Book Award from the School Library Journal and the Outstanding Book Award in Teenage Fiction from the New York Times, both in 1975. Expanding to another Puerto Rican New York neighborhood, the short-story collection In Nueva York (1977) ventures into the Lower East Side, renamed by the local population “Loisaida,” an area Mohr knew from her community work in visual and media productions. Felita, Mohr’s 1979 novel of a young Puerto Rican girl, the recipient of the Amer-
ican Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1981, chronicles the tensions and lessons of young people who encounter prejudice and frustration in a society unwilling to recognize the value of diversity. The novel’s sequel, Going Home, was published in 1986. Nicholasa Mohr has continued to be a productive and diverse artist, challenging herself in a variety of genres and endeavors. Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio, a collection of short stories and a novella written for adults (1985), is a testimony of women’s lives in New York. Novels, folktales, memoirs, television writing, and dramatic presentations of her works combine with teaching and lecture presentations to make her one of the most highly regarded U.S. Latina authors today. “I feel fortunate,” she states in her memoir Growing Up in the Sanctuary of My Imagination (1994), “to do work that is fun and creative and that serves as a conduit of communication enabling me to share with others the celebration of our imagination and the creative spirit.” Her contribution in documenting more than forty years of the New York Puerto Rican experience was recognized when she was honored with the prestigious Hispanic Heritage Award in 1997. See also Literature SOURCES: Dictionary of Literary Biography. 1994. Detroit: Gale Research. Vol. 145; Contemporary Literary Criticism. 1980. Detroit: Gale Research. Vol. 12; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1989. Biographical Directory of Hispanic Literature in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Notable Hispanic American Women. 1993. Detroit: Gale Research; Something about the Author Autobiography Series. 1999. Detroit: Gale Research. Vol. 113. Margarite Fernández-Olmos
MOJICA-HAMMER, RUTH (1926–
)
In 1926 Ruth Mojica-Hammer became the first Mexican American baby in the hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. Her father, a miner, named her María del Refugio Mojica-Gallegos. Both her parents had emigrated from Durango, Mexico. Her mother had a preparatoryschool education, unusual for Mexican women at the time, and Mojica-Hammer believes that her mother’s education significantly influenced her own life’s path. “Cuca,” as Mojica-Hammer was known, arrived with her parents in Chicago at the age of two and one-half. Her father became a union organizer at the Chicago stockyards, and Ruth and her brothers learned about social justice issues at the family table. She attended Chicago public schools, graduating as one of only two Mexican Americans in a class of 200 students. During World War II Mojica-Hammer was a “Rosie the Riveter,” making microphones for aviators. In 1946 she married a returning veteran named Jesse García.
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Molina, Gloria She returned to work and started what she calls “the evolution of a woman.” “My first step in liberation was opening my own savings accounts and getting my driver’s license,” she recalls. She was married for more than ten years and then divorced in 1957. Her daughter Linda was born in 1960, and in 1961 Mojica-Hammer married and changed her name to Rhea because her husband could not pronounce Refugio. Her second husband was an alcoholic, and MojicaHammer divorced him in 1964. In 1969, while trying to help a woman who had been locked out of her apartment by the landlord, Mojica-Hammer caught the attention of the deputy director of the Model Cities program where legal aid was housed. He offered her a job, which she turned down, but then he told her that a local Spanish television program was looking for a new host for a program called Ayuda. She took the job and became a forceful community advocate. She became involved in a number of local efforts and was asked to run for Congress by a political action group. The primary was held in 1972, and she compared her campaign to “a degree in political science.” She lost the election but continued her political education through La Raza Unida Party, the Chicano third party popular in the early 1970s. Mojica-Hammer also became active in the National Women’s Political Caucus and attended the first national convention in 1973 in Houston, where she was elected vice-chair, and where she learned the lessons of racial politics and coalition building. A founding member of the National Latino Media Coalition, she served as a cohost for “We Are Chicago,” a production of CBS-TV in Chicago. She was founder and publisher of El Clarín, a bilingual Chicano publication. President Jimmy Carter appointed Mojica-Hammer to the Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year in 1977. She served on the Census Advisory Committee on the Spanish Origin Population for the 1980 census and also on numerous boards of local community organizations, including the Spanish Coalition for Jobs and the Mexican American Business and Professional Women’s Club of Chicago. In 1979 Mojica-Hammer embraced the evangelical Christian faith, taking the name Ruth upon her baptism. She became active in the United Church of Christ and served as a member of the directorate of the Board of World Ministries for eight years, during which she visited a number of Latin American countries and served as the chair of the Latin American Committee. At the Fourth United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing, China, in 1995, Mojica-Hammer participated as a member of Church Women United. She also left her Chicago home and moved to El Paso, Texas. Since 1998, Mojica-Hammer has been executive director of the El Paso Council for International Visitors.
Midwestern politician Ruth Mojica-Hammer. Photograph by Glamour Shots. Courtesy of Ruth Mojica.
She is vice president of the El Paso County chapter of the National Hispanic Republican Assembly and a member of the Advisory Board on Aging. SOURCES: Delgado, R., and J. Stefancic, eds. 1998. The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press; Pantoja, A. 2002. Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja. Houston: Arte Público Press. Virginia Martínez
MOLINA, GLORIA (1948–
)
Gloria Molina is the oldest of ten children born in Los Angeles to Concepción and Leonardo Molina, a laborer and janitor with roots in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. When she was growing up in Pico Rivera, California, her family spoke only Spanish at home, and she often served as an interpreter for her parents in the English-speaking world. Encounters with discrimination occurred early in her life. She once led her parents in search of an apartment, and several landlords, unwilling to rent to a Latino family, turned them away. At school she was punished for speaking Spanish. When she attended El Rancho High School in the 1960s, the school was split between Anglo and Mexican American students. Molina remembers that “the white guys used to call us Marias. We didn’t have names. We were Mexicans.” Her father was a stern disciplinarian, and at school Molina was a shy and dutiful student. But her life shifted in new directions when her father became dis-
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Montemayor, Alice Dickerson abled in 1967; he was buried alive during a road construction accident. Molina helped take charge of the household, paying the bills and translating for her mother when they visited her father in the hospital. When she completed high school in 1966, Molina decided, “I didn’t really necessarily want to get married. I really wanted to have a career which was a very untraditional thing at the time.” She attended East Los Angeles College with hopes of becoming a fashion designer but changed her goals after joining the United Mexican American Student Association (UMAS). The group sent her to tutor young people at the Maravilla Housing Project. For the first time she met girls who had been raped, were illiterate, or were addicted to drugs. She concluded that “the whole system was mistreating them.” In 1968 she volunteered for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign but continued her activism in the Chicano movement. Tired of “making menudo for rallies,” she sought out other “like-minded” Chicana activists, and in 1974 became the first president of the formally established Comisión Femenil Mexicana. The group wanted to form an organization separate from other Chicano groups, one that would address issues relevant to Chicanas like child care, education, and employment opportunities. She campaigned to be the first Chicana appointed to the Commission on the Status of Women and became the group’s spokesperson as plaintiff in the class-action suit Madrigal v. Quilligan. In the early 1970s Molina worked for Richard Alatorre and Art Torres in their bids for state assembly seats and left college to work with Torres after he was elected in 1974. From then on Molina held a series of appointed political positions, including a job post in the White House as Jimmy Carter’s deputy for presidential personnel. With the support and encouragement of Comisión Femenil, Molina embarked on her own political campaign in 1982, winning a hard-fought battle for the state assembly in the Fifty-sixth District against the handpicked candidate of her former mentor, Richard Alatorre. She became the first Latina in the California state legislature. When state authorities proposed placing a prison in Molina’s district, she worked with Mothers of East Los Angeles and transformed her Los Angeles field office into the headquarters for a grassroots movement in opposition to the prison. The struggle established her reputation as a maverick and a fighter for Latino rights. She was an elected official with the courage to stand up to the Democratic Party establishment in Sacramento. In 1987 she defeated another Alatorre-backed candidate to become the first Latina to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council. She worked on a variety of initiatives, including a plan to redevelop the blighted
neighborhoods just west of downtown. In 1991 she became the first Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, representing the First Supervisorial District, and almost immediately began attacking the county bureaucracy’s old-boy network. She pushed through a series of ethics reforms and led the fight to save a public hospital serving East Los Angeles. In 1991 she was elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee and continues to serve in that position. She is also a mentor to numerous young Latinas entering the political arena. See also Chicano Movement; Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN); Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Tobar, Hector. 1993. “The Politics of Anger.” Los Angeles Times Magazine. January 3; Molina, Gloria. 1996. Interview by Virginia Espino, October 24; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Espino
MONTEMAYOR, ALICE DICKERSON (1902–1989) Alice Dickerson Montemayor was the first woman to hold a national post in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) not reserved for a woman. An outspoken feminist, she directly challenged male privilege in LULAC, an important civil rights organization. Born Alice Dickerson Barrera in Laredo, Texas, in 1902, she was a child of Anglo-Mexican heritage during a time when intermarriage in Texas was uncommon. Her father, John Randolph Dickerson, was a railroad engineer, and her mother, Manuela Barrera Dickerson, was a homemaker. She attended Colegio de Guadalupe (Ursuline Academy) in Laredo and graduated from Laredo High School in 1924, an unusual accomplishment. She planned to become a lawyer, but after her father died, she decided to stay with her mother in Laredo. She attended Laredo Business College for one year and worked as a clerk for Western Union. She married Francisco Montemayor in 1927, and the couple had two sons. She showed early signs of rebelliousness and independence. She wore a suit instead of a wedding gown and told her mother, “I’m not guaranteeing I won’t get a divorce if my husband doesn’t treat me right.” The marriage lasted for more than five decades and ended with her husband’s death in the 1980s. In 1934 Alice Dickerson Montemayor became a social worker for Webb County, where she helped place the poor on welfare rolls during the depression. She worked there until 1939 despite the fact that she experienced discrimination from her colleagues and clients. At first she was denied a key to the building and had to
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Montes-Donnelly, Elba Iris work under a tree. Some white clients refused to see her, and on one occasion she required the services of a bodyguard. At the behest of Ester Machuca of El Paso she became a charter member of the Laredo Ladies Council of the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1936. Unlike some women who joined Ladies LULAC and had husbands in LULAC, her husband Francisco never joined. During the 1930s women’s chapters were few and far between, but within a short period Alice Dickerson Montemayor made women very visible in LULAC. In 1984 she reflected, “I was a very controversial person. Many men didn’t want any ladies involved in LULAC.” As secretary of the local women’s council, she submitted articles to LULAC News, the national publication, and thus garnered notice for her civic enthusiasm. She stood for election and won the post of second national vice president general in 1936, the first woman to hold a position not specifically designated for a woman. Elected director general of Junior LULAC in 1939, she wrote the first Junior LULAC youth charter for the Laredo Boys and Girls Club. Unlike LULAC, the children’s club included both girls and boys and thus created future possibilities that men and women might work together under the same organization without separation into Ladies Council and “regular” LULAC. She also served as associate editor of LULAC News, writing more articles than any other woman. In her article “Women’s Opportunity in LULAC” she defined “women’s place” to be “in that position where she can do the most for the furthering of her fellow women.” She also wrote an editorial, “Son muy hombres,” condemning sexism in LULAC. In her words, “There has been some talk about suppressing the ladies councils of our League or at least relegate them to the category of auxiliaries.” She said that the “real cause” was the “aggressive attitude” by women and “the fear that our women will take a leading part in the evolution of our League . . . That our MUY HOMBRES might be shouldered from their position as arbiters of our League.” She and Adela Sloss Vento were among the few feminist voices in LULAC during the 1930s. She left LULAC because she received little support despite her leadership and because of the tragic death of one of her sons, a college student. In addition to her extensive involvement with LULAC during the 1930s, she was business head of the fashion department at Montgomery Ward. Alice Dickerson Montemayor also owned her own small business, a dress shop called Monty’s, for several years in the 1930s and another one in the early 1950s. After 1956 she worked as a school registrar at the L. J. Christen Junior High School and retired in 1973. A parish leader in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, she played
the organ, taught catechism, and organized the first youth choir. In 1951 she earned a pontifical blessing. After retirement she made a name for herself as a visual folk artist in the 1970s and broke tradition again as an older woman painter. Her surviving son Aurelio motivated her interest in art. Asserting her independence, she said, “I’ve never taken lessons. I just do what I can and don’t worry about it.” She painted acrylics on tin and masonite and painted color on her frames as well. Her works depicted women, nature, and the family. Men were typically absent from her portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. She signed her name “Admonty.” She exhibited her work in Chicago, California, Mexico, and Texas and was featured in Folk Art in Texas and in Stories to Treasure, a sixth-grade book. Her art captured her vision of beauty in the world and her tenacity. She died of natural causes in 1989. Alice Dickerson Montemayor challenged sexism well before the Chicana feminist movement, and her legacy of community activism has only recently been recognized. See also Feminism; League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCES: Jordan, Sandra. 1985. “Alice Dickerson Montemayor.” In Folk Art in Texas, ed. Francis Edward Abernathy. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press; Montemayor, Alice. 1938. “Son muy hombres.” LULAC News, February. Nettie Lee Benson Collection, University of Texas at Austin; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1997. “Alice Dickerson Montemayor: Feminism and Mexican American Politics in the 1930s.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, 435–456. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Cynthia E. Orozco
MONTES-DONNELLY, ELBA IRIS (1940– ) Elba Montes-Donnelly’s passion for community service surfaced at about the age of eight when she left her native Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to live with relatives in San Francisco’s Mission District. Outgoing and resourceful, she soon learned enough English to serve as an interpreter for the many relatives and friends of relatives who came to the Mission District in the first Latino influx of the 1950s. By age ten she was dealing with doctors, courts, and churches. “I remember at eleven being a translator for a murder trial,” she says, adding, “It was cut short because they found out I was supposed to be in school.” She also unearthed jobs and free medical and dental care for people. “I would walk into a company, find out who ran the show, and ask if they were hiring,” she recalls. “The first thing they’d say was, ‘We don’t hire children.’ Then
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Montez, María I’d drag the person in who wanted work.” If they said that they wanted English speakers, she would offer to interpret while the person was trained. To every objection, Montes-Donnelly voiced a solution, wearing managers down till they gave the person a chance. When her father died in 1951, her mother and siblings came to the United States. Montes-Donnelly landed her mother a sewing factory job though the owner wanted English speakers and machine operators, and her mother had neither skill. Helping fellow transplants often meant missing school, where Montes-Donnelly was one of very few Latinas. “At the parochial school I went to I was hit if I spoke Spanish.” Her formal education ended with ninth grade. Montes-Donnelly was determined to give her children a better experience. When her first child (born of her first marriage at age sixteen) entered school, she joined the PTA, ran church fund-raisers, and became the first nonwhite on the parish council. At the same time she worked as a janitor, hotel maid, and waitress. In 1965 a parish priest urged her to apply for a job as a community organizer aide with the new Economic Opportunity Council. She refused, convinced that her lack of education would rule her out. He applied for her. Within a year she was head of her work team. Riding the crest of Latino civil rights fervor, MontesDonnelly began years of dynamic work as a community organizer and leader who helped bring the now largely Latino Mission District better schools, jobs, and social agencies. She took a strong hand in founding agencies such as the Mission Coalition, an umbrella advocacy organization, and the Puerto Rican Organization for Women to support women in need. She helped establish an after-school program and a cooperative laundromat. While she raised five children as a single mother, Montes-Donnelly represented the community on boards and committees. In 1972 she attended Saul Alinsky’s Chicago school for community organizing, a training ground for civil rights leaders such as César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. “He taught us to train leaders from within the community,” says Montes-Donnelly, “like myself who was raised there, lived there, so people trusted me.” Returning to the Mission District, she practiced what she had learned. “We started with groups in people’s front rooms, trying to get them to believe in themselves.” She taught Latinos how to push for better schools, cleaner streets, and fair treatment by landlords. Montes-Donnelly taught community organizing at San Francisco State University. Working for the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor in several states, she helped women overcome barriers that kept them from jobs. She also helped Latinas in prison exercise their rights.
In the late 1980s Montes-Donnelly took new directions. A baby-clothes resale shop she established inevitably doubled as an informal support center for women. She became a foster mother for Latino/a children with AIDS, ran shelters and group homes, worked with crack-addicted African American women, and organized programs for the homeless of San Francisco’s largely gay Castro area. After her daughter’s death at the hands of carjackers Montes-Donnelly volunteered in a prison program where she urged male inmates to confront the consequences of their violence. Elba Montes-Donnelly won the League of United Latin American Citizens’ Key Man Award for 1971– 1972, the International Women’s Year Outstanding Latina Woman Award in 1975, and other honors. Among her peers she earned the unofficial title “Mayor of Twenty-fourth Street,” a well-known Mission District thoroughfare. As warm as she is frank and nononsense, Montes-Donnelly holds people responsible for their own progress. “I feel very passionately that people in the community can fend for themselves. I just believe they need to know their own strengths.” SOURCES: Flores, Francisco. 2001. “Elba Montes: A Mission Jewel.” El Tecolote, May, 7; Montes-Donnelly, Elba. 1977 and 2002. Oral Interviews by Annette Oliveira; Oliveira, Annette A. 1977. “Elba Montes, the Mayor of 24th Street.” La Luz Magazine 6, no. 11 (November): 21. Annette Oliveira
MONTEZ, MARÍA (MARÍA AFRICA GRACIA VIDAL) (1912–1951) María Montez was popularly known by the print press she courted on her way to fame as “the Queen of Technicolor,” “the Caribbean Cyclone,” “Dominican Dynamite,” “Hollywood Siren,” and “Tempestuous Montez.” The most common birth name given to María Montez in the United States is María Antonia Vidal de Santos Silas and Gracia, and in the Dominican Republic, María Africa Gracia Vidal. The actress adopted the last name “Montez” after the nineteenth-century Irish dancer Lola Montez, whom the former erroneously believed was Spanish. Although Montez’s stated year of birth varies widely, 1912, 1917, 1919, or 1920, biographers agree that Montez was born on June 6 in the Dominican Republic and was educated in a Catholic convent in her father’s native Canary Islands. The background of Montez’s Dominican-born mother, Regla Teresa María Vidal, is unclear, but her father, Isidoro Gracia García, was a Spanish honorary vice-consul and wood exporter who traveled widely on consular appointments. Raised devoutly Catholic, Montez married—and quickly divorced—William McFeeters an Irish officer of the British army and a banker with First National City
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Montez, María Bank, in 1937. She later wed French-Jewish actor Jean Pierre Aumont in 1943 and had one daughter, known as Tina Marquand (or Aumont), also an actress. Montez was the first woman to receive the Order of Juan Pablo Duarte and the Order of Trujillo from Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1943, for promoting friendly relations between the Dominican Republic and the United States and for her achievements as a “woman.” Montez also wrote a handful of songs, as well as several books of poetry, including Twilight (Crepúsculo) in 1942, which won the Manuscripters award in Santo Domingo. During World War II Montez served as a U.S. goodwill ambassador and attended official White House functions from 1943 to 1944. Legend has it that Montez hustled her first movie opportunity when she met an important RKO-Radio executive, George J. Schaefer, at a New York restaurant. Intrigued by Montez’s beauty, he offered her a card and a screen test, to which Montez allegedly exclaimed: “Movies! What harm can they do to me?” After she completed the screen test, RKO offered her a $100-a-week contract but required her to take a threemonth course in speech to alter her accent. A Universal scout inexplicably managed to see the screen test, and that studio offered her $150-a-week contract minus the speech course. Montez accepted. Montez’s accent proved to be both a blessing and a curse, as well as a compelling trope to approach her short career. She arrived in Hollywood during the heyday of the Latin spitfire, and her accent and largerthan-life Latina persona were cultivated to produce a fiery effect. Paradoxically, while the accent was often cited as an obstacle by Universal executives in casting Montez, its exoticizing and dramatic flair helped to set her apart from other studio contractees, while simultaneously confining her to stereotypical screen roles. After accepting secondary parts in films like The Invisible Woman (1940) and Lucky Devils (1942), Montez engaged in a series of publicity stunts to promote her career. She made grand entrances at public spaces, traveled with an entourage, created a Montez for Stardom Club, and gave press releases that stressed her liberated sexual attitudes. Daring revelations that she did not wear brassieres but enjoyed tight sweaters were grist for the tabloid mills. She was a favorite World War II pinup, and one of her best-known publicity pranks was claiming that a GI, reportedly missing in action, was her fiancé. At odds with her stable private life, Montez’s offscreen antics made her a favorite of the gossip media, but not the serious press. Although she was considered an untalented actress by the critics, Montez’s career benefited from the war and the Good Neighbor Policy. On the one hand, de-
mand for entertainment prompted the studios to increase their B-movie supply, with regular employment for many contract players. On the other, Latin-themed films set in South America and the need for celebrity visits to capitals in the region created a demand for Latino stars. Not surprisingly, Montez’s big break came after Universal Studios loaned her to Twentieth Century Fox for That Night in Rio (1941). This opportunity opened the door to the most lucrative period of Montez’s career, starring in so-called escapist Orientalist fantasies such as South of Tahiti (1941), in which she caught the public’s attention as a jungle beauty. Despite frequent demands for dramatic roles that would break with stereotypes, Montez’s first and last leading performances—The Mystery of Marie Roget (1942) and Tangier (1946)—were panned by the critics. Nevertheless, her performances in Arabian Nights (1942) and the box-office smash Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) established her as an audience favorite, mostly for her onscreen sensuality. The end of World War II and the Good Neighbor Policy accelerated the demise of Latin stars, already in peril from Hollywood’s abandonment of assembly-line production, the rise of television, and the threatening visibility of “real” Latinos in America’s major cities. From 1944 to 1947 Montez starred in a wide range of theatrical genres, but when her contract expired, it was not renewed. Scorn for Montez’s performances became commonplace, and by 1945 she was named “the year’s worst actress” by Harvard Lampoon. Montez continued her film career in Europe, where she moved with Aumont in 1947, and gave some of her best performances in films such as Il ladro de Venezia and Portrait d’un assassin. Film reviewers, however, continued to dismiss her work. Despite the ridicule endured by Montez, her work continues to be celebrated by both the Latino and gay communities. Often labeled “bombastic,” “phony,” and “fiery,” Montez was known for her campy, witty responses aimed at those bent on belittling her. Her propensity to play “queens” and insist on being treated as one was for Montez a practice of dignity that resonates with queer and minority spectators. Examples of her enduring appeal include the writings of underground performer and filmmaker Jack Smith, admired actor and Andy Warhol superstar Mario Montez, and Randy Shilts’s influential book on the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Fearing that she was becoming overweight, Montez believed that saline baths helped to keep her fit. In true iconic fashion Montez died from an apparent heart attack while she was taking a bath. The Dominican government immediately responded by renaming a street in her honor, and the actress’s hometown declared a
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Mora, Magdalena twenty-four-hour grief period. In 1996 the town of Barahona’s new airport was named María Montez International Airport. Montez’s Hollywood career was a product of shrewd determination in the face of great odds, but her ultimate contribution may have been to affirm her right to stardom by flaunting an excessive sentimentality, flamboyance, and joie de vivre common to Caribbean and queer cultures that made her both a cliché and the ruler of a lush and alternative cultural universe. Although she was frequently criticized for not allowing herself to be understood due to her accent, the fact that María Montez never let go of her “flaw” may have fed the Latin stereotype, but it also affirmed her as a different kind of star for generations to come. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: Parish, James Robert, and Lennard de Carl. 1976. Hollywood Players: The Forties. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House; Smith, Jack. 1962–1963. “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of María Montez.” Film Culture, no. 27 (Winter): 28– 32. Frances Negrón-Muntaner
MORA, MAGDALENA (1952–1981) Magdalena Mora—worker, feminist, writer, scholar, labor organizer, and activist—was born in the Mexican mining town of Tlalpujahua, Michoacán, to Magdaleno Mora and Esther Mora Torres. Her father was a miner who later became a bracero, working on the railroads and fields of the United States. In 1964 Magdalena, three of her four brothers, and her mother came to California to join her father. They settled in San Jose and picked crops. At sixteen she went to work in the Del Monte canneries while completing high school. Mora became an activist in her teens. Her political sense was born of her life experiences and influences in both countries. Her father had been on the central organizing committee during the fierce Tlalpujahua mining strikes of the 1930s, and she grew up in a town with a strong sense of class consciousness. Her mother taught her about collective work by insisting that the siblings work together. Mora learned about class struggles from her mother’s battles against class-based discrimination. In her teens she was inspired by the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the growing Chicano movement. Working in the canneries and fields gave her firsthand experience with exploitation. Her brother Nacho, an activist in the Mexican student protests of 1968, helped shape her development of a sharp analysis of class exploitation and racism. Throughout her life Mora combined incisive intellectual analysis with her participation in concrete struggles. She viewed
these conflicts within a Marxist analysis of international capitalist hegemony and the need for social revolution to overturn class exploitation, racism, and patriarchy. Mora joined the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in high school and el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) at the University of California, Berkeley, and pushed the organizations to support off-campus labor and community issues. She joined a strike at the cannery where she worked, participated in Berkeley’s swelling antiwar movement, and began to work with the Oakland-based Prensa Sembradora. In 1974 this group merged with CASA– Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA-HGT). CASA marked a decisive turn in the Chicano movement. A Marxist-Leninist organization, CASA focused on organizing Mexican workers and forged solidarity with workers in Mexico and with immigrant and labor groups in the United States. Mora joined the national leadership and authored a column in the CASA newspaper, Sin Fronteras. She helped organize a strike by Mexican women at the Tolteca Food Plant, where women battled a company union, an insensitive national labor board, and patriarchy in the unions, the company, and their own families. An active, engaged scholar and intellectual, Mora studied political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and researched the history of labor, immigrants, and Mexican women. Upon CASA’s demise she entered the doctoral program in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She authored an unpublished paper on the Tolteca strike and coedited Mexican Women in the United States. In Los Angeles she joined old friends to publish El Foro del Pueblo and support immigrant labor struggles. In 1977 Mora was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her struggle against cancer was emblematic of her other struggles. She continued to organize. Although her sight diminished, she navigated the Los Angeles bus system to interview striking women, organize fundraisers, and speak out publicly on working conditions. In the spring of 1981 she returned to Tlalpujahua, Mexico, where she died on May 28, 1981. Simply listing Mora’s contributions does not fully convey her impact. Her political commitments, experiences as a worker and a woman, intellectual acuity, enthusiasm, depth, and intensity inspired those she touched. In her own struggle with cancer she lost neither her spirit nor courage. She was, as one friend said, “a diamond honed from carbon in the fire of struggle.” She inspired organizers, intellectuals, and artists in the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. Friends produced a book on her life, Raíz fuerte que no se arranca. A corrido was written about her life, and a UCLA scholarship
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Mora, Patricia was established in her name. Writings in both Mexico and the United States have been and continue to be dedicated to Mora, and professors include her story in their classes. Mora was a visionary, a Mexicana, a Chicana, a feminist, and an internationalist who skillfully brought people together, asking not where they were from, but whether they wanted to join the struggle. As Professor Juan Gómez-Quiñones said, “She gave us an example. . . . She was one of those people who decided not to suffer from history but to make history. She made history.” See also Chicano Movement; Feminism SOURCES: Mora, Magdalena, and Adelaida Del Castillo, eds. 1980. Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, UCLA; Sembradora, E. P. 1981. Raíz fuerte que no se arranca. Los Angeles: Editorial Prensa Sembradora, Inc. Devra A. Weber
MORA, PATRICIA “PAT” (1942–
)
Through her extensive literary works on Latina “encounters with the world” and her career as an educator, Patricia Mora has become a leading advocate for multicultural education and family literacy. Born and raised in a middle-class household in El Paso, Texas, Mora was greatly influenced by the dynamic bilingual and transnational culture that flourished along the U.S.-Mexico border. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Texas Western College and went on to complete a master of arts degree at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her thought-provoking discussions of culture, language, literacy, and identity have garnered her much acclaim as an American poet. Her notable works include her autobiographical compilation Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle (1993), House of Houses (1997), and her collection of poems in Borders (1986), which was the winner of the Southwest Book Award. In addition to writing extensively on political, social, and cultural issues facing Latinas, Pat Mora has held a number of honors and faculty positions, including distinguished visiting professor at the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas at El Paso’s Distinguished Alumna for 2004. Her research and writing have taken her on extensive travels to Pakistan, Italy, and the Dominican Republic, among other places. Mora’s journeys along the physical and conceptual borderlands have been among her greatest contributions. Currently she is bridging the gap between cultural traditions and literacy through her awardwinning publications in children’s literature. Her most notable books for children and young adults are the award-winning Maria Paints the Hills and A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Inéz. By speaking at
schools, community organizations, and local bookstores, Mora has dedicated extensive efforts to strengthening a book-reading and writing culture among Latina/o youth. Her current project is promoting el día de los niños/día de los libros—a day dedicated to celebrating childhood, books, and culture. Pat Mora is also a mother of three adult children and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She continues to forge new approaches to conceptualizing Latina identity, as she once outlined in Nepantla’s essay “Desert Women”: “Much as I want us . . . Chicanas of all ages, to carry the positive aspects of our culture with them or sustenance, I also want us to question and ponder what values and customs we wish to incorporate into our lives, to continue our individual and our collective evolution.” See also Literature SOURCES: Mora, Pat. 1993. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; “Pat Mora.” Official website www.patmora.org (accessed August 2004); “Pat Mora: The Academy of American Poets.” Mary Prignano, resource page creator. www.poets .org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=297 (accessed July 16, 2005). Margie Brown-Coronel
MORAGA, CHERRÍE (1952–
)
Born on September 25, 1952, in Whittier, California, Cherríe Moraga is one of the most prominent writers in Chicano/a literature, an eloquent poet, essayist, and playwright. Of blended European American and Mexican heritage (her father is European American; her mother is Mexican American), Moraga felt the tension of multiple identities at a young age. Moraga’s fair skin allowed her to pass as a European American, but she identified with the Mexican heritage of her mother. Moraga attended Immaculate Heart, a small Catholic College in Hollywood, and graduated with a B.A. in English in 1974. After her undergraduate education Moraga taught high school in Los Angeles for three years. Her days as a teacher proved formative for Moraga because she also attended writing classes at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles. Here she began to develop her unique writing style and also found the courage to declare her sexual orientation. Moraga’s first poems were about lesbian love, verses that often brought her the contempt of her classmates. From her earliest writings she felt the sting of homophobic criticism that has followed her throughout her career, but she refused to hide or compromise her sexuality. Moraga decided to pursue her writing, as well as her education, and moved to San Francisco, where she earned a master’s degree in literature in 1980 from San Francisco State University. Fusing private desire and public consciousness,
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Moraga, Gloria Flores Moraga’s writings reflect the condition of both lesbians and Chicanas on a global stage. Moraga herself declared that she did not experience prejudice until she announced her own homosexuality. Taking inspiration from other lesbian poets, such as Judy Grahn, who celebrate their sexuality, Moraga writes as a Chicana lesbian—an identity that has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of intolerance against and within communities of color. Reflecting on the pervasive homophobia in the Chicano movement, she wrote, “My lesbianism is the avenue through which I learned most about silence and oppression.” A versatile creative writer, Moraga has compiled numerous collections of essays, crafted several collected works of poetry, and written and produced numerous critically acclaimed plays. In 1981 Moraga was the coeditor with Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Bridge was the first anthology of prose and poetry written entirely by women of color and won the Before Columbus American Book Award. It remains a classic text in the curriculum for women’s studies, ethnic studies, and Chicano/Latino studies at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Although they were written more than two decades ago, many of the themes and testimonios in Bridge continue to resonate with the current generation of women of color inside and particularly outside the academy. In 1983 Moraga edited Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, a well-received anthology of Latina fiction. The same year Moraga also published Loving in the War Years/Lo que nunca paso por sus labios, a collection of her poetry, fiction, and essays about life as a Chicana lesbian. Loving in the War Years is the first monograph published by a Latina lesbian. An expanded and updated version of this significant work was published in 2000. Considered one of the premier playwrights of the San Francisco Bay Area, Moraga has written and staged more than ten plays covering an array of issues related to gender, social justice, and cultural roots. Her first play, Giving up the Ghost, garnered wide acclaim in 1986 and established her presence as one of the leading voices in modern theater. She received a PEN West Literary Award for Drama, and her play Watsonville: Some Place Not Here received the 1995 Fund for the New American Play Award sponsored by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. (the second time she had won this prestigious award). Her other plays include A Circle in the Dirt, Heroes and Saints, and the award-winning Shadow of a Man. Of all contemporary Latina writers, she remains one of the most anthologized; her work has appeared in well over thirty texts relating to Chicano/Latino studies and/or feminist studies. Moraga has taught in some of the
most prestigious universities in California, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Stanford. See also Feminism; Literature SOURCES: Benson, Sonia G. 2003. In The Hispanic American Almanac, 3rd ed. Detroit: Thomson/Gale; Moraga, Cherríe. 1983. Loving in the War Years/Lo que nunca paso por sus labios. Boston: South End Press (updated and expanded ed., 2000); Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press; Palmismo, Joseph M. 1998. In Notable Hispanic American Women, Book II. Detroit: Gale. Daniel Ruiz
MORAGA, GLORIA FLORES (1930–
)
Gloria Flores Moraga was a “depression baby,” born on December 5, 1930, in Phoenix, Arizona, only fourteen months after the stock-market crash of 1929. Her father, Manuel Flores, baled hay for twenty-five cents a day to support his wife, Anita Daniel Flores, and their new daughter. Gloria Moraga was the oldest child of eight, and the only girl until her sister, Anita, was born in 1944. “My mother had a brother . . . that would steal milk off the porches for me during the Depression because they couldn’t afford to buy milk for me,” Moraga said, recalling her parents’ stories about their struggles of the time. During her childhood her parents moved often between Arizona and California. “At that time, I remember the grammar schools being much better (in Arizona) than in California,” Moraga said of the nine different grammar schools she attended. “And I had a terrible time, because we’d just be starting something in California, like fractions, and then I’d come (to Arizona) and they’d already finished them.” Her family decided to stay in Arizona after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. “There were rumors that the Japanese had gotten through the security in Santa Monica, and that was the only time my mother wanted to come to Arizona,” Moraga recalls. During World War II Flores Moraga’s father worked in construction and used this knowledge to build their home in Mesa, Arizona. Moraga recalled that her father dug a cellar for the house, an unusual feature for a house in Arizona. He did it in order to have dirt to make the adobe bricks. “Mom used to can a lot. She would buy fruit and things very cheap, and it paid to can, especially during the war,” she said. “All of that went into the cellar.” “We couldn’t get sugar; we couldn’t get candy bars, gum, because all those things went to the servicemen,” Flores Moraga said. “We used to collect aluminum . . . old tires, rubber, things like that. You used to get stamps for food and for gasoline;
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Moraga, Gloria Flores you got so many per month.” She remembers also writing letters and sending cookies to the servicemen. “The mail you’d get from them, I remember very distinctly, was crossed off, torn off, censored by the government to protect the troops.” Because Flores Moraga was the oldest, and her mother was often sick (she suffered from hypochondria), she was often pulled out of school to care for her brothers and sisters. “I was like a second mother. And you know, I think the mentality was at that time, if you were a woman, you didn’t have to go to school; you didn’t need an education because you were going to get married and have kids.” Of her four years at Mesa High School, Flores Moraga estimated that she attended for a total of two and one-half years. “But I did like high school; I was very active.” She took part in choir, drill team, and the Girls Athletic Association. “I used to be so active in everything, and at times, I was the only Latina, the only Mexican in these things.” Flores Moraga also recalls the de facto and de jure segregation in her community. She remembers visiting a theater, and because she had a fair complexion, an usher led her away from the section of the theater designated for “the Mexicans and the Indians.” She also remembered that her mother had to go to court to prove that her younger children could speak English in order to attend an elementary school close to their home; otherwise, they would be sent to a segregated school on the outskirts of town. Upset by the treatment of Mexican Americans, her parents moved the family to Tempe, Arizona, during Flores Moraga’s senior year of high school. She chose not to attend school in Tempe, but it was not the end of her education. She went to Lamson Business College in Phoenix for one year and then worked as a clerk in a dress shop. In 1948 she met Pete Moraga at a church picnic, but it was a date to the movies that led to an opportunity to work in radio. Pete Moraga was interviewing for a job with KIFN and took her along. At the interview KIFN program director Joe Alvarado was also looking for a Spanish-speaking “attractive gal who can work as a music librarian, be a receptionist, be a jack-of-alltrades.” “And Pete said, ‘How ’bout Gloria?’ ” she recalled. “So we were both hired that night.” Flores Moraga worked for KIFN, the first all-Spanish radio station in Arizona, even hosting her own halfhour show, La Linda Mujer Mexicana, which aired Mondays through Fridays. “I was very willing to do it,” Flores Moraga said. “I used to get a lot of fan mail and many requests. . . . People were always surprised that I was so young, but they were very loyal, and they wanted to meet you because you’re a celebrity.” She worked at the station for a year before she moved with her parents to California. Then, at age twenty-one, she moved out on her own. Her father
Radio personality Gloria Flores Moraga in Los Angeles, California, May 1948. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
would not set foot in her house. “He wouldn’t talk to me. When it came time for us to get married, I had to move back into the house; otherwise, my dad wouldn’t take me to the church.” Her romance with Pete Moraga continued on and off for six years before they finally married in California on June 12, 1954. Life with her husband led her back to Phoenix, but not for long. Soon he was applying for a job with the Voice of America. Pete Moraga went to Washington, D.C., all expenses paid, for an interview. He got a job with the Latin American division of Voice of America. This brought them to Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Lima, Peru. The couple moved back to Los Angeles in 1969, and Pete Moraga worked for KNX Newsradio and later as news director for KMEX-TV. “It’s been a very, very exciting life. I don’t think I would change anything, except the death of our daughter,” Flores Moraga remarked. Their youngest daughter, Catherine, died of systemic lupus in 1980. At age forty-one, with five children, Flores Moraga finished something she had started as a teenager, earning her high-school diploma from Mesa High School in 1972. She then attended Santa Monica College and received an associate’s degree in theater arts
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Morales, Iris in 1976 at age forty-five. In 1992 Pete Moraga retired, and the couple moved back to Arizona. They now have thirteen grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Flores Moraga said that she values education and family, but most of all pride in oneself. “There’s nothing wrong with being ethnic. You’re so fortunate to have two types of lives, two languages, two upbringings in essence,” she said. “I think the main thing is to have a lot of pride in yourself, have a lot of self-esteem and not let anyone put you down, because you are not less than anyone else.” See also World War II SOURCES: Garza, Raquel C. 2001. “Independent Career Woman Was Years Ahead of Her Time.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin), 4, no. 1 (Spring): 64. Moraga, Gloria Flores. 2003. Interviewed by Violeta Dominguez, Phoenix Vet Center, January 4. Raquel C. Garza
MORALES, IRIS (1948–
)
Attorney, filmmaker, and community activist Iris Morales was born in New York City in 1948 and was the first child of migrant Puerto Rican parents. As a first-generation child born in the United States, Morales was inevitably placed in the position of mediator between her parents’ generation and nonHispanic institutions. As a child, she experienced institutional racism within the New York City public school system and “felt the disrespect and lack of understanding of people who are poor, who speak another language, and who are of a different skin color.” During the early 1960s New York City had yet to embrace biculturalism and bilingualism; racism and xenophobia shaped the bulk of strict “English-only” policies. These policies disproportionately affected the residents of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), a thriving focal center of Puerto Rican identity and cultural pride. Morales was troubled by the social and material inequalities in her community. Through critical study of U.S. history she began to cultivate an acute political awareness. In an effort to transform the structural foundations of American attitudes toward race, she attended high-school meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As a political science major at Harlem’s City College of the City University of New York, Morales noted the dearth of Puerto Rican– and Latino-based student movements. When Morales became a college junior in 1968, a street gang known as the Young Lords was attracting attention in Chicago. José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, leader of the Lords, changed the nature of the gang fol-
lowing ideological exchanges with Fred Hampton, leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party for SelfDefense. Jiménez envisioned a service organization with a strong commitment to advancing the Puerto Rican community, and the new organization became the Young Lords Party. In 1968 Morales encountered “Cha Cha” Jiménez during a Crusade for Justice Conference in Denver, Colorado, and shortly thereafter was inspired to start a chapter of the Young Lords Party in New York City with a symbolic base in El Barrio. In 1969 the Young Lords Party became visible in Harlem’s depressed Puerto Rican ghettos and sought to provide medical, educational, and fiscal resources to the community through whatever means necessary. The group’s slogan became “¡Sigue (Siempre) Pa’lante!” Morales defines pa’lante as “an unstoppable revolutionary force that demands a people’s forward progression in the struggle.” The Young Lords Party specifically dedicated itself to improving the welfare and civil rights of U.S. communities and the independence of Puerto Rico. These goals were symbolized by adopting the independence flag unfurled in the island’s aborted movement to gain liberation from Spain during the nineteenth century known as the Grito de Lares. The party’s propaganda reinforced its radical nature by featuring a gun superimposed on the background of a Puerto Rican flag. Iris Morales became an uncompromising feminist voice within the Young Lords Party and demanded female representation within the Central Leadership Committee. She attacked one of the party’s thirteen principles of revolution—machismo must be a revolutionary force—denouncing it as reactionary and misogynistic. Moreover, Morales proposed that disciplinary measures be enacted against men in the Young Lords Party who exercised dominant attitudes or physical violence against women. These disciplinary measures were ultimately incorporated within the party. In addition, Morales’s activism and that of other dedicated women in the party led to an overall increase in female participation within the movement. At the height of its existence the Young Lords Party operated chapters in twelve major U.S. cities, as well as in Ponce and Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Surveillance and infiltration of the Young Lords Party by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Counterintelligence Program” led to the Lords’ ultimate demise in 1972. In an effort to vindicate the Young Lords and preserve their historical contribution, Morales solicited private and public funds to create the documentary film ¡Palante, siempre palante! The Young Lords. Filming took six years, during which time Morales gathered critical commentaries on the work in progress through public screenings in high schools, community centers,
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Morales-Horowitz, Nilda M. and other youth-oriented locales. The historical documentary is an important testament of the Young Lords’ contributions and Morales’s feminist principles that continue to inspire and educate new generations of Puerto Rican activists. Morales, a graduate of New York University School of Law, was instrumental in the creation of la Luchadora, an organization and newsletter that advocated feminist concerns of Puerto Rican women. She was director of the New York Networks for School Renewal and education director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. She was also the director of the New Educational Opportunities Network. Morales currently heads the Union Square Awards, a project of the New York City Fund that aims to recognize the work of grassroots activists. Morales lives and works in New York City and continues to advocate for fostering organizations in Puerto Rican communities. She occasionally tours on the college circuit, enlightening students about the Young Lords Party’s legacy. However, her joy is in cultivating activism at the middle- and high-school levels. See also Young Lords SOURCES: Morales, Iris. 1980. “I Became the One That Translated . . . the Go-Between.” In The Puerto Ricans: Their History, Culture, and Society, ed. Adalberto López. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, !Palante, siempre palante! The Young Lords. Point of View/PBS documentary. ———, director. 1996.
Rachelle Greene and Jeannette Reyes
MORALES-HOROWITZ, NILDA M. (1959– ) Nilda Morales-Horowitz was born on May 4, 1959, in New York City, to Dr. Hugo M. Morales and Gladys Morales. Her father, a Dominican immigrant and physician, had emigrated in the late 1950s to New York City, where he met and married a Puerto Rican New Yorker. Nilda Morales completed her education in private schools in New York City and Westchester and then studied at the Université de Paris, Sorbonne. She later graduated from Manhattan College and Hofstra Law School. She then opened her office for the private practice of law on Gerard Avenue in the Bronx, representing members of the community in family court, before the Social Service Administration (SSA), before the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and in landlord/tenant court. Shortly thereafter she was joined by her husband, Richard M. Horowitz, and the practice now has a second office in Westchester County. In July 1991 Morales-Horowitz was appointed workers’ compensation law judge by Governor Mario Cuomo and was the sole judge at the Yonkers hearing
point for eighteen months, after which she was appointed senior judge by the then chairwoman, Barbara Patton. As senior judge, Morales-Horowitz has supervisory duties over approximately thirty-eight hearing points statewide and thirty-six judges and chairs and serves on committees formed to address such issues as modernization and new training programs for judges. She has piloted a new program that will create a totally Spanish-speaking section of the Workers’ Compensation Board. Morales-Horowitz has also served as adjunct instructor at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in the Bronx, where she has taught courses in public administration and civics both in English and in Spanish. SOURCE: Cocco De Filippis, Daisy. 2000. Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History. New York: Alcance. Daisy Cocco De Filippis
MORENO, LUISA (1907–1992) Luisa Moreno was one of the most prominent labor leaders in the United States. From the Great Depression to the cold war, Moreno journeyed across the United States mobilizing seamstresses in Spanish Harlem, cigar rollers in Florida, and cannery women in California. The first Latina to hold a national union office, she served as vice president of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), in its heyday the seventh-largest affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Moreno also served as the principal organizer of el Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (the Spanish-speaking Peoples Congress), the first national U. S. Latino civil rights conference, held in 1939. Born Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López on August 30, 1907, she grew up in her native Guatemala, the daughter of powerful coffee grower Ernesto Rodríguez Robles and his wife, Alicia López Sarana. When she was nine, her father sent her to a California convent to finish her education and to enter religious life. After four miserable years she returned home. She desired a university education, but discovered that women were barred, so she organized her elite peers into Sociedad Gabriela Mistral to push for greater educational opportunities for women. Though she was slated to enter college, Rosa Rodríguez López rejected her family’s wealth and ran away to Mexico City. Working as a journalist, the Latina flapper enjoyed the heady avant-garde atmosphere where she consorted with the likes of Diego Rivera. She published a poetry collection, El vendedor de cocuyos (Seller of Fireflies) in 1927. Her poetry con-
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Moreno, Luisa veyed youthful abandon, passion, and desire without pretense. In “El milagro” she wrote, “And I have lived, / I have dreamed / held in the fire of your arms.” On November 27, 1927, she wed Miguel Angel de León, an artist sixteen years her senior, and in August 1928 they arrived in New York City. The couple found their employment prospects grim, and when their daughter Mytyl Lorraine was born on November 8, 1929, they lived in a crowded tenement. Rosa found work in Spanish Harlem as a seamstress. The tragic death of a friend’s infant spurred her to action. She joined a leftist community group in Spanish Harlem and in 1930 the Communist Party. She also organized la Liga de Costureras, a small garment workers’ union. In 1935, leaving a tattered marriage, Rosa Rodríguez de León accepted a job with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize African American and Latino cigar workers in Florida. Arriving with Mytyl, she chose yet another transformation—she became “Luisa Moreno.” Deliberately distancing herself from her past, she chose the alias “Moreno (dark),” a name diametrically opposite her given name Blanca Rosa (White Rose). She made strategic choices regarding her class and ethnic identification in order to facilitate her work as a labor and civil rights activist. With her light skin, education, and unaccented English, she could have “passed”; instead, she chose to forgo any potential privileges predicated on race, class, or color. Moreover, the first name “Luisa” could be interpreted as a tribute to Puerto Rican labor organizer and femi-
CIO labor organizer and civil rights advocate Luisa Moreno. Courtesy of Vicki L. Ruiz.
nist Luisa Capetillo, who had preceded her in Florida twenty years earlier. AFL officials believed that the Ku Klux Klan would think twice before harming a woman organizer. Slender and only four feet ten inches tall, Moreno possessed a delicate beauty, but her physical appearance belied her brilliance and determination. Given her own fears about the Klan and the nature of union work, Moreno decided to board her daughter with a prolabor family. From age seven until almost thirteen Mytyl lived with foster families; some treated her well, while others abused her. In Florida Moreno honed her skills as a labor leader. Organizing “all races, creeds and colors,” she negotiated a solid contract covering 13,000 cigar workers. When AFL officials revised the agreement to be friendlier to management, Moreno urged the workers to reject it. In 1938 she was hired as organizer with the newly formed UCAPAWA-CIO. Her first task as a UCAPAWA representative was to take charge of the pecan shellers’ strike in San Antonio, Texas. The secretary of the Texas Communist Party, Emma Tenayuca, emerged as the local leader. UCAPAWA had sent Moreno to help the affiliate move from street demonstrations to a functioning trade union. She organized the strikers into a disciplined force, and management agreed to arbitration. She then traveled to southern Texas to organize Mexican migrants. She lived among the farmworkers, sleeping under trees and sharing her groceries. When UCAPAWA pulled her out, she requested a leave in order to organize a national Latino civil rights conference. The result was el Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española. More than 1,000 delegates assembled in Los Angeles on April 28–30, 1939. As a group, they drafted a comprehensive platform that called for an end to segregation in public facilities, housing, education, and employment. Reuniting with her daughter, Moreno returned to Los Angeles in 1941 to consolidate the organizing among southern California cannery workers, many of whom were Mexican or Jewish women. Moreno, as UCAPAWA’s vice president, threw herself into this task, earning the nickname “the California Whirlwind.” Union members significantly improved their working conditions, wages, and benefits, and Moreno became the first Latina to serve on a state CIO council. Moreno’s family life was another matter. In 1941 she had a short-lived marriage, and Mytyl grew into a rebellious teenager. While Moreno worked behind the scenes raising money for the legal defense of the young Mexican American men unjustly convicted in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, she would not tolerate her own daughter dressing in pachuca-style clothing and personally took a pair of scissors to one outfit. In
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Moreno, Rita 1945 Mytyl eloped with returning veteran Edward Glomboske. Moreno faced her biggest professional challenge in 1945 when the union (now called FTA [Food, Tobacco, agricultural and allied workers of America]) launched a campaign in northern California canneries. Going head-to-head with the Teamsters, Moreno handpicked her organizing team, and FTA decisively won the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election covering seventy-two plants. In 1946 the NLRB rescinded the results and called for a second election. The Teamsters began a campaign of sweetheart contracts, redbaiting, and physical assaults, all of which ensured their victory. In 1947 Moreno married Gray Bemis, a union colleague she first met in New York. A year later she faced deportation proceedings. She refused to testify against Longshoremen leader Harry Bridges, unwilling to become a “free woman with a mortgaged soul.” Accompanied by her husband, she left the United States in 1950 under terms listed as “voluntary departure under warrant of deportation” on the grounds that she had once belonged to the Communist Party. Luisa Moreno died on November 4, 1992. Mytyl became an activist in her own right, participating in an array of social justice causes, including the United Farm Workers and animal rights, until her death in 2002. See also El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española; United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA) SOURCES: Camarillo, Albert. 1984. Chicanos in California. San Francisco: Boyd and Fraser; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ———. 2004. “Una mujer sin fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism.” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (February): 1–20. Vicki L. Ruiz
MORENO, RITA (ROSA DOLORES ALVERIO) (1931– ) One of the most recognized entertainers of all time and the only performer ever to win at least one Emmy, Oscar, Tony, Golden Globe, and Grammy, Rita Moreno was born Rosa Dolores Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, on December 11, 1931. Moreno was the daughter of Rosa María Mercano and Francisco Alverio, smallscale farmers in the eastern part of Puerto Rico who faced hard times during the depression era. In response to the economic crisis Moreno’s mother migrated during the 1930s to New York to work in the garment industry. In 1936, five-year-old Rosita joined
her mother, leaving her father and brother behind. The family was never reunited. Moreno’s training as a dancer, singer, and actress began while she was a child. At the behest of dance teacher Paco Cansino, who was Rita Hayworth’s uncle, Moreno made her first public appearance at a nightclub in Greenwich Village when she was only seven years old. Attending auditions regularly, she soon landed a part in a Broadway play, Skydrift, at age thirteen. During this period Moreno continued to work as a dubbing artist for American films to be exported to Spanish-speaking countries, often speaking for stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland. Upon a talent scout’s recommendation Moreno met movie mogul Louis B. Mayer in 1948, and he offered the young actress a seven-year contract to work for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in Hollywood. Mayer observed that she looked like a “Latin Liz Taylor,” but his approval of Alverio’s crossover looks did not extend to another aspect of the teenager’s persona. The executive believed that Alverio’s given name was not suitable even for a Spanish spitfire. Moreno’s stage name was then created by contracting her nickname Rosita and adopting her mother’s third husband’s surname. Following her debut as a delinquent in So Young, So Bad (1950), a black-and-white production set in New York, Moreno packed what would become a very versatile suitcase and traveled cross-country with big expectations. “Like many aspiring actresses, I came to Hollywood wanting nothing more than to be the next Lana Turner, but my education was to be abrupt and painful. . . . Latino contract players were afforded no options in the old studio system; we played the roles we were given no matter how demeaning they might have been.” Even before becoming an MGM player, the young Moreno was already familiar with the heavy baggage of being “cast” for her racialized sexuality. As a teenage nightclub entertainer during the 1940s, she had been billed as “Rosita the Cheetah” in New Jersey clubs. Once the MGM studio had no further use for her after almost two years, Moreno was “borrowed” by Twentieth Century Fox in 1957 and lived in what she refers to as a “Latin Inferno.” In an eleven-year span Moreno made fourteen films in which she played mainly Indian “squaws,” Mexican dancers, and handmaidens. Rita the Cheetah became the Chili Pepper and the Puerto Rican Pepper Pot. Playing into these stock roles was the only ticket for working in the movies, yet it had long- and short-term consequences, including depression, a suicide attempt, and a lifelong commitment to challenging what Moreno has called “Hollywood Jim Crowism.” Moreno’s dancing and voice ability eventually
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Moreno, Rita landed her a secondary role in The King and I (1956), where she was one of the few actors whose voice was not dubbed in the musical numbers. Beyond this achievement, however, the role was important because Moreno was able to meet choreographer Jerome Robbins, who later became one of the driving forces of a film that would make history, West Side Story (1961). Although Robbins had requested that Moreno audition for the Broadway show’s lead (which she declined), once the play was transformed into a Hollywood production, she was instead cast as the “spitfire” Anita, a secondary role. One of the most popular musicals ever produced, West Side Story has been hailed for its quality and innovation, yet its ambivalent representation of Puerto Ricans has engendered ill feelings among Latinos. Moreno might have received much less criticism had she played the least interesting, albeit “positive,” role of Maria. Yet West Side Story is a richer text than the critics suggest, and what Moreno achieves in this musical is nothing short of stunning: rising above the limitations of the (social) script to show her incredible talent as an actress, singer, and dancer. Nonetheless, the expectation that the Oscar, the in-
Winner of Emmy, Oscar, Tony, Golden Globe, and Grammy awards, Rita Moreno is recognized as a legendary entertainer. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
dustry’s top recognition, would translate into more substantial screen roles never materialized for Moreno. Committed to her craft but refusing Hollywood typecasting, she chose to work on the stage during the 1960s, appearing in plays in New York and abroad. She later ventured into television. These efforts paid off because Moreno won a Tony for her work in The Ritz (1975), a Grammy for her participation in a recording for the children’s television program The Electric Company (1972), and two Emmys, the first in 1977 for her appearance as a guest artist in The Muppets, the second for her portrayal of a prostitute in The Rockford Files (1978). Fortunately, the accumulation of Moreno’s knowledge regarding the workings of the movie business— although based upon bitter experiences—produced The Ritz’s central character, Googie Gómez, an important contribution to the analysis of Hollywood’s treatment of Latinos. Googie was a Puerto Rican singer who was absolutely untalented, bighearted, and unstoppably ambitious. She was always auditioning for truck and bus companies touring the musical Gypsy, singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” in extremely exaggerated Spanish. In creating Googie, parody and comedy are not only responses to individual (mis)casting, but a critique of dominant culture. As a text and performance, Googie Gomez explores how Puerto Rican–ness and stardom are created in the stereotypical Hollywood movie and pokes fun at their legitimacy and currency. According to Moreno, “By playing Googie, I’m thumbing my nose at all those Hollywood writers responsible for lines like ‘Yankee peeg, you rape my seester, I keel you!’ ” Unlike other well-known “Latina” performers before Moreno, for example, Dolores Del Río, Rita Moreno was not an aristocrat. From early childhood Moreno’s mother saw her daughter’s talent as a way to make it out of poverty and hardship. Moreno’s constant negotiation and struggle to work within the industry often made her take on work she would rather not, such as roles as the infamous spitfires of yesterday. However, the qualities of the spitfire—passion, determination, and wit—while limiting on the screen, are essential in “real life” to survive a hostile environment. Moreno has tried to put some distance between herself and the “spitfire” roles. Yet had Moreno not had any fire in her, she would never have endured the glaciers of Hollywood executives, casting directors, and infinite offers to play the same role over and over again, despite her Emmys, the Golden Globe, the Tony, the Grammy, and the Oscar. What ultimately made Moreno persist, create, and, above all, inspire was her deep, belly-down, raucous laughter, shared by all who seek to transform worlds not made for them. Nearing seventy, Moreno
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Morillo, Irma continued to appear in films such as Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) and Blue Moon (2000). She was a regular in the critically acclaimed television drama Oz (1997– 2002). See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Movie Stars; West Side Story SOURCES: Hacker, Ally. 1991. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum; Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 2000. “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican–American Identity.” Social Text, no. 63:83– 106; Reyes, Luis and Peter Rubie. 1994, Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of 100 years in Film and Television. Hollywood, CA: Lone Eagle Publishing. Sandoval, Alberto. 1994. “West Side Story: A Puerto Rican Reading of ‘America.’ ” Jump Cut 39:59–66; Suntree, Susan. 1993. Rita Moreno. New York: Chelsea House; Vázquez, Blanca. 1990–1991. “Puerto Ricans and the Media: A Personal Statement.” Centro (Winter): 5–15. Frances Negrón-Muntaner
MORILLO, IRMA (1919–
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Composer and poet Irma Morillo was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Her mother, María del Socorro Marrero, came from the town of Ciales, and her father, Antonio Morillo, was a native of Caguas. After her mother’s death when she was three years old, Irma went to live with her paternal grandmother, Inocencia Fonseca de Morillo, with whom she migrated to New York City. She has lived most of her life there and considers New York her second home. Inclined toward the arts from an early age, she wanted to study ballet, but her grandmother, a strict traditionalist, thought this unbecoming for her son’s only offspring. During adolescence she kept her interest in the arts alive by participating in theater groups in school, where she recited poetry, wrote stories, acted, sang, and danced, which she says was her first love. As a young adult, she traveled extensively, and it was on one of her trips to Cuba in 1953 that she became inspired by the flowering of love and wrote her first composition, “Flor de ilusión.” During this period she also wrote “Cuartito 22,” inspired by a hotel room she occupied while on a visit to Havana. Many songs came in rapid succession and were well received and subsequently performed and recorded by the most popular singers and bandleaders of the time, including Olga Guillot, Celia Cruz, Olguita Chorens, Joe Valle, Charlie Palmieri, Carlos Argentino, Raúl Marrero, Hugo Henríquez, Hilda Murillo, Elsa Rivera Salgado, el Duo Irizarry de Córdova, la Sonora Matancera, Tito Puente, Aida Pujol, Sylvia del Villard, Ruth Fernández, Graciela Rivera, Freddie Fraticelli, Rafael Muñoz, and his son Raffi Muñoz. Irma Morillo has composed more than 500 songs, most of them dedicated to love, without ever having
A celebration of the music of Irma Morillo. Courtesy of Irma Morillo.
taken a formal class in musical composition and without playing a musical instrument. It is an inspiration that comes from above, according to her, and is coupled with an immense love of life and love of love. Her compositions include tangos, waltzes, beguines, rumbas, seis, plenas, danzas, guajiras, congas, merengues, mambos, chachachas, españolas, and paso dobles, as well as boleros and the well-known Afro-Cuban torch songs “Oscuro es mi color” and “Liberato.” In all, twenty-three different rhythms have been identified in her compositions. She has also written two musicals: ¡Viva el amor!, symbolic of her work, and Tropical Suite, a compilation of Caribbean dance rhythms from the West Indian calypso to the Puerto Rican plena. Her music has been performed in Carnegie Hall, Cami Hall, and Town Hall, as well as in cabarets in New York City and concert halls around the world. In 1980 she was awarded the Silver Medal of the prestigious Academic Society ArtsScience-Letters of France. Morillo credits la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba, with being her spiritual guide. Inspired by the love of “Mi Virgencita,” for whom she wrote “Plegaria,” and with the help of Father Mendiola, she obtained ecclesiastical permission from Rome to erect the first altar to la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in the United States. It was consecrated on May 20,
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Movie Stars 1950, in La Milagrosa Church on 114th Street and Seventh Avenue on New York City’s west side. Morillo continues to organize her yearly concerts and her yearly commemorations to la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. She plans to edit a book of the poetic verses of her songs, titled Bendito Amor, which will include a CD. SOURCES: Morillo, Irma. Papers. Private collection; Rivera, Graciela. Graciela Rivera canta canciones de Irma Morillo. Cassette recording. Santurce, Puerto Rico: Disco Hit Productions. Susanne Cabañas
MOTHERS OF EAST LOS ANGELES (MELA) (1985– ) Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) is a grassroots community-based organization that was established by community members of Boyle Heights in protest of environmental hazards. In 1985 a group of mothers actively involved in local organizations such as the PTA and Neighborhood Watch informally gathered to discuss the proposed building of a state prison in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. Informed of the project by then assemblywoman Gloria Molina, these women addressed the concern of the continuous environmental discrimination that had targeted their community since the construction of the East Los Angeles freeway interchange, a state project that displaced many homes and families in the 1960s. Focusing on the struggle to maintain a safe environment for their children and neighbors, MELA launched a campaign that spread throughout the city and state to prevent the construction of the state prison. Spearheaded by the mothers and community activist Juana B. Gutiérrez, MELA used “unconventional” political networks of families and the Catholic Church to gain support and momentum for its campaign against the prison. These traditional, cultural networks used political strategies for garnering support and challenged assumptions of political activity within the Mexican American community on three different fronts. First, there existed a common perception that as immigrants or low-income earners, Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles would not be likely to protest environmentally hazardous projects proposed by the state. On the second front, MELA defied the notion that Mexican American women wield no political influence. On the final front, the women of MELA challenged the assumption that political activity of women and racial minorities is centered on issues concerning only race and gender. In the case of MELA, its political motivation and mobilization were primarily focused on environmental justice and equality for its community.
Juana Gutiérrez identified the efforts launched by MELA as a family movement. Children and husbands played a significant role in assisting with the organization of marches and protests. By using families, networks within the churches of Boyle Heights, and press coverage, MELA proved successful in preventing the construction of the state prison in Boyle Heights. Launching citywide marches and organizing statewide lobbying efforts, MELA gained considerable attention and influence in the state capital of California. In 1987 MELA faced another struggle concerning environmental discrimination. The city of Vernon became the site for a proposed hazardous waste incinerator. One report stated that eight of fifteen Latinos lived within close proximity to licensed toxic waste sites. The Waste Management Board of California followed with a report that stated that communities of lower income and educational backgrounds are less likely to protest the construction of such sites and attempted to build the toxic site. MELA responded with the same strategies it had implemented in the fight against the prison and was successful. MELA achieved national recognition. The organization was invited to join the Southwest Toxics Campaign, in which similar environmental campaigns were being launched in Arizona. Juana Gutiérrez recalls that when one fight was won, MELA continued to press on other issues. MELA assisted in protesting environmentally hazardous projects and waste facilities in Watsonville, Kettleman City, and Santa Maria. MELA has recently taken on the oil pipeline from Santa Barbara to Long Beach and continues to advocate for environmental justice for the families and residents of East Los Angeles. See also Environment and the Border SOURCES: Gutiérrez, Gabriel. 1994. “Mothers of East Los Angeles Fight Back.” In Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, ed. Robert D. Bullard. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books; Gutiérrez, Juana B. 2004. Oral history interview by Margie Brown-Coronel, February; Lerner, Steve. 1997. Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today’s Environmental Problems. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press; Pardo, Mary. 1998. “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: Mothers of East Los Angeles.” In A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
MOVIE STARS Toward the end of the twentieth century Latina film stars such as Jennifer López, Salma Hayek, and Penelope Cruz were seen as part of a “Latin boom.” This
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Movie Stars very term implied that little, if anything, had existed before. However, an examination of the history of Latinas in film shows that, in fact, they are following a long and illustrious line of Latina media giants. Latina actors navigated their sense of being “Latina,” or latinidad, in quite different ways at different times. Some were outwardly “Latina” in name and cultural identification; others were not. Moreover, issues of race and color were ever present in this generally buried history. Latinas who were dark or non-European in appearance were generally not the “stars” in the past. Indeed, if they had roles, they tended to play supporting roles or were part of the masses of peasants, nameless cantina girls, or extras. The history of Latinas in film can be divided into four major eras: the silent screen and early talkies; the good-neighbor era; the cold war period; and the modern period. A fifth, post-modern era appears to be in the making. During the early decades of the twentieth century, there were a number of Latina actors who were recognized as major stars even then. They performed with equal or higher billing alongside stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper, and Fred Astaire who are remembered today as legends of the silver screen. Moreover, and in contrast to subsequent periods, they played leads in major movies, had distinguishable Spanish surnames, played diverse character roles, and were cast in a variety of social positions. One of the earliest screen legends was Myrtle González (1891–1918). A native Mexican Californian, she made her first film, Ghosts, in 1911. From 1911 to 1917 she starred in more than forty films and enjoyed immense public fame. Also, in contrast to many of the roles played by Latinas in later periods, she often portrayed vigorous outdoor heroines in westerns. Her work at Universal earned her the title “the Virgin Lily of the Screen.” Despite the roles she tended to play, she was in frail health, and in 1918 the public lost one of Hollywood’s adored leading ladies when she succumbed to the Spanish influenza. Beatríz Michelena (1890–1942) was another major silent film star. She assumed the title role in her first film, Salomy Jane, in 1914. By 1919 she had starred in sixteen feature films, winning the acclaim of the major trade paper of the day, which placed her on its cover page and referred to her as the “greatest and most beautiful artist” in motion pictures. Dolores Del Río (1905–1983) was also a major actress during this early period of silent films and early talkies. Known as “the first Latina superstar,” she was born Lolita Dolores Martínez Asúnsolo y López Negrete in Durango, Mexico. The daughter of a banker in Mexico, she was discovered by Edwin Carewe, a major Hollywood director who was honeymooning in Mexico. Her career spanned half a century and included
starring roles in more than fifty-five films made in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. Throughout her career she played a variety of leading roles that ranged from “native” girl to European aristocrat or peasant, but she acknowledged the racialized casting that characterized Hollywood films when she noted that light skin could play any nationality, while dark skins played only servants and some villains. Her career soared early on, and magazines noted that her sudden success was equaled only by that of the Scandinavian Greta Garbo and the American Clara Bow. Del Río was also recognized as having the best figure in Hollywood, beating out other major actresses of the day such as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Clara Bow. Her public persona accentuated cool beauty, elegance, glamour, and, as was the case with many stars then, aristocratic status. During the 1940s Hollywood afforded Dolores Del Río fewer of the roles she wanted to play. She returned to Mexico, where she became a top star in Mexican movies and was known as the First Lady of Mexican Theater. She also made various television appearances in the United States. Summing up her long-lasting career, critics noted that she brought dignity to both leading and character parts and portrayed with ease women of all social classes. Also beginning her career in the silent film era was Lupe Vélez (1908–1944), who was born Guadalupe Vélez de Villalobos in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and was educated in a convent school in San Antonio, Texas. Her first major role was opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the silent movie The Gaucho in 1928, and she went on to star in other silent films. She was able to successfully make the transition to sound movies in the 1930s because her voice was husky and cartoonlike—a clear asset in the comedic characters she subsequently played. Her career skyrocketed in 1939 when she began her Mexican spitfire series. She starred as Carmelita in eight films in this series before committing suicide over a failed love affair in 1944. While the careers of some male Latino stars floundered after the advent of sound, both Lupe Vélez and Dolores Del Río went on to even stronger careers after sound was introduced. While Vélez’s accent and voice were deemed appropriate for comedic characters, Del Río’s voice was thought to be sufficiently demure and sophisticated and to have a slightly international accent. Both stars were constantly in the public eye, and their lives received attention in the press, particularly the media press. They had such image recognition that they were used to advertise particular products. For example, a February 1938 issue of Vogue sported a nearly full-page ad of Dolores Del Río endorsing Lucky Strike cigarettes. Lupe Vélez also was used to advertise cigarettes, beauty
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Movie Stars creams, and other products in a variety of major magazines of the day. Less celebrated but also beginning her career during the silent era was Mona Maris (1903–1991). Born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish family, she made her screen debut in England in 1926 and had appeared in German pictures before she began acting in Hollywood. She starred in a number of films from 1929 to 1950, the best known of which was The Arizona Kid (1930). She was described in 1930 as an “Argentine actress, educated in Europe, who first won fame in German pictures,” and stories accentuating her rugged horse-riding abilities as a result of her upbringing on an Argentine ranch were common. In part spurred by the success of Rudolph Valentino’s Latin lover image, there was a certain “Latin” allure during the early period of filmmaking. Spanish ancestry was openly acknowledged, and there were also numerous photos to be found in Photoplay, the major fan magazine of the day, of non-Latina actresses dressed as señoritas, with Spanish shawls and lace. Certain Latin cultural customs were also given prominence, for example, bullfights. Some Latinas of this era purposefully took on more Latin-sounding names, while others accentuated their ancestry. For example, Marie Osterman (1911–1987), who was born in Hermosillo, Mexico, and raised in Los Angeles, took her mother’s name when she went into the movies and became Raquel Torres. Contrary to subsequent practice, these name shifts were openly acknowledged in the press at the time. For example, Photoplay often noted the actors’ original names. In an article about Raquel Torres in 1928 it described her as “half Mexican and half German,” saying, “You can’t beat that for an interesting combination.” At age nineteen she starred in White Shadows, MGM’s first feature film with fully synchronized dialogue, music, and effects. Another example is Anita Pomares (1910–?), who took the stage name Anita Page. Described as a leading lady of Hollywood silent films, Pomares was born in Flushing, New York. She was regularly featured in Photoplay magazine, and her Spanish ancestry was routinely included in stories about her. For example, in one Photoplay photo she is referred to as “a blond, blue-eyed Latin,” and her real name, Pomares, is also noted. Another article focused on her family and stressed their Latin American origins. Thus, despite her anglicized name, her Latin origins were often highlighted. In the subsequent good-neighbor era (1939–1948) there were substantial changes in how Latina stars navigated their sense of their latinidad. Films produced during this era accentuated—for economic and military reasons—positive relations between the northern and
southern continents. When large portions of the European economy closed to U.S. films during World War II, the Latin American market assumed greater importance. There was also the desire to keep the hemisphere united in common cause against the Axis powers’ threat to the hemisphere. Consequently, many of the films produced were happy musicals or dramas that had been reviewed to ensure that nothing would appear on the screen that might offend the sensibilities of U.S. Latin American allies. During this era Carmen Miranda (1909–1955) came to symbolize the association of Latin Americans with music and positive images of their continent. Born María do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in Portugal, she moved as a child to Brazil. She was already a popular and well-known performer in South America before theatrical producer Lee Shubert brought her to the United States in 1939. She appeared in fourteen Hollywood films and, at the height of her career, was the top moneymaking star in Hollywood. Her exotic, magnificent headdresses, sparkling smile, radiant personality, and energized and rhythmic dancing and singing—and her platform shoes—made for a signature style that has often been imitated and parodied. Other important stars of this era included María Montez (1912–1951), who was born María Africa Antonio Gracía Vidal de Santo Silas in the Dominican Republic. She was educated in a convent school in the Canary Islands. Her father was a Spanish vice-consul, and so she traveled and lived in South America, France, England, and Ireland. Discovered in Manhattan in 1940 by a talent scout, she became a top box-office attraction for Universal Films during the 1940s. She starred in eighteen films, fourteen of which were in Technicolor. Her name became synonymous with exotic adventure epics, where, unusually for a Latina, she played authority figures that dominated nefarious proceedings, and she functioned as a sex symbol in diverse nationalities. Also associated with this era is Olga San Juan (1927–?), who, though born in Brooklyn, New York, returned to Puerto Rico with her parents at the age of three. Known as the Puerto Rican Pepperpot, she was featured in a number of films in the post–World War II period, including the well-known One Touch of Venus (1948). She also costarred with Fred Astaire in Blue Skies (1946), and their dance “Heat Wave” remains a classic. Quite different from these clearly identifiable Latinas was Rita Hayworth (1918–1987). Born in New York City, she began her career as Margarita Cansino, the name given to her by her father, a noted Spanish dancer, and his Irish wife. She made twelve films under this name and played numerous Mexican señoritas in several B pictures before launching her career as Rita
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Actor Olga San Juan was a versatile musical entertainer. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Hayworth. Indeed, her first film was a Spanishlanguage short subject. Her major screen debut occurred in 1935 in Dante’s Inferno, and her last film with the name Margarita or Rita Cansino was in 1937. Anglicizing her name, broadening her forehead via electrolysis, losing weight, and dyeing her hair red, she went on to become “the Love Goddess,” the “ethereal all-American girl.” She enjoyed immense popularity during World War II and was often cited as the favorite GI pinup girl during the 1940s. Hayworth believed that after she changed her name, the quality of the roles she was offered improved immensely. There have probably always been Latinas who obscured or denied their origins, but it was in this era that it began to be a clear and effective strategy for success. During the 1950s the sizzling “south-of-the-border” sounds gave way to the inward-looking conservatism of the cold war era, in which the politically conservative Eisenhower years were highlighted by the McCarthy hearings. As Ramón Novarro, a major Latino star of an earlier era, explained: “The Latin image was starker, and the music and gaiety were forgotten as the war receded. . . . There was less need not to offend former war allies. . . . I turned down many roles in which I would have played a villain or a caricature insulting to my own people.” When Latin images appeared, they
were often stereotypical. Even the more prominent Latino stars of the day often played “Latin lovers” and Latina “spitfires,” and many of the Latino characters were more somber, urban, and troubled. As in all the earlier decades, there were exceptions, performers who were able to play nonstereotypical characters. But many talented actors, such as Rita Moreno and Katy Jurado, contended with more narrowed options during this time. The story of Rita Moreno (1931– ), or Rosita Moreno, provides a good illustration of this struggle. Born Rosa Dolores Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, she was raised in New York City. Moreno made fourteen films in eleven years during the cold war era, and she admits that she took many of the roles in these films out of economic necessity. She played all these roles the same way: “barefoot with my nostrils flaring.” Moreno was dubbed “Rita the Cheetah” by the press. Struggling against the spitfire stereotype, she stayed off the screen for eight years after her Oscar-winning role in West Side Story (1961). The only roles she was offered were the conventional Rosita- and Pepita-type roles, and she refused to demean her talent any longer. It was at this point that she expanded her talents into other arenas, including theater, clubs, and television. As evidenced by the professional acknowledgment she has received, her trying struggle against the spitfire image was ultimately successful. She was the first Latina to win the Academy Award and was the first woman to have won all four coveted entertainment awards: the Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Golden Globe, and Grammy. Another well-known Latina actress of this era was Chita Rivera (1933– ), who was born and raised in Washington, D.C., the third child of a Puerto Rican musician who played in the U.S. Navy Band and a mixed Scots-Irish–Puerto Rican mother. At eleven she began dancing lessons. At seventeen she won a scholarship to the Balanchine School of American Ballet. Soon thereafter she was hired for the musical Call Me Madam and thus began her theatrical career as a singer and dancer. She played Anita in the 1957 Broadway version of West Side Story. Nominated for the Tony six times, she has received two, one for The Rink and the other for Kiss of the Spider Woman. She has also received numerous other awards. Since she was more a singer-dancer than an actress, she escaped the pressures toward stereotyped portrayals that actresses like Rita Moreno experienced more intensely. Katy Jurado (1927–2002) was another talented Latina actor of this period. Born María Cristina Jurado García in Guadalajara, Mexico, she came to Hollywood from Mexico City in 1951. She hit her peak in High Noon (1952) as a strong Latina character who had been a mistress to the two leading men, but who was also
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Movie Stars the proprietor of a store and a saloon. An accomplished actor in Mexico, in Mexican films she was often cast as a glamour girl or wealthy socialite and sometimes as a singer or dancer. American films, on the other hand, cast her as a sultry Mexican beauty, Indian squaw, or suffering mother. In the mid-1980s she played the mother in one of the few Latino-themed television sitcoms, A.K.A. Pablo. The modern era began in the 1970s and was strongly influenced by the social movements of the day, in particular the movements for social change, civil rights, and black power. In the modern era a medley of images appeared, some new, others continuing from the past, some in conflict, others simply and strangely contradictory but coexisting. In this era the ways in which Latinas navigated their latinidad varied. On the one hand, the underplaying of Latina identity and the subsequent success associated with this continued and was most evident in the career of Raquel Welch (b. 1940). When Time magazine proclaimed her “the Nation’s Number One Sex Symbol” in 1965, few knew that she had been born Raquel Tejada in Chicago, that her father was a Bolivian-born engineer, and that her mother was of English descent. Referred to as the last of the studio-manufactured sex goddesses, Welch has purposely assumed sexless roles in the theater and on television to shed this image, and her performances have won her critical acclaim. She became an instant icon when she burst onto the movie scene in 1966 in two science fiction classics, Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C. Acknowledged as an undisputed major female star of the 1960s, she has appeared in more than thirty-five films. In addition to her movie career, she made a triumphant Broadway debut in the hit musical Woman of the Year and has performed nationally and internationally in her own highly successful musical review. Since her highly praised debut as a continuing major character on television’s Central Park West in 1996, she has continued an active career in both film and television. Other Latina actors were more clearly identified as Latinas, and, to a large degree, they conformed to and continued the comical style of Carmen Miranda and Lupe Vélez, a “hot-blooded” and “hyper” persona, heavily accented speech, and often humorous errors in English. Even when the Spanish-born Charo (1942– ) entered the world of the media in the 1970s, she assumed the stereotypical trappings of the hyper persona. Born María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, she became known as the “cuchi-cuchi girl.” Her cute, sexy, and dizzy persona was sometimes contrasted with her skills as an accomplished classical guitarist. Despite a limited film career, Charo and her ever-present chihuahua received extensive exposure on television talk shows.
Rosie Pérez (1964– ) countered the image of both Charo and Raquel Welch, but her early work has been viewed by some as representing an updated version of the urban spitfire. Others see her work as departing from earlier images and representing cultural resistance to Eurocentric views. Listed in the Hollywood Reporter as the most bankable Latina star in 1995, Rosie Pérez was raised in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parentage. She studied marine biology in college and was twice “discovered” while dancing at a dance club, first by a Soul Train producer and then by Spike Lee, who cast her in her first major movie, Do the Right Thing (1989). Since then she has had major roles in numerous movies and starred in her own film, The 24-Hour Woman. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Fearless (1993), and she has also won major acclaim for her choreographic skills. The twenty-first century may herald yet another transformation to a postmodern era. This appears to be an era in which Latinas are again taking center stage in many films, and in which obscuring Latinaness seems foolish. The questions being asked of the more ethnically diverse stars of today, such as Jessica Alba, Tatyana (Marisol) Ali, Lizette Carrión, María Costa, Rosario Dawson, Melissa De Sousa, Cameron Díaz, Lisa Rodríguez, Michelle Rodríguez, and Tia Tejada, are not whether they are Latinas, but how Latina they are. Does she speak Spanish, or identify as Latina? Is she Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, or U.S.-born? These younger performers are following in the immediate footsteps of recent Latina actors, such as Trini Alvarado, Sonia Braga, Salma Hayek, Jennifer López, Elizabeth Peña, Madeline Stowe, Lauren Vélez, Lisa Vidal, and Daphne Zuñiga. Together they also follow a much longer and illustrious line of Latina media giants. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary SOURCES: Doyle, Billy H. 1995. The Ultimate Directory of the Silent Screen Performers: A Necrology of Births and Deaths and Essays on 50 Lost Players. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press; Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1993. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Hadley-Garcia, George. 1993. Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures. New York: Carol Publishing Group; Hershfield, Joanne. 2000. The Invention of Dolores Del Río. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; López Springfield, Consuelo, and Geoffrey Thompson. 1999. “Rosie Pérez at the Crossroads of Cultures.” Latino(a) Research Review 4, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Winter): 41–45; Reyes, Luis, and Peter Rubie. 1994. Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television. New York: Garland Publishing; Ríos-Bustamante, Antonio. 1992. “Latino Participation in the Hollywood Film Industry, 1911–1945.” In Chicanos and Film: Essays on Chicano Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon A. Noriega. New York: Garland Publishing; Rodríguez, C. E. 1997. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Boulder, CO: Westview
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Mugarrieta, Elvira Virginia Press; Unterburger, Amy L., ed., and Claire Lofting, picture ed. 1997. International Directory of Films and Filmmakers. Vol. 3, Actors and Actresses, 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, Gale. Valdivia, Angharad N. 2000. “A Latina in the Land of Hollywood: Transgressive Possibilities.” In A Latina in the Land of Hollywood and Other Essays on Media Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Clara E. Rodríguez
MUGARRIETA, ELVIRA VIRGINIA (BABE BEAN; JACK BEE GARLAND) (1869–1936) The journalist and cross-dresser known as Babe Bean was born in San Francisco, California, to José Marcos Mugarrieta and Eliza Alice Denny Garland Mugarrieta. Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta became an itinerant journalist and self-appointed social worker who dressed and later passed as a man in northern California. Her father, who served in the Mexican army, had been the first Mexican consul in San Francisco. Her maternal grandfather, Rice Garland, served in the U.S. Congress from Louisiana and then on the Louisiana Supreme Court. The second of six children, four of whom survived early childhood, Mugarrieta identified as a tomboy, loved to dress in her brother’s clothes, and desired the “liberty and freedom” accorded boys. Constrained by the convent school to which her mother sent her, at age fifteen she married, but the couple separated after traveling together for a few months. Her father’s death in 1886 strained the family’s already precarious resources. By choice rather than necessity, Mugarrieta began to live as a vagabond. She hiked through the Santa Cruz Mountains and lived in hobo camps and city streets, dressed as a man and calling herself Jack Garland. In August 1897 Mugarrieta came to the attention of police in Stockton, California, where she was living alone on a houseboat on a nearby lake under the name of Babe Bean. A petite woman in men’s clothing, at first she aroused suspicion but soon became a local celebrity. Claiming to have lost her voice in an accident, she wrote on notepads to communicate. “I have been wearing men’s clothing off and on for five years,” she explained to the press, “for as a man, I can travel freely, feel protected and find work.” Dubbed the Trousered Puzzle of Stockton, Babe Bean became a reporter for the Stockton Evening Mail, which also covered her life extensively. Under the byline Miss Bean she wrote feature articles on local mining conditions, the state hospital for the insane, and hobo camps; she visited a baby show and a gambling joint and interviewed California governor James H. Budd. In May
Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta (Babe Bean). Drawing from the Stockton Evening Mail, October 9, 1897. Courtesy of Estelle B. Freedman.
1898, after a horse-and-buggy accident, the paper reported, she miraculously regained her speech. A few months later, while the United States was at war with Spain, Babe Bean disappeared from Stockton. In October 1899 a Jack Bean sneaked aboard an army transport ship, the City of Para, bound for the Philippines, and passed for a while as a cabin boy. She eventually revealed herself as a “newspaperwoman” but stowed away again to reach the Philippines, where she was arrested by military police. Using her reporter’s credentials, she was allowed to live among the troops; she accompanied the Twenty-ninth Infantry into battle and also volunteered as a hospital aide. Before returning to San Francisco in 1900 she acquired a tattoo and the affectionate nickname Lieutenant Jack. Back in San Francisco, Mugarrieta initially dressed as a woman but soon returned to male clothing, took the name Jack Bee Garland, and assumed a male identity for the remainder of her life. Garland wrote stories, sold newspaper ads, and lived simply in city rooming houses. He earned a reputation as a freelance social worker who ministered to those in need, possibly drawing upon family money sent by his sister, Victoria Shadburne. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake Garland worked as a (male) nurse and provided emergency medical care for the homeless. For the next thirty years he lived in San Francisco and Berkeley,
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Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, Brooklyn known by the name of Uncle Jack. According to Mary L. Haines, one of the few confidantes who knew Garland’s true sex, Jack believed that he was “middle sexed.” On the evening of September 18, 1936, Garland collapsed on a San Francisco street. When he died two days later of a perforated peptic ulcer, the autopsy revealed his sex. He was buried in the family plot in Colma, California. In contrast to his usual attire—a worn blue suit and man’s hat—Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta’s body wore a white satin dress. SOURCES: Duberman, Martin Bauml, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. 1989. “She Even Chewed Tobacco.” In Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, 183–194. New York: New American Library. San Francisco Call. 1897. “Story of a Modern Rosalind.” August 27, 4:1–3. Stockton Evening Mail, August 1897–May 1898; Sullivan, Louis. 1990. From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. Boston: Alyson Publications. Estelle B. Freedman
MUJERES IN ACTION, SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN (1987–1995) In the 1980s Sunset Park was a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. However, Latinos were in the process of neighborhood displacement to make way for a more affluent population in rehabilitated homes and apartments. The impact of dislocation was felt most strongly by women because their traditional domestic roles assigned them the responsibilities of finding and keeping their homes and reproducing their cultures. In this context they became the backbone in the struggle to preserve the neighborhood’s Latino character and population. However, women were often unaware of their capacities and did little to reinforce and capitalize on their strengths. Their actions were frequently spontaneous, sporadic, and of an individual nature. Mujeres in Action was formed in 1987 to promote a better understanding of Latina problems, raise consciousness of the causes and consequences of gender inequality and women’s rights, empower Latinas through self-esteem and control over their lives, and develop leadership skills and attitudes. Spearheaded by a group of female professionals whose work in community institutions signaled the need to provide such a vehicle, Mujeres allowed Latinas to voice their concerns and struggle more effectively to transform themselves, their families, and their community. Among the initial leaders were Evelyn Cuevas, Evelyn García, María Loperena, Vicky Muñiz, Lourdes Rivera, Nidia Rivera, Ana Rosario, Julie Salas, and Minerva Valentín. The intentional code-switching in the organiza-
tion’s name was meant to attract a cross section of all Latinas, including diverse national origins and regional dialects. A focus on commonalities among all Latinas was favored over competition. Three major goals evolved during the life course of Mujeres: consciousness-raising, leadership training, and educational services. Initially the focus was twofold: defining leadership and consciousnessraising. A coordinating committee was favored over the traditional board of directors model, with rotating responsibilities rather than hierarchical delegating and decision making. No actual recruiting took place. Rather, activities were community-wide forums announced in local newspapers and focusing on issues such as child care, domestic violence, parenting skills, race, class, and ethnicity, immigration, basic home maintenance/repair, nontraditional jobs, and the importance of organizing for change. These activities raised enthusiasm and attracted a wide audience, including women from other city boroughs. Festivities such as the Three Kings Day were celebrated to promote cultural continuity among children. The women were encouraged to look beyond themselves and their families. A special event to express solidarity with and welcome Salvadorans, the most recent Latino group in the neighborhood, was an exhibition on the impact of the war in El Salvador as perceived in children’s drawings. Mujeres also started networking with other feminist organizations, such as a Dominican women’s group from Manhattan, the Latin Women’s Group of Brooklyn College, and female members of the neighborhood’s Latino Youth. These contacts allowed the women to derive inspiration from the experience of others by developing awareness that problems transcended geographic space and generations, exchange ideas on how to approach and solve problems, and open up the possibilities of joint activities. In 1989 the organization was allowed to meet and hold activities at the Concerned Citizens of Sunset Park Head Start Center. A fixed meeting place became a stabilizing factor and allowed recruiting. A stable group of thirty-five to forty women attended meetings and workshops, which in practice represented training sessions. Nearly 100 may have participated intermittently. In June 1991 the stable group was awarded certificates. The majority of workshop participants were welfare recipients whose children (or grandchildren) attended the center. Most were heads of household in their thirties and forties. Some were quickly incorporated in a leadership capacity and involved themselves in organizing and decision making, but their close contacts with the other members rendered them more valuable in generating enthusiasm and assuring a consistent attendance. Mujeres obtained financial backing for the first time
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Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, Brooklyn around 1993. Until then members of the leadership had financed activities out of their own pockets. Lack of money hindered the organization from engaging in large projects; it never had a salaried staff, office, or equipment. But there was fiscal autonomy, and work was carried out as time and energy permitted. At this time the New York Women’s Foundation granted Mujeres $15,000 to engage in GED (general equivalency degree) and ESL (English as a second language) instruction for some twenty-five or thirty women addicts affiliated with substance abuse and participating in a program run by a local hospital. Important as these services were to women in the program, the organization’s focus shifted away from empowerment and centered on meeting bureaucratic requirements. With the shift in its objectives, Mujeres experienced significant leadership losses. Several of its leaders returned to their countries of origin or migrated to other cities or states. Some stopped attending as the demands of work, family life, and the organization’s duties became too difficult to juggle. The leadership vacuum led to an ideological clash between the most recently integrated leader, who promoted reconceptualization of the organization’s mission, and the sole original leader. After a while the clash caused a slowdown of activities. By 1995 the organization had dwindled away. Mujeres never became a mass movement, yet its cultural and historical impact must not be understated. This was the first organization to validate the voices and experiences of Latina women in the neighborhood’s history. Only Mujeres aimed to empower the women of the community. At the end of its eight years of existence, several hundred women had attended forums and workshops. Many questioned their culturally prescribed roles, experienced changes in self-definition, acquired
new skills and more self-esteem and assertiveness, and became more self-reliant. They learned to challenge the authority of landlords, state officials, and their partners, realizing that they did not have to accept unsatisfactory conditions. Some terminated marital relationships that restrained their efforts to change. Others completed GED or ESL instruction, returned to school, and became employed. Most jobs were menial, but represented a break from dependency. As an organization, Mujeres never engaged in political activism aimed at transforming structural conditions to end gender or ethnic subordination, but women who had been touched by Mujeres did become involved in other community struggles as tenant organizers or bilingual program activists; one even advocated for addressing community problems in the nation’s capital. Along with other efforts in the neighborhood, the women’s individual acts may have served to slow down the process of gentrification. Toward the end of the decade Sunset Park was still a Latino barrio, now even more diverse in composition as Mexicans flooded in to occupy spaces vacated by those who left. SOURCES: Muñiz, Vicky. 1998. Resisting Gentrification and Displacement: Voices of Puerto Rican Women of the Barrio. New York: Garland Publishing; Popkin, Annie. 1990. “The Social Experience of Bread and Roses: Building a Community and Creating a Culture.” In Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination, ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Sealander, Judith, and Dorothy Smith. 1990. “The Rise and Fall of Feminist Organizations in the 1970s: Dayton as a Case Study.” In Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination, ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Sunset Park, Brooklyn, 2004. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
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Vicky Muñiz
Mujeres Latinas en Acción
MUJERES LATINAS EN ACCIÓN (MLEA) (1973– ) Founded in Chicago, Illinois, as a grassroots agency, Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA) arose from a need to address the lack of services accorded Latinas. By 1971 the Chicano movement had reached Chicago, which fostered the development of social service centers in the Latino communities on the north, south, and near west sides of the city. However, all were male dominated and served men and boys only. Health care, substance abuse, domestic violence and sexual assault, rising teen pregnancy, high school dropout rates, and other problems affecting the welfare and living conditions of Latinas were either ignored, concealed, or cast aside. In June 1972, after attending a leadership development conference, “Adelante Mujer,” sponsored by the Midwest Council of La Raza, in Indiana, delegates María Mangual and Hilda Frontani returned to Chicago determined to politicize women, bring their issues to the forefront, and start impacting the social service system. Attempting to build bridges between two core communities, Mangual and Frontani began to hold conferences with women from the Puerto Rican neighborhood in Humboldt Park and the Mexican one in Pilsen. As more women, including socialists, Brown Berets, students, housewives, and working mothers, supported the effort, they began to mobilize toward establishing a first Latina women’s agency. Nevertheless, establishing the agency proved to be an arduous task. Not only was the group inexperienced and without resources or funding, but it also faced opposition from the community and indifference from many women. A core group, including Mangual, Frontani, Gwen Stern, Judy Mendoza, Mary Tulle, and Elena Sarabia, continued to organize. In 1973 el Centro de la Causa, a Latino youth center in Pilsen, offered them an abandoned rectory left in uninhabitable condition by drug dealers and addicts. The women mobilized and restored the building in several months’ time. With Luz María Prieto as its first executive director, MLEA opened its doors that same year, offering GED and English classes, a toy-lending library, and a food co-op. In order to learn about running an agency, as well as to push for services for Latinas, the women also joined the boards of other Latino organizations. MLEA received immediate retaliation. In Chicago, as in the Southwest, Chicano male leadership defied feminist activism, stating that women were not ready for liberation, and that furthermore, their efforts would only divide and weaken the movement. Church leaders claimed that the women encouraged divorce and abortions. MLEA began to receive hate mail and threats. Its members were labeled Communists, bra burners, men-haters, and lesbians. According to Mangual,
when they began to question the drug policies of one methadone clinic, several drug-dealing gang members using that location began to systematically attack the women. Another ravaging discouragement was that six months after opening, their building was torched. Disheartened by these events, several women stopped organizing, and others simply gravitated toward other causes. However, committed to their mission, a core of approximately ten members persisted. They reopened MLEA in a new storefront location as the Mujeres Latinas Drop-in Center for runaway girls and offered various classes and workshops. Being a member of MLEA was an all-consuming commitment. Each member not only was active in stabilizing Mujeres Latinas, but also remained and represented the group on the boards of other organizations, where they were neither welcomed nor taken seriously. Mangual often said, “You are never given power, you have to take power. You have to be active, participate, and take power.” Recognizing that few leadership opportunities existed for women, they decided not to institutionalize their own. True to their mission to empower women, the women of MLEA decided to elect a new executive director every two years. Each board member was also a certified foster parent providing her own home as a refuge for runaway girls. They kept to a feminist agenda, determined that women should have equality in terms of careers, support, and rights, gained “not at the expense of men, but in collaboration with them.” Equally as important, women needed to be conscious of the fact that they had choices. Latino Youth, a drug-prevention program, provided MLEA with its first staff member in 1974. María “Maruca” Martínez had been volunteering with MLEA for more than a year. A recent graduate of the University without Walls, Martínez was the agency’s first outreach worker, recruiting young runaways before they became ensnared in drugs and prostitution. Martínez, a social worker and single mother fighting cancer, was a vital impetus toward the organization’s growth. She solidified the presence of Mujeres Latinas in the community and encouraged the development of programs centered on women’s needs. MLEA still had no funds, yet it wanted to provide affordable resources and so did not charge for any services. The members kept an empty coffee cup where people deposited dimes so that Martínez could contact clients and secure resources. By 1978 MLEA had gained the respect, if not the complete acceptance, of the Latino community. Countless women benefited from its services, and many returned as volunteers. Formerly indifferent donors now granted funds. Hospitals, schools, and the police force had originally opposed its founders, but now referred people to it. MLEA’s one-person staff had tripled its
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Mujeres por la Raza size. The group spawned the Arco Iris/Rainbow House, the first shelter for battered women in Chicago. In this same year Mujeres Latinas moved into its permanent home, a dilapidated building rehabilitated by the Eighteenth Street Development Corporation. Although Mujeres Latinas almost closed in 1981 when then exective director Linda Coronado failed to secure sufficient funds, the agency has prospered and has become a strong force for Latinas and their families. In 1986 Mujeres Latinas commissioned the Latino Institute, a not-for-profit organization that promotes Latino progress, to carry out an extensive study concerning the health, educational, and socio-economic conditions of Latinas. Latinas en Chicago: A Portrait illustrated the poverty, limited education and Englishlanguage abilities, single parenthood, lack of resources and quality employment, lack of moral and emotional support, and many of the barriers that women and Mujeres Latinas had been combating for years. The study provided statistics that could more easily influence legislation, funding, and further program development. One of the consequences of the study was the emergence of a network of committees and coalitions dedicated to the improvement of conditions and increased opportunities for Latinas. MLEA participated in many of these initiatives. The beginning of Mujeres Latinas en Acción was marked by an unrelenting vehemence to give a voice to Latinas and to address their needs. MLEA first opened to an approximately 80 percent Englishspeaking constituency, which in recent times has reversed. MLEA still maintains key relationships with a host of city and statewide service and advocacy groups, and its seven programs provide services in the areas of domestic violence, sexual assault, parent support, housing and homelessness prevention, youth crisis intervention, after-school programs, and Latina leadership. Still a nonprofit organization, MLEA has been preparing for several years to move from its dilapidated, overcrowded twenty-four-year home into a new, expanded 12,000-square-foot building. Despite the numerous successes MLEA has experienced during its thirty-year history, leaders such as Alicia Amador have not stopped questioning existing conditions and seeking other areas in which Latinas have no voice. Amador is challenging the community and the agency to develop services and provide a safe environment for a tabooed segment of the community: lesbian Latinas. Like its founders, the agency’s staff remains committed to the progress of the community and to improved conditions, opportunities, and quality of life of Latinas in Chicago. SOURCES: Fernández, Lilia. 2005. “Latina/o Migration and Community Formation in Postwar Chicago: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Gender, and Politics, 1945–1975.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, San Diego. Schultz, Rima Lunin, and Adele Hast. 2001. Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mangual, Maria. n.d. Mujeres Latinas en Acción. Video. Housed at MLeA, Chicago; The Latino Institute. 1986. Latinas en Chicago: A Portrait. Study commissioned by MLeA; Rosales, F. Arturo 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press.
Martha Espinoza
MUJERES POR LA RAZA (1973–1978) From 1973 to 1978 Mujeres por la Raza was the women’s caucus within La Raza Unida Party, the Chicano third party. This caucus represented the merging of Chicano nationalism and Chicana feminism. Women were present at the founding of La Raza Unida in 1970 in Crystal City, Texas, and made up about one-third of those attending this historic political convention. The idea of a nationalist third party particularly struck a chord among youths as the party spread from Texas (always its home base) to New Mexico, Colorado, California, and parts of the Midwest. Evey Chapa helped write the party platform that asserted the primacy of la mujer, la familia, and women’s equality. However, putting the words of the party platform into practice proved more difficult. Women fought for inclusion in party leadership, but some men considered women groupies or hangers-on, at best. Sexism permeated the party, so women decided to form Mujeres in 1973. The caucus was founded by Ina Alvárez, Evey Chapa, and Martha Cotera, and its goals were to obtain party leadership positions and to elect women to office. Women organized consciousness-raising regional conferences called “Conferencias de Mujeres” to empower women. They also organized locally. They taught women how to organize, how to run a campaign, and how politics worked. Martha Cotera remembered Mujeres with great fondness because it represented women’s grassroots politics at its best. In her words, “That was the happiest I had ever been, because I was doing what I really wanted and that was consciousness raising.” Mujeres took a number of political stands outside the party itself. It passed a resolution condemning the use of public funds for the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame. For many Tejanos, the Texas Rangers bore a legacy of brutal vigilante justice against Mexicans. Members also voiced opposition to contemporary police brutality against the Mexican American community. They were feminists who refused to be condescended to or ignored by European American feminists. They withdrew from the Texas Women’s Political Caucus after it failed to work for the campaign of Alma Canales of Houston, who ran for lieutenant governor on the 1972
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Mujerista Theology La Raza Unida ticket. They also withdrew from the National Women’s Political Caucus. Mujeres encouraged Chicanas to run for office and supported their campaigns. For instance, Orelia Hisbrok Cole of Houston ran for state representative on a platform of accessible child care, a progressive corporate tax rate, and a cleaner environment. In 1976 María Elena Martínez of Austin became state chair of this third party. Historian Ernesto Chávez has referred to La Raza Unida as an “attempt to create Aztlán through the ballot box.” By the late 1970s the party had faded. When it failed to win 2 percent of the vote for the gubernatorial race in 1978, the party lost state funds for the primary. La Raza Unida represented a political awakening for a new generation of Mexican American leaders, particularly in Texas. Mujeres por la Raza constituted one of the first efforts to mobilize and educate Mexican American women in electoral politics. See also Feminism; La Raza Unida Party SOURCES: Chávez, Ernesto. 2002. Mi Raza Primero! (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978. Berkeley: University of California Press; García, Ignacio M. 1989. United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party. Tucson: University of Arizona Mexican American Studies Research Center; Villarreal, Mary Ann. 2000. “The Synapses of Struggle: Martha Cotera and Tejana Activism.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 273–295. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications. Cynthia E. Orozco
MUJERISTA THEOLOGY (1988–
)
With the publication in 1988 of Isasi Díaz and Yolanda Tarango’s Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, Latinas’ religious understandings and practices began to have a say in the academic world and to affect the way God is understood and explained in U.S. society and in the Christian churches. Latina women began to use the term mujerista theology to refer to their explanations of their faith and its role in their daily struggles, to speak with their own voice, to point out the particularity and significance of their own understandings, and to indicate the importance of religion in their culture. Mujerista theology is a liberative praxis, that is, reflective action that has as its goal the liberation of Latinas. As such, mujerista theology is a process of enablement for Latina women that insists on the development of a strong sense of moral agency and clarifies the importance and value of who they are, what they think, and what they do. The articulation of mujerista theology has as one of its goals enabling Latinas to understand the many oppressive structures that
almost completely determine their lives. It provides tools to help them understand that they should struggle, not to participate in and to benefit from these structures, but to change them radically. In theological and religious language this means that mujerista theology helps Latinas discover and affirm the presence of God in the midst of their communities and the revelation of God in their daily lives. Mujerista theology highlights the fact that many societal structures are offensive to God—sinful—and that, therefore, one needs to work to change them because they effectively hide God’s presence in the world. Mujerista theology insists on and aids Latinas in defining their preferred future: What will a radically different society look like? What will be its values and norms? In theological and religious language this means that mujerista theology enables Latinas to understand what it means to be part of the “kin-dom” of God, of la familia de Dios. Latinas’ preferred future breaks into the present oppression they suffer in many different ways—social, economic, and political—and provides glimpses of the “kin-dom” of God. Mujerista theology provides tools for Latinas to understand how much they have already bought into the prevailing social systems, including the religious systems, and how they have thus internalized their own oppression. Mujerista theology helps Latinas see that radical structural change cannot happen unless radical change takes place in every facet of life. This means that mujerista theology assists Latinas in the process of conversion by helping them see the reality of sin in their lives. Further, it enables them to understand that to resign themselves to what others tell them is their lot, while accepting suffering and self-effacement, is not necessarily virtuous. Another important element of mujerista theology is that it uses as its source Latinas’ lived experience, experience upon which they have reflected. Here mujerista theology follows a centuries-old Christian way of defining theology as faith seeking understanding: it is the faith of Latinas, which historically has proven to be a resource in their struggles for liberation, that is at the heart of mujerista theology. This does not preclude church teachings and traditions or biblical understandings, nor does it exclude religious understandings and rituals labeled “popular religiosity,” which are mainly a mixture of Christian, African, and Amerindian religious practices. In mujerista theology all of these religioustheological elements are examined to ascertain whether they contribute to Latinas’ struggle for liberation. Furthermore, mujerista theology is communal theology. The materials developed in this theology are gathered mostly during reflection sessions of groups of Latinas meeting in different parts of the United States. In all of this, mujerista theology benefits from feminist
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Munguía, Carolina Malpica de and Latin American liberation understandings. It engages in serious critique of Latino and other U.S. cultures from the perspective of gender, as well as from that of race and ethnicity. Mujerista theology seeks to influence mainline normative theologies that so far have ignored Latinas’ religious understandings and practices. It understands that it has a cultural and political role it must play in today’s world. At present mujerista theology is but a small daughter recently born with the help of only a few Latina theologians, but it holds promise for the liberation of Latina women and for the liberation of all peoples. See also Feminism; Religion SOURCES: Isai-Díaz, Ada María. 1993. En la lucha—in the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press; ———. 1996. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Isai-Diaz, Ada María, and Yolanda Tarango. 1988. Hispanic Women Prophetic Voice in the Church: Toward a Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Ada María Isasi-Díaz
MUNGUÍA, CAROLINA MALPICA DE (1891–1977) Carolina Malpica de Munguía was born to wealthy landowner Patricio Malpica and his wife on January 14, 1891, in Puebla, Mexico. Although she was Catholic, she was educated at the Instituto Normal Metodista. She acquired teaching credentials in 1911 and did graduate work in English. Malpica combined her educational influences with Mexican cultural nationalism. She became a successful teacher and administrator, serving as principal at a Methodist school in Orizaba. After her marriage to José Rómulo Munguía Torres in 1916, she left her career. The couple had seven children. Rómulo Munguía’s political involvement during the Mexican Revolution eventually led to the family’s exile in the mid-1920s. During the Great Depression Carolina Munguía helped her husband operate a print shop in San Antonio, Texas, and when money was tight, she contributed to the family economy by taking in washing and shelling pecans at home. These were temporary measures, for Munguía Printers thrived and still exists today. In San Antonio Munguía, by now a mother of four, immersed herself in community activism designed to address the problems of poverty and racism faced by Mexican-origin people. During the late 1920s she taught Spanish classes at the Wesleyan Institute, and in 1932 she created a Spanish-language radio program, La Estrella, on KONO. Through the program she promoted Mexican culture, especially music and litera-
ture. In 1937 she served as secretary of the Crockett Latin American Parent-Teachers Association. The following year she served as president. This organization sought to improve the educational experiences of Mexican-origin schoolchildren by getting their mothers involved in the Spanish-speaking PTA and working to promote cordial relations with European Americans. In 1938 she also participated in literacy work and assisted the Mexican Consulate with the Asociación de la Biblioteca Mexicana. On June 12, 1938, Munguía, influenced by the consul general of Mexico, formed a female voluntary association designed to, as she put it, “socially and culturally uplift less fortunate Mexican-origin women.” Under the slogan “Toda por la patria y el hogar” (All for country and home), Munguía founded the Círculo Social Femenino de Mexico, as a vehicle for cultural redemption and female benevolence. It was later renamed Círculo Cultural “Isabel la Católica.” Munguía’s goal of culturally redeeming the members of Círculo Cultural was carried out through cultural negotiation and nationalism. As their cultural negotiator, she worked to help the women adapt to a foreign world. For example, she secured the services of two Mexican-origin lawyers so that the women would have someone to turn to for questions regarding U.S. laws, and she served as the contact point between the club and the Anglo community. She also informed the members of educational opportunities, such as free sewing and English-language classes. While cultural negotiation benefited members by expanding their social links and resources, cultural nationalism was about promoting Mexican ethnicity, specifically a sense of ethnic pride and unity among la raza (the Mexicanorigin community). Ethnic pride took various forms: all minutes and correspondence were written in Spanish; the society’s theme song was the “Mixteca,” a very popular song expressing feelings of sorrow brought on by life away from Mexico; Munguía periodically delivered talks on Mexican-related issues; and the fiestas patrias, Cinco de Mayo and Dieciséis, were observed religiously. The second component of Munguía’s quest for community uplift was female benevolence. She believed that “as women, wives, and Mexicans,” members were in an excellent position to uplift their families and communities. This conviction guided Munguía throughout her activist career. Círculo Cultural disbanded in the early 1940s, but Munguía continued her community work. In 1940 and 1941 Munguía headed the Spanish Speaking Department of the Council in District 5 for San Antonio PTA meetings at Crockett. She also organized a PTA chapter at T. J. Brackenridge School. The significance of Munguía’s community activism
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Muñoz, María del Carmen was that it reflected a transnationalist perspective where borders were respected as political creations, but culture transcended national boundaries. She sought to preserve a Mexican cultural heritage even as she helped Mexicans in the United States adapt to American ways. By 1944 Munguía and her husband had taken this transnationalist perspective a step further, working toward the creation of el Patronato, a group that supported the founding of the Universidad Autónoma de México in San Antonio. Until the end of her life Carolina Munguía remained active. In her later years she was involved in the Shrine of the Little Flower, a Catholic organization devoted to St. Thérese of Lisieux. Munguía died on May 25, 1977, in San Antonio. SOURCES: Cisneros, Elvira. 1995. Interview by Gabriela González, November 19; González, Gabriela. 2003. “Carolina Munguía and Emma Tenayuca: The Politics of Benevolence and Radical Reform.” Frontiers: A Journal for Women Studies, Special issue on “Gender on the Borderlands,” ed. Antonia Castañeda 24, nos. 2–3: 200–229; Munguía, Ruben. Interview by Gabriela González, May 6; Munguía Family Papers. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; 1994. Gabriela González
MUÑOZ, MARÍA DEL CARMEN (1936–
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From childhood, Carmen Muñoz seemed destined to succeed—and to bring others with her. “My sisters claim I was bossy,” said Muñoz, the fifteenth of sixteen children born in Detroit to Simón and María Muñoz. “When you’re in such a big family, you have to make yourself known.” Her father, an employee at a Ford Motor Company plant, made sure his children knew their roots. He arrived in Detroit during the 1920s industrial boom, one of a handful of Latinos in the city, many of whom spoke little English. To help keep them informed, he started Detroit’s first Spanish-language newspaper, La Chispa. His children helped him print and distribute it. He also started Saturday Spanish classes for children in the community, “so they wouldn’t forget their language.” To give his own children a taste of agricultural life (a typical occupation for working-class Mexicans in Michigan), he took them to northern Michigan to pick cherries and cucumbers. Carmen Muñoz remembered the dances held nearly every Saturday night, always overseen by mothers who made sure girls and boys stayed out of trouble. After graduation from a Catholic high school, Muñoz attended the Detroit College of Business and Madonna College. She came within four credit hours of graduating with a degree in social work, but never enrolled in
the last required religion course. By then she had married, and soon she had a daughter and two sons. She quickly found that she did not enjoy social work, so she continued working at a machine shop, where she started as a secretary. “The owner said I’d never make more than $375 a month,” she said. But when a co-worker took maternity leave, Muñoz volunteered to add that job to her own—for half the pay the co-worker earned. In time she permanently took over other jobs in the office. “I learned everything—estimating, purchasing, reading blueprints,” she said. “Then I started volunteering to do anything the owner didn’t want to do.” She stayed with the company twentyseven years, through her divorce and then remarriage to Robert Crites. “When I got divorced, it was a big cultural shock, because I had always been taken care of.” With her youngest son in college, she struck out on her own in 1984 with Muñoz Machine Products, a fullservice machining company supplying the big three automakers. One automaker turned down her application as a minority supplier because she “didn’t look Mexican enough,” she said, adding, “Struggles make your life interesting, and when you accomplish something despite them, it’s a thrill.” For three consecutive years Muñoz Machine earned the Ford Motor Q1 quality award and the General Motors QSP Award. Muñoz sold her company in 1996, the year she started GRACE, which stands for Gang Retirement and Continued Education/Employment. The program trains former gang members as workers at Muñoz Machine. If they said that they could not study for their high-school equivalency tests, she hovered over them until they passed them. More than ninety young men completed the program in its first three years, and many inform Muñoz that they have enrolled in college or bought houses. Muñoz also has served on the Michigan Minority Business Council, the Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the Community Advisory Board for the Detroit Tigers. Her community service awards fill four file boxes, she said. But the rewards most valuable to her deal with children: “That my children all finished their education and have good family lives, and my involvement with the GRACE program.” Her achievements did not come easily. Her secret to success: “Every time someone tells you you’re stubborn, turn and say ‘Thank you very much.’ ” See also Entrepreneurs SOURCE: Lewis, Shawn D. 1996. “Her Determination Leads to Success.” Detroit News, May 14.
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Holly Ocasio Rizzo
N q NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR CHICANA AND CHICANO STUDIES (NACCS) (1972– ) The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) was established in 1972 under its original name, the National Caucus of Chicano Social Scientists. The organization held its first meeting in November 1973 at the University of California at Irvine. The members present voted to change the organization’s name to the National Association of Chicano Social Scientists (NACSS), and during the third national conference, held in 1976, the membership renamed the organization the National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS). The most recent name change took place in 1995 at the national conference held in Spokane, Washington. The membership voted unanimously to change the name to the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). The preamble of NACCS outlines its vision of Chicana/o Studies, stressing its advocacy role in combining academic scholarship with political activism within Chicana/o communities. The organization further envisions the discipline of Chicana and Chicano Studies as developing an ongoing critique of what it calls “mainstream academic research [that is] based on an integrationist perspective emphasizing consensus, assimilation and the legitimacy of society’s institutions.” NACCS calls for its members to engage in academic scholarship and political involvement that examine and challenge the inequities and constraints of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in U.S. society. The organization further calls for its members to develop new theories, paradigms, and frameworks for academic research that will provide a holistic, interconnected approach to systems of exploitation and domination and subordination. Relying on members to establish links between universities and communities, NACCS adheres to a core belief that “ideas must be translated into political action in order to foster change.” As part of its mission statement and bylaws, NACCS outlines six specific goals. First, NACCS strives to establish communication among scholars, students, and
community activists. Second, it seeks to promote and assist the development of Chicana/o Studies university centers, programs, and departments. Third, NACCS works in recruiting and retaining students in the educational system. Fourth, NACCS also focuses on reforming the educational curriculum on Chicana/o Studies and integrating it into all levels of education. Fifth, NACCS develops mentorship programs for Chicana/o undergraduate and graduate students. Last, NACCS mentors university faculty to promote their recruitment and retention. The organizational structure of NACCS is based upon its general members, who vote for policies at its annual conference held at designated locations throughout the United States and occasionally in Mexico. Membership is divided into regional areas called Focos. Members vote for their regional representatives at the national conference. These representatives constitute the organization’s Coordinating Committee, which elects national officers such as general coordinator, treasurer, and secretary. In addition to the regional areas, NACCS has a variety of specialized caucuses: student, Chicana, lesbian, “joto” (gay), community, K– 12, and graduate student. A national office coordinates the organization’s activities. NACCS spans more than thirty years, during which many watershed events took place in Latina/o history. Many members have lived through and participated in the United Farm Workers struggles, the Chicana/o student movement, labor union strikes, and the anti–Vietnam War movement, as well as protests against U.S. involvement in such places as El Salvador and Nicaragua. Not only have NACCS members engaged in research related to these historical events, but many have been active participants and, in some cases, leaders. For example, many NACCS members were formerly student leaders who organized the high-school and university boycotts and protests of the 1960s and 1970s. NACCS women were at the forefront of the Chicana feminist movement and brought the issue of sexism to the center of discussion within the organization. As early as the 1960s Chicanas voiced their concerns as feminists within diverse Chicano organizations. The
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National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers actual confrontation with NACCS came in the early 1980s when a small but growing number of Chicana undergraduate and graduate students began to join women of longer standing as members of NACCS. Chicanas brought the discussion of male dominance and sexism within the organization to both regional and national conferences, and these discussions led to tense political debates and personal attacks. Chicanas within NACCS were accused of being divisive and a threat to the organization. Lesbian baiting further complicated the attempts by Chicanas to address sexism within NACCS. During the 1983 national conference held in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a group of Chicanas met informally and formed the Chicana Caucus. They drafted a letter to the National Coordinating Committee that was planning the 1984 national conference to be held in Austin, Texas. The Chicana Caucus called for the conference theme to be changed to “Voces de la Mujer” (Voices of Women). Eventually their demands were met, and for the first time in the history of NACCS its annual meeting focused on women. The papers presented at the plenary session were published in a groundbreaking volume, Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender. After the watershed 1984 conference, women became very visible in the national leadership, and Alma García was chosen the first Chicana national coordinator. The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies has played a significant role in Chicana/o history as an agent both of scholarship and of political activism. Its members have produced some of the most important research in the discipline, and its mentorship of young undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty has contributed greatly to the development of a diverse and more equitable educational system. NACCS continues to work toward its original mission of analyzing the dynamics of social inequality and promoting political activism to address issues critical to Chicana and Chicano communities. SOURCES: Cordova, Teresa, Norma Cantú, Gilberto Cárdenas, Juan García, and Christine Sierra, eds. 1986. Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies Publications, University of Texas; National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). http://www.naccs.org/naccs/General_Info.asp (accessed September 15, 2004). Alma M. García
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PUERTO RICAN/HISPANIC SOCIAL WORKERS (NAPRHSW) (1983– ) A nonprofit, nonpartisan association located in Brentwood, New York, the National Association of Puerto
Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW) advocates for the professional and paraprofessional Latino/a social worker and provides resources and services within the Latino community. In the formation of a local branch of the New York City–based NAPRHSW in 1983, the chapter’s first president, José Fernández, CSW, recalls that there was a “strong need for bringing to Long Island a group that could serve as a conduit for inquiry, fact finding, and advocacy.” Gaspar Santiago, the president of the New York City organization, along with a group of Professor Luis Campos’s Latino/a graduate students from the School of Social Welfare at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, joined forces with other social work students and human service professionals from the area to form and run the chapter. Opening ceremonies were held in the Brentwood Public Library on May 16, 1983. In 1985 in response to the growing needs of the rapidly increasing Latino population on Long Island, the chapter seceded from the New York City group, incorporating as a separate national entity on April 14, 1993. In November 2004 the New York chapter resumed activities under the national office in Brentwood, Long Island. Members of the newly formed association met in members’ homes, public libraries, and their respective workplace agencies to discuss community and professional issues and to formulate responsive actions. One of the earliest battles the group confronted was the fight to increase the number of bilingual-bicultural professionals who were capable of directly assessing and addressing client needs in Suffolk County. The struggle to establish lines for Spanish-speaking social workers, caseworkers, and other social service positions, then and now, is based on the principle of maintaining client confidentiality. This right is breached whenever an agency is forced to rely on a third person’s interpretation. The organization’s current priorities include expanding outreach and recruitment efforts to Latino/a mid- and high-school-age students. In line with attracting bilingual recruits into the profession, the association is also looking to revive “La Visión,” the youth conferences it cosponsored over the years with various county agencies. Other issues that have been identified as high-need areas include increasing services to Long Island’s expanding immigrant populations, offering cultural-sensitivity training through community institutions, that is, churches, schools, and agencies, and addressing matters that concern the undocumented. Political education and participation are essential tenets of NAPRHSW’s philosophy, and the board encourages its members to actively participate in struggles important to the community it serves, including engagement in research and policy making. Since its
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National Chicana Conference inception more than twenty years ago, the organization has formed strong coalitions with national agencies, such as the National Association of Social Workers, and local groups. Working with the Long Island Coalition for English Plus, it helped repeatedly defeat the Englishonly legislation proposed in Suffolk County in 1989, 1996, and 1998. Supporting upward mobility, the association boasts of members’ exemplary dedication to the community, their successes, and their affiliations. Among the admirable are Sonia Palacio-Grotolla, founding member and past president; María Cuadra, executive director of COPAY (a drug rehab and counseling center); Sylvia Díaz, chief deputy commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Social Services; Irene Lapidez, former commissioner of the Nassau County Department of Social Services; Yvonne Peña, executive director of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission; Lynda Perdomo-Ayala, department administrator of the Department of Pharmacological Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Pauline Velázquez, chair of the Nassau-Suffolk Hispanic Task Force. Members of NAPRHSW have also been appointed by the former county executive, Patrick Halpin, to sit on the Suffolk County Hispanic Advisory Board since its first incarnation in 1988. Advocating for increased visibility and recognition of Latinos/as in the social and human service fields, the association provides its membership with a strong network of support. In addition to guest speakers at bimonthly meetings, culturally relevant and timely inservice workshops are regularly offered; recent topics include working with immigrants and issues of separation, and the assessment and treatment of traumatic stress disorders. Workshops have assisted those individuals preparing for certification in the profession. A national job bank and placement assistance are also available to members, who, in turn, act as mentors and role models to students pursuing social work careers, particularly those elected to serve on the executive board of the NAPRHSW as student members-at-large. Published three times a year, the association’s newsletter highlights pertinent news items, publishes articles of interest, posts position announcements, reviews books and films, and provides information about upcoming events. The organization also provides a speakers’ bureau and professional provider list. A central and essential activity from the organization’s earliest days, fund-raising includes the Annual Scholarship Dinner Dance held each November and the Moonlight Boat Ride each June/July. NAPRHSW is administered by an executive board of members elected for two-year terms. The board is composed of the president; the first and second vice presidents; the treasurer; the secretary and corresponding secretary;
members-at-large; and student members-at-large. The first national conference, “The Diversity and Strengths of the Latino Family,” was held on June 8, 2001. The organization continues to thrive and play a central role in bringing Latino professional and community issues to the political table. Paying tribute to those who respond to the call to participate en la lucha (the struggle), NAPRHSW annually honors those who distinguish themselves in advancing Latino issues at the Scholarship Dinner Dance, at which time the Social Worker of the Year Award, the Leadership and Humanitarian Awards, the Agency Award, and the President’s Award are all presented. Scholarship monies are also awarded annually. For its dedication and service to the community, NAPRHSW’s awards include the Salute to Latino Professional Organizations, given by the City Council of New York in July 2001. Accomplished and vital, the National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers and its individual members constitute a fundamental part of Long Island’s Latino/a history and its future. SOURCES: NAPRHSW (National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers). www.naprhsw.org (last accessed July 22, 2005); Palacio-Grottola, Sonia. 2002. Oral history interview by Lisa Meléndez. June. Lisa Meléndez
NATIONAL CHICANA CONFERENCE (1971) The first National Chicana Conference, also known as the Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza, was organized by Elma Barrera, Houston’s first female Hispanic television reporter, and the staff at the Magnolia Park YWCA. More than 600 Chicanas from around the country attended the Houston conference, held on May 28–30, 1971, to organize around gender-related issues within the Chicano movement and within their communities. Before the national conference Chicanas in Texas and California had hosted regional conferences where they set their platform agendas for the national meeting. These platform agendas were strongly influenced by regional differences. In an article after the California regional conference held in Los Angeles, a Chicana wrote, “The philosophy of the Chicana has to be one of uniting the Chicano movement, to realize that our enemy is not the Chicano, but the system which keeps us divided.” Accordingly, attendees at the national conference concentrated on finding solutions to the obstacles they encountered in their double-jeopardy role as both women and Chicano. In contrast, the Chicanas at the 1969 Denver Youth Conference took the stand that they did not want to be liberated.
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National Conference of Puerto Rican Women Two key issues identified by the Houston conference organizers and attendees were reproductive freedom and motherhood, which were individually addressed in “Sex and the Chicana” and “Marriage: Chicana Style.” A resolution from the first workshop called for “free, legal abortions and birth control for the Chicano community, controlled by Chicanas.” Critical of the control that the Catholic Church held over their right to choose, the resolution stated that “we [Chicanas] have a right to control our own bodies.” The “Marriage: Chicana Style” resolution echoed this philosophy, stating that “we as mujeres de La Raza recognize the Catholic Church as an oppressive institution and do hereby resolve to break away and not to go to them to bless our union. So be it resolved that the national Chicana conference go on record as supporting free and legal abortions for all women who want or need them.” Both resolutions broke the silence about a Chicana’s ability to have a say about her body and the institution of marriage. Their statements stood as testimony of the strength of Chicanas to change cultural and religious values. Other resolutions passed at the conference included a demand for “24-hour child-care centers in Chicano communities,” because “Chicana motherhood should not preclude educational, political, social and economic advancement.” This conference set the stage for the discussion of Chicana liberation versus women’s liberation. Chicana leaders argued that by denying Chicanas their rights, Chicanos oppressed them in the same way that white men oppressed Chicanos. The conference allowed Chicanas to express their thoughts and to create an agenda that helped them organize against racism and sexism. But other Chicanas felt that too much attention was paid to women’s liberation and that “ ‘women’s lib’ was irrelevant to the Chicano movement.” Unfortunately, miscommunication about housing left a number of women from out of state without a place to stay, and they returned home dissatisfied with the results of the conference. Regardless of the tensions, the conference was one of many that Chicanas organized throughout the 1970s around issues of sexism and family within the Chicano movement. SOURCES: Cotera, Martha. 1964. Papers. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; García, Alma, ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; The Handbook of Texas Online. 1997–2002. “Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza.” www.tsha .utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/cc/pwcpz.html (accessed October 19, 2002); Mirta Vidal. 1971. “New Voice of La Raza: Chicanas Speak Out.” International Socialist Review, October, 7–9, 31–33. Mary Ann Villarreal
NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF PUERTO RICAN WOMEN (NACOPRW) (1972– ) The advocacy organization National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW) was created in 1972 with a challenging agenda that included generating support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, increasing representation and participation of Puerto Rican women in state commissions on the status of women, developing leadership skills among women, and many other areas related to family planning and child care. During its early years the organization upheld “Puerto Rican women’s role as an agent of change.” For more than three decades NACOPRW has continued to work with government agencies, policy makers, and political leaders in defining the most pressing issues and concerns for both workingclass and professional women. During the mid-1970s, the period when NACOPRW was most visible, the organization established chapters in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Hartford, and other cities with a significant Puerto Rican population. NACOPRW was the first Puerto Rican advocacy organization that tried to define a national agenda focused on women’s issues. For many years NACOPRW has held annual conferences that have combined the dissemination of knowledge and sharing of experiences with the process of developing strategies for promoting social change. Some of the past conferences focused on political rights, the development of organizational and individual skills, and women in the workforce. In 1974 NACOPRW, along with several other organizations, was invited to a meeting with President Gerald Ford at the White House to discuss the status and needs of the U.S. Hispanic community. During the 1975 International Women’s Year it represented Puerto Rican women at many different meetings and activities throughout the United States and abroad. The publication Puerto Rican Women in the United States: Organizing for Change includes the proceedings of NACOPRW’s fourth conference, held in Washington, D.C., in 1977. It contains selected papers presented at the conference such as “Puerto Rican Female Heads of Household” by Lourdes Miranda King, “Educational Status of Puerto Rican Women” by Paquita Vivó, “Puerto Rican Women in Poverty” by Carmen Delgado Votaw, and “The Puerto Rican Woman in the International Women’s Year” by Celeste Benítez. For several years NACOPRW also published the quarterly newsletter Ecos Nacionales. Among NACOPRW’s most prominent past presidents are Aida Berio, Lourdes Miranda King, Paquita Vivó, and Carmen Delgado Votaw. The organization remains a vibrant organization.
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National Council of La Raza SOURCES: Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame. 1992. “Carmen Delgado Votaw.” www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/ educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/votaw.html (accessed July 22, 2005). National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. Puerto Rican Women in the United States: Organizing for Change. Washington, DC: NACOPRW, 1977. Edna Acosta-Belén
NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA (NCLR) (1968– ) The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization that has risen to national prominence as one of the leading Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country. Established as the Southwest Council of La Raza in 1968 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, the council has greatly expanded its scope, activities, membership, and financial resources during its thirty-five-year history. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the NCLR engages in policy analysis and national advocacy for Hispanics on a wide range of issues, for example, education, employment, health, and immigration. Five regional offices in Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, assist in the NCLR’s work. The NCLR also serves a large constituency-based membership of more than 270 affiliate organizations, mostly community development corporations and social service agencies, in forty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. It operates on a multimillion-dollar budget sustained from government contracts and corporate and foundation grants. Founded during the social activist era of the Chicano movement, the Southwest Council of La Raza, based in Phoenix, Arizona, began as an umbrella organization to channel resources from the Ford Foundation to local affiliates in several major cities of the Southwest. Each local affiliate, in turn, was to support the grassroots organizing efforts and programs of a broad range of barrio groups. Council founders originally intended to develop local leadership and “empower” barrio residents through community organization. However, organizational and political problems caused the council to move away from community organization and mobilization toward sponsorship of economic development projects through its local affiliates. In 1973 the council claimed a new role for itself—to become an organizational leader for Hispanics in national politics. A name change resulted, headquarters were moved to the nation’s capital, and the council sought to represent not just Mexican Americans, but Hispanics from all nationality groups in all regions of the country. Shortly thereafter Raúl Yzaguirre became
national president, a position only he has held since 1974. Under Yzaguirre’s leadership the NCLR established a permanent capacity for policy analysis and legislative advocacy on national issues while expanding its technical assistance and support to communitybased affiliate organizations. A board of directors sets broad policy for the organization, and two additional bodies serve in an advisory capacity: the Corporate Board of Advisors and the Affiliate Council. A publications unit distributes council reports that command attention from the national media and policy makers. The publication Agenda serves as the organization’s newsletter. Given the vicissitudes of political and financial support for public-interest groups, the council’s ability to survive and expand during several decades is a notable achievement. The council characterizes itself as the largest constituency-based national Hispanic organization in the country, pointing to its affiliate membership and associational ties to “more than 30,000 groups and individuals nationwide.” Raúl Yzaguirre supervises eighty-four national staff members who oversee a myriad of programs and initiatives. Annual conferences feature an array of big-name Latino celebrities and politicians and draw crowds of more than 15,000 in attendance. High-level government officials, including the President of the United States, the Vice President, members of the cabinet, and prominent politicians, and influential corporate and foundation executives appear at NCLR functions. Over the years the NCLR has built a reputation of credibility and influence as a major player on policy issues affecting Hispanics in the United States. Latina women have been part of the NCLR’s development, but their initial inclusion as women in the council involved a political struggle. In 1968 the original board of directors included only one woman among its twenty-five members. At the same time only one of the council’s seven affiliate organizations was headed by a woman. Three years later only three women served on the twenty-six-member board. The few but outspoken women in the NCLR pushed for what became a controversial but ultimately successful cause: equal representation of women and men on the board. The council adopted this policy in 1973, and it is still in effect. Indeed, the NCLR notes that it is one of only a handful of Latino organizations that mandates a 50-50 gender split on its board. In the late 1970s the first woman was elected chair of the board of directors. Since that time half of the board chairs have been women. Gender equity also applies to representation on the NCLR’s Affiliate Council. Each of five regions elects two representatives, one man and one woman, to three-year terms on the Affiliate Council.
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National Hispanic Feminist Conference Women are well represented throughout the organization’s corporate staff structure. The NCLR reports that women have constituted the majority of staff members for almost two decades. Women have counted among the executive staff for nearly three decades; at one point women made up the majority of vice presidents in the organization. In 2002 Cecilia Muñoz served as vice president of policy, Lisa Navarrete as deputy vice president in the Office of Public Information, and Sonia Pérez as deputy vice president of policy. In 2005 Janet Murgía assumed the presidency and is CEO. Monica Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinión, is board chair. In the early 1990s NCLR issued reports on Hispanic women, work and welfare, teen pregnancy, and family poverty. A fact sheet of demographic data on Hispanic women was also prepared. Notably, the fact sheet continues and is updated periodically. In 1993, at a Latina empowerment workshop at the annual conference, Latinas representing NCLR affiliates called for a greater focus on women’s issues at the annual conference and in the work of the organization. NCLR formed a Hispanic Women’s Task Force to address these concerns, and at the request of the task force, a major study of Latina women was produced in February 1996, Untapped Potential: A Look at Hispanic Women in the U.S. Annual conferences now include more workshops on Latinas; the 2001 conference included a “Latinas workshop track” for the first time. Latina concerns have also become incorporated more specifically into NCLR policy analyses and advocacy. For example, NCLR’s Center for Health Promotion has focused much of its work on Latina health issues. As one of the leading Latino organizations in the country, the NCLR can be credited with institutionalizing a Latino presence in national policy making. Latina women have been an important part of the organization’s story as activists in local affiliates, members of governing bodies, and council staff and officers. Given the increasing significance of the Latino population in the United States, the NCLR is likely to remain a player in national politics for some time to come. As women exercise their influence within the council, they will no doubt ensure that Latina women’s experiences, issues, and perspectives are represented in the organization and in national politics as well. SOURCES: Sierra, Christine Marie. 1983. “The Political Transformation of a Minority Organization: The Council of La Raza, 1965–1980.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; ———. 1991. “Latino Organizational Strategies on Immigration Reform: Success and Limits in Public Policymaking.” In Latinos and Political Coalitions: Political Empowerment for the 1990s, ed. Roberto E. Villarreal and Norma G. Hernandez, 61–80. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Christine Marie Sierra
NATIONAL HISPANIC FEMINIST CONFERENCE (1980) During the 1960s and 1970s Latinas addressed the issue of feminism and its relevance to their everyday lives and to their communities in general. Latinas from specific cultural groups, such as Mexican American women, identified certain key aspects of feminism. For example, Mexican American women (or Chicanas, the preferred name during this era) developed a feminist consciousness largely as a result of their participation in the Chicano civil rights movement. They took part in every aspect of the movement, including the student and farmworker movements. Chicanas and Puertorriqueñas, like their African American women counterparts, encountered various forms of sexism. Latinas recognized the need to address sexism and other pressing issues, and local, state, regional, and national conferences were organized. The 1980s began with one of the most significant and controversial conferences in Latina history: the National Hispanic Feminist Conference. Held in San Jose, California, the National Hispanic Feminist Conference was organized to bring together an estimated 1,000 Latinas from throughout the United States and from such countries as Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and the Caribbean. They came to the conference to discuss such issues as employment, education, the relationship between Latinas and Euro-American women within a feminist movement, and the problematic relationship between lesbian and heterosexual feminists. The conference’s organizer was Sylvia Gonzáles, a San Jose activist, who together with a small group of women put together the conference’s agenda, workshops, and plenary speakers. The opening day of the conference witnessed the beginning of a series of controversial issues. Some participants called for a boycott of the conference headquarters because of its insensitive handling of a Native American burial site during the ongoing construction of the hotel. A boycott of the National Hispanic Feminist Conference soon developed among a small group of participants who urged the rest of the participants to join them. Other women protested that many community women found the registration fees prohibitive and thus called for the establishment of a sliding fee scale. Because of the scheduling of separate workshops for university and community women, some Latinas criticized the organizers for working against the conference’s major goal: establishing a dialogue between community and university women. Many also questioned the presence of Euro-American women who represented the National Organization for Women (NOW), fearing that NOW would dominate political debates.
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National Puerto Rican Forum Sylvia Gonzáles, the conference’s organizer, addressed these criticisms during the conference and later in an article in the magazine Nuestro. Gonzáles claimed that her opponents were angry that they had not been included in the program as keynote speakers. She and other conference organizers believed that those undergraduate Latinas who supported the boycott did not understand the issues. In the Nuestro article Gonzáles acknowledged the seriousness of the opposition to the conference’s format and agenda but remained optimistic that Hispanic feminists would eventually resolve their differences and unite as a political force. Soon after the National Hispanic Feminist Conference ended, many women who attended the conference wrote about their experiences. An important publication, La Razón Mestiza/Union Wage, devoted an entire issue to commentaries on the National Hispanic Feminist Conference. Latina feminist writers, such as Dorinda Moreno and Chela Sandoval, wrote insightful, critical appraisals of the conference. Although both Moreno and Sandoval agreed that the conference displayed serious flaws that accentuated the ongoing exploitation of community activists, they both concluded that at least the conference provided a forum to bring these divisions to the surface. Other participants also pointed out that despite the forces that pulled participants apart, other forces developed that began a tentative dialogue among Latinas from a diversity of backgrounds. Sandoval concluded: “The struggles within the conference pointed out real differences among ‘Hispanic Feminists,’ but they do not suggest the divisiveness of defeat. Much of the excitement of ‘The First National Hispanic Feminist Conference’ lay in a reworking of differences rather than their settlement. . . . We Chicana feminists consider the conference another beginning.” Indeed, the 1980 National Hispanic Feminist Conference set the stage for Latina feminists of the 1980s to grapple with the contradictions inherent in feminist organizing across class, culture, sexuality, and communities. SOURCES: García, Alma M. 1989. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980.” Gender and Society 3 (June): 217–238; Gonzáles, Sylvia. 1997. “The Latina Feminist: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going.” In Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. García, 250–253. New York: Routledge; Moreno, Dorinda. 1997. “Un paso adelante (One Step Forward).” In Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. García, 247–249. New York: Routledge. Alma M. García
NATIONAL PUERTO RICAN FORUM (1957– ) The Puerto Rican Forum was founded in 1957 as a collaborative umbrella agency to initiate the formation of
other organizations in the New York Puerto Rican community. The brainchild of Antonia Pantoja and a cadre of Puerto Rican professionals and activists who worked with her on launching this prestigious organization, the forum, a civic, nonprofit coalition, sought to improve the economic conditions of the community while simultaneously mobilizing for social change. Among its earliest projects was a plan for an ambitious comprehensive community project, detailed in the 1964 publication A Study of Poverty in the Puerto Rican Community. The Puerto Rican Community Development Project, a forum-spawned agency, called upon the services of more than sixty organizations and community leaders to deliberate upon and craft solutions for the problems facing the Puerto Rican and Latino community in the city. Many of the proposals that surfaced from the group were implemented, but others were not. Perhaps the most successful project to come out of the plan was the concept of ASPIRA. Headed by Pantoja, this educational enterprise focused on creating Latino and Puerto Rican leadership for positions in the public and private spheres. It came to fruition in 1961. Overall, the forum specialized in community development programs and small-business loans. In 1967 Pantoja conceived the Basic Occupational Language Training (BOLT) program, along with other social service programs, to advance the community. Adult literacy, English as a second language, and occupational placements provided essential services to a heavily Spanish-speaking community. In 1972 the forum assumed a national focus and a new name, the National Puerto Rican Forum, shifting its mission from advocacy and research to service. As a national organization that serves Puerto Ricans and Latinos, the forum ranks among the oldest in the continental United States. The National Puerto Rican Forum provided employment and training programs in the city’s five boroughs, Hartford, Connecticut, Miami, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the forum lost significant funding because of government budget reductions, causing the organization to lose most of its staff. Nonetheless, the mid1990s brought new leadership, an experienced staff, and dedicated board members. The forum reconsidered its mission and program goals and committed itself to those services most needed by the Puerto Rican and Latino community. The pledge to continue to improve the socioeconomic conditions of Latinos in the United States resulted in the creation of a wide array of programs covering employment, education, technology, and professional training. Today the forum runs programs in Manhattan, Chicago, and the Bronx that meet the employment and ed-
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Puerto Rican civic group promoting voter registration, 1956. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
ucational needs of underserved communities. Wheels to Work is a welfare-to-work program funded by the U.S. Department of Labor; the Technology Learning Centers encourage community technology initiatives and are funded by the U.S. Department of Education; Project SUBE/Step Up, supported by New York City’s Human Resources Administration, funds employment; AVANCE and LEAP are after-school programs funded by the New York City and New York State education departments; and English on Wheels offers instruction in English as a second language in mobile classrooms. Among its newer programs are the Allied Health Services Academy and Maestros Excelentes, a teachertraining program funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. The forum publishes a quarterly newspaper, El Foro, and organizes events and symposia. SOURCES: Pantoja, Antonia. 2002. Memoir of a Visionary. Houston: Arte Público Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 2005. “Antonia Pantoja and the Power of Community Action.” In Latin Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
NATURALIZATION The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) defines naturalization as the conferring of citizenship upon a person after birth. The general requirements for naturalization state that an immigrant must be at least eighteen years old, must be a legal permanent resident, and must have lived in the United States continuously for five years. Other requirements for citizenship include the ability to speak, read, and write in English,
as well as being of good moral character. There exist certain exemptions to these requirements. For instance, children born to parents in the military outside the United States make up a significant number of those naturalized. Spouses of U.S. citizens may be naturalized in three years rather than five, and children who migrate with their parents also gain citizenship when their parents become citizens. Also, individuals who served in the military may be granted naturalization. For instance, a legal immigrant who served for at least three years in the military can apply for naturalization within six months of an honorable discharge or while he or she is still serving. In order to apply for naturalization, a person must first be a legal permanent resident. There are two ways of applying for legal permanent residency. A person living abroad may apply to the State Department for an immigrant visa. Preference is given to individuals who already have family living in the United States. Immigrants who entered the country illegally, temporarily, or as students or refugees can also apply for adjustment of their status if the INS approves their application. After naturalization forms (N-400) are filled out and accepted by the INS, immigrants are interviewed. Background and fingerprint checks are also conducted. If the immigrant appears in good standing as stipulated by the INS, the final processing of an application can take several months. Critics have charged that the naturalization process is too inconsistent, backlogged, and nonsystematic. For instance, some complain about the random nature of the interview exams. Some examiners ask questions that require considerable conceptualization. A stan-
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Migrant and immigrant women enrolled in English language and citizenship classes sponsored by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in preparation for naturalization and voter registration. Courtesy of the Kathy Andrade Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
dardized test has recently been developed to determine knowledge of writing, reading, and U.S. civics in order to expedite the process. Another criticism notes that the INS is overwhelmed with increasing responsibilities as agents process a growing number of immigrants. As a result, the process takes much longer than it should. The INS has implemented new procedures to speed up the naturalization process. For instance, the INS has hired more agents to process paperwork, fingerprint applicants, and conduct background checks. However, critics of the naturalization process contend that these improvements have not corresponded with the in-
creased numbers of immigrants applying for naturalization. SOURCES: DeSipio, Louis, and Rodolfo de la Garza. 1998. Making Americans, Remaking America: Immigration and Immigrant Policy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 2004. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/statistics/yearbook/index .htm (accessed July 22, 2005); U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. 1998. Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service.
Another view of a citizenship class, International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Courtesy of the Kathy Andrade Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Lisa Magaña
Navarro, M. Susana
NAVARRO, M. SUSANA (1946–
)
Educator Susana Navarro is the executive director of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence. She has devoted her professional lifetime to research and policy advocacy in order to focus on higher academic standards for all public school students. These actions have especially benefited Latino and Latina students in Texas and California. Navarro was born in El Paso, Texas, located on the U. S.-Mexico border and immediately next to one of Mexico’s largest cities, Ciudad Juárez. Her leadership skills were formed and shaped in a family with strong emphases on public service: “We all grew up with the idea of service as ‘what we were about’ and ‘what we wanted to be about.’ ” Navarro’s grandparents were also involved in public service through neighborhood and faith-based organizations. They owned cars and often drove friends and neighbors to the doctor. She remembers the strong women in her family “defining themselves in terms of what they did for others.” Educated in parochial schools, Navarro experienced student diversity within the Mexican-heritage student body. She studied with students, both privileged and underprivileged, from El Paso and from Mexico, including Mexico’s interior states. These experiences, she said, put “culture at the core of my life.” From Loretto Academy, a Catholic school for girls, she went on to the University of Texas at El Paso, where she graduated with a B.A. in political science in 1968. After graduation Navarro went to Washington, D.C., with no job offer in hand and little cash. In the late 1960s, an era of “questioning and unrest,” she needed and wanted to “make a difference” and tried to find a leverage point to do so. At the time few Mexican American women had bachelor’s degrees. Navarro talked to people in the many different agencies that were springing up, but waited for the right one because she did not want “to work for just any agency.” Eventually she acquired a meaningful position in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, working with a research team that examined Mexican American education in five southwestern states. Using this groundbreaking study, reformers brought about changes in educational funding equity and desegregation and eliminated penalties for speaking Spanish among students. The work set Navarro on her lifelong career path: research and policy advocacy to raise educational standards. After her work in Washington, D.C., Navarro underwent several other life-changing experiences that expanded her skills and deepened her commitment to research and policy advocacy. She took a one-year appointment as a VISTA volunteer in New Mexico. Then she moved to California, where she initially worked in public schools and later attended Stanford
M. Susana Navarro. Courtesy of M. Susana Navarro.
University, where she acquired her Ph.D. in educational psychology in 1980. Navarro helped found and lead the Achievement Council in Oakland and Los Angeles, where she worked with more than 200 schools in the state to develop partnerships and change policies in ways that would raise expectations for “lowperforming” students. It was an era of vicious cycles when, all too often, low expectations created third-rate education for many students from families of limited incomes, especially those of Mexican and African heritages. In 1991 Navarro returned to El Paso, where she founded the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence. As executive director, she put together coalitions for reform among educators, business leaders, and community-based organizations. The timing was perfect. Texas had finally established an accountability system that provided “no more excuses” for low performance among students, regardless of their neighborhood, class, or ethnic/racial backgrounds. Navarro raised scores of millions of dollars and accumulated social capital to provide teacher training, technology, and partnerships with the University of Texas at El Paso to support higher achievement for the area’s majority Hispanic student population. In accountabilityscore achievement terms, El Paso ranked better than most other urban school districts in the state, including Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, in the late 1990s. Navarro is the mother of three children and is married to Arturo Pacheco. She carried her extendedfamily leadership mantle to leadership at the school
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Nerio, Trinidad district, local, and state levels in order to use research to effect systemic policy changes that raised school expectations for all students. In so doing, she expanded educational opportunities for huge numbers of students to achieve the kind of academic excellence necessary for success in higher education. SOURCES: Achievement Council. 1988. Unfinished Business: Fulfilling Our Children’s Promise. Oakland, CA: Achievement Council; Navarro, Susana M., and Diana Natalicio. 1999. “Closing the Achievement Gap in El Paso: A Collaboration for K–16 Renewal.” Phi Delta Kappan, April; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 1971–1974. Mexican-American Education Study, 6 vols. Washington, DC: USCRC. Kathleen Staudt
NERIO, TRINIDAD (1918–
)
Trinidad Nerio was born in 1918 in Piedras Negras, Mexico, into a family of ten children, six boys and four girls. When she was six years old, the family moved to Texas for two years, where the children learned to speak English. “My mother would get so mad when we would speak English, and I would say, ‘Well, Mama, we have to learn it here,’ ” Nerio recalls. Later, when raising her own five children, she had similar concerns about the impact of living in an English-speaking country. “It’s too bad, the kids nowadays—none of them want to learn Spanish. None of my kids can speak Spanish. I tried to tell them that it’s good to have two languages,” she explains. After living in Texas, her brothers decided to relocate to Saginaw, Michigan, to work in a plant. Two years later Trinidad Nerio and the rest of the family followed. At age sixteen Trinidad Nerio eloped with her first husband. “My father was so mad. He didn’t speak to me for a year. I didn’t care. When you’re young, you don’t care. Now I sit down and think about it and say, ‘That was awful.’ But what can you do? I turned out good anyhow.” Her father began speaking to her after she bore her first child, Jack, whom she named after her brother. “My father was crazy about him,” she said. Another child and then a divorce followed. During that time Nerio worked in a restaurant and went to a dance hall every Saturday night with her sister and two friends. “It was a big hall. We did the jitterbug, dances like that. They don’t have them anymore.” There she met Arnold Nerio of Texas. She recalls, “He went with a bunch of guys. He used to take them in his car because he didn’t have much money.” Trinidad continues, “So he’d take them, and they’d pay him for gas. He used to say that he didn’t get much money at work and that he had to pay his car and everything. I replied, ‘That’s good. Finish paying for it so we can get married.’ ”
Trinidad Nerio in Saginaw, Michigan. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
Trinidad Nerio’s ten-year-old daughter often accompanied the couple on dates. He proposed at a dance. “But I’ve got two kids,” Nerio said. His response was, “That makes no difference to me.” At the time of the proposal she was twenty-two, and he was nineteen. Nerio remembers people teasing her about the arrangement because she was older. “ ‘Oh, that little boy you married!’ they would say. I said, ‘Oh, shut up.’ My dad really liked him. Arnold started talking to him right away after we got married,” Nerio said. The two were busy establishing a new family and buying a home when World War II broke out. “It was just a small home. We both worked because I always liked to work, and we paid cash up front. We didn’t think anything of the war. We had just bought the home when the Army called him in 1942. He didn’t want to go because I was pregnant, but they took him anyway.” Nerio continued to work in a restaurant to support her family. “There were no Mexican people, just white people. I liked restaurant work because you see a lot of people and talk. You can’t talk to people when you work at a plant. After Arnold came home, I quit.” Her husband returned after two years and lived with the family for only two weeks before he was called to serve again. Nerio recalls, “I was so happy the first time I saw him. I was at home alone with the . . . kids. When he came back the second time, he went to the hospital. I asked him if he had to go back again. He told me no, that it was all over.” Nerio recalls that her husband would tell her about his experiences serving in the war. “He said it was bad. He said guys that were shot, they
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New Economics for Women used to pick them up and throw them away. It was bad when the war was on. I was worried all the time—and then with the kids. They missed him a lot at first. He was so young, but it’s all over.” During her husband’s service in the army Nerio had her fourth child, Armida. She recalled her husband’s initial encounter with his child. “He was so happy. He said, ‘My little girl!’ She was little. She was a little devil. She was a pretty little girl, too. Our last child was a boy, Junior. He’s just like his dad. We made it. My kids turned out real well,” Nerio said. Nerio and her husband have lived in Saginaw and been married for almost sixty years. “Anything I want, he gets it right away. He’s a good man. My mother lived with us for 10 years before she died, and he was really good with her. She liked him a lot.” The couple has fourteen grandchildren, twelve great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. See also World War II SOURCES: Nerio, Trinidad. 2002. Interview by Elizabeth Aguirre, Mexican-American Cultural Center, Saginaw, MI, October 19; Smith, Lauren. 2003. “Soldier’s Wife Worked to Support Family.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring). Lauren Smith
NEW ECONOMICS FOR WOMEN (NEW) (1984– ) Founded in 1984 by a group of extraordinary Latina feminists, New Economics for Women (NEW) nurtured a vision of low-income housing predicated on women’s needs, ideas, and concerns. In 1993 the first concrete result was Casa Loma, an $18-million, 110-unit apartment complex located just west of downtown Los Angeles in an area known as Pico Union. Designed in consultation with focus groups of neighborhood women, Casa Loma offers on-site child care, a computer lab, and organized youth activities. Residents participate in job training, enroll in English classes, and take part in an array of adult education programs. Casa Loma is transitional housing, “a safe oasis for working mothers and their children, allowing them to escape the conditions of substandard housing long enough to forge a better life.” Beatríz Olvera Stoltzer, former director of NEW, declared, “It’s not about four walls. . . . It’s about the ability to govern your life.” Although it is primarily for single mothers, units are available for two-parent families and seniors, with rents substantially below market value. The vision for New Economics for Women emerged among a group of Latina professionals who were members of Comisión Femenil Mexicana, a feminist
organization “that in 20 years created a group home for girls, two day care centers, . . . and a job training center for Latinas.” NEW’s dedicated founders included Stoltzer, a utilities administrator, urban planning professor Rebecca Morales, banker Carmen Luna, and attorneys María Rodríguez and Esther Valadez. Maggie Cervantes, Sandra Serrano Sewell, and Gloria Moreno Wykoff were also integral to NEW’s early success. With memories of their own working-class childhoods, they pooled their resources, expertise, and networks to make Casa Loma a reality in 1993. One Casa Loma resident, María Zepeda, points with pride to NEW’s founders. “These women have demonstrated that not only men can do things. Sometimes without men, we can do more.” During the last decade this nonprofit community organization has grown by leaps and bounds. In addition to Casa Loma, NEW has constructed five other properties for a total of 498 housing units serving teen mothers, large families, single-parent households, and senior citizens. Located in Pico Union, the majority of the organization’s clients are women of color, primarily Latinas and African Americans. Four hundred additional apartments are currently in various stages of development. Moving residents toward home ownership is another important goal. NEW sponsors seminars for first-time home buyers and also participates in a partnership project that renovates foreclosed properties in South Los Angeles and then makes them available to graduates from selected home-ownership classes. A combination of federal, state, and local funding and technical assistance, private foundation support, general donations, and a web of partnerships with other nonprofit community groups provides the financing necessary to build, sustain, and grow NEW’s innovative projects and programs. New Economics for Women remains committed to a vision of housing in which clients are “the community development experts” and in which multifaceted social and educational services go hand in hand with affordable housing. Like Casa Loma, all of “NEW’s housing developments offer onsite child care as well as onsite educational and case management services designed to help families move from poverty to personal and economic success.” As an outgrowth of its bilingual day-care centers, NEW also operates a charter elementary school. La Posada is one of its most innovative housing complexes—sixty studio apartments for teen mothers and their children. La Posada offers a twoyear transitional program that provides “job training and a conflict resolution program,” as well as “child development, parenting, self-esteem, and domestic violence prevention classes.” In 2000 the Fannie Mae Foundation recognized New Economics for Women as “one of the ten best ex-
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New York City Mission Society amples of community-based non-profit housing organizations.” Parenting Magazine, Consumer Action, and the National Council of La Raza have also honored NEW’s groundbreaking achievements. Accolades aside, the statistics speak for themselves. According to NEW’s official website, “NEW families increase their gross annual income an average of 33.4% within two years of moving into one of [its] housing developments” and “NEW families increase their average household income by 50% within five years.” Under its Family Development Program NEW has provided comprehensive services to more than 700 households. As Beatríz Olvera Stoltzer, a former director and a founding mother, reflected, “This is about honoring our mothers, our families, and communities.” SOURCES: Jones, Charisse. 1991. “Ground Broken for Homes for Single Latina Parents Housing: women’s sevenyear dream is to provide a temporary haven for young mothers and children.” Los Angeles Times, May 25; ———. 1993. “Home at Last: Casa Loma-a Housing Complex Built by Latinas for Latinas Will Open Its Doors This Week.” Los Angeles Times, May 31, E1; Mothner, Linda Beth. 1994. “More than shelter, home, help, hope.” Los Angeles Times, April 3, K1; New Economics for Women Web site. “Annual Report 2003.” www.neweconomicsforwomen.org (accessed July 22, 2005); Seal, Kathy. 1993. “Designing Women.” Southwest Airlines Spirit, August: 50, 53–54. Vicki L. Ruiz
NEW YORK CITY MISSION SOCIETY (NYCMS) (1812– ) Founded in 1812, the New York City Mission Society (NYCMS), also known as the Mission Society, is the city’s oldest private social service agency. It was established as the New York Religious Tract Society during a time of harsh economic conditions. In addition to handing out Christian tracts, the organization distributed food and clothing and provided basic educational and health care services to meet the needs of impoverished city dwellers, particularly newly arrived immigrants. Its accomplishments include the creation of the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor (AICP), today known as the Community Service Society and located in the same building as NYCMS. Before the Civil War the organization served primarily the British, Irish, and Germans; after the Civil War until World War I it focused on serving Italians, Polish, and Greeks. Since then the organization has focused on the Harlem and South Bronx communities, primarily serving the African American and Latino/a populations. Since September 11, 2001, it has also focused on those affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The motto of the New York City Mission Society is “Changing lives since 1812,” and its impressive history seems to attest to this. The Mission Society serves approximately 3,000 people annually, from children to the elderly, via programs and initiatives in the areas of education (math, literacy, and financial literacy instruction in after-school programs), personal growth and development (journal writing, career-readiness instruction, conflict resolution, and engagement in community service projects), prevention (teenage pregnancy and foster care, parent advocacy, counseling, crisis intervention, and day-care, health, and substance-abuse referrals), and arts and recreation (music, dance, arts and crafts, and sports). Since the mid-nineteenth century the Mission Society has been credited with a broad range of interests in the field of human services. Its leadership was involved in creating the New York City public library system; providing the model for the Fresh Air Fund, which takes innercity children to experience life in the rural areas of the United States; establishing an employment agency for women and children; and developing the visiting nurse services in Manhattan. By the twentieth century it shifted its focus away from the institutional church and pioneered New York City’s first sleep-away camp, Camp Minisink, for African American children, instituted leadership training programs (the most widely known was the Cadet Corps), and created family-based camping programs. It also served in facilitating the establishment of Spanish-speaking churches, such as the Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas Pentecostal church denomination, which involved many Latinas, primarily of Puerto Rican descent. Ministerial leadership among Latinas was more readily accepted in this institution. In the early 1990s, after long-standing leadership provided by African Americans, NYCMS hired its first Puerto Rican executive director, Emilio Bermiss. Continuing the strong leadership and visionary efforts of the Mission Society, Bermiss encouraged the Urban Ministry Program, which had already conducted a study about, and established a program for, black women in ministry, to conduct a study of Latinas in ministry in the northeast corridor of the United States. In 1992 it secured funding from the Lilly Endowment and hired a Latina sociologist to serve as principal investigator and program planner for the Latinas in Ministry Program. The resulting study is titled Latinas in Ministry: A Pioneering Study on Women Ministers, Educators and Students of Theology (1993, revised in 1994); it stands as groundbreaking research on Latinas in ministry across denominational spheres. The study surprised the religious establishment when it found that as of April 1993, 673 Latinas served as ministers,
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Nieto, Sonia students of theology, and educators or administrators in theological institutions, and 97 Latinos served as educators or administrators in theological institutions. It also dealt with the issues, concerns, and needs of Latinas in pastoral service and assessed the inclusion of courses focusing on women or Latinas/os in the curriculum of the theological institutions in the Northeast. The study led to funding for the first annual Latinas in Ministry Conference, which included women from various Protestant/Pentecostal and Roman Catholic traditions and pioneering women in this field. The ongoing efforts of the Latinas in Ministry Program include retreats, conferences, networking, and referral services. Today the program is under the auspices of the Center for Emerging Female Leadership under the umbrella organization of the Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC). In 1992 NYCMS served as the fiscal conduit of LPAC and began to filter its Latino-related initiatives under this organization. It then gifted its Urban Ministry Complex in the South Bronx to LPAC, which is currently a multimillion-dollar faith-based, multiservice agency that also lends its support to grassroots, not-for-profit, faith-based initiatives. The New York City Mission Society is a benchmark organization with a vision to serve populations in need and to provide continued training to persons involved in ministry across gender, ethnic, racial, and denominational lines. Its contributions to the Latina/o community via its church-raising efforts, pioneering study on Latinas in ministry, unprecedented gathering of Latinas in ministry across denominational boundaries, Latinas in Ministry Program, and support of the Latino
Rev. Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, on the left, and Rev. Aimee García Cortese, First Annual Latinas in Ministry Conference, Latino Pastoral Action Committee and New York City Mission Society, 1994. Courtesy of María Pérez y González.
Pastoral Action Center have had an enormous impact on Latinas/os, particularly in New York City. SOURCE: Pérez y González, María. 1993. Latinas in Ministry: A Pioneering Study on Women Ministers, Educators and Students of Theology. New York: New York City Mission Society. María E. Pérez y González
NIETO, SONIA (1943–
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Sonia Nieto was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1943, one of three children. Her mother, Esther Mercado Cortés, and her father, Federico Cortés, migrated from the Ponce area of Puerto Rico to the city in 1929 and 1934, respectively. Nieto was educated in the New York City public schools and has commented on the importance of her regular visits to the Brooklyn Public Library. Her first language was Spanish, and she remembers, “We spoke Spanish at home, even though teachers pleaded with my parents to stop doing so.” Achieving some degree of economic success with a family-owned bodega, Nieto’s parents purchased their first home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn when she was in junior high school. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, at the time one of the most prestigious New York public schools, and remembers the challenges of its rigorous curriculum. She credits the education she received there with laying the foundation for her future academic success, but she also recalls never feeling a sense of belonging in the school. Nieto earned the baccalaureate degree from St. John’s University in 1965 with a major in education and completed a master’s degree in Spanish and Hispanic literature in 1966 at New York University. In 1967 she married Angel Nieto, and together they raised two daughters and a granddaughter. Nieto earned the Ed.D. from the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1979 and soon thereafter became a professor at that institution. As an activist and educator, Nieto came of age in New York during a period of parental mobilization and student protest. Arriving at Junior High School 278 in the Ocean Hill/Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1966, Nieto entered a key contested arena engaged in the community control and decentralization struggles that pitted Albert Shanker’s Teachers’ Union against community parents in conflicts that erupted throughout the city. In reflecting on her first teaching experience, Nieto has written, “I was young and naïve . . . I was not prepared for the hopelessness that permeated the school on the part of the students and staff. I often went home and cried.” Two years later she accepted a
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Nieto Gómez, Anna position as a fourth-grade teacher in the first bilingual school in New York. She entered a school that was run by Puerto Rican professionals and served Puerto Ricans, an environment in which the school staff supported the politics of community control, as opposed to Ocean Hill/Brownsville. After two years Nieto was recruited to help develop the teacher education program in the newly formed Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College, another heavily politicized environment. This experience introduced Nieto to public protest and demonstrations in the streets. She credits her political awakening to all these early experiences. Multicultural education, bilingual education, and Puerto Rican studies were in their early stages, activist educational movements that grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These experiences shaped Nieto as a young educator, and she, in turn, matured to assume leadership in these fields as a scholar and activist. Nieto has taken up the challenge of educational failure (high dropout rates) and has proposed multicultural education, including bilingual methodology, not as simple solutions, but rather as strategies toward significant or transformative changes in the lives of students and educators. Although multicultural education in the United States was initially conceived as a movement to infuse public school curricula with more content about people of color, Nieto argues that multiculturalism must transcend the curriculum and address the structure of inequality in the schools. A frequent argument in Nieto’s publications posits the concept that improving the academic success of students of color comes
about through the communication of high expectations for all students; the creation of caring, studentcentered educational environments, and the skillful use of pedagogical strategies to affirm cultural identity, including language. She emphasizes positive social relations between teachers and students, noting that helping students discover a sense of belonging is important for academic success. In her influential book Affirming Diversity, Nieto defined multicultural education as encompassing all types of differences, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Nieto’s other significant contributions center on the study of a variety of Puerto Rican issues in education, notably the inclusion of Puerto Rican images and themes in children’s literature. She completed two studies of children’s books during a twenty-year period (1973–1993) and found Puerto Rican representation in only 98 books. Noting that some 40,000 children’s books had been published in the United States during the period of her research, Nieto decried the invisibility of Puerto Ricans in the literature and criticized the stereotypical images of Puerto Rican families. Nieto continues to advocate on behalf of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in her research studies and publications on multicultural education and in teacher training. She is a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. See also Education SOURCES: Nieto, Sonia. 2000. Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools. Mahwah: Lawerence Erlbaum, Associates, 2003. What Keeps Teachers Going. New York: Teachers College Press; ——— . 2004. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. 4th ed. New York: Longman; Shaughnessy, Michael. 2002. “Interview with Sonia Nieto.” North American Journal of Psychology 4, no. 3 (December): 479–488. Victoria Núñez
NIETO GÓMEZ, ANNA (1946–
Writer and specialist in bilingual and multicultural studies Sonia Nieto. Courtesy of Sonia Nieto.
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Anna Nieto Gómez was born and raised in a segregated community on the west side of San Bernardino County, California, to Mexican American parents. Her father was a World War II veteran and native of Flagstaff, Arizona, and her mother, a native of Gallup, New Mexico, was a railroad clerk. In 1967 Nieto Gómez attended California State University, Long Beach, where she was first exposed to the growing Mexican American student movement for civil rights and power. She recalls vividly the day a young man walked by her carrying a large sign that read “Chicano.” “It was the first time I had ever seen that word spelled out.” In May of that year she attended her first meeting with Mexican American students, a group that
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Norte, Marisela evolved into the first United Mexican Students (UMAS) on campus. Nieto Gómez’s participation in UMAS centered on recruitment and retention of Chicano students. The group’s efforts brought 600 Chicanos/as to the university in 1969 and twice that number in 1970. Nieto Gómez was concerned with the ideological questions raised by the Chicano movement. She participated in the 1969 conference at which student activists drafted the Plan de Santa Barbara. This plan embraced more militant ideas about racial identity, demanded classes on Chicanas/os in the curriculum, and called for a change in the name of their organization from UMAS to el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Nieto Gómez became the first woman elected to the presidency of MEChA, an organization that would play an important role in Chicano/a issues on university campuses. As the Chicano movement grew, Nieto Gómez moved to create vehicles for expressing women’s issues within a liberation struggle whose leadership was dominated by men. She helped found a Chicana student newspaper, Hijas de Cuauhtémoc. The paper published essays, art, and poetry written by Chicanas and discussed sexism within the Chicano movement. Nieto Gómez criticized the leaders of a Denver Chicano student conference for deciding that “the Chicana woman does not want to be liberated” in an article titled “Chicanas Identify!” The paper soon became the target of criticism from cultural nationalists within MEChA. In protest they staged a mock funeral over the “grave sites” of Hijas staff members. Critics hanged and burned an effigy of Nieto Gómez, then president of a MEChA chapter, and some Chicana activists argued that feminism was divisive and hurt the larger Chicano cause. After graduation from California State University at Long Beach in 1970, Nieto Gómez was employed in the Chicano studies program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she taught the first courses on the Chicana experience. Among Nieto Gómez’s courses were La Chicana, History of La Chicana, La Familia, and History of Third World Women in the United States. Nieto Gómez’s curriculum materials included a slide show on Chicana history that formed the basis for the documentary film La Chicana. Merging community activism with academic interests, in 1974 Nieto Gómez founded the seminal publication Encuentro Femenil, a forum for discussing issues affecting Chicanas. In “La femenista,” a key essay in which she analyzed the various ideological threads of the time, feminism and cultural nationalism, Nieto Gómez articulated a critical theory on the Chicana experience. She expressed sharp differences between Anglo feminism and the broader Chicano movement. “The middle-class Anglo woman only shares with the
Chicana the fact that they are both women,” Nieto Gómez wrote. She critiqued the “male privilege” within the Chicano movement, which, she said, “sometimes makes the Chicano movement just like a male liberation movement.” Instead, she called upon Chicanos to support democratic participation, equal rights, and recognition and support of social and economic issues affecting Chicanas, including child care and welfare rights. Many of these issues became the subject of other Encuentro articles. Despite her active role in the community and her journal publications, Nieto Gómez was denied tenure from CSUN in 1976. She believes that she was “denied tenure because of her political beliefs.” See also Chicano Movement; Feminism SOURCES: Blackwell, Maylei S. 2000. “Geographies of Difference: Mapping Multiple Feminist Insurgencies and Transnational Public Cultures in the Americas.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz; García, Alma M., ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; Nieto Gómez, Anna. 1994. Interview by Virginia Espino, 23 April; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Espino
NORTE, MARISELA (1955–
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Marisela Norte is affectionately known as “the Cultural Ambassador of East L.A.” and “the Poet Laureate of Boyle Heights” and was dubbed “the Muse on the Bus” by Buzz magazine. Her thirty-plus years of bus riding inspire her critical bilingual perspective on Los Angeles’ perpetually transforming cultural landscape. For more than twenty years Norte’s biting irony and dark humor have illuminated the consequences of the city’s transformation for working women on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Norte’s sharp-witted, honey-throated pieces reflect how she “viewed Los Angeles as a child: a bad movie with a running commentary in English and Spanish. Writing has enabled me to speak when keeping silent was the only choice.” Norte grew up and attended public schools in East Los Angeles during the socially tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Her father’s strict enforcement of “Spanish only” at home guaranteed her bilingual fluency. Drive-in trips to view Hollywood B movies with her father animated her love of cinematic images, which was later infused into her writing. Emerging as a public persona in the 1980s, Norte developed her writing within the performance collective ASCO and the Latino Writers Workshop. Critically acclaimed in the United States and the United Kingdom, Norte’s spoken-word compact disk
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Novello, Antonia Coello Norte/word (1991) is considered the first and best of its genre. It captures the cinematic beauty and brutality of daily life in Los Angeles. Traversing the geography of the southwestern borderlands, Norte/word produces a transnational imaginary that humanizes the struggle of a transnational work force, composed mostly of women, caught in the web of economic exploitation, patriarchy, and dysfunctional relationships. The urban spaces and “las vidas de ellas” that Norte’s narrator registers in “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” are juxtaposed with a working woman’s U. S./Mexico border-crossing experience in “Act of the Faithless”—“she cleaned up after everyone else leaving her mess at home in neat pile / like his laundry / waiting to be washed / cleansed / delivered from evil.” “Baby Sitter Girl” critiqued the dehumanizing reporting of a young girl’s murder, “your smile blurred on my set, they didn’t tell us your name until after the commercial,” and inspired artist Gronk to paint the spoken-word piece for the Four Directions installation at the Hammer Museum in 1995. Since Norte does not have a driver’s license yet, most of the material for Norte/word was written on the Number 18 bus to downtown. Norte explains, “As a writer, the bus has been my transportation and my inspiration for the past thirty years. It has become my ‘mobile office,’ the space where I write about the daily lives of Angelenos that ride the bus to and from work. My writing circulates as I do through economically marginalized parts of the city in spoken word form. . . . My work is an ethnography of post-industrial Los Angeles culture viewed through a bus window.” Fittingly, Norte’s essays circulated in more than over 2,000 Los Angeles buses after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) selected Norte and photographer Willie García to develop a series of photos and essays, posted as placards in bus interiors, that honored Metro System operators, including bus drivers, maintenance personnel, and others. Norte’s ability to translate images seen on bus rides into spoken word is singular. In a 1983 interview at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Norte asserted, “I tend to deal first with an image, rather than an experience. . . . if you’re walking somewhere and you see something . . . that makes . . . a[n] impression on you, you build your story around that particular incident. . . . It’s like the image comes first and everything else falls into place.” Norte advances her technique in the Ovation Award–nominated play Black Butterfly, Jaguar Girl, Piñata Woman, and Other Superhero Girls like Me. Performed at the Kennedy Center in 2000, Black Butterfly combines the poetry of Norte, Sandra C. Muñoz, and Alma Cervantes under the direction of Luis Alfaro and thematizes both the promises and perils of models of survival for adolescent girls in East Los Angeles. A butterfly tattoo Norte spied on a young
woman bus rider that said, “ ‘I’ll remember you’ under it in that swirling, gorgeous East L.A. writing,” inspired the play’s final act. Norte explains, “To me it was more than a tattoo—it was ink.” In the play a girl bus rider witnesses a mother “talking real mean to her daughter. . . . You’re just so stupid.” No one stops the abuse, so the witnessing girl takes action. Moved by the tattoo of a “homegirl on the bus,” she sprouts “big, soft black, velvety butterfly wings. . . . I see that little girl through the bus window, I want her to open her eyes, look up, and see me. When she finally does, she makes a big old smile when she sees her wings, and then she’s outside and I see her lifting her sister up in the air. All of a sudden there are thousands of black butterflies in the sky, flying together and we spell out, ‘I’ll Remember You.’ ” Illuminating the social context that continues to disempower Mexican American and immigrant women, Norte’s eloquent spoken word captures the effects of global economic shifts on the personal lives of working women subject to the violence and vicissitudes of immigration policy, local politics, and patriarchy. Chronicling the harsh realities while paying tribute to working women, Norte—as a “revlon revolutionary”—seeks to “mobilize every immobile woman I see at the bus stops or standing all the way home after ten hour shifts with red, white, green and black strings of thread all over their clothes.” Indelibly marking the imaginations of her peers, Norte’s themes paved the way for subsequent generations of Los Angeles writers. A PEN West mentor who serves on the Central Library Advisory Board and as an Avance (the East Los Angeles Rape Hot Line) volunteer, she avidly participates in workshops to help nurture new writers. See also Literature SOURCES: Habell-Pallán, Michelle. 1997. “No Cultural Icon: Marisela Norte.” In Women Transforming Politics, ed. Kathy Jones, Cathy Cohen, and Joan Tronto, 256–268. New York: New York University Press; Lipsitz, George. 2001. American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Michelle Habell-Pallán
NOVELLO, ANTONIA COELLO (1944–
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Antonia Coello Novello holds the distinction of being the first female and first Latina to be appointed surgeon general of the United States. She was born on August 23, 1944, in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. When she was eight years old, her father died. Her schoolteacher mother raised Novello and her brothers. As a child, Novello suffered from a congenital birth defect of the colon that caused her to spend much of her childhood in hospitals and in bed. She was hospitalized every summer for treatments for this condition, which was finally cor-
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Novello, Antonia Coello rected by surgery when she was eighteen years old. As a result of this experience Novello decided to pursue a career in medicine so that she could help other sick children. Novello earned her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Puerto Rico. After completing her medical training in 1970, she married Joseph R. Novello, a navy flight surgeon who later became a psychiatrist, author, and medical journalist. The couple moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There Novello completed an internship and residency program in pediatric nephrology at the University of Michigan Medical Center, where she treated children with kidney diseases. For her skilled and caring treatment of patients, Novello was awarded Intern of the Year by the University of Michigan Medical Center’s Pediatrics Department. She was the first woman to receive this award. Novello then moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where she completed a fellowship at Georgetown University Hospital in 1975. She later joined the teaching staff at Georgetown University Hospital as a professor of pediatrics and earned a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1982. In 1978 Novello joined the staff of the National Institutes of Health. In the early 1980s she served as a congressional fellow on the staff of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, advising legislators on bills dealing with such health issues as organ transplants and cigarette warning labels. In 1986 Novello was promoted to deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. During this time she took a special interest in children with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Working to become the best physician she could be, Novello earned a reputation in the medical field and in Washington, D.C., for her dedication to the profession. President George H. Bush, who was elected in 1988, was impressed by Novello’s ideas on various medicallegal issues. In the fall of 1989 President Bush nominated Novello to be the nation’s surgeon general. In this position Novello was not only the first woman, but also the first Latina. The surgeon general serves as a symbolic doctor for all Americans and is responsible for informing the public about problems and trends in medicine. The surgeon general also heads the U.S. Public Health Service, an organization associated with the U.S. Navy that is composed of military medical professionals. As surgeon general, Novello held the rank of vice admiral in the U.S. Navy. Shortly after her appointment Novello visited her birthplace in Puerto Rico. She told a Washington Post reporter, “When I got off the plane, kids from my
Former Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Antonia Coello Novello. Courtesy of Dr. Antonia Coello Novello.
mother’s school lined both sides of the road handing me flowers. I went to the [veterans] hospital to speak. When the veterans saw my gold braid (part of the Navy uniform signifying her rank) they all stood and saluted. . . . I realized that for these people, for women, I have to be good as a doctor, I have to be good as a surgeon general, I have to be everything.” During her term in office Novello was influential in promoting an antismoking campaign, improved AIDS education, and worked for better health care for minorities, women, and children. Concerned about the dangers of teenage drinking, she met with some of the largest beer and wine companies in the country and asked them to stop directing their advertising, particularly with the use of cartoon figures, at young people. Novello was concerned about the rising lung cancer rates among women. She criticized the tobacco industry and lectured the public on the dangers of smoking. A workshop convened on these issues led to the emergence of the National Hispanic/Latino Health Initiative. AIDS and its long-term effect on children remained an especially important issue for Novello. In her post she worked hard to advance the fight against AIDS, especially the war against pediatric AIDS. Despite an extremely hectic schedule, she found time to visit hospitals to give hugs and encouragement to children and AIDS patients. Novello left the post of surgeon general in 1993 to become a representative for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), where
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Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia she continued to address children’s health issues. From 1993 until 1996 she also worked as UNICEF’s special representative for health and nutrition, where she advised the organization’s executive director on issues pertaining to women, children, and youth. Novello now holds the position of commissioner of health for the state of New York, one of the leading public health agencies in the nation. Novello is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the national honorary medical society. She has published extensively. Among her many awards and honors are the Surgeon General’s Exemplary Service Medallion and Medal, the American Medical Association Nathan B. Davis Award, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Medal. See also Medicine SOURCES: Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1998. Reference Library of Hispanic America, Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research; Puerto Rico Herald. 2000. “Puerto Rico Profile: Antonia Novello.” March 24; Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research. Pamela J. Marshall
NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LA DIVINA PROVIDENCIA Our Lady of Divine Providence is the Roman Catholic patroness of Puerto Rico. The notion of “divine providence” and protection due to this image derives from the order of the Servants of Mary (Servites). This order was founded in Florence on August 15, 1233, to promote the worship of the Virgin Mary. Philip Benizi, ordained as a Servite in 1258, was one of its most important members. He was canonized in 1671. According to religious lore, Benizi called on Mary for help to provide food for his friars. Subsequently he found several baskets full of provisions at the door of his convent. The devotion to Our Lady of Divine Providence is also connected to the Clerics Regular of Saint Paul, known as Barnabites. When they were in extreme financial difficulties during the construction of their church dedicated to St. Charles Borromeo, one of its members traveled to Loreto to beg assistance from Our Lady of Loreto. On his return the Barnabites received the much sought-after assistance, and they promoted the worship of the Mother of Divine Providence. In the mid-seventeenth century they received a painting of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus in her arms painted by one of Raphael’s assistants. This image became the basis of the Barnabite devotion. In 1744 Pope Benedict XIV granted the congregation the right to worship this image and celebrate a mass in honor of Mary as the mother of divine providence, wise and unfailing, dis-
penser of aid and grace, on the Saturday before the third Sunday in November. The worship of Our Lady of Divine Providence was introduced in Puerto Rico by Monsignor Tomás Gil Estévez, thirty-seventh bishop of Puerto Rico, a Catalonian who was acquainted with the image of Our Lady of Divine Providence as worshiped in a sanctuary of Tarragona (Catalonia). He placed the cathedral of the city of San Juan under her advocacy. An image of a seated Mary holding an infant Jesus standing on her lap is still worshipped today in Tarragona. A sculpted image of the Virgin was carved in Barcelona and was brought to Puerto Rico in 1853 and placed in the cathedral. By the end of the century the image was seated on an altar also made in Catalonia, and her worship had become widespread in the island. It was a seated figure, made to be dressed, and it remained in the cathedral for sixty-seven years until 1920, when it was replaced by a wood carving, which is the image of Our Lady of Divine Providence most familiar to Puerto Ricans and their communities abroad. In 1892 the Provincial Deputies, a legislative body, established the feast of the Virgen de la Divina Providencia as an official celebration for Puerto Rico. In the first half of the twentieth century the Catholic Church continued to sponsor and strengthen the worship of this image as patroness of the island and fostered the formation of secular associations to honor her. In 1953 the celebration of the first century of worship reinforced her position as the prime religious icon of Puerto Rico. In 1969 Bishop Luis Aponte Martínez asked that the image be canonically declared the patroness of the island. This request was granted by Pope Paul VI on November 19, 1969. The festivity of the Virgin was moved from January 2 to November 19 to commemorate the discovery of the island of Puerto Rico in 1493. Luis Aponte became cardinal in 1973. In 1985, after the papal visit of John Paul II, funds began to be collected for the construction of a special sanctuary for Our Lady of Divine Providence. The sanctuary would act as a second cathedral for the island. On November 4, 1976, the eve of its coronation—a reverential practice—the original image brought by Bishop Gil Estévez was burned in an act of arson. It was crowned in this condition, but it was sent to Spain to be refurbished. In New York a statue of the Virgin is on permanent display at the Church of Saint Barbara in Brooklyn, and at St. Lucy’s Church in East Harlem. She was worshiped and eulogized by Pope John Paul II in his visit to the island in 1985. SOURCES: Siervas de los Corazones Traspados de Jesús y María (a Spanish-speaking order of Catholic religious founded in Miami in 1990). “Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia.” www.corazones.org/maria/america/puerto_rico_div_provi .htm (accessed July 25, 2005); University of Dayton, Marian Li-
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Núñez, Ana Rosa brary. “Puerto Rico: Señora de la Divina Providencia.” www.udayton.edu/mary/resources/spsix.html (accessed July 25, 2005).
Asunción Lavrin
NÚÑEZ, ANA ROSA (1926–1999) Ana Rosa Núñez dedicated herself to poetry and librarianship with equal enthusiasm, curiosity, and excellence and is today remembered both for her contributions to the body of Cuban exile literature and for the preservation of Cuban culture and heritage. Born in Havana, Cuba on July 11, 1926, to Carmen Gónzalez y Gónzalez de Burgos and Dr. Jorge Núñez y Bengochea, Ana Rosa Núñez attended the private Phillips School and Baldor Academy before obtaining a scholarship in 1949 from the Institute of International Education to study at Wooster College in Ohio. She completed her education at the University of Havana, graduating in 1955 with a library degree. A founding member and vice president of the Colegio Nacional de Bibliotecarios Universitarios, Núñez was the librarian of Cuba’s National Audit Office. While pursuing her career as a librarian, Ana Rosa Núñez dedicated herself to her true passion, poetry. In the 1950s she discovered haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry that until Núñez had been unexplored in
Cuban poetry. Núñez approached the form with characteristic zeal, translating the works of Harold G. Henderson, founder of the Haiku Society of America, visiting the Japanese embassy in Havana, and sending her haikus to Emperor Hirohito on his birthday. On September 10, 1965, Ana Rosa Núñez was exiled to the United States. The following year she began working at the Otto G. Richter Library of the University of Miami. It was in exile that Núñez made her strongest mark. She published several books of poetry, including Las siete lunas de enero (1967), Viaje al Casabe (1970), and Crisantemos (1990). Her poetic works are marked by a lyrical expression of Cuban exilic themes of separation and longing, as well as nostalgia and hope. As a librarian, Ana Rosa Núñez’s legacy may not be as well known as her poetic contributions, but is nonetheless noteworthy. At the University of Miami’s Richter Library she worked with other librarians such as Rosa Abella to increase the library’s holding of Cuban and Cuban exile materials. She assisted many other exiled Cuban librarians who found work at the Richter Library. To countless researchers, Núñez provided not only her expertise as a librarian, but also her insights and discerning ideas as a writer and scholar. Ana Rosa Núñez passed away on August 1, 1999. She donated her personal library and papers to the
Ana Rosa Núñez. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
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Nuns, Colonial Cuban Heritage Collection, a division of the Richter Library that would not exist without her efforts. Ana Rosa Núñez will be remembered as one of the most important Cuban poets of the exile experience, a distinguished librarian, and a preserver and propagator of Cuban culture. See also Literature SOURCES: Núñez, Ana Rosa. 1967. Las siete lunas de enero. Miami: Ediciones Universales; ———. 1971. Escamas del Caribe (Haikus de Cuba). Miami: Ediciones Universales; ———. 1990. Crisantemos/Crysanthemums. Madrid: Editorial Beatania. María R. Estorino
NUNS, COLONIAL Nunneries were the places where women took vows as nuns and lived cloistered for life dedicated to the worship of God and the pursuit of their own spiritual salvation. They were European medieval institutions, imported to the New World by the mid-sixteenth century, and they survived beyond the end of the colonial period into the nineteenth century. As feminine branches of the monastic orders, the following were represented in colonial Spanish America: the Conceptionists, the Franciscans and its stricter branch, the Capuchines, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Carmelites, the Hieronimites, the Brigittines, and the teaching Order of Mary. Nunneries were urban institutions, and all important cities boasted several. The cities of Mexico and Lima had twenty-two and thirteen nunneries, respectively, by 1810. Cuzco had three nunneries, Quito had five, and Puebla had eleven. The first nunnery of the Americas, Our Lady of Conception, was founded in Mexico City around 1550. In Lima the Augustinian convent of la Encarnación was founded around 1561. As they proliferated throughout the sixteenth century and later, the nature and purpose of these institutions became clearly and rigidly fixed. From the sixteenth century convents were mostly founded to shelter and provide for the spiritual needs of the population of Spanish descent. Race became the defining quality to enter the cloisters. Class was no obstacle for some poor girls to profess since a system of social patronage could ease their admission by providing them with the dowry and expenses of profession. Legitimacy was also required, but under exceptional circumstances it could be relaxed. Indians were excluded for nearly two centuries on the assumption that they were neophytes (new to the faith). The social stigma attached to interracial origins and African descent precluded the mixed races from profession. Exceptions to this rule are found in Cuzco, where the convent of St. Clare, founded in 1551, had
sixty initial inhabitants, of whom only three were Spaniards. The rest were Indians or mestizas sheltered there. However, not all of them were destined to become nuns. As the convent expanded, mestizas continued to be admitted in small numbers, but they professed in a lower rank of the conventual hierarchy. Our Lady of Conception, in Mexico City, welcomed the daughters of Moctezuma, but it did not admit any others. The Franciscan convent of St. Clare, in Querétaro, was founded by an Indian, Diego de Tapia, in 1607 under the stipulation that his daughter be the abbess. She occupied this position until her death, but no other Indian woman was allowed to profess. In the eighteenth century four convents for Indian women were founded in Mexico: Corpus Christi (1724), Our Lady of Cosamaloapán in Valladolid, today Morelia (1734), Our Lady of the Angels in Oaxaca (founded in 1767 by the king and opened in 1782), and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City (1811). Corpus Christi accepted only Indian women of the highest social ranks. Nuns were allowed to be served by maids, most of whom were Indians, mixed bloods, or Africans, including slaves. Despite the racial chasm that separated professed nuns from the majority of colonial women, nunneries were microcosms in themselves, since rich and poor women and white and nonwhite lived within the same convent. Thus these institutions reflected the multiethnic nature of colonial society. For the most part, to enter a nunnery a woman had to be literate and capable of carrying out tasks in the administration of her institution. It was within nunneries that most women writers found the opportunity to exercise their abilities. Most of them wrote spiritual diaries under the close supervision of their confessors, but others wrote poetry and plays. Few of these works have been published or were even known in their times. Exceptionally, the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), the most notable of all nuns in the colonial period, were well known in her time. Other writers of note include Mother Francisca Josefa de la Concepción del Castillo (1671–1742) of the convent of St. Clare in Tunja (New Granada) and Sor María Agueda de San Ignacio (1696–1756) of the Dominican convent of Our Lady of Saint Rose in Puebla. Innumerable girls received some education within the cloisters as protégées of the nuns, even though this was never a mandate of profession or the rule governing these institutions. The foundation of a nunnery of the teaching Order of Mary in Mexico City by María Ignacia Azlor (1715–1767) in 1754 marked a growing interest in the education of women. The Order of Mary took paid pupils and also opened public schools for girls of all races. The order had four convents in Mexico by the beginning of the nineteenth century, one in New Granada (Colombia), one
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Nuns, Contemporary in Mendoza (Argentina), and one in Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic). Nunneries had an important economic position in their communities. Their assets resulted from the charity of pious and wealthy founders and the good management of their properties and investments. Patronage was provided by the wealthy in their communities, who included members of the church and city councils, and the contributions of the families of the nuns. Most nuns had to provide a dowry of between 2,000 and 3,000 pesos for their entrance, which was destined to the upkeep of the community or to the investment funds. Through the accumulation of donations, either in cash or in liens, some nunneries amassed capital that they invested in real estate or in loans that paid interest of 5 percent. At the end of the colonial period three wealthy convents in Mexico City, Jesús María, la Encarnación, and Our Lady of Conception, had hundreds of thousands of pesos in loans and real estate. These multifaceted institutions stand out as a key element in the history of women in Spanish America. As the only identifiable corporate group of women within the colonial period, nuns and nunneries remain one of the most important components of the colonial world. See also Nuns, Contemporary SOURCES: Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau, eds. 1989. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Burns, Kathryn. 1999. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Lavrin, Asunción. 1986. “Female Religious.” In Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America, ed. Louise Schell Hoberman and Susan Migden Socolow, 165–195. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ———. 1999. “Indian Brides of Christ: Creating New Spaces for Indigenous Women in New Spain.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 15, no. 2 (Summer): 225–260; Myers, Kathleen A., and Amanda Powell. 1999. A Wild Country out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Sampson Vera Tudela, Elisa. 2000. Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1550–1750. Austin: University of Texas Press. Asunción Lavrin
NUNS, CONTEMPORARY Throughout most of the twentieth century a feeling that Latinos/as or Hispanics were ill suited to the religious life prevailed in many ecclesiastical circles. The limited success of North American congregations in attracting and keeping Hispanic vocations was often attributed to a supposed Latin American inability to profess religious life. This opinion results from the ignorance among non-Hispanic church leaders about the important role that women have traditionally
played in the nurturing and maintenance of the Christian faith in Latin America. Despite cultural and religious prejudices with which Hispanics have been traditionally viewed by the leaders of religious institutions in the United States, North American convents have drawn and kept a number of Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and other Hispanic vocations. There have been at least two autochthonous Hispanic congregations that have emerged, one Puerto Rican in the Northeast and one Mexican American in the Southwest. Of the two, the Puerto Rican Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de la Providencia had its autonomy from its inception. The second, the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence, a Mexican American congregation, is an offshoot of a North American congregation. In the U.S. mainland, as in Puerto Rico, it is primarily among lay catechists that the foundation of Hispanic groups of women religious can be found. This is the case with Las Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de la Providencia among Puerto Ricans, as just described, and the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence for Mexican Americans. Because the latter congregation was primarily engaged with the needs of the Mexican Americans in San Antonio, it attracted many Mexican American women to the religious life and in 1946 refocused itself so that it became a native U.S. Latina congregation. The Missionary Sisters of Victory Knoll has a similar focus, but has not organized itself specifically with a Mexican American orientation. Similarly, among Puerto Ricans, the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Cross (Amityville Dominicans), the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity (Trinitarians), and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood (Josephites) are three North American congregations that have attracted a number of Puerto Rican vocations. This was due in part to their presence in Puerto Rico from the early twentieth century, but it has not led to a redefinition of mission in terms of Latinas only. The two most successful native congregations in Puerto Rico in terms of numbers and outreach are the Hermanas del Buen Pastor and Las Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Fátima. They are also the oldest in the island. Most, but not all, members of these native congregations are working in Puerto Rico; as these congregations become successful in Puerto Rico, they extend their activities to neighboring islands and to the northeastern United States. In fact, las Hermanas Dominicas de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Fátima has mission houses not only throughout the island of Puerto Rico but also in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States. All of the native institutes and congregations emerged during the twentieth century—more specifically after 1930—most often out of a need for
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Nuns, Contemporary catechetical and social work, although education has also been part of their work. Though presently established as a native Puerto Rican congregation, one among these, las Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de la Providencia, has its origins in New Jersey and in the migration experience of the Puerto Ricans to the northeastern United States. Another group of sisters of the Dominican order recently separated from its motherhouse in Florida to incorporate itself as a native Puerto Rican congregation. The Hispanic women who entered religious life in the United States formed a national group in the 1970s known as Las Hermanas in order to address the needs of Latinos/as or Hispanics nationwide and at the same time form a network of support and solidarity among themselves. This national organization at first drew its membership from the Hispanic members of religious congregations and later welcomed Euro-American religious women who were engaged and interested in Hispanic ministry. Eventually it also incorporated laywomen. During the 1970s and 1980s Las Hermanas played a key role in raising the consciousness of the Hispanic Catholic community in the United States through its presence and activism at the local, regional, and national levels. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, like many other groups that arose after the Second Vatican Council, Las Hermanas lost members and thus suffered a decline in its strong base of support. While a number of
Hispanic women continue to be attracted to religious life and while Hispanic religious women continue their work at different levels in the Catholic Church, a national agenda seems less clear today than in the 1970s and 1980s. It is also obvious that present vocations to the religious life, be they from the Hispanic or nonHispanic community, are women of mature age and profession. See also Nuns, Colonial; Religion SOURCES: Díaz-Stevens, Ana María. 1993. “The Saving Grace: The Matriarchal Core of Latino Catholicism.” Latino Studies Journal 4, no. 3 (September): 60–78; ———. 1994. “Latinas and the Church.” In, Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Ebaugh, Helen Rose, Jon Lorence, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. 1996. “The Growth and the Decline of the Population of Catholic Nuns Cross-Nationally, 1960–1990: A Case of Socio-cultural Change.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 2 (June): 171–183; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, and Yolanda Tarango. 1988. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church. San Francisco and New York: Harper and Row; Luna, Anita de. 2003. “Evangelizadoras del barrio: The Rise of the Missionary Catechists of Divine Providence.” U.S. Catholic Historian (Winter 2003); 53–71; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1988. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations before Mid-century.” Oral History Review 16, no. 2 (Fall): 47–63.
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Ana María Díaz-Stevens
O q OBEJAS, ACHY (1956–
)
Achy Obejas, a Cuban American writer, was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956. She immigrated to the United States six years later with her parents, grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, and moved to Chicago in 1979. A widely published poet, fiction writer, journalist, and activist, Obejas is a very well regarded journalist who, since 1980, has written for many of the major newspapers in the Midwest. She has been a journalist in both the mainstream and the gay and alternative media. In an interview with Gregg Shapiro she disclosed that it was at the Chicago Reader that “I really found my voice and learned my chops.” She has also written for the Windy City Times, the Advocate, High Performance, and the Village Voice. Since 1991 Obejas has worked for the Chicago Tribune, first as a record reviewer and then as a cultural writer. During this time she has worked on a variety of important assignments that have included reporting on the aftermath of the Gianni Versace murder and also on the case of Matthew Shepard. In 2001 Obejas was part of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team for explicatory journalism for the series “Gateway to Gridlock,” and she has received several other awards for her contributions in journalism. One of the most noteworthy is for her coverage of the Chicago mayoral elections, for which she earned a 1998 Peter Lisagor Award for political reporting. Achy Obejas has made significant contributions to the literary world in the area of fiction writing. In her interview with Gregg Shapiro she stated that fiction writing for her was easier and more satisfying than autobiography, like “tossing a new ingredient into a stew: It reacts, it provokes, it meshes with everything else and the end result is a new whole.” Her accomplishments in fiction include a collection of short stories, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress like This? (1994), as well as two novels, Days of Awe (2001), which was designated a Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and Memory Mambo (1996), winner of the Lambda Award. Her prose is also included in Circa 2000, Cubana, Food for Life, Estatuas de sal, The Way We Write Now, Feminisms, Latina, Dag-
ger, Girlfriend Number One, West Side Stories, and Discontents. Obejas has also contributed articles and essays to magazines and newspapers such as Vogue, Ms., Playboy, the Village Voice, Latina, the Nation, the New York Times, Chicago Reader, Girlfriends, and many others. Obejas’s poetry has similarly had a significant impact on the literary world and has appeared in a number of journals, including Conditions, Revista ChicanoRiqueña, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. In 1986 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. The themes treated in the author’s creative and journalistic writings reveal a great commitment to the articulation of a diversity of voices and causes in the American melting pot. Her works represent Cuban Americans, women who are still underrepresented in many areas of public life and who still experience inequality on many levels. Also critical to her work is the representation of racial, cultural, and sexual diversity among the many groups that make up the American and Cuban populations. The writer herself attests to her multiple identities when she states, “In the U.S., I’m Cuban, Cuban-American, Latina by virtue of being Cuban, a Cuban journalist, a Cuban writer, somebody’s Cuban lover, a Cuban dyke, a Cuban girl on a bus, a Cuban exploring Sephardic roots, always and endlessly Cuban. I’m more Cuban here than I am in Cuba, by sheer contrast and repetition.” Through her roles as journalist, fiction writer, and activist Achy Obejas is making an important contribution to the literature and society of the United States. See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Araujo, Nara. 2000. “I Came All the Way from Cuba So I Could Speak like This? Cuban and Cuban-American Literatures in the U.S.” In Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray, 93–103. New York: Palgrave; Embry, Marcus. 2001. “Cuban Double-Cross: Father’s Lies in Obejas and García.” Double Crossings/Entrecruzamientos, ed. Mario Martín Flores and Carlos von Son, 97– 107. Fair Haven, NJ: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio.
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Wendy McBurney-Coombs
Ochoa, Ellen
OCHOA, ELLEN (1958–
)
Astronaut and engineer Ellen Ochoa was born in Los Angeles, California, on May 10, 1958. Ochoa credits her mother’s insistence on education as the inspiration for her own academic dedication. Her mother, Rosanne Deardorff Ochoa, enrolled in college soon after Ellen was born. Five children and twenty-three years later Deardorff Ochoa graduated with a bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University. Ochoa’s mother and father, Joseph Ochoa, divorced when Ellen was in junior high school. Growing up in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, California, Ochoa demonstrated mastery in all subjects, winning honors in science, mathematics, spelling, and music. When she was thirteen years old, she won the San Diego spelling bee. She was valedictorian of her class when she graduated from Grossmont High School in La Mesa in 1975 and again, five years later, upon earning the baccalaureate degree in physics from San Diego University. Awarded a Stanford Engineering Fellowship and an IBM Pre-doctoral Fellowship, Ochoa earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1981 and a Ph.D., also in electrical engineering, in 1985. Ochoa was a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, from 1985 to 1988. In optics, her area of specialization, Ochoa combined her understanding of light with its application to robotics. In her post at the Imaging Technology Branch Ochoa developed innovative methods that resulted in three patents in optical processing. Ochoa became interested in becoming a pilot after her older brother obtained his pilot’s license. After learning about the NASA space program from fellow students at Stanford in 1985, Ochoa submitted an application but was rejected. She was also rejected the following year when she reapplied. But when she submitted her application again in 1987, she soon learned that she was one of the top 100 finalists. Her excellent work as a researcher was noted, and she was made chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at the NASA/Ames Research Center at Moffet Field Naval Air Station in Mountain View, California. In 1989 she was honored with the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award as the most promising engineer in government. In 1990 she was chosen as an astronaut from a pool of nearly 2,000 applicants. When she graduated as a mission specialist in the astronaut class of 1990, she became the first Latina selected for the space shuttle program. In July 1990 Ochoa’s considerable accomplishments earned her the Pride Award from the National Hispanic Quincentennial Commission. That same year she married Coe Fulmer Miles and reported
to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for astronaut training. When the space shuttle Discovery (STS-56) ascended into space in April 1993, Ochoa, at the age of thirty-four, became the first Latina to travel into space. The five-member crew’s nine-day mission was to measure solar activity, study the atmospheric composition of Earth, and assess ozone depletion. Ochoa successfully completed her assignment, which was to use the cargo bay’s fifty-foot robotic arm to deploy and later retrieve Spartan, a 2,800-pound satellite designed to gather information about the Sun’s corona and solar wind patterns. Ochoa’s handling of the complicated maneuver was praised by NASA veterans, one of whom said, “She did it very carefully, very slowly, very methodically, with extreme concentration.” An accomplished concert flutist, Ochoa took her instrument into space and was the first to play the flute while orbiting Earth. In November 1994 Ochoa flew on the Atlantis shuttle (STS-66), whose mission was to collect data on the impact of the Sun’s radiant energy on Earth’s climate and environment. As the payload commander, Ochoa used the Remote Manipulator System to retrieve the CRISTA-SPAS satellite. In 1999 Ochoa was a mission specialist and flight engineer on Discovery’s nine-day mission (STS-96). The flight was noteworthy because it was the first to dock with the International Space Station as Ochoa coordinated the transfer of two tons of supplies and equipment in preparation for the arrival of the first crew to live on the station. In addition to the numerous awards and commendations she has received at NASA, Ochoa is also the recipient of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Medallion of Excellence (1993), the Women in Science and Engineering’s Engineering Achievement Award (1994), and the Hispanic Heritage Leadership Award (1995). In 1998 Ochoa was named by President Clinton to the Presidential Commission on the Celebration of Women in American History, a group charged with considering “how to best acknowledge and celebrate the roles and accomplishments of women throughout American history.” See also Scientists SOURCES: Johnson Space Center. “Biographical Data: Ellen Ochoa (Ph.D.).” www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/ ochoa.html (accessed July 22, 2005); Marvis, Barbara J. 1996. Famous People of Hispanic Heritage (Vol. 1). Elkton, MD: Mitchell Lane Publishers; McMurray, Emily J., ed. 1995. Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists. Detroit: Gale Research; Olesky, Walter. 1998. Hispanic-American Scientists. New York: Facts on File; Romero, Maritza. 1998. Ellen Ochoa: The First Hispanic Woman Astronaut. New York: Rosen Publishing Group.
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Bárbara C. Cruz
Olivares, Olga Ballesteros
O’DONNELL, SYLVIA COLORADO (1920–1997) Born in Clifton, Arizona, veteran of the U.S. Diplomatic Service Sylvia Colorado was the fourth child of Santos Colorado, a Mexican immigrant copper miner, and Evangelista Martínez Colorado, the daughter of one of the original settlers in the Clifton-Morenci coppermining district. When Sylvia was still young, the family moved to Antioch, California, in an attempt to better itself economically. Although the family remained poor throughout her childhood, the move to Antioch provided stability and educational opportunities. Colorado excelled in school, graduating from high school with secretarial skills to support herself and to help her family. While she was working as a junior accountant at the local steel mill, her supervisor encouraged her to take a business course at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. In order to remain under her family’s roof each night, in accordance with Mexican American tradition, Colorado commuted an hour and a half each way to attend the university. In 1945 Colorado enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, full-time and graduated in 1948 with a degree in political science. She also added Portuguese to her native English and Spanish fluency. Throughout this time she continued to support herself. Her fascination with travel and the ability to speak several languages led her to take and pass the U.S. Foreign Ser-
vice examination. After security clearances were completed in 1950, she was offered a position with the State Department. At this time the Diplomatic Corps was, by and large, dominated by white men from elite eastern schools. When Colorado went to Washington, D.C., for training before her first assignment, she was not prepared for a city in which segregation was the rule of law. As a new member of the Diplomatic Corps, she was directed to a boardinghouse that had listed a vacancy with the State Department, only to have the door slammed in her face because of her color. She never forgot the incident, but continued her training and left for her first assignment in Angola, then a Portuguese colony. Colorado rapidly became a functioning member of the U.S. consulate in Luanda, handling confidential matters pertaining to American interests in the region. In Angola she traveled by jeep to native villages and by small airplane to Nairobi and other locations in Africa. She later served at the U.S. embassies in London, England, and Lisbon, Portugal. In the course of her career she obtained “top secret” and “cosmic” security clearances in addition to the usual clearances given personnel in the Foreign Service. She never divulged any secret of the U.S. government to which she was privy, despite gentle prying from younger family members. She met her future husband, Col. John O’Donnell, at an embassy function in Lisbon. They married in France in 1955. When her husband was posted to South Korea, she joined the staff of the U.S. embassy in Seoul. Her later life was spent on military posts in England, Spain, and the United States, during which time she had two children, Kevin and Maureen. Throughout this time she lectured about her travel experiences. The O’Donnells retired to northern California, returning to the region where the rest of Sylvia’s family lived. Sylvia Colorado O’Donnell died in 1997. SOURCES: Antioch Ledger (California). 1955. “Will Air Force Major in France.” Spring; O’Donnell, Sylvia orado. November 1991. Interviews by Diane Sandoval; doval, Margarita Colorado. July 1982. Interview by Diane doval.
Wed ColSanSan-
Diane Sandoval
OLIVARES, OLGA BALLESTEROS (1939– )
Sylvia Colorado O’Donnell served in the U.S. diplomatic corps during the 1950s. Courtesy of Diane Sandoval.
Inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s agenda for social equity, Olga Ballesteros Olivares dedicated herself to improving people’s lives. A social worker and community activist, she helped thousands of western Ne-
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Olivares, Olga Ballesteros braskans, particularly low-income families and Mexican American farmworkers, secure access to education, health care, and other basic services for more than thirty years. Twice recognized as the Nebraska Mexican American Commission’s Woman of the Year (1985 and 1989), she became a state spokesperson for President Ronald Reagan’s White House Conference for a Drug-Free America and a network member of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the late 1980s. In 1991 she founded Nebraska’s Mexican American Historical Society and Mexican American Museum in Scottsbluff, which permanently houses the traveling exhibit Our Treasures: A Celebration of Nebraska’s Mexican Heritage. Born in Floresville, Texas, in 1939, the oldest daughter of ten siblings, she migrated with her parents, María Mata and Juan Ballesteros, to Lyman, Nebraska’s, sugar-beet fields in 1950. A family contract worker by age eight, she grew up quickly, following crops and attending elementary schools throughout the Midwest. At fourteen she married field hand Jesús Olivares in Torrington, Wyoming. From 1952 to 1975 they had eleven children—Elida, Haydee, Diana, Dora Maria, Elsa, Susanna, Donna, Myrta Elizabeth, David, Lisa, and Michael—most of whom joined their “crew leader” mother in the fields. Yet early in her marriage Olivares determined that only education could break the farmwork cycle in her family. Convincing her husband to settle in Scottsbluff, she enrolled her children in the local schools and later in colleges and universities, and she too soon followed. She earned a high-school diploma in 1985 from Western Nebraska Community College, where she pursued undergraduate studies and later taught Tex-Mex culinary courses. Driven by the wisdom of her father’s dichos (proverbs) such as “Help yourself and God will help you!” and by a strong Catholic faith, Olivares risked her marriage to join Panhandle Community Action in 1971 as an outreach worker—her first minimum-wage employment. “Coming from a culture that believed that men should be the breadwinners in a family, it was one of the most difficult decisions of my married life,” she writes in a brief autobiography. The on-the-job training program, which provided her family health insurance for the very first time, recruited the young Olivares to work with Spanish-speaking families like hers throughout the region. Although she almost quit after a traumatic first day, she persevered for more than a decade, building her reputation as a successful social worker and respected community leader. In 1981 Project Assist hired Olivares as a Panhandle drug and alcohol prevention specialist to assist Mexican American and Native American families. Instead of approaching the project as a “pipeline” pro-
gram solely geared toward educating people about the dangers of abusing alcohol and drugs, she created family programs that offered children’s after-school activities and parenting skills-exchange workshops. She earned national recognition for her drug-free youth projects “Teens in Action” and “Just Say No,” traveling with the teens to conferences in Washington, D.C., and Oakland, California. In 1985 she met President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony honoring “Teens in Action” with student Joe Chávez, now a Catholic priest in Grand Island, Nebraska. She remembers the day as “the greatest experience in my life!” To gain expertise in family law, Olivares joined Western Nebraska Legal Services as a paralegal in 1991. The venture significantly altered Olivares’s career. Within two years she initiated a Mexican American community improvement network that culminated in the founding of a historical society and museum dedicated to preserving the heritage of Mexicandescent people in western Nebraska. Building upon her reputation in social services and as emcee of a weekly Spanish radio program in the 1980s, she encouraged Mexican American families to tell their stories of migration, hard work, and discrimination. The network garnered financial donations and the use of a two-room Works Progress Administration building, popularly believed to have been built by Mexican labor, to house a museum. In 1996 the historical society joined forces with the Nebraska Mexican American Commission and the Nebraska State Historical Society to help produce the Mexican American Traditions in Nebraska project. Olivares collected oral histories as a volunteer, and the museum hosted the exhibit, which opened in 1997. Olivares continued her outreach throughout the 1990s as a bilingual health aide for Migrant Health and as a caseworker for Lutheran Family Support, where she counseled families split by the effects of alcohol, drug, physical, and sexual abuse. She continues to manage the Mexican American Museum and serves as a consultant to the Nebraska Humanities Council, offering statewide presentations to school youth on the history of Mexican Americans. She is currently writing a cookbook, which she hopes will help her family retain the “great Tex-Mex way of cooking!” SOURCES: Olivares, Olga Ballesteros. 2004. Autobiography (2 pages). February 1; ———. 2004. Interview by Laura K. Muñoz, February 2; Our Treasures: A Celebration of Nebraska’s Mexican Heritage/Nuestros tesoros: Una celebración de la herencia mexicana de Nebraska. 1998. Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society and Nebraska Mexican American Commission.
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Natasha Mercedes Crawford and Laura K. Muñoz
Olivarez, Graciela
OLIVAREZ, GRACIELA (1928–1987) Graciela Olivarez was one of the most outstanding Arizonans in the state’s history. To attain her goals, she combined a remarkable number of vocations and careers; disc jockey, attorney, government official, feminist, and civil rights activist. She was born and raised in Sonora, Arizona, a mining town in the eastern part of the state, and her ethnicity reflects the early history of that community. Her father was Spanish and her mother Mexican, two ethnic groups that coalesced to form a vibrant labor-organizing tradition in Arizona. The spirit shown by Hispanics in Arizona’s mining towns as they struggled for social and economic justice inspired Graciela Olivarez in her own pursuits. Because of financial difficulties, however, Olivarez left school during World War II without finishing the eighth grade and found employment as a store clerk. In the 1950s an advertising firm in Phoenix hired her as a bilingual secretary. This environment provided an opportunity to become a radio disc jockey at a time when the Hispanic public hungered to hear people like themselves on the radio. Becoming a radio personality, she hosted an Action Line program where discussions on
civil rights, one of her priorities, often took place. The media position gave her visibility in the Phoenix community, and with the advent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, she became director of a newly formed branch of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Arizona. However, bureaucratic limitations frustrated her desire to realize broader social objectives. Recognizing the importance of academic credentials, in 1965 she enrolled at the University of Notre Dame Law School, impressing the university’s president, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, who personally facilitated her admission. Olivarez embraced law studies with undaunted enthusiasm, and although she lacked a high school diploma, she became the first woman to graduate from Notre Dame Law School. Olivarez worked as a consultant to the Urban Coalition in Phoenix and as director of a food stamp program, Food for All. Committed to civil rights, she remained involved in numerous social causes, including advocacy for women’s issues. Olivarez was a charter member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), along with Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan, but she considered herself a “pro-life” femi-
Radio personality Graciela Olivarez. Courtesy of the Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Olivera, Mercedes nist, one of the few pioneers in the modern women’s rights movement to hold such a belief. In 1972, as vicechair of the President’s Commission on Population and the American Future, she dissented from the commission’s recommendation that abortion be legalized. This was before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Her views probably stemmed from her Christian upbringing and, as she often explained, were reinforced because she had seen firsthand the psychological trauma women suffered from abortions. In 1978 she left Phoenix for the University of New Mexico to direct the Institute for Social Research and Development. While she was there, she became the highest-ranking woman in New Mexico government and perhaps in the entire Southwest when Governor Jerry Apodaca selected her to head the New Mexico State Planning Office. She often recounted that she had never been so busy. With a staff of sixty-two, her office reviewed long- and short-range planning for all New Mexico state agencies. Nonetheless, she still found time, along with Vilma Martínez, to serve on the board of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Rejecting offers for other government appointments and suggestions that she run for electoral office, in 1977 she became director of the federal government’s Community Service Administration and, consequently, the highest-ranking Hispanic female in the Carter administration. In 1980 Olivarez started the Olivarez Television Company, the only Spanish-language television network in the country at the time. She continued to work in broadcasting and philanthropy until her death in 1987.
husband, José, arrived in Dallas around 1916. He emigrated from Villa García, Nuevo León, Mexico, which is located near Monterrey. Of her grandparents Casimira and José, Olivera writes: “He became a U.S. citizen, but my grandmother never did. She was always a resident alien. Both lived most of their lives and died in Dallas. But they always took their children, and some grandchildren (especially me) back to San Luis every summer until the children grew up and lived their own lives. My grandmother was a very successful businesswoman; she owned her own restaurant from 1936 until 1972, when she sold the business and retired. My grandparents were divorced when I was young.” Mercedes Olivera has been a columnist with the Dallas Morning News since 1975. As a Latina columnist at a major metropolitan daily, she is one of the most experienced Latina columnists nationally. Olivera received her B.A. at the University of Dallas and her master’s at New York University. In 1979 she was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1989 she held a Gannett Teaching Fellowship at Indiana University. In 1996 she was a Fulbright scholar and lectured at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, and in the same year she participated in the Freedom Forum Professors Publishing Program (FFPPP). Olivera held a ten-and-a-half-year appointment (1988–1999) as an instructor in mass communications
SOURCES: Luckingham, Bradford. 1994. Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Luey, Beth, and Noel J. Stowe, eds. 1987. Arizona at Seventy-five: The Next Twenty-five Years. Tempe: Arizona State University Public History Program and the Arizona Historical Society; Navarro, Armando. 2000. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press. F. Arturo Rosales
OLIVERA, MERCEDES (1954–
)
Mercedes Olivera was born in Dallas, Texas, on August 13, 1954, at the old St. Paul Hospital to Catalina Valdez and Samuel Gonzáles. They in turn had been born and raised in Dallas to Mexican immigrant parents. Mercedes’s maternal grandparents were Casimira Luna Valdez and José Valdez. Casimira emigrated from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and arrived in Dallas in 1919. Her
Columnist Mercedes Olivera. Courtesy of Mercedes Olivera.
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Olivera, Mercedes at Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth. At TCU she taught upper-division journalism skills in both print and broadcast media and in international intercultural communications. She was also responsible for the news operations of KTCU-FM 88.7 and taught a graduate course on pre-Hispanic and modern Mexican belief systems. In addition to her column with the Dallas Morning News, she was a staff writer from 1982 to 1988, serving as a general assignments and education reporter. She covered a wide range of stories, including the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas, both Delta Airlines crashes at Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, the visit of Pope John Paul II to San Antonio in 1987, and the Democratic presidential debates at Southern Methodist University in 1988. A committed journalist, from 1981 to 1995 Olivera developed and cohosted the Public Affairs Show on KZPS-FM 92.5, a fifteen-minute program dedicated to the discussion of Latino issues and events. Over the years she organized special half-hour programs with community leaders and scholars to discuss a range of policy issues. Since 1990 she has engaged in extensive professional activities. In 1990 she coproduced a onehour special program for WFAA-TV Channel 8 on “Sensitivity in the Media.” It examined the impact news coverage of ethnic and racial communities exerts on race relations in the city of Dallas. In 1990 she traveled to Lake Bled, Yugoslavia, where she made an invited conference presentation at the International Association of Mass Communication Research. She traveled to Nicaragua in 1990 as part of a U.S. delegation to monitor national elections; the Dallas Morning News published her articles. In 1992 she wrote articles on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. These were syndicated by Hispanic Link Weekly Report and published in Mexico City’s Excelsior. In 1992 she was a guest panelist on a teleconference that reached 150 chapters of the International Association of Business Communicators and the International Television Association in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The topic of the telecast was “Communicating to a Diversified Audience.” In 1993 she was the primary organizer responsible for hosting the first international journalism conference at TCU. The conference gathered 130 journalists and media scholars from Latin America and the United States. Participants examined the role of U.S. news values in Latin American news coverage. Olivera has long been interested in research on Mesoamerican women deities. In 1995 she developed a workshop based on this extensive research that she presented at schools, community and cultural centers, libraries and other venues across northern Texas. She
wrote a story on the significance of the Virgen de Guadalupe to Latinos that was syndicated by Hispanic Link. She presented a paper in Dallas at the Texas Association for Chicanos in Higher Education conference “Of Virgins and Goddesses: From Mesoamerica to Modern Mexico.” During her 1996 Fulbright Scholarship in Mexico Olivera also conducted field research on Mesoamerican deities. She spent two months doing fieldwork on a grant from the FFPPP to study the impact of preHispanic belief systems on contemporary Mexican culture and women. As part of her research she interviewed Zapatista women in Chiapas and worked with Mexican anthropologists studying ancient ruins in Vera Cruz. In relation to this research, at TCU she organized and raised funds to host a Day of the Dead ethnographic exhibition. Activities involved constructing an altar of the dead, mounting a photographic exhibit, and presenting a lecture series. Four scholars from the Institute of Anthropology, Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa, Vera Cruz, and a veracruzano folk healer lectured. This lecture series went beyond TCU. Off-campus venues included the Dallas Museum of Arts and other community centers. In 1998 she traveled to the Universidad Rómulo Gallegos in San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela, where she presented a lecture, “Virgins and Goddesses of Mesoamerica.” She was a guest speaker in 1998 at a symposium on the Texas-Mexico border at Texas A&M University, College Station. In 2002 she was a participant in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict seminar sponsored by the Interchange Seminars in Israel. She wrote about her experiences and spoke at Dallas synagogues. In 2003 she led the effort to create a Latino Advisory Committee at KERA-TV Channel 13, a PBS affiliate. She organized a launch event for American Family, the first U.S. Latino drama series on prime-time television. Olivera has been a board member of several organizations and the recipient of numerous awards. In 2003 she was awarded the Woman of Spirit Award by the American Jewish Congress, Dallas Chapter, for “spirited” pursuit of social justice. In 2002–2003 she was president of the Association for Arts and Culture at Cathedral Guadalupe in downtown Dallas. In this capacity she led the annual Crockett Street Arts Festival. Between 1999 and 2003 she was on the Board of Directors of Literacy Instruction for Texas. She was responsible for organizing life skills workshops at the Dallas Public Library for recent immigrants. In 1994 she was the recipient of the President’s Award given to her by the DFW Network of Hispanic Communicators. From 1990 to 1992 she was president of the DFW Network of Hispanic Communicators, where she helped raise funds for college scholarships. In 1987 she was
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Ontiveros, Manuela named among the Top 100 Women in Communications by Hispanic USA, a Chicago-based magazine. See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCE: Olivera, Mercedes. 2004. Personal correspondence with Roberto R. Calderón, April. Roberto R. Calderón
ONTIVEROS, MANUELA (1921–
)
Manuela Ontiveros was born Manuela García on December 22, 1921, in Lockhart, Texas. Her family moved to Saginaw, Michigan, where she now lives, when her father took a job there. She attended Potter Elementary School and graduated from St. Joseph’s High School in 1941. Her mother and sister died of spinal meningitis when Manuela Ontiveros was nine, leaving her grandmother to raise the remaining children while their father worked. Ontiveros learned Spanish from her grandmother, Catarina Sánchez. She would sound out letters, read the Mexican newspaper, and talk to her grandmother in Spanish to help learn the language. “My grandmother would say ‘You’re going to school, aren’t you? So you should learn Spanish,’ ” Ontiveros said. “My dad would tell my grandmother, ‘I don’t know why she’s going to school; she’s just going to get married,’ but my grandmother still made me go so that I would have an education. My grandmother was a member of a church ladies organization, and she took me along with her to help me learn Spanish,” she said. Her grandmother spoke only Spanish, so young Manuela Ontiveros interpreted for her. During the depression her grandmother boarded Mexican men so that they could eat good Mexican food and be around their people. She also made corn tortillas and Mexican cheeses that Ontiveros and her sister would sell to Mexican families. “My grandmother was very protective of me,” Ontiveros said. “I wasn’t allowed to go out alone or to the dances. It’s just part of the Mexican culture. Nothing from Mexico was ever bad, it was all good,” she said. “She instilled in me a lot of love for a country I had never been to.” Manuela married Jesús Quiroz Ontiveros in 1941 after she graduated from high school. Jesús Ontiveros, twenty years her senior, worked as a laborer for Chevrolet and at the Grey Iron Foundry for thirty-seven years. Jesús and Manuela Ontiveros were married for thirty-six years before he died of lung cancer in 1977. A very community-conscious man, Jesús Ontiveros was the president of the Unión Cívica Mexicana and wanted their children to attend school because he only acquired a third-grade education. They had five children, of whom four are still living. Throughout her life, Manuela Ontiveros worked in her community by serving on boards, volunteering,
Teacher and community volunteer Manuela Ontiveros. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
and helping preserve the Mexican heritage. Her activities included the Young Women’s Christian Association because her aunt, Adelia, took her to meetings as a young woman. “They were all professionals, and it made me feel kind of funny being on the board because I was just a housewife,” Ontiveros recalls. “But I learned a lot from them.” She was also a member of the Mexican Civic Union, along with her husband, to help fight discrimination. “Men were coming back from the war [World War II], and even though they served, they were discriminated against.” Ontiveros returned to school in 1975 at age fiftyfour. After earning her teacher’s certificate, she taught kindergarten and first, second, and fourth through eighth grades for eleven years until she retired in 1986. Ontiveros’ love for teaching began when she was as a teacher’s aide. Through a grant, she attended Delta University and Saginaw Valley State University, where she earned her teaching certificate. “When you first go back to school, you’re scared. I never thought I’d finish, but I did.” Ontiveros still had to take Spanish classes to become a bilingual teacher. She also spent nine years mentoring children who were behind in reading. It was “very rewarding to see kids I worked with” progress and succeed. “You can influence a lot of people, and I’m glad.” Active in politics, Ontiveros is a member of the League of Women Voters and helped start the Saginaw chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens. She also served as an election inspector and helped register voters. She believes that Mexicans need to be knowledgeable on where to get help, whether it be a lawyer in regard to civil rights violations or an elected official to make their needs known.
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Operation Pedro Pan “I recently attended a fund raiser for a candidate, and it helps to have a representative or senator you know to get things done,” she said. Always proud of her culture, Ontiveros remembers that the Mexican Civic Union members would go to public schools and do original Mexican cultural dances. Their goal was to build a meeting hall for the Mexicans in Saginaw like those other groups had. “We had our dances in any hall we could get,” Ontiveros said. “The Italian and Polish had their halls, so the Mexicans decided to build a hall. We wanted to have a hall because we wanted to keep young men in line,” she recalls. “We wanted to show them to be proud of their heritage, which is a superior race, I believe.” Overall, Manuela Ontiveros dedicated her life to her family and community and to preserving treasured Mexican heritage and traditions. “You instill in your children and grandchildren pride [in their heritage].” “I’m 81 years old, so I’ve seen a lot,” Ontiveros said. “I’m glad I grew up in this community.” She currently participates in the Bridge of Racial Harmony, an organization that combats racism. See also Politics, Party; World War II SOURCES: Nelson, Carrie. 2003. “Woman Dedicates Self to Preserving Heritage, Serving Community.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): Ontiveros, Manuela. 2002. Interview by Raul García Jr., Mexican American Cultural Center. Saginaw, MI, October 19. Carrie Nelson
OPERATION PEDRO PAN (1960–1962) Operation Pedro Pan was the name given to the twenty-two-month clandestine program involving the political exodus of more than 14,000 Cuban children to the United States in the early 1960s. Fearing Communist indoctrination, religious persecution, political retribution, and the rumor of patria potestad—the government assuming legal guardianship of their children and the attendant loss of parental rights—Cuban parents sent their unaccompanied children to the United States. Rumors of children sent to the Soviet Union for Communist indoctrination, the establishment of stateoperated dormitories, and the opening of day-care centers incited panic in some parents. Government campaigns that conscripted youths and compelled them to serve in revolutionary programs, such as the Union of Rebel Pioneers and the mass literacy crusade of 1961 that partially relied on the use of schoolchildren as tutors in the countryside, further fueled the fears of the loss of parental custody. At the time the parents believed that by sending their children to the United
States they would be separated from them for only a short while—that either Castro would soon fall from power or they would join their children in a matter of months. The semiclandestine name given to the program first appeared in a Miami Herald article written by Gene Miller on March 9, 1962. Some claim that the program’s name honored the first child Father Bryan O. Walsh took under his care, Pedro Menéndez; others say that the name referred to the boy who could fly in the James Barrie play. Walsh himself described Operation Pedro Pan as “our project to fly the children out of Cuba.” At the time, Father Walsh, a young Irish-born Catholic priest, directed the Catholic Welfare Bureau. He and James Baker, the director of the American Ruston Academy in Havana, devised a plan to get Cuban children out of the country. Many of the airline tickets were financed by American businesspeople. Once the children were in the United States, the government allocated funds to provide foster care and shelter for them through the Cuban Children’s Program. Even after Operation Pedro Pan came to a halt, the Cuban Children’s Program continued to provide assistance to unaccompanied Cuban refugee children in the United States. After the severing of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States in January 1961, Walsh worked out an arrangement with the State Department whereby he was given authority to grant “visa waivers,” thereby circumventing immigration procedures and allowing entry to Cuban children aged six to sixteen. The waivers were disbursed through an underground network organized by María Leopoldina (Polita) Grau and her brother Ramón Grau, whose uncle, Ramón Grau San Martín, had been president of Cuba from 1944 to 1948. Polita Grau was the director of a clandestine women’s anti-Castro organization called Rescate (Rescue). She mobilized other women, such as Alicia Thomas, Beatriz Pérez López, Hilda Feo, Elvira Jované de Zayas, and Juanita Castro (Fidel’s sister), in the underground network. In 1966 the Graus were convicted of trying to overthrow the Castro government. Although both were sentenced to thirty years in prison, Polita Grau was released in 1978, and her brother was freed in 1986. Another underground operative was Penny Powers, an English teacher at the Ruston Academy who procured visa waivers and passports through the British embassy. Because she chose to stay in Cuba, her important role in the operation remained obscured until recently. Also involved were Berta de la Portilla de Finlay, a teacher at the Ruston Academy, and her husband, Francisco Finlay. The Finlays were instrumental in securing passports and air transportation for the children. Serafina Lastra de Giquel, the landscape artist
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Operation Pedro Pan for the Ruston Academy, and her husband, Sergio Giquel, were also active in distributing passports and visa waivers. Other women involved in assisting the children’s departure included Sara del Toro de Odio, Elena de la Torriente, Margarita Oteiza, and Albertina O’Fárril. Many of these women served time in Cuban prisons for counterrevolutionary activities soon after the end of Operation Pedro Pan. The first children arrived at Miami International Airport in late December 1960. At first the children were housed in temporary shelters, camps, and orphanages in Miami. Because they were grouped by age and separated by gender, sibling groups were disrupted. Later, about half of the children were housed with their parents’ families and friends residing in the United States. The remaining children were sent to live with foster families or in boarding schools and delinquent homes for youthful offenders in thirty-five states. About 60 percent were teenage boys (many parents sent their sons to avoid the military draft in Cuba). Although the children were supposed to be between the ages of six and sixteen, some of them were as young as three years of age. Most of the children had attended Roman Catholic schools in Cuba, but at least 500 of the refugees were Protestant or Jewish. Although the majority of the children came from Cuba’s wealthy and middle-class families, all economic classes of Cuban society were represented among the children. There were many Cuban American women who were instrumental in hosting and fostering the refugee children. Eloisa M. Fajardo, along with her husband, Rubén Fajardo, oversaw the placement and welfare of about 700 Cuban children through the Catholic Service
Matecumbe, Operation Pedro Pan camp in the United States, circa 1960. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
Bureau. Nina and Angel Carrión served as permanent houseparents of a home for Cuban boys that was eventually known as Casa Carrión. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, severe restrictions on emigration from Cuba delayed the reunification of families. Operation Pedro Pan lasted until October 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis led to the abrupt cancellation of commercial airline flights between Cuba and the United States. Although nearly half the children were reunited with their families in less than a year, some of them never saw their parents again. “None of us could have predicted the length or severity of separation,” reflects María Cristina Romero Hallorán, who, as a twelve-year-old, was sent to the Queen of Heaven Orphanage in Denver, Colorado. Romero was one of 200 girls sent to Denver, many of whom were sent to the orphanage; some stayed for a few months, others for several years. There were some placements—most notably in juvenile homes and orphanages—that were problematic and resulted in maladjustment for the children. There were also some reports of abuse at the hands of teachers and nuns. However, the majority of the placements, especially those in foster families, seemed to have had positive outcomes. In a few rare cases the Cuban children bonded so well with their American foster families that when their parents finally arrived in the United States, the children preferred to stay with their foster parents. Recent controversies center on the speculation that the CIA planted rumors that the Castro government was planning to displace parental rights and take children from their families for the purposes of socialist indoctrination. When author Yvonne M. Conde placed a Freedom of Information request pertinent to the Pedro Pan program, the CIA denied her access to any files while “not confirming nor denying” the existence of related documents. Political scientist and university professor María de los Angeles Torres, herself one of the children who emigrated from Cuba through the program, has filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA and requested that pertinent documents be released. The CIA has repeatedly denied any involvement in the exodus. Many of the Pedro Pans, as the now-adult former refugees call themselves, have become successful businesspeople, educators, lawyers, judges, and entertainers. Singers and songwriters Willy Chirino, Lissette Alvarez, Marisela Verena, and Carlos Oliva were all Pedro Pans; together they produced a music album based on their experiences as child refugees. There is mixed reaction from the Pedro Pans regarding their parents’ decision to send them to a distant country. Painful memories of lonely and abridged childhoods surface as nightmares, resentment, the suppression of recollection, or even nervous break-
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Orozco, Aurora Estrada downs. Elly Vilano-Chovel, founder of the Operation Pedro Pan Group, says, “I was forced to grow up before my time, estranged from my family, my roots, and my customs and had to become responsible not only for myself but also for my younger sister who could not comprehend what had happened.” Jorge Viera, who was sent to Miami when he was fourteen, did not see his parents until twenty-five years later. “Basically,” Viera says, “I lost my parents when I was fourteen—the family, as I knew it, ceased to exist then.” Pedro Pan Alex Azán recalls how the records of Cuban women singers were played at night to help the children fall asleep. “At night,” remembers Azán, “you had a tendency to miss your family the most and you could hear some children crying.” Singer Willy Chirino, recalling his experience, says, “Knowing the way I am with my kids, which is probably not much different than how my parents were with me, I don’t know if I would be able to . . . it would have been a very difficult decision for me to make.” Psychologist Lourdes Rodríguez found that many of the children forestalled their anxiety via a kind of coping mechanism called “delay-grief process.” By suppressing their distress at the time, the children were able to focus on survival and protect their parents from the pain of separation. Years later, as adults, many of these normal fears and anxieties surfaced, sometimes when their own children reached the age that they were when they were sent from Cuba. A three-year study by María P. Gondra of seventy-two former Pedro Pans found that the majority had experienced depression, anxiety, and hostility as adults, although the group as a whole seemed to be remarkably resilient. Psychologist María C. Fernández, who has counseled some of the Pedro Pans, reports that some of them feel tremendous resentment toward their parents’ decision, equating it with abandonment. But many of the Pedro Pans say that they are grateful for the undeniably wrenching decision their parents made. María Teresa Carrera, who was nine years old when she was sent to the United States, feels that “now that I have my own children, I think that they [my parents] were very brave, that they thought there was this desperate situation in Cuba that they were going to lose their children and that they would rather lose them to democracy, where they could have a future, than to Communism.” In June 1991 some of Pedro Pans founded Operation Pedro Pan Group, an organization that provides a support network for the immigrants, as well as assistance to new immigrant children. Working toward the goal of creating a Children’s Village—a child-care facility with a homelike atmosphere for unaccompanied refugee children—the group has hosted a number of charitable activities and social events. There is also a quarterly,
the Pedro Pan News, that maintains links and contacts among the group, and monthly member breakfasts and annual parties are held. Many of the now-adult Pedro Pans find comfort and understanding only with each other. As María Cristina Romero Hallorán says, “There’s a gap in our childhood; that’s what we all have in common.” SOURCES: Arocha, Zita. 2000. “A House Divided.” Latina, July, 102–107; Conde, Yvonne. 1999. Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children. New York: Routledge; Gondra, María P. 1999. “The Pedro Pan Experience: An Analysis Based on Attachment Theory.” Doctoral diss., Miami Institute of Psychology; Hubbell, John G. 1988. “Operation Pedro Pan.” Reader’s Digest 132, no. 790 (February): 98–102; MasudPiloto, Félix Roberto. 1988. With Open Arms: Cuban Migration to the United States. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield; Ojito, Mirta. 1998. “Orphaned by Revolution, Cuban-Americans Recall Pain of Family Separation.” New York Times, January 12; Padorr, Sari. 2000. “39 Years Ago, Denver Took in 2 Cuban Orphans.” Denver Post, April 26; U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. 1967. Cuba’s Children in Exile. Washington, DC: Children’s Bureau; Veciana Suárez, Ana. 2000. “Fond Pedro Pan Memories Inspire Reunion Plans.” Miami Herald, April 4; Walsh, Bryan O. 1971. “Cuban Refugee Children.” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 13 (January): 379–415. Bárbara C. Cruz
OROZCO, AURORA ESTRADA (1917–
)
Born in Cerralvo, Nuevo León, Mexico, Aurora Estrada Orozco is a working-class Texas community leader and writer. At the age of seven she immigrated to the United States with her parents. Her mother, Gertrudis Gonzáles Toscano, was Mexican, and her father, Lorenzo Estrada Phillips, hailed from Jamaica and spoke fluent English and Spanish. In Mexico he worked as a supervisor in the mines, but in the United States he was a farmworker. As a child, Aurora worked in the fields and attended public schools in Mercedes, Texas. She graduated from Mercedes High School in 1937, and from 1947 to 1949 she took extension classes in business at the University of Texas. At the age of thirty-three she married Mexican immigrant Primitivo Orozco Vega, a boot maker, and they moved to Cuero, Texas, to start a family. The couple had six children. As an involved parent, she joined the local Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) in 1959, and from there her civic involvement spiraled. She cofounded local organizations Familias Unidas, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and Texans for the Advancement of the Mexican American. She was president of las Guadalupanas, served on Our Lady of Guadalupe’s church council for ten years, read as a lector, and raised funds through jamaicas (fund-raisers), dinners, bingo, and tamales.
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Ortega, Carlota Ayala In the 1970s she became very involved in local politics. She joined La Raza Unida and ran as a write-in candidate for the school board in 1973. She served on a city advisory committee from 1985 to 1990. She also volunteered for the Southwest Voter Registration Project. Aurora Orozco worked as a saleswoman, was a fixture in community politics, and managed a large family. All of her children graduated from college. When her children were growing up, Orozco penned a few poems, but her career as a writer began in 1977 after all her children had left for college. Indeed, her creativity was kindled by an oral history interview her daughter Irma had conducted as part of a Chicana class at the University of Texas, Austin. Influenced by the Chicano movement, Orozco developed as a writer late in her life and espoused Mexican and Chicano nationalist and feminist themes, unusual for her generation. She demonstrated that one did not have to be an idealistic young person to embrace the goals of the Chicano movement. Her autobiography, the biography of her husband Primitivo, thirty-five short stories, a children’s book, more than fifty poems, more than ten political essays, and other writings await publication. Her best-known published work is the essay “Mexican Blood Runs through My Veins,” published in the book Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity. In “Mexican Blood” she wrote about family, the love of Spanish, education, and discrimination. She wrote the testimonio because “I want to show them that although there were very hard times, the unity, respect, and love of familia helped me grow into a woman who loves education. Although I didn’t have the opportunity like there is today, I had the desire—las ganas—and vision to help my children educate themselves and help others, if possible, to do the same.” She documented racial discrimination in Texas. “The Anglo community didn’t have anything to do with Mexicans except in things related to business, at drugstores, in doctors’ offices, in lawyers’ offices. The other contact with Mexicans was hiring them to work as maids, cooks, drivers, and other kinds of jobs.” Orozco is also proud to be bilingual. “I would like to offer some advice to parents of our younger and future generations. Teach them the importance of education. While they are home, read to them in English and in Spanish. . . . We have deep roots that connect to our ancestors, their customs, and their language. This is why I am proud to say that Mexican blood runs through my (our) veins.” Her writings have served as a source of inspiration for others, such as playwright Teresa Palomo Acosta. Orozco is also a natural orator who has conducted readings based on her writings at many conferences, including the National Association for Chicano Studies, and at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin. In 2000, at the
age of eighty-three, she presented at the U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II Conference at the University of Texas on her experiences in Mercedes, Texas. Felipe Gonzáles, a University of New Mexico sociologist, wrote, “She gave an excellent presentation on what life was like at home while the war waged on overseas. She was articulate and humorous, without any notes, totally in Spanish. She was one of the gems of the conference.” Aurora Orozco is a gifted Latina whose writings and activist legacies deserve a wider hearing beyond her local and regional community. Her oral history of the war was published in 2004. She attended President George W. Bush’s first state dinner with her daughter Sylvia. SOURCES: Acosta, Belinda. “Author opens realm of suppression.” 1992. Austin-American Statesman, May 16,15; Austin-American Statesman. 1992. May 16; Orozco, Aurora. 1985. “El Piscader.” Revista Mujeres 2, no. 2 (Junio): 34; ———. 1999. “Mexican Blood Runs through My Veins.” In Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity, ed. D. Letticia Galindo and María Dolores Gonzáles, 106–120. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cynthia E. Orozco
ORTEGA, CARLOTA AYALA (19??–
)
Born in Mexico, Carlota Ayala Ortega moved to Texas with her family when she was only three years old. She was born into a family of thirteen brothers and sisters. Her family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and settled in San Antonio. Though Ortega was young when she left Mexico, she still remembers the sadness she felt when she left her native country. “I cried and cried,” she said. “I just missed my grandparents so much.” Her family eventually grew tired of Texas and moved to Saginaw, Michigan, where Ayala Ortega remembers a pleasant childhood and a loving family. “We used to play hide and seek,” she said with a nostalgic smile. “We used to love that game.” On many nights her mother would sit on the family’s front porch and watch the children play hide-and-seek until nightfall. On April 11, 1942, she married Guadalupe Ortega, whom she had met at a baseball game. “He was a good pitcher,” she said proudly. “They won a lot of games because of him.” During World War II, Guadalupe Ortega was drafted into the Army. Ayala Ortega gave birth to their first child, Yvonne, before her husband went overseas. After her husband’s return from the war, the couple had two more children, sons David and Joseph. In 1949 Ayala Ortega was elected president of the American Legion Post 500 Auxiliary, where she served until 1951. During her term she managed to solidify the
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Ortiz Cofer, Judith auxiliary by encouraging the members to carry out the goals and objectives for which the auxiliary stands. Her accomplishments earned her respect within the Legion, and she was asked to serve on state and national levels. “I couldn’t leave my baby,” said Ortega, giving her reason for declining the national title. “I would have had to give talks in every state, and I couldn’t leave my baby.” Ortega earned her bachelor’s degree from Saginaw Valley University, a master’s degree from Central Michigan University, and, in 1981, a doctorate from Wayne State University. She taught junior high school for a number of years and eventually taught college courses at Saginaw Valley University. It was not a challenge, she recalled when talking about her time as a professor. Her students were teachers who were earning master’s degrees, so they were eager to learn. “Now teaching kids to read—that was the challenge,” she said. Since 1977 Ortega has worked on the migrant program in the Bay City schools. She wrote, developed, implemented, and supervised migrant programs, including a consortium of bilingual programs for three local school districts. Ortega was recognized by the Michigan Department of Education as the 1990 Michigan Outstanding Hispanic Educator of the Year. The U.S. Department of Education later named her migrant education program in Bay City as the National Exem-
Carlota Ayala Ortega. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
plary Model for her initiatives to improve education of disadvantaged children. Since her retirement Ortega has continued to volunteer as a reading teacher at Jesse Rouse Elementary School in the Help One Student to Succeed reading program in Saginaw. See also Education; World War II SOURCES: Ortega, Carlota Ayala. 2002. Interviewed by Gloria Monita, Mexican American Cultural Center, Saginaw, MI, October 19; Walker, Angela. 2003. “Carlota Ortega: A Hero in Her Own Right.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 47. Angela Walker
ORTIZ COFER, JUDITH (1952–
)
Noted writer of the Latino experience Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in 1952 in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. Because of her father’s job with the U.S. Navy, she was brought to live with her family at a young age in Paterson, New Jersey, while her father was assigned to duty in Brooklyn, New York. Her early years were spent between her home in Paterson and her maternal family’s home in Puerto Rico. At age sixteen she and her family moved to Augusta, Georgia. Of her experience with bilingualism, Ortiz Cofer has stated, “It was a challenge, not only to learn English but to master it enough to teach it and—the ultimate goal—to write poetry in it.” She did indeed master the language, receiving a degree in English from Augusta College in 1973 and an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University in 1977. She has taught on the faculty of a number of institutions, including the University of Miami and the University of Georgia, and has published several books of poetry, including Peregrina in 1986 and Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland, both in 1987. In 1989 Ortiz Cofer published her first novel, The Line of the Sun, praised in the New York Times as the work of “a prose writer of evocatively lyrical authority.” The book includes the autobiographical elements usually found in a first novel. It traces three generations of a Puerto Rican family from an island village to their new home in Paterson. The balance that the protagonist of the novel strives to achieve is also a theme of Ortiz Cofer’s volume of poetry and personal essays Silent Dancing, published in 1990, the title of which is based on the author’s recollections of a silent home movie filmed during a family New Year’s Eve party. Ortiz Cofer’s acclaimed collection of poems, stories, and essays The Latin Deli was published in 1993 and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. It presents the voices and experiences of a variety of Puerto Rican and other Latina female characters in an urban North American city. Critics have noted that Ortiz Cofer’s
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Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, María Concepción
ORTIZ Y PINO DE KLEVEN, MARÍA CONCEPCIÓN “CONCHA” (1910– )
Writer Judith Ortiz Cofer. Courtesy of Judith Ortiz Cofer.
characters and poetic voice display a strong feminist awareness, although she herself has claimed that her family is one of the main inspirations for her writing. “In tracing their lives, I discover more about mine. The place of birth itself becomes a metaphor for the things we all must leave behind; the assimilation of a new culture is the coming into maturity by accepting the terms necessary for survival. My poetry is a study of this process of change, cultural assimilation, and transformation.” A collection of stories based on the lives of teenagers in a New Jersey barrio, An Island like You: Stories of the Barrio, was published in 1995 and The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems in 1998. When asked in interviews whether a Puerto Rican writer living in Georgia is representative of the culture, Ortiz Cofer responds that her experiences are simply another alternative to the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. “There is not just one reality to being a Puerto Rican writer. I am putting together a different view. . . . even though I live in rural Georgia, my husband is North American and my daughter was born here, I feel connected to the island. . . . Poetry is my emotional and intellectual connection to my heritage.” See also Literature SOURCES: Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1989. Biographical Directory of Hispanic Literature in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Palmisano, Joseph, ed. 1998. Notable Hispanic American Women Book II. Detroit: Gale Research. Ocasio, Rafael. 2000. “Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Latin Deli.” In U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers, ed. Harold Augenbraum and Margarite Fernández Olmos. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Margarite Fernández Olmos
In 1936 Concha Ortiz y Pino took her seat as a member of the New Mexico state legislature. At twenty-six she became the youngest American woman elected to state office, and she was the second Hispanic woman legislator in the United States. During her six years as a representative from Santa Fe County, the media frequently depicted her as a “glamour girl,” but on the floor she proved a conscientious, outspoken, and shrewd lawmaker. With confidence, style, and on occasion a tart tongue, she earned the respect of her colleagues and her constituents. During her last term Ortiz y Pino, a Democrat, served as the majority whip in the New Mexico House of Representatives, the first woman legislator to hold such a position of political leadership. On May 23, 1910, José Ortiz y Pino and his wife Paula Ortiz welcomed their daughter María Concepción into the world at their home in Galisteo, New Mexico. From an elite landed family, Concha learned early the expectations of service and responsibility associated with her social status. She recalled how at Christmas her father José would reiterate how the family’s position in the region (“the many more gifts the Lord has given you”) required them to be generous and to oversee the welfare of their neighbors and employees. Her family also carried a strong sense of political tradition, and following in the footsteps of her father, she became the sixth generation of her family to serve in the New Mexico legislature. Although she was only twenty-six when she was elected, she was well prepared for elective office. During her father’s ten-year tenure in the state house, she attended legislative sessions after school. At the age of twenty she organized villagers in her hometown of Galisteo into a vocational school for the promotion of traditional Hispanic crafts, such as blankets, embroidery, leather goods, and furniture. This artisan venture became so successful that it attracted the attention of the New Mexico Department of Vocational Education and, more important, provided a sustainable livelihood for Galisteo families hard hit by the Great Depression. In 1936 she switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and, with a chauffeur as her chaperone, campaigned for a seat in the legislature. Although she was ostensibly a New Deal Democrat, she took a dim view of several measures associated with social welfare. She voted against a state amendment prohibiting child labor and against state regulation of hours for working women. Although she has never considered herself a feminist, she did propose the first bill that would make women eligible for jury service. Her measure was defeated, and it was not
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New Mexico state representative Concha Ortiz y Pino stands on the left as the group ponders artifacts from a romantic Spanish past. Courtesy of New Mexico Cuarto Centennial Commission Records, 1935–1949. Center for Southwest Research, General Library, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Neg. no. 000-048-0092.
until 1969 that women could serve on New Mexico juries. She also introduced a bill that instituted a civil service merit system for state jobs, in part over her concern for the welfare of young women. “I had seen so many of the girls who had gone to work in the capital and had ended up with babies. . . . I had seen men abuse girls and I wanted the merit system. It was my dream and it did come true.” Another important legislative accomplishment was the passage of a bill requiring the teaching of Spanish in New Mexico’s grade schools. An early proponent of bilingual education, she resigned her membership in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) when the group publicly opposed her measure. She also pushed for legislation creating the School of Inter-American Affairs at the University of New Mexico. A popular legislator, she received fan mail, some praising her as a role model for New Mexico’s youth and others begging for a date. She even received an admiring letter from the actor Clark Gable. In addition to her busy legislative schedule, she also took classes at the University of New Mexico, and when her last term ended in 1942, she graduated from college as the first degree recipient in Inter-American Affairs. A year later she married her favorite professor, Victor Kleven. For seventy years Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven has been a force to be reckoned with in New Mexico. Called “the most powerful woman” in the state, she has been a steadfast advocate for abused children and people with disabilities. President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the National Council of Upward Bound, and President Lyndon B. Johnson asked her to serve on the National Commission on Architectural Barriers.
She served on the National Humanities Council as an appointee of President Gerald Ford. Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven is also well known as an influential patron of the arts and the humanities. In 2000 she was honored as a Santa Fe Living Treasure. In 2004, at the age of ninety-three, she remained an active community leader, having recently completed a term on the VSA New Mexico Arts Board. An ageless aristocrat, she views a good life as one devoted to public service. A quintessential doña in New Mexico politics and culture, she maintains a strong sense of her heritage and of her responsibilities. In her words, “I don’t need a costume. . . . I know who I am.” See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Concha. Papers. Center for Southwestern Research, General Libraries, University of New Mexico; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Salas, Elizabeth. 1999. “Soledad Chávez Chacón, Adelina Otero-Warren, and Concha Ortiz y Pino: Three Hispana Politicians in New Mexico Politics, 1920–1940.” In We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960, ed. Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elizabeth I. Perry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
O’SHEA, MARÍA ELENA (1880–1951) Born in 1880 at Rancho La Noria Cardenena near Peñitas in Hidalgo County, Texas, María Elena Zamora was a descendant of an old Texas Spanish land-grant family. After the death of her mother Gavina, her aunt Rita
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Otero-Smart, Ingrid Zamora Villarreal reared her. María Elena Zamora grew up on a rancho between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, where she gained an appreciation for rancho culture and education. On the ranch all children learned to read and write in Spanish. Zamora attended the boarding school at the Ursuline Convent, where she learned English. Very well educated for her time, Zamora also attended Methodist-sponsored Holding Institute in Laredo, Texas, as well as the Southwest Texas Normal School in San Marcos, the Normal School in Saltillo, Nuevo León, and the Universidad Autónomo de México in Mexico City. From 1895, at the age of fifteen, to 1902 she taught on the family ranch. Over her father Porfirio’s objections, she left home to become a private tutor on the King Ranch. She also taught school throughout southwestern Texas; her first job was in the town of Alice in 1907. The legendary Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie was one of her students. At the age of thirty-two she married Daniel Patrick O’Shea, a native of London, England. The couple moved to Dallas in 1912, where she worked as a translator for the Sears-Roebuck department store and taught Spanish. She and her husband also began a family business, O’Shea Monument Works. A Democrat active in community affairs, she joined the Dallas Women’s Forum and the Latin American League. She was also a devout Catholic. In 1935, on the eve of the Texas centennial, she wrote El Mesquite, a fictionalized history of Mexican settlers between the Nueces and the Rio Grande from 1575 to the early 1900s, the land of her childhood and her ancestors. Using the autobiographical voice of an old mesquite tree, O’Shea provided a literary eyewitness account of the life and events among the Spanish/Mexican settlers in which the eleven chapters described the region of Nuevo Santander in southern Texas: its settlers, their customs, and the rise of vaquero (cowboy) culture. The book also related European American arrival, the Civil War, changing land and transportation patterns, women’s work, material culture, and folklore. It encompassed the diversity of the region’s population with Spanish/Mexican Texans, European Americans, Indians, and Irish and German immigrants. El Mesquite precedes the better-known works of Texas folklorist Jovita González, Caballero and Dew on the Thorn. Interestingly, J. Frank Dobie served as a mentor for a number of Tejana folklorists, including González, yet as a child he had been instructed by their literary predecessor María Elena Zamora O’Shea. When she died at the age of seventy-one in 1951, a local obituary noted that she “helped many other historians set the record straight”; however, she remained unknown until the publication of the New Handbook of
Texas in 1996. Her book documents Tejano history in literary form and was reissued with introductions by Leticia Garza-Falcon and Andrés Tijerina in 2000. SOURCES: Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Maria Elena Zamora O’Shea.” In New Handbook of Texas 4:1176–1177. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; O’Shea, Elena Zamora. 2000. El Mesquite: A Story of the Early Spanish Settlements between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Vera, Homero. 2000. “Elena Zamora O’Shea, School Teacher-Author.” El Mesteño 3, no. 36 (September): 15. Cynthia E. Orozco
OTERO-SMART, INGRID (1959–
)
Ingrid Otero-Smart was born in Puerto Rico in 1959. Among the first to graduate from the University of Puerto Rico with a baccalaureate degree in public communication, she majored in journalism and graduated magna cum laude. She was known among her classmates as a kind and highly disciplined person who excelled in most subjects while working hard and long hours as a fashion model. Sometimes she came to class made up from work, and even when she was sick, she did not miss class or modeling sessions. Though she worked hard in her classes and her occupation, she was always optimistic and grateful for the opportunity to attend college while excelling in a demanding profession. At that time she was in her late teens and early twenties. Her classmates and professors admired her perseverance and are, to this day, proud of her accomplishments in Puerto Rico and in the United States. When Otero-Smart graduated, she decided to slow down a tad before starting graduate school, but, energetic as she was, she soon became bored. After years of traveling and working inflexible hours as a fashion model, she thought that a more “normal” office job would allow her to practice what she had learned in college while giving her more control over personal time. That was the beginning of her skyrocketing career in advertising. She accepted a three-month replacement position for a maternity leave at McCannErickson, and those three months led to a twenty-twoyear career in an industry with which, in her words, “she fell in love.” This was still a time when women’s salaries were, on average, lower than men’s and minorities were not treated as equals. Otero-Smart is a rare case of a Latina who was promoted to president in the same top agency that she joined in 1987. She stayed for seven years at the Puerto Rico agency where she began her advertising career and worked in almost every department, including office traffic, media, accounts, and others, until a headhunter lured her to California, where
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Otero-Warren, Adelina
Ingrid Otero-Smart, president of Mendoza Dillon and Associates. Courtesy of Ingrid Otero-Smart.
Mendoza Dillon and Associates (MD&A) in Newport Beach, California, hired her as an account director. A pioneer agency in U.S. Hispanic advertising, MD&A was acquired by the London-based WWP group, the world’s largest advertising agency parent company, in 1987. Among others, this agency held prestigious accounts such as Kraft Foods, Ford Motor Company, Nabisco Brands, Sears, Mission Foods, Coca-Cola Foods, and People PC. Otero-Smart is a strong believer in education, not only because of the lack of qualified people in her field, but also because to her, education means growth in the economic and personal sense. Before she became MD&A’s president, she was applied services director and felt that part of her responsibilities was making sure that her agency trained people. The best way to deal with the industry-wide shortage of qualified personnel, according to MD&A, was to train its own people and to hire from within. This policy led to the development of an annual training program offering about six training classes a year. As president, OteroSmart designs the yearly curriculum based on end-ofthe-year employee suggestions. Additionally, she ac-
tively participates in education-related community associations: the Youth Motivation Task Force and the Advertising Education Foundation. One of her duties is to give conferences in schools and universities, where she advises students, particularly those of Hispanic descent, on the importance of an education. A master time manager, Otero-Smart never let her career as an advertising executive or her public service interfere with a demanding family life. As she stated in a Vanidades magazine interview with Fernando Arrejuría (1999): “The key word is ‘organization.’ If there is no organization, there is stress. With organization, there are no problems. That is why, to succeed in business and in life itself, this word should not be forgotten. . . . I repeat . . . organization!” Hispanic Business Magazine listed Ingrid OteroSmart among its Top 100 Most Influential Hispanics List for 1999–2000. As president of MD&A, she is a shining star on this list. Unless the president of an advertising agency is also the owner or major shareholder, there are few women in this executive position. In addition to being chief executive of MD&A, Otero-Smart was the president of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (2002–2003). In this capacity she commissioned key studies on advertising investment in the U.S. Hispanic market. In 1999 most advertisers spent less than 5 percent of their budget and many less than 1 percent on outreach to the Hispanic market, a disproportionately small investment, given the size and diversity of the population and its untapped pent-up demand and purchasing power. These investment levels have not significantly changed even since release of the 2000 census figures. Estimates placed the U.S. Hispanic population as a $500 billion consumer market. Given her experience and drive, Otero-Smart is bound to bring about positive changes in the advertising industry. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Arguelles, Eileen. “Smart Moves: Ingrid Smart, President of Mendoza, Dillon, and Asociados, Inc.” Hispanic Business Lifestyle Magazine 6, no. 1: 32–34; Arrejutia, Fernando. 2000. “Ingrid Otero Smart.” Vanidades 40:14 (July 11), 99–127; “Ingrid Otero-Smart Elected to CPI Board of Directors.” 2003. PRNewswire-First Call. Internet document. St. Louis, August 14, n/p; “Ingrid Otero-Smart, Honored Guest.” Florida Festivals and Events Association. 10th Annual Convention and Trade Show, July 14–16, n/p. Tomás López-Pumarejo
OTERO-WARREN, ADELINA (1881–1965) Adelina Otero-Warren played a crucial role in establishing a Hispana presence in New Mexico’s educational institutions and political life. Otero-Warren wove in and out of New Mexico politics, addressing is-
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Otero-Warren, Adelina sues such as women’s suffrage, bilingual and bicultural education, and cultural preservation. Born into an old elite family, María Adelina Isabel Emilia (Nina) Otero grew up as a member of a powerful Republican political network. Her second cousin Miguel served as territorial governor at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her mother, Eloisa Luna, became the first woman member of the Santa Fe School Board in 1914. Adelina Otero-Warren received a convent education and attended one year of college in St. Louis, Missouri, before doing a stint in settlement-house work in New York City. Otero-Warren was appointed to the position of Santa Fe County superintendent in 1917 by Democratic governor Ezequiel Cabeza de Baca as an expression of solidarity between the Republican and Democratic elite families. She then ran for the office in her own right and was reelected until she retired from the post in 1919. She proved a vocal advocate of educational diversity at a time when the Euro-Americandominated public school system became a reality in New Mexico. Otero-Warren called for a school curriculum that incorporated the customs and traditions of Hispanos. She also called for equal education for Hispanas and for vocational training in traditional Hispano arts and crafts. Her views about teaching in Spanish changed from English-only immersion at the primary levels (the “sink-or-swim” policy) to promoting bilingual education in the higher grades. An ardent supporter of women’s suffrage, OteroWarren headed the local Congressional Union chapter. Her skill as an advocate of suffrage and her friendships with Euro-American suffrage leaders led to her appointment as chair of the women’s division of the Republican State Committee for New Mexico, as well as chair of the Legislative Committee of the New Mexico Federation of Women’s Clubs. Alice Paul of the Congressional Union and the National Women’s Party “recognized her contributions as an influential state lobbyist and in a telegram credited Otero-Warren’s ‘splendid leadership’ in securing New Mexico’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.” In 1922 Otero-Warren decided to run for national office as the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. While all Republican candidates for national and local offices lost in 1922, Otero-Warren’s campaign was shaken by her cousin Miguel’s revelation that she was not a widow but a divorcée. Given the temper of the times, if she had admitted that she was divorced from Rawson Warren, she would not have been nominated for national office in the first place. She lost by fewer than 10,000 votes. However, she continued to be a forceful presence in local politics and later was appointed director of literacy education for the state-directed Civilian Conservation Corps in
Adelina Otero-Warren, the first Hispanic woman to run for Congress. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, Neg. no. 89756.
the 1930s and director of the Works Progress Administration Program in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in the 1940s. Throughout her life Otero-Warren found herself caught between her traditional Catholic beliefs about “right conduct—piety, devotion to duty and deportment—and the proper roles for women in church and community” and her own personal desires and actions. At the end of her 1922 campaign for political office, she began a thirty-year relationship with Mamie Meadors. Both women, known in Santa Fe as “Las Dos,” homesteaded 1,257 acres about twelve miles northwest of Santa Fe. They also established a real-estate and insurance business, which Otero-Warren ran until her death in 1965. During their time at Las Dos Ranch, Otero-Warren wrote Old Spain and the Southwest. Published in 1936, the book romanticized life in New Mexico because Otero-Warren sidestepped the multiracial identity of Hispano class conflicts between the elite families and the working class. Some literary scholars, however, hail the book as “a narrative of resistance to the Anglicization of New Mexico.” As historian Vicki L. Ruiz has commented, “Adelina Otero-Warren traversed at least two worlds on two levels as she negotiated across Hispanic and Euro-American New Mexico as well as
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Otero-Warren, Adelina across her own subjectivities as both rural aristocrat and modern feminist.” See also Education; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Salas, Elizabeth. 1995. “Ethnicity, Gender, and Divorce: Issues in the 1922 Campaign by Adelina Otero-Warren for the U.S. House of Representatives.” New
Mexico Historical Review 70 (October): 367–382; ———. 2005. “Adelina Otero-Warren: Rural Aristocrat and Modern Feminist.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; Whaley, Charlotte. 1994. Nina OteroWarren of Santa Fe. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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Elizabeth Salas
P q PACHUCAS Pachucas were the female counterparts of the pachucos, a second-generation Mexican American youth subculture evident throughout the Southwest during World War II. Rejecting both traditional Mexican and mainstream U.S. culture, pachucas blatantly rebelled against social conventions by donning a modified version of the zoot suit (a symbol of adolescent rebellion in working-class communities) and keeping company with male zoot-suiters on city streets. Pachuca attire typically consisted of a short skirt, socks worn to midcalf, and either a tight sweater or a broad-shouldered fingertip coat; some adopted the drape pants worn by male counterparts. Their ostentatious appearance also included exaggerated makeup and hair piled high into an elaborate pompadour. The actual label “pachuca” is a contested term that carries different meanings depending on the frame of reference. Euro-American and Mexican populations generally associated pachucas with gang activities; in reality, involvement in the subculture varied in degree from one individual to another. Some of the young women did participate in a street-based culture of gang life, but most did not. They simply used fashion and public behavior as a means to create a distinctive ethnic and gender identity. An anxious wartime populace largely failed to distinguish among variations of the social group and often confused delinquent pachucas with any Mexican American woman who defied social norms by dressing in the pachuca style. Pachucas were part of a larger generational response to the Mexican community’s exclusion from U.S. society. During the late 1930s and 1940s the Mexican population underwent significant changes; demographically the group transformed from a primarily foreign-born immigrant population to one composed mainly of American-born offspring. Yet as Americans, this new generation of working-class youths grew increasingly dissatisfied with their status as second-class citizens. The stark realities of poverty, discrimination in public facilities, poor housing and educational opportunities, and confinement to menial labor greatly
contradicted the wartime rhetoric of “Americans All.” One of the most noticeable markers of the second generation’s alienation and discontent was the zoot suit. Wages earned from war production created new avenues for working-class youths to experiment with consumer culture, and increasing numbers of Mexican Americans—men and women—began to frequent public venues in the conspicuous fashion. Amid patriotic appeals for conformity and austerity, the spectacular attire signified a display of disaffection with American society and an effort to “put on the style.” But unlike their male counterparts, pachucas also challenged traditional gender roles. For the Mexican immigrant generation, women in the public arena under most circumstances—let alone in questionable attire and with disreputable company—spelled trouble. Mexican parents typically subscribed to a double standard in sexual relations, closely cloistering daughters until marriage while allowing sons the freedom to do as they pleased. Such rules derived from social customs in Spanish America, where a family’s reputation usually depended on the chastity of its women. During World War II, with the recruitment of parents and older siblings into war work and the armed services, it became increasingly difficult to monitor the behavior of a new generation of young women looking for excitement and adventure amid lives constrained by poverty and rigid parental restrictions. Pachucas experimented with their social and sexual roles by adopting a persona that asserted new claims to public life. Some used their status as wartime wage earners to push for the privilege to socialize with peers away from the watchful eyes of immigrant parents and to buy the latest fads in cosmetics and zoot-suit styles. Clothing and makeup enabled females to play with identities separate from the old-fashioned, rural ethos of their parents’ generation. Others skirted notions of propriety altogether by entering public life for their own self-interest, completely outside the context of wartime necessity, wage labor, and familial needs. Refusing to be limited by family obligation, pachucas hiked up skirts and hair to disrespectful lengths, jitterbugged the night away in downtown dance halls, en-
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Pachucas gaged in fistfights on city streets, and loitered on corners after dark with male zoot-suiters. Their brash appearance and bold public conduct violated strict moral codes and societal expectations of proper feminine behavior. The persona created by pachucas also took on political meaning as the young women embraced a womanhood that emphasized ethnic identity. Participating in one of America’s favorite consumer pastimes, beauty culture, these second-generation daughters invented new, unique styles that did not attempt to look “American” or to wash off their Mexican ethnicity. Pachucas parodied the understated updos and subtle makeup of everyday women, as well as Hollywood starlets featured in the mainstream media. Their shared adoption of exaggerated pompadours, overstated lipstick, and short skirts visibly signified a sense of belonging to a distinctly Mexican American subculture. In addition, pachucas often spoke in a distinctive dialect—a mixture of Caló, Spanish, and English slang—and hung out in groups with other young men and women of Mexican descent. Many juvenile authorities considered such behavior troublesome and deemed the young women unassimilable. Some reformatories even refused to accept pachucas on the grounds that they threatened harmonious race relations. Yet by subverting mainstream consumer culture and visibly expressing discontent with the dominant society, pachucas fashioned a racialized, collective identity that helped many Mexican American women escape their feelings as outsiders in the United States. But for Euro-American society, pachucas represented a threat to wartime stability. When a young man named José Díaz was found dead near a Los Angeles reservoir in 1942, police rounded up hundreds of second-generation youths of Mexican descent in connection with the now-infamous Sleepy Lagoon case. In a trial plagued by bigotry, seventeen young men, all except one of Mexican or Mexican American ancestry, were convicted for involvement in the murder. Two years later the defendants won acquittal upon appeal. But one of the biggest shocks to the wartime populace was the presence and involvement of Mexican American girls in the scandal. Law enforcement officials focused their investigation on ten young women, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-one years, eight of whom bore Spanish surnames. The Los Angeles Herald Express stated: “Particularly disturbing in one of the new outbreaks was the participation of several girls. It was hoped that the prevalent delinquency might be confined to the boys who stand accused.” Although they were innocent of any involvement in the murder of Díaz, most of these young women were eventually sent to the Ventura School for Girls, a California correctional facility, and came to embody the threat of a
new wartime enemy, Mexican girl hoodlums, wreaking havoc on city streets after dark. The English-language press continued to reprimand pachucas for their unconventional behavior by stereotyping the young women as hypersexed degenerates. A moral panic erupted as newspapers, particularly in Los Angeles, unleashed a sensational campaign that painted lurid pictures of sexually promiscuous barrio women. In 1943 a Los Angeles Herald Express exposé on juvenile delinquency emphasized the participation of “sharp” and “sexy-looking” pachucas in “weird sexual activity” and insinuated their infection with venereal disease by claiming that the girls were “not particularly clean.” According to the article, a “gang girl gives herself freely, if she likes the boy. If she doesn’t she knifes him or has other girls in her gang attack him.” The national newsmagazine Newsweek also used sexual imagery to criticize the young women; one reporter surmised that male zoot-suiters attacked servicemen who tried to steal their girls since “a sailor with a pocketful of money has always been fair game for loose women, and the girls of the Los Angeles Mexican quarter were no exception.” Pachucas faced the ridicule of the Mexican press as well. La Opinión, a Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles, likened the young women to prostitutes, asserting that pachucos, their male companions, served as pimps. Referring to male zoot-suiters as “pachucos,” the newspaper deemed their female counterparts “las malinches,” a reference to the woman (La Malinche) historically known as the archetypial traitor of the Mexican people. La Opinión found this a fitting analogy to describe the wartime pachuca; like Malinche, the young women publicly betrayed proper female behavior and brought shame to the Mexican people. The immorality associated with pachucas deeply troubled many Mexican American women coming of age during World War II. Some of the secondgeneration women did engage in sexual activity and a gang lifestyle. However, many more young women simply adopted aspects of the pachuca persona in a spirit of adventure and independence, not delinquency. According to contemporary observers, less than 5 percent of Mexican American youths were classified as delinquents during the war years; an even smaller percentage of Mexican American girls required the attention of juvenile authorities. In 1942, for instance, the director of the Civilian Service Corps estimated that a mere 0.6 percent of the girls of the Mexican community demonstrated delinquent behavior. But an anxious wartime populace did not distinguish delinquent pachucas from any Mexican American woman who adopted aspects of the pachuca look. Nearly a week after the Los Angeles Herald Express exposé of the pachucas’ alleged sexual laxity, a group of about thirty
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Pachucas Mexican American women from Los Angeles challenged these prevailing assumptions and vowed to undergo medical examination in order to demonstrate their chastity and respectability. Although many of the young women admittedly dressed in the zoot-suit fashion, they wished to make it clear to both the EuroAmerican and Mexican public that the style did not go hand in hand with crime and sexual delinquency. As one protester stated, “To prove our side, to take a chance, to have a good reputation, we were willing to do anything. It means a lot for a girl to have a clean reputation, but the Herald Express doesn’t care for
that.” Mexican community leaders eventually deemed such extreme actions unnecessary; instead, the protesters decided to affirm their patriotism to the United States by donating blood at the local Red Cross. The young women hoped to show that those who dressed in the pachuca fashion were not a threat to a nation in crisis and would do their patriotic best to help out on the home front. Despite such efforts, the pachucas’ entrance into urban life heightened anxieties. Immigrant parents worried that the young women’s flagrant violation of gender norms and expectations symbolized the flag-
Las tres Marías, by Judith Francisca Baca, mixed media, 1976. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.
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Palacio-Grottola, Sonia ging authority of the Mexican family to police female sexuality and retain ethnic culture. Like many of their Euro-American female counterparts, pachucas did not adhere to chaperonage and enjoyed leisure activities with the opposite sex, such as venturing out to ballrooms and amusement parks. Moreover, pachucas crossed geographic barriers by physically leaving urban barrios to frequent traditionally white public venues. Because women were considered the purveyors of cultural values within the Mexican community, parents feared that a daughter’s interest in the pachuca subculture might represent an end to Mexican customs and traditions. To the Euro-American community, pachucas represented a dangerous example of the increasing public role of all women during World War II. With more and more women entering the workforce than ever before, an anxious U.S. society feared that females with newfound freedoms would be unwilling to return to domestic life once the war ended. Women might be encouraged to enter the public sphere as a wartime necessity, but they were simultaneously expected to maintain their femininity and sexual purity. Whether pachucas actually retained “proper” sexual standards or not, their short skirts, heavy makeup, and pronounced presence suggested a tainted sexual reputation that sounded alarms about the future role of women throughout the United States. As women of color, pachucas also triggered EuroAmerican fears of miscegenation. Media coverage of pachucas carrying venereal diseases and having contact with Euro-American servicemen mirrored public preoccupation with so-called victory girls, women whom servicemen were warned to stay away from because of their sexually transmitted diseases and patriotic desire to pursue sex with men in uniform. By likening pachucas to allegedly loose women like prostitutes and victory girls, the English-language press and public did its best to limit interethnic contact between the two groups and to keep servicemen from having sexual relations with Mexican American women. Male pachucos threatened Euro-American society as men of color asserting a more public role in urban life. Despite the stereotypes that surrounded them, pachucas took pride in their appearance and public identity as they navigated across the worlds of their parents, their peers, and U.S. society at large. With pompadours and nail polish they worked in defense plants in the role of “Rosie the Riveter” and coordinated blood drives. Ultimately the pachuca became both a part and a symbol of the changing ethnic and gender landscape of World War II. The pachuca style largely petered out during the 1950s, although some have called female zoot-suiters
the predecessors to the chola phenomenon of the later twentieth century. Beginning in the 1970s, Chicana artists and writers paid tribute to the controversial figures as symbols of female strength and resistance in the face of adversity, discrimination, and strict gender conventions. Judith Baca’s multimedia triptych Las tres Marías (1976) and Carmen Lomas Garza’s painting Las Pachucas, Razor Blade ’do (1989) provide artistic representations of the pachuca. Pachucas also play prominent roles in the poems “Para Teresa” (1978/1993) by Inés Hernández and “Later, She Met Joyce” (1983) by Cherríe Moraga and Mary Helen Ponce’s novel The Wedding (1989). The pachucas’ challenges to the policing of female behavior and their creation of an ethnic, female youth culture helped redefine sexuality and cultural identity for a new generation of Mexican American women. See also World War II SOURCES: Escobedo, Elizabeth. 2004. “Mexican American Home Front: The Politics of Gender, Culture, and Community in World War II Los Angeles.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington; Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1995. “Homegirls, Cholas, and Pachucas in Cinema: Taking Over the Public Sphere.” California History 74: 316–327; Griffith, Beatrice. 1948. American Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Pagán, Eduardo. 2003. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime LA. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Ramírez, Catherine Sue. 2000. “The Pachuca in Chicana/o Art, Literature and History: Reexamining Nation, Cultural Nationalism and Resistance.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley. Elizabeth Escobedo
PALACIO-GROTTOLA, SONIA (1934–
)
Born and raised on the upper west side of New York City in Washington Heights, activist social worker Sonia Torruella was the only child born to Josefina Alemán from Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, and Juan Torruella of New York City. After Josefina divorced her husband in the mid-1930s, a move that places her among Sonia’s list of “first liberated women,” Sonia began to consider her mother’s second husband, Mario Segarra, as a father. Graduating from George Washington High School in 1951, Sonia attended the Pan American Institute to gain credentials as a bilingual secretary/stenographer. After that she began working and translating in the importing and exporting industry. Active in her community from an early age, PalacioGrottola served as president of the local social club for young women, the Coronet Club. She met her husband, Joseph Anthony Palacio, through club-sponsored dances, and she married at the age of twenty-two. Throughout their years of marriage and the raising of two children, Sabrina and Paul, Palacio-Grottola struggled to maintain her own source of income by baby-
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Palacio-Grottola, Sonia sitting and sewing for neighbors. However, after moving to Suffolk County in 1960, she defied discouragement and sought employment as a library aide at the Commack elementary- and high-school libraries, where her children were in attendance. While she was working in the libraries, she also pursued an associate’s degree in liberal arts at the Brentwood Campus of Suffolk County Community College and taught elementary Spanish for the Continuing Education Program in the Commack School District. Widowed in 1978, Palacio-Grottola faced and met new economic challenges. She recalled this as the moment when she “became a real activist.” Deepening her commitment to further her formal education and to advocate for the Latino community, she continued volunteer work with PRONTO, a community-based organization, in Bayshore, where she later became a board member, and with St. Luke’s Church in Brentwood. After a year of full-time study to become a bilingual teacher at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue, she was informed of a state grant for “minority” students through the School of Social Work at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook for pursuing a master’s in social work. Given the opportunity to complete her undergraduate degree later, which she did through Empire College, Palacio-Grottola applied for and became a fellow in the Child and Welfare Training Program. At SUNY she and other Latino/a graduate students from the area joined with seasoned human service professionals to start a local chapter of the New York City–based National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW) in 1983. An original founder of the Long Island chapter, she served as its longest-running president from 1987 to 1993. She continues her work with NAPRHSW today as an executive board member-at-large and editor of its newsletter and Web site. In 1982 she married James Grottola, a president of the New York Typographical Union. Palacio-Grottola welcomed the familial support for obtaining the education and professional life that was lacking in earlier years. After completing her master’s in social work from the School of Social Welfare in 1983, she accepted a position as a Spanish-speaking caseworker with Child Protective Services (CPS), Suffolk County Department of Social Welfare. During her tenure at CPS the apparent lack of bilingual social workers provided her with the impetus to push for increases in the number of bilingual professionals working for the county. Voicing the need for such professionals, she and others argued their case before various political boards. When the eventual backlash forced the English-only question in Suffolk County, she was prepared and coordinated the opposition movement as
Social worker and community activist Sonia PalacioGrottola. Courtesy of Sonia Palacio-Grottola.
chair of the grassroots Long Island Coalition for English Plus (LICEP). The proposed legislation was defeated in 1989, 1996, and 1998. Advocating in favor of linguistic diversity and en contra del monolingualismo, LICEP became a model for community involvement around a controversial and pressing national issue. As a continuous and influential member of Suffolk County’s Hispanic Advisory Board since its inception in 1988, Palacio-Grottola was invited in 1996 with then county executive Robert J. Gaffney to a conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss, as she describes it, “how a grassroots organization as small as we were could defeat a bill as important as this . . . how a group of people can really turn legislation around.” The conference, which was sponsored by the National Puerto Rican Coalition, was broadcast live on C-SPAN. After leaving CPS in 1987 Palacio-Grottola went to work as a psychiatric social worker in the Family Care Program at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital in Brentwood. In the same year she completed her postgraduate studies at Adelphi University and was awarded the certificate in clinical studies. During her ten years at Pilgrim State she was instrumental in expanding services for Latinos/as beyond the walls of the wards, advocating for some of the first bilingual day-treatment programs in the state. Known as la Casita, the project served as a prototype for similarly emerging programs. Among the varied and prestigious awards Palacio-
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Pantoja, Antonia Grottola has received, including many for her work in defeating English-only legislation, is the Community Service Award she was presented in 1995 by the New York State Assembly Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force. In the same year she was also honored as Public Servant of the Year by the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW). In addition to being a current and active board member of NACOPRW, NAPRHSW, the National Association of Social Workers, and Adelante of Suffolk County, she has an active private practice in psychotherapy and continues as a consultant for the Suffolk County Department of Health’s Early Intervention Program. She is a member of the Alumni Advisory Board for SUNY Stony Brook’s School of Social Welfare, through which her inspiring life’s work and commitment to empowering Latino/a communities, families, and individuals, as well as the social work profession, continues to affect and challenge the Latina student and professional, among others. Keenly aware of the value of active political participation, she is a role model for all in learning how to take the fight to the political table, be it local, county, or state. With the increasing number of Latino/a immigrants on Long Island, as in the United States, the bilingual thread that winds itself throughout her work currently finds her visiting and working with international and transnational communities, as well as collaborating with others to teach Spanish to social workers. Returning frequently to Puerto Rico to visit one of her earliest role models, her mother, on “la guagua aérea” (the air-borne bus), as referred to by Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sánchez, Sonia PalacioGrottola reminds people that no matter the puddle, they can jump it.
in human rights from her grandfather, a self-educated man and a union organizer for the American Tobacco Company, whose concerns for the conditions of the working class permeated his daily life. The power of collective action and purpose, reflected in the type of literature that surrounded the preadolescent Pantoja, an avid and early reader, gave her “ideas as to the rights of people . . . to organize and fight for the problems that affect them.” Although he died while she was still a child, his struggles against injustice instructed her for a lifetime. Despite the family’s poverty and expectations that Pantoja would contribute to the household finances, she insisted on furthering her education, reasoning that she would be more marketable with a high-school diploma. Pantoja attended Central High School, a move that forced her to leave the security of her working-class Barrio Obrero and associate with students whose surnames denoted lineage and status. She recalled in her memoirs, “Now, thrown together with a different social group and social class, I no longer felt self-assured and confident. Here, social class was the major determinant of who you were and how you were treated and respected.” After graduation Pantoja moved in with her mother, Alejandrina, who had married and started a new family. Again, scarce finances motivated Pantoja to strive
See also National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW) SOURCES: NAPRHSW (National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers). 2005. www.naprhsw.org (accessed July 22, 2005); Palacio-Grottola, Sonia. 2002. Oral history interview by Lisa Meléndez, June. Lisa Meléndez
PANTOJA, ANTONIA (1921–2002) Antonia Pantoja was a builder of institutions who received the highest honor given an American citizen, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but her inauspicious beginnings in poverty-stricken Puerto Rico held no indication of her future achievements. She was born of an unwed mother and an unknown father in Puerta de Tierra in 1921. Raised by her grandparents, Conrado Pantoja Santos and Luisa Acosta Pantoja, Antonia Pantoja reaped a solid philosophical grounding
The Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to Antonia Pantoja for her education and community leadership. Courtesy of the Antonia Pantoja Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Parsons, Lucia González for opportunities beneficial to the family, and with a scholarship and some savings, she opted to go to college. In 1942 Pantoja graduated from the Normal School of the University of Puerto Rico and began teaching in the island’s one-room, rural mountain schools. She recalled this period as one of the happiest of her life. “Every Friday when I left the mountains to return to my home . . . my horse would move very slowly because the children would hold on to his tail. I always left with my arms full of gardenias, pineapples, and oranges.” Two years later Pantoja moved to New York City in search of opportunities not available in Puerto Rico. Sharing expenses with a friend in the South Bronx, Pantoja embarked on a series of factory jobs that paid far better than her former teacher’s salary. Substandard conditions, labor exploitation, and violations on the job soon motivated Pantoja to begin to organize and reawakened her sense of collective action and workers’ rights. A light-skinned person with kinky hair and Caucasian features, Pantoja also experienced the severe discrimination leveled against Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Enrolled in an undergraduate degree program at Hunter College, she joined a student group concerned about the problems faced by Puerto Ricans. They formed the Hispanic Young Adult Association (HYAA), committed to advancing the Puerto Rican community through action and advocacy. HYAA became the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), an important multiservice agency serving New York’s Latino population. From 1950 to 1957 Pantoja created three selfsustaining community service groups, HYAA, PRACA, and the Puerto Rican Forum, and established a reputation for herself as an institution builder and effective grassroots leader. During this time she also completed a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. In 1973 she earned a doctorate in sociology from the Union Graduate School. In 1961, with a group of like-minded activists, Pantoja founded ASPIRA, the organization often identified as her greatest contribution. This group, conceived some seven years before, focused on creating a welleducated Puerto Rican and Latino leadership cadre prepared to occupy decision-making positions in all facets of the private and public sectors. ASPIRA established chapters in schools, churches, or storefronts and provided tutoring in academic coursework and classes in Puerto Rican history and culture. The aim was to develop knowledge, pride, and confidence and to encourage aspirantes (ASPIRA members) to pursue higher education. Sessions were held for parents and students on college opportunities, financial aid, and admissions. ASPIRA is a success story. Among the first ASPIRA college graduates, including the former Bronx borough
president Fernando Ferrer, and actor Jimmy Smits, thousands hold influential positions in universities, community service, government, hospitals, and schools. The organization has offices in five states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Between 1963 and 1999 an estimated 36,000 students received ASPIRA services. Pantoja accepted a professorship in Columbia University’s School of Social Work in 1966, where she developed the first courses in community organization theory. Her activism thrust her into statewide affairs when Robert F. Kennedy appointed her a delegate-atlarge to the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1967. She served on the Bundy Panel to decentralize the public schools in New York City and taught at the New School for Social Research, but the pace began to take its toll, Pantoja was physically exhausted, requiring two years of recuperation in a warmer climate. During this period she wrote a proposal for a research center that was funded by the Ford Foundation. In 1971 the Puerto Rican Research and Resources Center was established in Washington, D.C. Pantoja had also proposed the creation of a bilingual college. Ultimately that idea was carried out by others in the form of Universidad Boricua/Boricua College, because Pantoja’s health continued to deteriorate. Dozens of other projects came to fruition under her supervision and in partnership with her beloved associate, Mina Perry. Among these were the creation of a graduate school for urban resources and social policy in San Diego and the economic rehabilitation project Producir in Puerto Rico. Pantoja and Perry returned to New York in 1999 with plans to develop other initiatives, but on May 24, 2002, Pantoja died of cancer at the age of eighty. See also ASPIRA; Education SOURCES: Pantoja, Antonia. 2002. Memoir of a Visionary. Houston: Arte Público Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 2005. “Antonia Pantoja and the Power of Community Action.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
PARSONS, LUCIA GONZÁLEZ (1853–1942) Described as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” by the Chicago police department in the 1920s, Afro-Latina human rights activist and labor leader Lucia González married young journalist Albert Parsons, and the couple relocated to Chicago in 1873. There they assumed leadership roles in labor organization to protect the rights of wageworkers.
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Patiño Río, Dolores Born in 1853 in Johnson County, Texas, Lucia González Parsons rose as an uncompromising supporter of the labor cause despite press accusations labeling Lucia and Albert Parsons as radical instigators of a Communist revolution in the United States. Driven by a passionate, steely determination to fight for the working class, Lucia González Parsons remained unyielding in her public views, denouncing racism, lynching, and worker abuse in the newspapers Freedom and Liberator. Lucia and Albert Parsons spoke up in labor circles, encouraging workers to organize and to strike through “sit-ins” for the eight-hour workday. Together the Parsonses coedited the weekly newspaper the Alarm, published by the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), as well as leading peaceful meetings frequently interrupted by police. Deemed “dangerous” because of his involvement in labor organization, Albert Parsons was fired from a position he held with the Chicago Times and was blacklisted in the Chicago printing trade. The couple tried their best to survive without compromising their political beliefs. Lucia Parsons opened a dress shop to support the family, but continued to work on behalf of working women by joining her friend Lizzie Swank in hosting meetings for the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). While devoting most of her energies to labor organization, Lucia González Parsons also earned a reputation as a fascinating, energizing speaker who championed women’s rights. Identifying working women as “slave of slaves,” Parsons advocated women’s liberation through her work in the Chicago Working Women’s Union, fighting to free women from patriarchal and economic dependence and stressing a woman’s right to divorce, as well as to gain access to contraception. When her husband was accused and jailed as a conspirator in the bombing of Chicago’s Haymarket Square, Lucia González Parsons went on a nationwide tour to proclaim his innocence and published The Life of Albert Parsons in 1889, which was dedicated to exposing the state’s crime of executing her husband on suspicions of anarchism when he had not been present at the time the bomb had exploded in Haymarket Square. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the appeal failed, and with the exception of one man, all the accused, including Albert Parsons, were executed. After her husband’s death Lucia Parsons lived in poverty, receiving $8 a week from a support fund that aided Haymarket survivors and their families. Expecting to die without a fair trial, Albert Parsons left his wife a poignant letter reminding her that “whether living or dead we are as one” and encouraging her to “commit no rash act to yourself,” but to continue fighting for liberty, justice, and equality. After her
husband’s execution Lucia Parsons continued writing political articles, leading protests, and encouraging workers to fight for their rights. Although Lucia González Parsons’s efforts to reverse the fate of the Haymarket’s accused failed, she continued to work on behalf of workers and political prisoners by helping cofound the International Labor Defense (ILD), which served as a legal organization for the defense of political prisoners and oppressed workers that took on such cases as those of the McNamara brothers, and the Scottsboro Boys. On March 7, 1942, a fire killed Lucia González Parsons at the age of ninety and destroyed her home, most of her writings for the Alarm, her personal journals, and her letters. The authorities promptly confiscated the writings that managed to survive. Lucia González Parsons’s life serves as testimony of the unparalleled determination of an Afro-Latina woman to fight for her fellow workers and for women’s rights. See also Journalism and Print Media; Labor Unions SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Mirande, Alfredo, and Evangelina Enriquez. 1979. La Chicana: The Mexican American Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Young, Julia. 2003. “Our Hidden History.” Latina Style 9, no. 5: 20–23. Soledad Vidal
PATIÑO RÍO, DOLORES (1909–
)
Dolores Patiño Río represents the experiences of thousands of Cuban women in Florida who entered cigar work in the early twentieth century, joined unions and mutual-aid societies, and made the transition from hand-rolled to machine-made cigars. She was born in West Tampa, Florida, on May 29, 1909. Her father, José Patiño, was a Spanish-born cigar maker who trained in Cuban factories before moving to West Tampa as part of a mass migration from the island. Her mother, Severina Cardo, was born in Key West, Florida, of Cuban parents. She bore eight children, the oldest of whom was Dolores. Dolores Patiño was born into a vibrant and radical immigrant community. Her father joined in a prolonged strike the year she was born, and after several months he traveled to Key West to find work. Her mother soon followed with Dolores. Two more children were born in Key West before the family returned to the Tampa area, making their home in Ybor City when Dolores was five years old. The Patiño household expanded rapidly over the next decade. As Dolores Patiño recalled years later, “Ybor City was like the frontier. . . . women always work. Like my mother, she raised eight children.
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Patiño Río, Dolores Grandma and two cousins also lived in the house. We got a duplex, there were so many people. . . . Laundry, so much laundry. And cooking, of course.” Her mother also kept a vegetable garden and cared for the children of women factory workers. Dolores Patiño, meanwhile, attended school, helped around the house, and breathed in the thick sweet smell of tobacco that marked the neighborhood. In 1923, at age fourteen, she entered the workforce alongside many of her friends. Her first job was at Sánchez y Haya, where both her father and aunt worked. After a two-week unpaid apprenticeship with an older cigar maker, the foreman offered her a paying job. She worked as a bunch maker, gathering the tobacco leaves together for a cigar roller, in this case her aunt. The next week she brought home her first paycheck—$3.25. Soon she was serving as bunch maker for two male cigar rollers. The majority of women, including her sisters, worked in an all-female enclave as tobacco stemmers. Some, however, sought positions as bunchers and rollers. Patiño recalled that many women were “embarrassed, standing between these two men. They look up at you, yell at you that you’re too slow, make jokes.” Yet bunchers and rollers received higher pay and had access to los lectores, who provided laborers with dramatic readings of international and local news, political pamphlets, and novels. Dolores Patiño joined the International Cigarmakers Union as soon as she was eligible. Her first strike came shortly after she joined when employers sought to hold paychecks back a week. After a brief walkout the union won a partial victory. This kind of action was more common than the prolonged industry-wide strikes that erupted every decade from 1899 to 1931. Laborers also engaged in informal efforts to control
their work environment. Patiño remembered that a male supervisor who abused and harassed women workers was tipped headfirst into a large barrel of tobacco leaves; another was called el cochino (the pig). In November 1929 a cousin of Patiño’s mother came to visit with her three sons, including Francisco Río, a cigar maker. He and Dolores began dating and were married on September 27, 1930. They continued to work in the cigar industry, and Patiño became a cigar roller, producing 200 to 300 cigars per day. Because workers were paid piece rates, her speed and dexterity were especially valuable. When Dolores Patiño Río became pregnant with her children, Sylvia, Gloria, and Daniel, she left work for only short periods. Once she was fired when she was seven months pregnant; another time she worked until the day before she gave birth. In all three cases she was back at work within a month. The need for two incomes in the family became critical as the nationwide depression deepened. Cigar workers in Ybor City and West Tampa had staged a massive industry-wide strike in 1931 when owners eliminated los lectores, whom they accused of propagating Communism. When the workers finally returned, the readers had been replaced with radios, and the number of workdays was limited to spread the declining workload to the largest number of laborers. At the same time factory owners began installing machines to do the stemming, bunching, and rolling. Workers protested automation, but throughout the 1930s and 1940s the process continued. As Patiño Río recalled, many men, including her husband, started taking up other trades, while women moved to machine work. Although Patiño Río initially resisted the change, a supervisor told her, “This [hand
Members of Sarcedo Dicia del Hogar, a Ybor City social club, circa 1927. Dolores Patiño Río, a cigar worker, is sitting in the center of the front row. Courtesy of Tampa Bay History.
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Pauwels Pfeiffer, Linda Lorena work] is going down. Don’t tell nobody, but go to some machine and see how it works.” Soon only machine work remained. “At the machines,” she said, “you have to be fast, fast. They make 5,000 cigars a day, the machines run, really run.” Patiño Río was proud of her ability to make the transition. Dolores Patiño Río engaged in a variety of other activities common to the immigrant enclaves of Ybor City and West Tampa. She joined el Centro Asturiano, one of several mutual-aid societies that provided medical care, burial benefits, and midwives along with libraries, theaters, dances, and concerts. She was active in the women’s committee and participated in other community-wide efforts to raise funds for various causes, including aid to the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish civil war of the 1930s. Dolores Patiño Río worked in the cigar industry for fifty-one years, retiring in 1974. She was the first cigar maker in Tampa to retire with a pension. Despite the limits of her education, the upheavals of strikes, wars, and the depression, and the declining demand for handrolled cigars, she managed to find work, help sustain her extended family, participate in union and community activities, and adapt to changing industrial conditions. See also Cigar Workers; Tabaqueros’ Unions SOURCES: Hewitt, Nancy A. 1985. “Women in Ybor City: An Interview with a Woman Cigarworker.” Tampa Bay History, Fall/Winter, 161–165; ———. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Patiño Río, Dolores. Interviews by Nancy A. Hewitt, September 4 and 10, 1985, and April 7, 1986, in author’s possession. Nancy A. Hewitt
PAUWELS PFEIFFER, LINDA LORENA (1963– ) Adversity seems to fuel aviation pioneer Captain Linda Pauwels’s spirit. The world’s youngest woman to become a jet captain—at age twenty-five, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots— Pauwels has faced her father’s death, a childhood filled with feelings of abandonment, and two engine failures in flight. Yet she has prevailed. In October 2000 she became one of the first Latina captains for American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier. Pauwels also is the Orange County Register’s first aviation columnist. Born in San Pedro, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, in March 1963 to Mabel Gaspard Pfeiffer and Jorge Pfeiffer, she was barely six when her father died. Nine months later she, her mother, and her two-yearold brother arrived in Miami, Florida. Life was harsh for the young immigrant mother, who worked two jobs
and often had to send her children to stay with relatives in Argentina. “It’s just a very tough thing, feeling abandoned,” Pauwels said of being separated from her mother. She and her husband, Frederick, waited twelve years before having their children, Nathalie and Patrick. She feared that her job would keep her away from them too much. She made it a priority to spend as much time as possible with them at their southern California home. When she is flying, however, her attention is focused in the cockpit, and her passengers’ safety is paramount. Twice she has been at the controls when an engine has failed, and she has brought the aircraft down safely. “Pilots are very disciplined people and you have to take care of the issues at hand; you prioritize matters. You have to ensure that everything is done. Basically, you lead,” Pauwels said. American Airlines captain Fidel Guerrero, who once was with Pauwels when an engine blew up as they were leaving Miami, said that she is so prepared and conscious of details that “she’s always two miles ahead of the airplane.” He and other colleagues described her as a consummate professional. That sense of professionalism and dogged determination started at an early age. She returned to the United States from Argentina at sixteen and earning her general equivalency diploma (GED) soon afterward. She began working as a hotel cashier, then fell in love with flying when she took a job at an aviation company. Not able to afford training at an approved flight school, she rented airplanes, found a flight instructor on her own to get the required hours, and ultimately earned her private pilot’s license at age seventeen. The day she received her license, she met her future husband, Frederick Pauwels, whom she married in June 1981, when she was eighteen. Their honeymoon was spent ferrying a plane from Florida to Santiago, Chile. At age twenty-two she became the first woman hired by now-defunct Southern Air Transport, and at twenty-five the company’s first female captain on a Boeing 707. Meantime, while working a night shift, she became a full-time, straight-A student in the Career Pilot/Flight Engineer program at Miami-Dade Community College. In recommending her for a scholarship, Aviation Department coordinator John M. Archibald wrote: “In the past nineteen years of teaching, I cannot recall a more talented student. Her enthusiasm for aviation and flying is so evident her peers look to her for advice.” She received the scholarship. Pauwels attributes some of her enthusiasm and work ethic to her paternal grandfather, Franciczek Edward Pfeiffer, a general in the Polish army during the Warsaw insurrection. She says that she carries his warrior spirit: “I feel it in my veins.” Pauwels also is multilingual, speaking English,
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Linda Lorena Pauwels Pfeiffer. Courtesy of Linda Pauwels.
Spanish, French, and German. German was spoken in both her and her husband’s families, though it was not their native tongue. She is passing her love of languages along to her children. “Languages always played an integral part in getting jobs,” she said. After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, in which two of the jets used in New York and at the Pentagon belonged to American Airlines, Pauwels took on another role. She is a spokesperson, and the only woman in that position, for the Allied Pilots Association, the collective bargaining agent for American Airlines pilots. She used her Spanish-speaking abilities to share a pilot’s perspective with the Hispanic community. “I feel I have a certain amount of responsibility to share my story and the dream and how I’ve been able to accomplish what I have,” she said. Her next dream is to establish a foundation to help young Hispanics who have the ability, but not the money, pursue their goal to become pilots. Pauwels has proven the power of Latina determination and perseverance amid adversity. SOURCES: Bencomo Lobaco, Julia. 2002. “A League of Their Own: Five Latinas Who Make a Difference.” Hispanic Magazine, June; Cabrera, Yvette. 2002. “Linda’s Flying High, Way up in the Sky.” Orange Country Register, May 13. Julia Bencomo Lobaco
PAYÁN, ILKA TANYA (1945–1996) Ilka Tanya Payán was born in the Dominican Republic and lived in New York City from 1956 to the time of her death from AIDS in 1996. An attorney with a practice in immigration law, Payán was also a columnist for El Di-
ario/La Prensa and for the New York edition of the Dominican daily El Nacional. The latter focused on immigration and human rights issues. Payán received her law degree from the People’s College of Law in 1981 in California. In addition, Payán was also a professional actress with credits in the Spanish-speaking theater of New York. In New York and in Puerto Rico she acted in two films and several television programs. She costarred with the noted actor Raul Julia on HBO’s Florida Straits and in Telemundo’s serial Angélica, mi vida, the first Spanish-language soap opera to be broadcast nationally throughout the United States. Moreover, Payán’s readings of Aida Cartagena Portalatín’s poems at the “Women of Hispaniola Conference: Moving towards Tomorrow” at York College of the City University of New York in May 1993 illustrated her commitment to education and to the dissemination of Latino culture in the United States. Payán’s law degree and practice, coupled with her public participation in cultural life, shaped the level of engagement and contributions to public life. Payán served as supervisor of the Immigrants with HIV Project of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. She was appointed to the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1992 by Mayor David Dinkins. She volunteered in many direct-service organizations serving the Latino community, including the Center for Immigrants and Catholic Charities. Her legal services were offered free of charge to the Actors’ Fund and to cultural associations such as the Association of Hispanic Arts (AHA). An AIDS activist since the beginning of the epidemic, Payán announced that she was HIV-positive in a press conference on October 14, 1994. Her courage was acknowledged and praised in articles printed in El Diario/La Prensa and in the New York Times. Ilka Tanya Payán was a beautiful, luminous, talented, and generous woman whose life and very public death serve as a shining example of selfless dedication and grace even under the most painful circumstances. Her memory has been honored with the establishment of the Ilka Tanya Payán’s Leadership Award, given each year by the Dominican Women’s Caucus, and by the honorific naming of a public square in Washington Heights, Northern Manhattan, in New York City. SOURCES: Cocco De Filippis, Daisy. 2000. Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History. New York: Alcance; Navarro, Mireya. 1993. “An Actress Openly Faces AIDS and Receives an Audience’s Ovation.” New York Times, December 5; Thomas, Robert Mag, Jr. 1996. “Ilka Tanya Payán, Fifty-three, Dies. Champion for Anti-AIDS Cause.” New York Times, April 8, B12; Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández. 1998. The Dominican Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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Peña de Bordas, (Ana) Virginia de
PEDROSO, PAULINA (1860–1925?) Paulina Pedroso, an Afro-Cuban born and buried in Cuba, was very influential in the fight for Cuba’s independence from Spain during the years she lived in Key West and Tampa. She was born Paulina Hernández Hernández in 1860 but married and assumed her husband’s name. Both Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso were strong supporters of Cuba’s independence from Spain, although Paulina was also an important feminist who supported the role of women in Cuba’s Revolutionary Party. She was the founder and treasurer of the feminist arm of the party, the Sociedad de Socorros la Caridad. At the end of the nineteenth century Spain promised political reforms in its colonies but maintained slavery in Cuba until 1886. Sources dispute whether Paulina Pedroso participated in the Ten Years’ War for independence from Cuba (1868–1878), or came to Florida in 1878 and was among those Cubans living in the United States who supported the movement from a distance. Although Pedroso and her husband arrived in Key West, they eventually settled in Ybor City in Tampa, where their political activity made a significant impact on Cuban politics. Arriving in Ybor City, the Pedrosos built a boardinghouse with the help of immigrant revolutionaries. In addition to managing it, Paulina Pedroso also worked as a cook, seamstress, lecturer in the cigar factory, and cigar-factory worker. From her home she helped form los Libres Pensadores de Martí y Maceo (the Freethinkers of Martí and Maceo) in 1900, cared for José Martí, and headquartered his revolutionary activities in the United States. The Pedrosos eventually offered Martí their home’s mortgage to fund arms for Cuba’s revolution. The Pedroso family donated the lot on which their house stood, and eventually it became the Park of Friends of Martí/José Marti Memorial Park in February 1960. In 1910, during a tobacco-factory strike, the Pedrosos returned to Cuba as revolutionary heroes. Paulina Pedroso, blind and in extreme poverty, suffered an illness and died. Sources also dispute the date of her death, with some claiming that she died soon after her arrival on May 21, 1913, and others suggesting that she enjoyed Cuba’s independence through 1925. Upon her death the Cuban flag was placed on her chest with a picture of Martí that he had dedicated to “my beloved black mother.” See also Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party SOURCES: Florida Women’s Hall of Fame. 1993. “Paulina Pedroso.” www.fcsw.net/halloffame/WHOFbios/paulina%20 pedroso.htm (accessed July 22, 2005); Menéndez Febles, Idalma. “Paulina Pedroso: La madre negra de Martí.” Guer-
rillero. www.guerrillero.co.cu/marti/trabajos/lamadre.htm (accessed July 22, 2004); University of South Florida. Department of Anthropology. “Historical Timeline of la Sociedad la Unión Martí-Maceo, an Afro-Cuban Mutual Aid Society in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, 1899 to 1949, Part One.”www.cas.usf.edu/an thropology/MartMaceo/HistoryPartOne/timelinepartone.htm (accessed July 22, 2004).
Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
PEÑA DE BORDAS, (ANA) VIRGINIA DE (1904–1948) Ana Virginia de Peña de Bordas was the daughter of Julio de Peña and Edelmira Bordas and the granddaughter of the distinguished Dominican intellectual Manuel de Jesús Peña y Reynoso. She attended elementary and secondary school in her native Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic. As a young woman, she studied painting and ballet for a number of years at the Cushing Academy of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. Although as a young girl Peña de Bordas showed literary interest and promise, as an adult she kept her writings under what has been termed a strange and hermetic silence. At the age of thirty-six she published in newspapers her children’s stories “La eracra de oro” and “La princesa de los cabellos platinados.” In addition to the aforementioned children’s stories, Peña de Bordas authored a novel in the indianista tradition, Toeya, and Seis novelas cortas, both published posthumously in 1952 and 1949, respectively; second editions for both appeared in 1978. In the Archivo Nacional of Santo Domingo there is a copy of Peña de Bordas’s Toeya that bears a handwritten, unsigned dedication, recording the fact that the family had donated the copy of the poema indigenista [sic], written by their “unforgettable” Virginia. It is dated 1968 and appears on the opposite side of a printed biographical sketch of the author in the 1952 publication that also explains that “Su poema Toeya es la hija espiritual que nos lega. Educada en los Estados Unidos, la escribió primero en ingles, con el propósito de publicarla en una revista Americana; traduciéndola más tarde al castellano.” Her poem Toeya is the spiritual daughter she bequeaths to us. Educated in the United States, she wrote it first in English with the purpose of publishing it in an American journal, translating it much later into Castilian. A similar explanation appears in Seis novelas cortas, where it is also indicated that the note had been previously printed in El Caribe, one of the leading newspapers in Santo Domingo at that time, on September 14, 1949. In her introduction to the 1952 edition of Toeya, the Dominican scholar and literary critic Flérida de Nolasco indicates that Peña de Bordas “como cultora de
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Peñaranda, Ana Marcial la palabra fue una flor que vivió en la sombra” (as an artisan of the word, Peña de Bordas was a flower who lived in the shadows). Virginia de Peña de Bordas remains a little-studied Dominican woman author whose work has only recently received some attention in the United States. An article about her, “Una flor en la sombra: Vida y obra de Virginia de Peña de Bordas,” appears in the fourth volume of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. The survival of her work is due to the diligence and financial position of Isidro Bordas, her widower, who, desolate about her untimely death in 1948, proceeded to collect her writings and to have them published posthumously, some as late as 1978, some thirty years after her death. Peña de Bordas’s work is marked by her experience in the United States, where she lived and studied for a number of years in the 1920s. Her life and work pose very real questions about the nature of the Latino and Caribbean experience for women writers and about their place, or lack thereof, in literary and cultural history. Virginia de Peña de Bordas died unexpectedly, a young and vibrant young woman, during an afternoon siesta in 1948. SOURCES: Cocco De Filippis, Daisy. 2000. Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History. New York: Ediciones Alcance; ———. 2002. “Una flor en la sombra: Vida y obra de Virginia de Peña de Bordas.” In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 4, ed. José Aranda Jr. and Silvio Torres-Saillant. Houston: Arte Público Press; Peña de Bordas, Virginia de. 1952. Toeya. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud; ———. 1978. Seis novelas cortas. Santo Domingo: Taller. Daisy Cocco De Filippis
PEÑARANDA, ANA MARCIAL (1901–
)
Three years after the United States occupied Puerto Rico as a result of the Cuban-Spanish-American War, Ana Peñaranda was born in the northwestern region of the island, in the city of Arecibo. Under a political system that essentially denied her a legal status until the bestowal of American citizenship in 1917, Peñaranda experienced childhood, adolescence, and motherhood. Life was not easy for Puerto Ricans in the first three decades of American rule. The island underwent political and economic changes that also affected the educational system. Puerto Rico moved toward a monocultural economy based on sugar production. Increased mechanization in the industry and American absentee ownership resulted in unemployment. Compulsory education was extended throughout the island, and teaching offered prepared individuals an opportunity to work and care for their families. Peñaranda was educated under Americanization
pedagogical practices that required that most of the elementary curriculum be taught in the English language. Made to leave her Spanish language and heritage at the classroom door, Peñaranda nonetheless enjoyed learning the new language. In 1917 the Jones Act, passed by the U.S. Congress, made Puerto Ricans American citizens and ensured the continuation of Americanization policies in the public and private schools. It also allowed drafting young men into the American military during World War I. Teachers were desperately needed, and in 1921 Peñaranda took advantage of an accelerated seven-week program that upon successful completion offered a temporary teaching certificate. Participants, however, had to commit to completing their baccalaureate degree. From 1921 until 1943, when Peñaranda completed the degree as a maestro graduada—a credentialed teacher— she gained knowledge and experience that served her well in the New York barrios where she became the first bilingual teacher in the city. In Puerto Rico Marcial Peñaranda taught at all levels of the elementary school. She rode a mare into the mountainous interior that separated the countryside from the city, and left her infant son in her mother’s care. Peñaranda earned $60.20 per month, a sum that increased to $70.00 only in her last years of teaching. After forty years of teaching in Puerto Rico Ana Marcial Peñaranda retired from the school system and came to New York City. After World War II jobs were plentiful in the garment industry, especially for Puerto Rican women who were experienced in that type of work. She lived with her sister in the South Bronx and worked in la costura (sewing). During this period the New York Puerto Rican community increased enormously as migrants, like Peñaranda, were lured to the city by the promise of employment. The increased population meant an increase in the numbers of Spanishspeaking youngsters enrolled in the public schools. A report issued by the board of education in 1953 estimated that some 40,000 non-English speakers were enrolled in city schools, compared with 8,828 in 1948. Through the intervention of a family friend Marcial Peñaranda’s long and successful career as a teacher was brought to the attention of Mr. Shoenfeld, the principal of Public School 25 in the South Bronx. Concern about the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking children in his school prompted him to hire someone who knew the Spanish language and could teach the students English-language skills. Concurrently the New York Board of Education had come to the same realization, and in 1949 ten Puerto Rican teachers were hired, including Marcial Peñaranda, who had already been assigned to Public School 25, to assist the regular classroom teachers with the mostly Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking students. These bilingual pio-
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Pentecostal Church neers created new methodology, materials, activities, and classroom practices, but although they were experienced teachers from Puerto Rico, they were not allowed to become regular teachers in the New York City system. Peñaranda recalled, “We started as special teachers in this program. That is how I began . . . then I continued taking graduate courses over here [New York] . . . then Mr. Shoenfeld said, “ ‘The class is yours.’ Well what do you expect me to do?” she continued. “ ‘That you teach them English . . . that they begin to feel comfortable and happy.’ ” Peñaranda taught an additional twenty years in New York as a substitute auxiliary teacher. She taught long enough to witness the institutionalization of the bilingual teacher license in school and community affairs. She saw the flourishing of academic departments devoted to Puerto Rican and ethnic studies, the mobilization of Latino communities in support of bilingual education and the neighborhood schools, and the emergence of politically influential professional groups and organizations in her field. See also Bilingual Education; Substitute Auxiliary Teachers (SATs) SOURCES: Peñaranda, Ana Marcial. September 10, 1987. Oral interview by Virginia Sánchez Korrol; Brooklyn College, New York. Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1996 “Toward Bilingual Education: Puerto Rican Women Teachers in New York City Schools, 1947–1967.” In Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor, ed. Altagracia Ortiz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
PENTECOSTAL CHURCH (1906–2000) Any discussion of Pentecostalism in the United States should address the pivotal year 1906 and the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles as a point from which to begin. Pentecostalism shares much in common with other evangelical Christian denominations. Core beliefs include (1) the supremacy of the Bible for religious instruction, (2) a need for an adherent to profess faith in Jesus, and (3) a desire to share that message with others in keeping with what evangelicals believe was Jesus’s final command, the Great Commission taken from the Gospel of Matthew. Pentecostals, unlike many of their evangelical brethren, emphasized the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of adherents and within that work stressed faith healing. Also, unlike many evangelicals, Pentecostals ordained women. While this act usually involved ordination as evangelists or missionaries, a number of Pentecostal denominations have incorporated several levels of ordination. Among them the highest category for women is licenciada ordenada, although men can reach a higher order, obispo orde-
nado. The emphasis on faith healing and the availability of ordination seem to be two prime reasons why Latinas, as early as 1906, sought to become part of this religious movement. Despite its theological openness toward women’s ordination, Pentecostalism’s conservative theology toward gender roles tended to reinforce traditional roles already evident in Latino culture. This created a paradox for Latinas who viewed Pentecostalism as a faith worthy of their religious allegiance, but at the same time were relegated, or relegated themselves, to auxiliary roles as helpers and pastors’ wives, partially because of that same allegiance to the faith. Because of the paucity of written sources about Latina Pentecostals even in the Pentecostal press, any discussion of their role in the movement is hindered. This lack of biographical information should not diminish the overall role of Latinas as founders of churches and transmitters of faith to their families and their communities. If the following examples are any indication, Latinas are usually the first in the family to convert; they also become active members by seeking meaningful roles as teachers and children’s ministers and generally work to share the Pentecostal message with others at a higher rate than Latinos. As in most Christian churches, Latinas make up more than half of the congregants in Pentecostal churches. Again, if this small sample is used as a gauge, Latinas have become Pentecostal because of the faith’s emphasis on healing and the availability of ministry opportunities in most Pentecostal churches. In order to explore these two ideas, brief overviews of some of the more prominent women who have participated in the growth of the Pentecostal movement are in order. These women’s histories are often condensed flashes in Pentecostal magazines of the time, lost to the historical record except for mention of one or two of their initial activities, but important nonetheless to develop a sense of how Latinas worked with their churches to develop Pentecostalism into one of the largest religious movements in the world. The Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles began in 1906 and lasted for three years. Aside from being the catalyst of the Pentecostal movement, much was made of the revival’s multicultural makeup. One of the first converts at the revival was Susie Valdez, who might be considered a minor figure if it were not for the fact that many of the early Latinas in the Pentecostal church did not leave any historical record of their activities aside from brief mentions in magazines or, in Susie’s case, mention of her conversion and work by her son A. C. Valdez, who wrote about the Azusa Street revival. What is known is that Susie Valdez volunteered at a nearby Pentecostal church that emerged out of Azusa
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Pentecostal Church Street and volunteered as a translator for the Spanishspeaking visitors to the church. Valdez took her son to Azusa Street, and he also converted. Valdez worked at a mission, where she helped spread the Pentecostal message by translating, feeding families, helping women with household skills such as sewing, and serving as a role model for her son, who became one of the first Latinos to leave any written record of the revival. Another figure nearly lost to the historical record aside from mentions of her work by Azusa Street founder William Seymour is Rosa López. Little is known about López except that she and her husband apparently were not new to Protestantism before they arrived at Azusa Street, since they had been married in a Presbyterian church. López and her husband Abundio helped Seymour with Latinos at Azusa Street. Like many Latino converts, Rosa and Abundio López left Los Angeles to evangelize fellow Latinos throughout the borderlands. According to Seymour, the Lópezes proved very useful in attracting other Latinos to the revival and in teaching new converts about key Pentecostal doctrines like being baptized in the Holy Spirit. Some Latinas did more than follow their husbands’ lead into ministry; one woman returned to Mexico from Los Angeles after her conversion and founded her own denomination. Romanita Carbajal de Valenzuela was converted to a particular strain of Pentecostalism that emphasized a unitarian view of God, as opposed to the conventional triune view of God. From a house church in Los Angeles around the time of the revival, she returned to Chihuahua in the 1910s and began spreading Oneness
Pentecostalism. Very much in keeping with the role many Latinas played in the growth of Pentecostalism, Valenzuela first sought to convert her family. When she had accomplished that, she founded her own denomination. The U.S. counterpart, la Asamblea Apostolica, spread quickly throughout southern California and the Southwest and became one of the largest Latino-led Pentecostal groups in the United States, with more than 40,000 members. Isabel Lugo, a Puerto Rican woman whose pastoral work was mostly in the East, converted under the ministry of her husband, Juan L. Lugo, who participated at the Azusa Street revival. Spreading the Word in Hawaii, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York, the couple became partners in their sacred mission. Isabelita, as she was known, helped found la Sinagoga in East Harlem, which today forms part of the Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas. After the Azusa Street period of the Pentecostal church, the next phase of the movement can be classified as a time of institution building. One of the first groups to congeal into a denomination was the Assemblies of God. The Assemblies of God launched an aggressive evangelism campaign throughout the borderlands, beginning around 1917. One of the leaders of this effort was a couple, Demetrio and Nellie Bazán. Demetrio became the first Latino supervisor in the Assemblies. Nellie, on the other hand, played a very traditional role, as a helper and as a mother. The Bazáns founded churches in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Nellie Bazán was ordained by the Assemblies in 1920. She came to the faith because of a healing expe-
A Pentecostal congregation in Greeley, Colorado, 1932. Courtesy of Archives, City of Greeley Museums, Permanent Collection.
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Pentecostal Church rience that she recorded in a brief autobiography, Enviados de Dios. Bazán’s testimonials, especially of her healing and of a subsequent healing in the 1940s that she equated with resurrection-like experiences, have been widely transmitted throughout the Assemblies of God Spanish-language press. Unfortunately, in keeping with her role as a helper and mother, Bazán offered little detail of her role in the building of the Latino branch of the Assemblies. Instead, she focused on the roles of her children, all of whom eventually went into ministry, and on her healing experience. Sometimes decisions to support the family were made difficult because not every family of a convert was willing to make ministry a family enterprise. By contrast, the experiences of the Reverend Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, perhaps the first woman to lead a congregation, the Damascus Christian Church in the Bronx Borough of New York City, are well documented. Mamá Léo, as she was known, received her calling to become a missionary and evangelist in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, when she was a young woman. Told in a vision that her destiny was in New York, she migrated to the city in 1935. There she preached, visited the sick, became involved in the activities of the congregation, and ultimately married the pastor, Roberto Rosado. Her husband’s induction into the military during World War II signaled two major events in Mamá Léo’s life. She began her ministry as pastor of the Damascus Church and brought the church directly into the social service of the community through the creation of the Christian Youth Crusade. Both events had been foretold to her in a vision. Initiated in 1957, the Christian Youth Crusade was one of the earliest grassroots programs against drug abuse and other addictions. It rapidly expanded into other boroughs, and an estimated 250 young people who were rehabilitated through the program entered the ministry. María Rivera Atkinson, known as the Mother of Mexico, shares many similarities with other Latina Pentecostals. Atkinson came to the faith when her Latina washwoman convinced her that Atkinson’s cancer could be healed. Unlike other Latina Pentecostals, many of whom came from the laboring classes, Atkinson came from an affluent landowning family with mining interests in Sonora, Mexico. This class difference, along with Atkinson’s strong personality, may be a reason why she rose quickly to become the most prominent Latina in another Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God, headquartered in Cleveland, Tennessee. Atkinson came to the United States in 1916, settled in Los Angeles, and opened a dressmaking shop, where she met and eventually married Mark Atkinson in 1920. In 1924 Atkinson was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently sought the faith healing prominent
in Pentecostalism. She became a convert shortly thereafter and joined the Assemblies of God. Unable to convince her husband to join her in ministry, Atkinson left Los Angeles without him, opened her own church in Douglas, Arizona, and in 1926 returned to Mexico. In 1931 the Church of God offered Atkinson the resources to evangelize in Mexico, and she became a renowned church planner who established the denomination’s presence in the country and along the Mexico-Arizona border. In an era when female leadership in churches was not common, Atkinson seemed to accomplish her goals by using her elevated social class to impress her followers, as well as her forceful presence. Often Atkinson controlled her services with the discipline of a schoolteacher, correcting her congregants who did not live up to her expectations of being polished Bible students. Despite Atkinson’s pioneering work, she was passed over for supervisory roles, and by the late 1940s she steered most leadership positions to men and relegated herself to auxiliary roles within the denomination. This loss of power for women is typical of most Pentecostal institutions, where women ministers seem to be most prominent in the early stages of new Pentecostal movements. As a movement becomes a denomination, women lose power and men take center stage as leaders, often at the expense of women like Atkinson. Another example of Latina leadership shows how the paradox of Pentecostalism works in regard to female leadership. Although women are necessary as transmitters of the faith and healing, there appears to be little desire to usurp male authority. This behavior has been supported by traditional interpretations of certain biblical passages and the historically subordinate role of women in traditional Latino culture. This reluctance has led to the loss not only of female power but often of Latina voices to preserve their own history as one of the most influential vehicles for the growth of Pentecostalism among Latinos. Though she could be one of the most dynamic Pentecostal leaders by the sheer presence of her personality and appeal, Julie Arguinzoni, a cofounder of Victory Outreach, chooses not to usurp the singularity of her husband’s role as leader and principal founder of the denomination. Julie Rivera was born in East Los Angeles in the 1940s. By most accounts her family converted to Pentecostalism through her father, and they soon joined the Assemblies of God. Rivera’s desire throughout her formative years was to be a missionary to Mexico. Rivera attended the Assemblies’ Bible institute for training ministers, the Latin American Bible Institute (LABI), with the intention of becoming a missionary. She met a reformed substance abuser at the school in the mid-1960s, and they set out to found a
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Pentecostal Church church that would be responsive to the needs of drug abusers and gang members. Julie Arguinzoni began Victory Outreach in 1967 in a small apartment in East Los Angeles. She and her husband Sonny developed a plan to move their Pentecostal ministry from a church-based environment to a home-based rehabilitation ministry where they lived with recovering people and housed gang members intent on leaving that life behind. She spent the first fourteen years of the church’s existence sharing her apartment with her husband, five children, and an assortment of people in recovery. When the denomination entered its institution-building phase, Arguinzoni expanded her interests to the mission work she planned on commencing after graduating from LABI. Her husband acknowledges that Victory Outreach’s international growth would not be what it is if it were not for the women who under Arguinzoni’s direction have expanded the church to more than a dozen countries. Arguinzoni also heads the women’s ministry group United Women in Ministry, presiding over its conventions, speaking at its many regional functions, and leading it spiritually. Despite the lack of ordination for women in Victory Outreach, women play prominent roles as teachers, rehabilitation home directors, and evangelists. Women also constitute more than half the membership of the congregations. The role model for women in this predominantly Latino denomination is Julie Arguinzoni, who serves as a mother figure for many of the women who have come through the rehabilitation homes or have been rescued off the streets through one of Arguinzoni’s favorite programs, Twilight Treasures, which works with prostitutes. “Sister” Julie Arguinzoni is revered as a model of loyalty to the denomination, to her family, and to the hundreds of women whom she has personally guided through the rehabilitation process. An exception in terms of church leadership is the experience of Aimee García Cortese, who was ordained by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Puerto Rico in 1962, became a missionary evangelist for the Spanish Assemblies of God, associate minister of Thessalonica Christian Church in the South Bronx, and the first female chaplain for the New York State Department of Corrections. García Cortese began her calling through a Pentecostal outreach effort in the South Bronx’s Puerto Rican barrio. When at fifteen years of age she confided to her pastor that she wanted to become a minister, he admonished her that “las mujeres no predican” (women do not preach). To reach her full potential in ministry, García Cortese had to travel a different road. Countless Latinas in the Pentecostal church have been and continue to be stuck in a paradox, often of
their own choosing. The same faith that is seen as liberating because it stresses the experiential—direct contact with the divine—offers little in the way of liberating strategies out of subordinate positions in church leadership. As partners with their husbands, Latina Pentecostals could certainly share the credit for founding churches and denominations, but they usually do not ask for or to receive credit for their work as helpers. What recognition they do receive inevitably supports the well-worn notion that the sphere where women should do work and should be recognized is within the confines of marriage and family life. Indeed, recent scholarship attempting to argue for the social as well as spiritual liberating qualities Latinas find in Pentecostalism has had a difficult time accounting for this glaring discrepancy and has usually deferred to the theological peculiarities of evangelical Christianity’s conservative view of gender roles. However, other scholars who have studied Latinas argue that the family forms a crucible of liberation. It is a place where Latinas like Susie Valdez and Romanita Valenzuela transmitted their faith to their families. It is also a social institution that may at times be a hindrance to faith. Maria Atkinson decided to leave her family behind for the ministry. There is also an aspect crucial to many of these stories that needs to be reiterated. The role of Latina Pentecostals as healers, long a part of folk Catholic traditions with such healers as Teresa Urrea, has seen alternative healing transmitted to Protestantism. Latina healers have helped break down the barriers to alternative healing in evangelical Christianity by tying such healing to a theology rooted in historic Christianity. Healing systems with roots in indigenous religions would not be viewed as acceptable by Pentecostal converts, but healing that purported to be from God and had enough biblical support to assuage evangelical suspicions became a major entryway for generations of Latinos to become Pentecostal. Latina Pentecostals continue to minister to each other and in specific ways contribute to a grassroots Pentecostalism that does not privilege hierarchy nearly as much as do today’s institutionalized and professionalized denominations. See also Religion SOURCES: Arguinzoni, Sonny. 1994. Treasures out of Darkness. La Puente, CA: Victory Outreach Press; Avalos, Hector. 2001. “Maria Atkinson and the Rise of Pentecostalism in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands.” Journal of Religion and Society 3: 1–20; Bazán, Nellie, with Elizabeth B. Martinez and Don Martinez Jr. 1987. Enviados de Dios: Demetrio y Nellie Bazán. Miami: Editorial Vida; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1990. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations before Mid-century.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. E. C. Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz. New York: Routledge; Sánchez
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Perales, Nina Walsh, Arlene. Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society. New York: Columbia University Press.
Arlene Sánchez Walsh
PERALES, NINA (1966–
)
A child of first-generation parents and immigrant and native-born grandparents, Nina Perales was born in New York City in 1966 to César Perales and Patricia Welsh, who were native-born New Yorkers; he was born in 1940 and she in 1942. Her father’s parents were Francisco Perales and Manuela Western Echavarría. Francisco migrated to the United States from Puerto Rico in 1932, while Manuela migrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1938. Nina Perales’s maternal grandparents were Flora Mattola and Frederick Welsh. Flora migrated to the United States from Italy in 1915, and Frederick was a nativeborn New Yorker. Nina Perales attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard, where she obtained an associate of arts degree in liberal arts in 1984. In January 1987 she received a B.A. degree with honors from Brown University with a double major in women’s studies and political science. At Brown Perales was the recipient of the Wolf Scholarship for Women’s Studies in 1986 and was awarded the Joan Wallach Scott Prize for Women’s Studies Thesis of the Year in 1987 for her thesis “Poor Widows and Helpless Wives: The Politics of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.” Perales graduated in May 1990 with a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. At Columbia she was awarded numerous honors. She was named a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar in 1989 and 1990 and a Charles Evans Hughes fellow for demonstrated commitment to the legal problems of the disadvantaged in 1989. She was awarded the Paul Robeson Scholarship in Minority Legal Studies in 1989, the Jane Parks Murphy Prize for exceptional proficiency in clinical advocacy in 1990, and the Samuel I. Rosenmann Prize for academic excellence and outstanding qualities of leadership and citizenship in 1990. Her legal career began in New York City between May 1988 and May 1990 while she was still enrolled in law school when she worked with MFY Legal Services teaching indigent clients how to proceed pro se in uncontested divorce cases. Subsequently Perales was associate counsel with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) in New York City between September 1990 and December 1995. The first two years of her work in this capacity were funded by the Skadden Foundation Fellowship. She developed and litigated civil rights class-action cases and performed national advocacy on behalf of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the areas of
Attorney Nina Perales. Courtesy of Nina Perales.
health, language rights, and public assistance. The PRLDEF named her coordinator of its Latina Rights Initiative (LRI) in October 1993, and she held this position until December 1995. In this capacity she directed the litigation and advocacy of the LRI, which was created to address civil rights problems faced by Latinas. Her responsibilities included developing and conducting impact litigation, performing national advocacy on behalf of Latinas, and coordinating meetings and activities of the national Advisory Committee to the LRI. In 1995 she led a landmark delegation of U.S. Latinas to the Fourth International Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Perales next moved to Texas, where between February 1996 and October 1996 she worked with Texas Rural Legal Aid (TRLA) in its Private Attorney Involvement Program, based in Laredo, Texas. She assisted low-income residents of two colonias with legal issues related to responsive local government and infrastructure development. Her responsibilities included legal research, public education, and supporting small-scale litigation in the following areas: public access to records, open meetings, local elections, intergovernmental relations, and official misconduct. Her TRLA position led her next to work with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) between November 1996 and July 2002, where she worked as a staff attorney in its Political Access Program. Her responsibilities entailed maintaining a substantial active caseload of litigation and advocacy to promote the voting rights and political
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Pérez, Eulalia access of Latinos in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and other areas as needed. She served as lead counsel and cocounsel in state and federal court litigation, analyzed proposed legislation, responded to media inquiries, and conducted community education. She further participated in developing long-term strategic goals and objectives for the Political Access Program. Within MALDEF Perales was promoted in July 2002 to regional counsel. Based in San Antonio, Texas, as regional counsel, Perales directs the litigation and advocacy of MALDEF in a region that comprises Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi. She supervises staff attorneys working in the areas of education, employment, and immigration. She maintains a substantial and active caseload of litigation and advocacy to promote the voting rights and political access of Latinos. She manages the daily activities of the regional office, including budget administration and fund-raising. Perales has been admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, the state of Texas, the state of New York, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Tenth Circuit, the U.S. district courts for the Northern, Southern, and Western Districts of Texas, and the U.S. district courts for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. She has served as lead counsel in the following redistricting voting rights challenges: Session v. Perry (Texas congressional redistricting), Arvizu v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (Arizona congressional redistricting), Balderas v. Texas (Texas congressional and state house and senate redistricting), Del Rio v. Perry (Texas congressional redistricting), Associated Republicans of Texas v. Cuellar (Texas congressional redistricting), LULAC District 15 v. City of San Antonio (Section 5 enforcement action), Miguel Hernández Chapter of GI Forum v. Bexar County (Section 5 enforcement action), LULAC v. City of Seguin, Texas (Section 5 enforcement action), and Zaldivar v. Krier (Section 5 enforcement action). As cocounsel, Perales has participated in the following redistricting or voting rights challenges: Ruiz v. City of Santa Maria (seeking single-member districts), Reynoso v. Amarillo I.S.D. (seeking singlemember districts), Valero v. City of Kerrville (seeking single-member districts), and Vera v. Bush (Texas congressional redistricting). Perales has published two chapters in separate anthologies: “A ‘Tangle of Pathology’: Racial Myth and the New Jersey Family Development Act,” in Mothers in Law: Feminist Theory and the Legal Regulation of Motherhood, edited by Martha Fineman and Isabel Karpin (1995), and “Cultural Stereotype and the Legal Response to Pregnant Teens,” in Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas, edited by Sara Ruddick and Julia E. Hanigsberg (1999).
SOURCES: Mayer, Robert. “Latino groups present plan for re-districting to lawmakers.” 2001. The Daily Texan, 101:14, April 27. www.dailytexanonline.com (accessed July 18, 2005). Roberto R. Calderón. Personal correspondence with Perales, Nina. April 2004. Roberto R. Calderón
PÉREZ, EULALIA (179?–?) Originally from Loreto, Baja California, Eulalia Pérez settled in Alta California during the last decades of the Spanish colonial period. She arrived in Alta California around 1800 when her soldier husband, Antonio Guillén, was transferred to the San Diego Presidio. Pérez, her husband, and their two children stayed in the area for approximately eight years until he was transferred further north to the San Gabriel Mission. There Pérez became familiar with the mission and surrounding area while her family lived at the San Gabriel Mission for approximately ten years before returning to San Diego. In 1821 Pérez, now widowed and with six children, moved back to San Gabriel when she was hired as the mission’s chief cook, overseeing its kitchen facilities and supervising its neophyte Indian labor. Pérez eventually held a number of jobs at the mission: head cook, housekeeper, administrator, nurse, and midwife. Because of the size of the mission, the scope of her duties was extensive and akin to those of a quartermaster. The well-regulated household she ran entailed meeting the domestic needs of more than 2,000 mission inhabitants. Pérez assisted the missionaries in a variety of capacities: organizing the work of the mission Indians, supervising the training of Indian women and men for work in the various shops, mills, and fields, and overseeing the execution of all mission production, including the making of soaps, clothing, blankets, brandies, leather goods, and agricultural crops. Pérez managed the supply provisions for the presidio and for other missions, and she was charged with maintaining the daily schedule of mission activities. As Eulalia Pérez stated, she was additionally responsible for the daily distribution of rations for all the Indians at the mission and for the missionaries, as well as for supervising the weekly distribution of provisions for the presidio troops and other non-Indian servants. Pérez was also in charge of the jabonería, or soap factory, and the production of leather goods. She supervised the trained leather workers and was responsible for the distribution of suede jackets, saddles, shoes, and all other locally produced leather goods. According to Pérez, she presided over the cutting and making of clothes and other items to outfit the vaqueros (cowhands) from head to toe, including shirts, vests, pants, sombreros, boots, spurs, saddles, bridles,
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Pérez, Graciela and rope. Her position as llavera, the key keeper or administrative director of the mission, carried with it a significant degree of influence, not only in respect to Indian neophyte labor but also to the labor of other settler women. When necessary, for example, Pérez had the authority to assign duties to her five daughters and to employ women of the Los Angeles pueblo to assist in the sewing of clothes, and teach these skills to some of the Indian women. The most crucial role that Eulalia Pérez played at the mission was coordinating the training and acculturation of the indigenous women and men who were expected to work in colonial productive practices. They were taught caring for fields, harvesting crops, winemaking, stock tending, tanning, weaving, use of spinning wheels, sewing, soap making, cooking, carpentry, constructing buildings, manufacturing leather goods, and blacksmith skills. Eulalia Pérez served as nurse and midwife at the mission, as needed, and trained others to perform related tasks at the infirmary. Thus the llavera was also responsible for the nutritional and health needs of the Indians. Despite her substantial influence and independence of action in the mission setting, Pérez was also subject to—and somewhat grudgingly submitted to—the paternalistic control of the missionaries to the point of their determining her marital status. When all of Pérez’s daughters were married, the mission’s friar insisted that she remarry. Eulalia Pérez’s power within the mission had been to some extent allowed by the missionaries and depended on their goodwill. For this reason, Pérez was unwilling to go against their wishes or orders. Pérez grudgingly agreed and in 1833 married a Spanish soldier/settler, Catalan First Lieutenant Juan Mariné. Pérez’s work for the mission was not in opposition to the mission’s goals. Rather, it undeniably served to consolidate colonial domination of the indigenous population. The range and significance of her functions at the mission would have been totally erased from history had she not been called upon to offer her memories of her ties to the mission by the H. H. Bancroft project, an effort dedicated to documenting the stories of early inhabitants of California that involved interviewing some of the surviving Californios in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. These interviews later became commonly referred to as the “Californio testimonials.” Eulalia Pérez’s life and work, however, illustrate that in the frontiers there were gaps in the rigid social structure that enabled women to perform at levels generally reserved for men. What is especially noteworthy is that some mestiza (mixed-race) women such as Eulalia Pérez were able to gain positions of author-
ity and responsibility in the nineteenth-century Southwest. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Padilla, Genaro M. 1993. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Pérez, Eulalia. 1877. “Una vieja y sus recuerdos.” Manuscript. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Sánchez, Rosaura, Beatrice Pita, and Bárbara Reyes, eds. 1994. Nineteenth Century Californio Testimonials. CRÍTICA, A Journal of Critical Essays, CRITICA Monograph Series, University of California, San Diego, Spring. Bárbara O. Reyes
PÉREZ, GRACIELA (1915–
)
Afro-Cuban music vocalist Graciela Pérez, the younger half sister of Francisco (Machito) Grillo, was born in the Jesús María district in Havana. Pérez and her brother were the only musically inclined members of their family. In the film Machito: A Latin Jazz Legacy, Machito recalls hearing the workers singing in the cane fields when he and his father delivered food to the sugar mills in Havana and Pinar del Río. This was his introduction to music, while Pérez was inspired to become a singer after hearing a performance by trovadora María Teresa Vera. Pérez made her professional start in 1933 when she joined the all-female Septeto (later Orquesta) Anacaona. The group, named after a fifteenth-century Taína woman, was started by the Castro Zodarriaga sisters and was led by the eldest sister, Concepción. It was formed in 1932 when the Cuban president, General Gerardo Machado, closed the universities in response to a student-led strike against the government. Unable to attend classes, the band members played their music full-time, incorporating a range of musical styles from the Cuban son to American popular songs in a jazz style. The band’s appearance coincided with a craze for all-female bands in the early 1930s. Although Orquesta Ensueño was the first Cuban all-female band, Orquesta Anacaona, which later included vocalists Omara Portuondo and Moraima Secada, became the most famous. Graciela Pérez remained Anacaona’s lead vocalist for nearly ten years, during which time the group recorded such songs as “Después que sufres” and “Amor inviolado.” The musical director was the flutist Alberto Socarras. Anacaona toured throughout Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and New York and then made a two-month tour of Europe, where in 1938 it played at Paris’s Cabaret Havana-Madrid opposite Django Reinhardt and became the toast of New York City and Paris. Since one of the younger Castro sisters was unable to go on the European tour, Pérez had to take a crash course in the acoustic bass and learn it in three months. Following the band’s return to Cuba, it toured
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Pérez, Graciela
Celebrated Afro-Cuban vocalist Graciela Pérez. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Venezuela, Aruba, and Curaçao. After that tour Pérez left the band and was replaced on vocals by Dominica Verges. She then sang for a short time with Tito García’s ensemble. Machito and his brother-in-law, Mario Bauzá, married to Machito’s other sister, Estela, had formed the Afro-Cubans in 1940. This group became famous for its fusion of jazz arranging techniques combined with authentic Afro-Cuban rhythms—the first to do so. In 1943 Machito, the vocalist for the group, was drafted into the U.S. Army, and Bauzá asked Pérez to come to New York and share the singing duties with Puerto Rican singer Polito Galíndez. When Machito returned in 1944, Pérez stayed on with the Afro-Cubans. In 1947 the Afro-Cubans played at Town Hall in New York City, on the same bill as Stan Kenton’s orchestra, in the first concert in which jazz and Afro-Cuban music shared the stage. This event marked the start of a career for Machito, Pérez, and the Afro-Cubans recording with jazz musicians, and for more than three decades Pérez was part of the group that played a key role in the New York City Latin music sound and in the creation of Afro-Cuban jazz that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. During her time with the Afro-Cubans she toured throughout the United States and Latin America, visiting places such as Peru, Colombia, and Mexico. In 1954, along with Machito’s Afro-Cubans and other popular musicians of the time, including pianist Joe Loco, timablaero Tito Puente, conguero Candido Camero, and vocalist Facundo Rivero, she took part in Mambo USA, a fifty-six-city tour organized by Tico Records. Though she sang mambos, guarachas, and even jazz standards, she is especially remembered for her boleros. She and Galíndez recorded “Sí, sí, no, no” with the Afro-Cubans for Verve Records. The song, composed by Blanco
Suazo, was originally titled “Mi cerebro” (My brain), but with a title change and the addition of some very suggestive lyrics it became both a major hit and Pérez’s signature song. Her appearances at New York City’s Apollo Theatre became legendary, and she was considered by jazz critics and the general public as the Latina equivalent of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Pérez has appeared on more than fifty albums. In addition to “Sí, sí, no, no,” some of her other hits include “Caso perdido” (written by Arsenio Rodríguez), “Contigo en la distancia,” “Hay que recordar,” and “Ay José!” (another song with sexually suggestive lyrics). In 1975, due to personal conflicts, Mario Bauzá and Pérez left Machito’s group and recorded the album La Botánica, which established them as solo artists. In 1986 Bauzá formed the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, and Pérez joined him as the principal vocalist. Their 1986 release Afro Cuban Jazz on the Caiman record label was nominated for a Grammy. In 1990 they recorded the album Tanga: Mario Bauzá and the AfroCuban Jazz Orchestra on the German-based Messidor label. The album was hailed by the jazz press as a masterpiece and brought long-overdue recognition to Bauzá and Pérez. Subsequent albums, such as My Time Is Now and 944 Columbus Avenue (both on Messidor), demonstrated that she still had the passion that made her famous in the 1940s and 1950s. The orchestra toured Europe three times, bringing Bauzá and Pérez a new public that has rediscovered their legacy. After Bauzá’s death in 1993 Pérez went into semiretirement, occasionally making public appearances and recording cameos such as ones for jazz trombonist Steve Turre and Cuban composer and arranger Chico O’Farrill. Her most recent recording in 2004 teamed her with legendary conguero and fellow countryman Can-
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Phelps Dodge Strike dido Camero. It features Pérez reinterpreting classic Cuban-based compositions. Pérez remains a revered and legendary icon in the Latin music scene today. SOURCES: Boggs, Vernon. 1992. Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Ortíz, Carlos. 1987. Machito: A Latin Jazz Legacy Film. First Run/Icarus Films. New York City: Salazar, Max. 1993. “Machito, Mario & Graciela: Destined for Greatness.” In Cubop! The Life and Music of Maestro Mario Bauzá. Exhibition catalog. New York: Caribbean Cultural Center. Elena Martínez
PÉREZ V. SHARP The plot seemed right out of a 1940s Hollywood movie—pretty Rosie the Riveter meets dashing coworker; he goes off to fight for their country, and upon his return they fall in love and decide to marry. Credits roll. However, this landmark California Supreme Court case brought into stark relief the centrality of race in this real-life scenario. Andrea Pérez was the daughter of Mexican immigrants; her fiancé Sylvester Davis was African American. Fully aware that California’s antimiscegenation code prohibited their marriage, they hired an attorney to challenge this discriminatory law. After a Los Angeles County clerk denied the couple a marriage license, Andrea Pérez filed suit. Pérez v. Sharp highlights the shifting or “in-between” racial status of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. During the nineteenth century Mexicans intermarried with European immigrants, European Americans, and indigenous peoples. At no time did legal sanctions against European American and Mexican American unions exist. Amended several times to exclude various groups, California’s antimiscegenation law prohibited “all marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race [Filipinos], or mulattoes.” Mexicans were legally classified as white, but were they? The racialization of Mexicans was a longstanding practice, a persistent legacy of Manifest Destiny and Social Darwinism. Phenotype mattered, and though Mexicans were technically Caucasian under California law, county clerks routinely turned a blind eye to Mexican-Filipino marriages, especially along California’s central coast, and to frequent Punjabi-Mexican unions in the Imperial Valley. Andrea Pérez could marry a European American or an Asian immigrant, but her diversity of choice did not extend to an African American. Devout Catholics, Pérez and Davis enlisted the aid of Dan Marshall, a civil rights attorney who was a leader in the Los Angeles Catholic Interracial Council (LACIC), a group that had been formed months after the zootsuit riots with the purpose of promoting racial harmony and community collaboration. Marshall argued that the
law violated the religious freedom of the couple and thus violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The California Supreme Court agreed in its 1948 ruling. American studies scholar Alex Lubin underscores the importance of this decision. “In this case for the first time ever, a state Supreme Court found an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional.” For the majority opinion, Justice Roger Traynor explained: “We are dealing here with legislation which involves one of the most basic rights of man. Marriage and procreation are fundamental. . . . Legislation infringing upon such rights must be based on more than prejudice and must be free from oppressive discrimination to comply with the constitutional requirements of due process and equal protection of the law.” Historian Dara Orenstein points out that Earl Warren served as governor of California at the time the court handed down its historic decision. Nineteen years later he presided as chief justice in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down all remaining state antimiscegenation laws. Much as Méndez v. Westminster foreshadowed Brown v. Board of Education, Pérez v. Sharp remains a relatively unacknowledged forerunner to Loving v. Virginia. Although the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) had joined forces with the Méndez plaintiffs to challenge educational segregation in Orange County, California, both groups kept their distance from this case. Conservative officials at the Catholic diocese also looked askance at the activities of Marshall and the LACIC. At a time when cold war red-baiting made political hash out of progressive causes in California, Pérez v. Sharp stood as a sentinel for a larger civil rights movement to come. Married for more than fifty years, Sylvester and Andrea Davis scripted their own happily after ever. See also Intermarriage, Contemporary SOURCES: Brilliant, Mark. 2002. “Color Lines: Civil Rights Struggles on America’s ‘Racial Frontier,’ 1945–1975.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Pascoe, Peggy. 1996. “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in TwentiethCentury America.” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June): 44–69. Lubin, Alex. 2004. “ ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ The Politics of Race and Marriage in the California Supreme Court’s 1948 Pérez v. Sharp Decision.” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 4 (July): 31–37; Dara Orenstein. 2005. “Void for Vagueness: Mexicans and the Collapse of Miscegenation Law in California.” Pacific Historical Review 74, no.3 (August): 367–407. Vicki L. Ruiz
PHELPS DODGE STRIKE Arizona copper miners shared a long history of labor activism and, after World War II, strong union repre-
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Phillips, Carmen Romero sentation. This period of trade union power marked the end of the dual wage system whereby EuroAmerican miners made more than their Mexican counterparts for the same work, as well as the beginning of increased social interaction between EuroAmerican and Mexican American mining families. In Clifton and Morenci, for example, there existed a mingling of Euro-American, Mexican, and EuroAmerican/Mexican families whose genealogies were as much a part of the mines as the shafts. When contract negotiations broke down and a strike was called against Phelps Dodge, the major company in the area, in 1983, the residents of Clifton and Morenci rallied behind the strikers. Phelps Dodge obtained an injunction that restrained striking miners from picketing, and like the women profiled in the classic labor film Salt of the Earth, the wives, sisters, and daughters of miners took their place on the picket line. Though they faced tear gas, arrests, and severe financial hardships, these women blocked traffic, organized mass demonstrations, and stood their ground on the picket line. One law enforcement officer snidely declared, “If we could just get rid of those broads, we’d have it made.” Governor Bruce Babbitt sent in the National Guard, ostensibly to maintain order, but the presence of soldiers and helicopters had a chilling effect. Yet women such as Chicana activist Ana O’Leary maintained their vigil for two years. Historian Karen Anderson asserts that these smalltown Arizona women acted out of an “attachment to their community” and “used the managerial and interpersonal skills they had developed as homemakers in order to organize . . . and mediate.” Or, as Cleo Robeledo, wife of a striking miner, explained, “Before I was just a housewife. Now I am a partner.” Indeed, Jessie Tellez told author Barbara Kingsolver, “I think there are a lot of feminists around here.” Again, in a manner reminiscent of the shift in consciousness that took place during the actual Empire Zinc strike chronicled in Salt of the Earth, the Phelps Dodge strike is another example of the integration of Latina public and private spheres for community goals. However, this labor dispute did not end with a workers’ victory. The National Labor Relations Board ordered an election in which only the scabs (strikebreakers) could vote, and the union was decertified. A student at Arizona State University related the following story. His father, a striking miner, could not find other work, and his mother supported the family on her earnings as a waitress at the local Pizza Hut, $2 per hour plus tips. Phelps Dodge evicted them from their home, and before they had time to gather all of their belongings, a bulldozer destroyed the structure. Picking through the rubble, the young man found his dog, which died in his arms.
Union busting did not bolster the profits of Phelps Dodge. The long-term decline of the copper market has meant widespread mine closures throughout the state. Copper communities, such as Bisbee and Globe, have searched for other means of economic livelihood, primarily cultural tourism, with rows of antique shops, art galleries, and bed-and-breakfast inns. The Phelps Dodge strike signaled the twilight of a way of life for thousands of mining families in which, according to Barbara Kingsolver, “the women had grown up with the union, a tool as familiar to them as a can opener or a stove.” See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Anderson, Karen. 1996. Changing Woman: A History of Racial and Ethnic Women in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press; Kingsolver, Barbara. 1989. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mining Strike of 1983. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
PHILLIPS, CARMEN ROMERO (1921–
)
Carmen Romero was born on January 19, 1921, in Silverbell, Arizona. Her father, Jesús Romero, was a rancher, and her mother, Brigida Romero, was a housewife. Carmen had two brothers and six sisters, and their parents taught the children both Spanish and English. After graduating from high school, Carmen Romero decided to go to nursing school, partly because it was very cheap. She worked hard in twelve-hour shifts that included attending class and working in the hospital. When she graduated, she became a Red Cross nurse and still has the badge. Soon after graduating from nursing school Romero took a physical examination in order to enlist in the military. Both of her brothers had joined the military during World War II. Lt. Romero was assigned to the station hospital at the Santa Ana Army Air Base in Santa Ana, California. During her years at nursing school she maintained a grade point average of 96.4 and discovered that her favorite aspect of nursing was working in the operating room. Her reputation preceded her, and a special request for her service was made when she arrived in California. “Robert E. Hastings was an orthopedic doctor here in Tucson, and he was already in the Air Force there in Santa Ana. So he asked our charge nurse, ‘Will you please send Carmen Romero to the operating room the first day she gets here?’ So here I go to the operating room.” Although Romero went through basic training that involved a two-hour hike to show fitness and en-
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Pilsen Neighbors Community Council durance and gas-mask training, when she was working in the hospital, she could not miss basic training. “I was the only one that was in the operating room because at the time we had corpsmen that would scrub in and help with the surgeons at the operating table. But an RN (registered nurse) had to be a circulating nurse and do all the record-keeping and make sure that everything was ready, and that’s what I did.” At the base in Santa Ana, Romero mostly tended to men wounded in the Pacific. “When they got back to the States, we had to do the final repair, especially if they had fractures with casts. In those days, those were hard casts. Some of them smelled bad, some of them not so bad. You take that cast off, and you would see a lot of maggots. They would be full of maggots. But those wounds—those maggots had cleaned the wound because they ate all the blood and pus.” In August 1944 Carmen Romero left Santa Ana and reported for duty at Stockton Field in Stockton, California. She was in Stockton when Germany surrendered in May 1945. Japan surrendered in August 1945, and Romero left the military on November 1. In the summer of 1945 Carmen Romero married for the first time, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Before she was discharged, she was promoted to first lieutenant. After her discharge Romero worked at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson. In 1946 one of her flight surgeons asked her to work with him at a clinic and hospital in Corpus Christi. She accepted the job and took a train to Texas. She worked for the surgeon for one year before accepting a job at Memorial Hospital. In January 1947 Carmen Romero married Charles Alexander Phillips. Phillips had been a bombardier
aboard B-24 bombers in the Pacific during the war. He and his brother, Israel Phillips, lived in Corpus Christi after the war. “I met him first, Israel. Both of them had a business not far from the hospital. It was like a little grocery store and they had cigarettes and pop and stuff like that. And so us nurses from Memorial Hospital would walk across the street and go get our stuff there and that’s how come I met him (Charles).” Charles and Carmen Phillips had a son and three daughters. In 1961 they moved to Tucson from Corpus Christi. Charles Phillips died in 1991. Carmen Phillips continued to work as an operating room nurse, retiring in 1986 after a forty-three-year career. “For some reason I was always in charge of whatever I was doing, and it was usually an operating room,” she said. “I got to train a lot of the new nurses and help them. If we wanted them to do a good job, I had to teach them.” Phillips returned to Tucson in 1961, but still would like to serve as a health professional. After September 11, 2001, she called the Red Cross to offer her services in New York. The Red Cross representative on the telephone, learning of her age, said that it was unlikely that they could ask so much of an older person. Phillips replied that she would do whatever was needed—filing, office work. She was not called back. Recounting the story, Phillips said that she still feels that she has the strength to take on the world. See also Medicine; Military Service SOURCES: Howell, Rachel. 2003. “High Grades Landed Nurse a Job Working in Operating Room.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 35; Phillips, Carmen Romero. 2003. Interview by Delia Esparza, Tucson Vet Center, January 5. Rachel Howell
PILSEN NEIGHBORS COMMUNITY COUNCIL (1954– )
Lt. Carmen Romero Phillips, right, with Ensign Beatrice A. Kissinger in 1944 in Long Beach, California. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
Pilsen Neighbors Community Council was formed in 1954 in what was then an eastern European immigrant community (Pilsen was also known as Eighteenth Street) in the city of Chicago. The grassroots organization maintained a fairly noncontroversial agenda: organizing block clubs, neighborhood improvement, rezoning, and maintenance of neighborhood homes. Its early accomplishments included shutting down local taverns that attracted illicit activities, evicting drug addicts and prostitutes from neighborhood apartments, and having abandoned cars removed from neighborhood streets. By the mid-1960s, however, Pilsen received a large influx of Mexican and Mexican American residents, displaced by the construction of a University of Illinois
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Pinedo, Encarnación campus just north of Pilsen. When the community began to change, Pilsen Neighbors began to address new issues, including education. The organization began to offer after-school English classes for Spanishspeaking children. The incoming Mexican population, along with increased social mobility of second- and third-generation Euro-American residents, dramatically fueled white flight to the suburbs. Faced with these trends, Pilsen Neighbors aimed to preserve the neighborhood in the face of urban deterioration and a changing population. While Pilsen Neighbors had Mexican American representation in the 1960s, by 1969 the organization experienced a radical transformation in both its leadership and its mission. Mexican American community activists, particularly Guadalupe Reyes, Mary Gonzáles, and Teresa Fraga, redirected the organization toward more pressing community issues—social services and equitable municipal services, overcrowded and deteriorated conditions of local public schools, and getting a high school for the neighborhood. The women of Pilsen Neighbors led dozens of campaigns for equity, access, and rights for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans with regard to police relations, municipal employment, public transportation, immigration, and education. Pilsen Neighbors also helped establish the Eighteenth Street Development Corporation to address housing and economic development in the community, and El Valor Corporation, an agency to serve people with disabilities. The organization has been notable particularly for its successful educational campaigns. In the early 1970s Pilsen Neighbors boycotted local schools and led 1,000 people in a march to the Chicago Board of Education’s offices demanding the construction of a sorely needed high school in the community. After four years of protesting the board finally agreed to open a new school—Benito Júarez High School—the first to be built in the neighborhood. These struggles for educational equity for mostly Mexican children were led by Pilsen’s women. Finally, Pilsen Neighbors has hosted the annual Fiesta del Sol community festival since 1972. Originally organized as a block party to celebrate the Pilsen Neighbors’ success in obtaining a commitment for Benito Juarez High School, Fiesta del Sol has become an annual summer festival that, decades later, attracts more than 1 million people. Drawing on the symbolism of the Sun in Aztec culture and history, the event is organized by community members with support from corporate sponsors. The festival brings revenue to local Mexican-owned businesses and provides entertainment, community health booths, and service agencies, all in an alcohol- and tobacco-free environment.
Although Pilsen Neighbors Community Council originated among the eastern European immigrant community, the Mexican American activists of Pilsen, particularly women, have made the organization an important institution for leadership and grassroots activism. Indeed, the leadership of Pilsen’s women can be credited for many of the social changes that the community has witnessed for more than three decades. SOURCES: Chicago. 1976. “Pilsen and the Pioneering Spirit.” December, 202; Chicago Daily News. 1963. “Pilsen Neighbors—Brotherhood in Action.” February 18; Lanier, Alfredo S. 1988. “Doing It Their Way: Why Pilsen Is So Stubborn.” Chicago Enterprise (October): 16–20. Lilia Fernández
PINEDO, ENCARNACIÓN (1848–1902) Born on May 21, 1848, Encarnación Pinedo was a renowned cook, and a local San Francisco press published her collection of recipes in 1898. As the first Latina cookbook author, Pinedo revealed treasured family dishes in her native Spanish. She dedicated her book El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook) to her nieces, and her words speak volumes about her position as a woman from a once-elite Californio family: “So that you may always remember the value of woman’s work, study the contents of this volume and take advantage of my knowledge of this art, so important in the management of the family’s home.” She continued, “You should consider your needs, because if a woman is rich, she needs to manage; and if she is poor, she needs to know how to work.” Her father, Lorenzo Pinedo, a native of Ecuador, married María del Carmen Berreyesa, a member of a wealthy landowning clan in northern California. The Berreyesas controlled the New Almaden mine and expansive holdings in the Santa Clara Valley. Encarnación’s great-grandfather Nicolás Berreyesa had journeyed to California at the age of fifteen as a member of the famed De Anza expedition. While most of these early settlers were of mestizo or mulatto origins, their descendants, especially if they were prosperous gente de razón (the right people), claimed a Spanish identity. Certainly this was the case with Encarnación Pinedo. While many of her recipes are distinctly Mexican, including mole, which has Aztec roots, Pinedo titled her cookbook El cocinero español (The Spanish Cook). Like other Californio families, she and her relatives endured the pattern of land loss, violence, and cultural displacement that occurred after the U.S.-Mexican War, and like her peers, Pinedo clung to nostalgic notions of golden yesteryears in romantic “Spanish” California where her grandparents and parents held considerable political, economic, and social sway. De-
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Politics, Electoral spite their elevated position in the community, the Berreyesa family felt the violent brunt of the Bear Flag Revolt and U.S. dominion. Kit Carson and his men executed her grandfather and two cousins, and a EuroAmerican mob lynched her uncle. Given the loss of her father, brother, and several male relatives, it is not surprising that María del Carmen Berreyesa de Pinedo forbade her daughters to talk to Euro-Americans. When Encarnación Pinedo was four, her father fell ill and died, and she, her older sister Dolores, and her mother witnessed the extended family’s decline to the extent that according to culinary historian Victor Valle, the Berreyesas “had no choice but to beg the San José town government for a small plot on which to build their homes.” Nevertheless, María del Carmen Pinedo ensured that her daughters received a proper education at the nearby Notre Dame Academy. Never married, Encarnación Pinedo lived with her mother until the latter’s death and then, abiding by Victorian standards of respectability, went to live with her sister and her family. Dolores Pinedo did not heed parental admonishment about avoiding EuroAmericans and married William Fitts despite strong familial objections. Like the Californianas profiled by historian María Raquel Casas, many Spanish-speaking women exerted considerable choice in selecting a spouse and were not powerless pawns of plotting patriarchs eager to hold on to their lands at any cost, including marrying their daughters off to EuroAmericans. William and Dolores Pinedo Fitts had eleven children, and while Dolores did not live at the level of past grandeur, she lived comfortably because Fitts worked as a trolley driver, railroad supervisor, local sheriff, and jailer. Giving her daughters such names as Erminia and Carmencita indicates that Dolores Pinedo Fitts did not perceive her family as on the fast track to assimilation. Rather, this act of naming perhaps suggests a fluidity of identities among children of blended heritage, a fluidity that rested more on cultural location than on a fixed biological mooring. Encarnación Pinedo’s El cocinero español can be read on a number of levels. First, it is a tangible heirloom to her nieces and perhaps to other Californios as well, given that it appeared in Spanish. Second, the book reflects a constructed Spanish identity common among Californios, an identity that bolstered their social distance from working-class Mexicans. Third, it can be interpreted as an act of both cultural pride and resistance. Acclaimed celebrity chef and author Rick Bayless summarizes Encarnación Pinedo’s culinary legacy on the book jacket of Encarnación’s Kitchen as follows: “Food, as Encarnación understood, can be a seductively delicious catalyst for social understanding, change, and even rebellious protest.” At fifty-three years of age Encarnación Pinedo died on April 9, 1902.
SOURCES: Casas, Maria Raquel. 2006. Married to a Daughter of the Land: Interethnic Marriages in California, 1820– 1880. Reno: University of Nevada Press. 2003. Pinedo, Encarnación; Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California. Ed. and trans. Dan Strehl. Berkeley: University of California Press; Valle, Victor. 2003. “The Curse of Tea and Potatoes: The Life and Recipes of Encarnación Pinedo.” In Encarnación’s Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California, ed. and trans. Dan Strehl, 1–17. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
POLITICS, ELECTORAL The number of women running for elected office has grown substantially in the 1990s. This is especially true among Latinas. Both major parties have initiated unprecedented campaigns to mobilize the Latino community. During the 2004 presidential campaign Republicans and Democrats aired commercials on Spanish-language television networks nationwide, as they had done in 2000. The presidential front-runners, George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000 and Bush and John F. Kerry in 2004, personally appeared at the major Latino political conferences to profess their support for Latino causes. In explicit appeals to potential Latino constituents, political candidates routinely intersperse Spanish words or phrases in their political speeches. Candidates nationwide launch Web sites featuring Spanish-language content. Polls indicate that the Latino presence in states such as Texas, California, and Florida could mean the difference between winning or losing local, state, and national elections. The number of Latina elected officials is expected to grow substantially by 2010. Despite these expectations, the majority of Latino politicians nationwide are men. Several factors contribute to this gender gap, including traditional gender roles—a Latina candidate can still be regarded as unusual in many communities. While obstacles that discourage political participation do exist, Latinas are politically engaged. Like other women across class and ethnicity, Latinas tend to be involved in politics at the local level and for personal reasons. For instance, election to local school boards is a common entry point for new Latina politicians. Work conducted by Carol Hardy-Fanta, Vicki Ruiz, and Mary Pardo examined Latinas who mobilize communities and command genuine political power. Ironically, the researchers found that some of these women in leadership positions did not view themselves “traditionally” as leaders or as political players. For example, the researchers examined the vital roles Latinas played in rallying their communities around issues concerning the environment and education and found that many
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Politics, Electoral of the women interviewed continued to regard political leadership as a male prerogative. Nevertheless, the number of Latina elected officials has grown. The National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) reports that 1,952 Latinas served in public office in 2001. This figure included Latinas in the U.S. Congress, such as Nydia M. Velázquez of New York, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (in 1992). Voters have never elected a Latina to the U.S. Senate, though Gloria Tristani earned the 2002 Democratic nomination in New Mexico’s Senate race. However, she was defeated in the general election by the Republican incumbent, Senator Pete Domenici. On the state level, thirty-seven Latinas served in state legislatures in 2001. The first Latina elected as a state senator in California, Hilda Solis, received the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award for her work pertaining to domestic violence legislation in August 2000. In line with their community interests, Latinas have been represented in greater numbers at the local level. In 2001, 131 Latinas held public office in counties nationwide, 104 Latinas were in judicial and law positions, and 335 Latinas served in elective municipal posts. In comparison, an astounding 1,298 Latinas served on school boards, and several had been appointed as district superintendents, including Darlene Robles in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty Latinas have also held special district positions, serving, for instance, on boards of directors for municipal or regional water districts. In 2001 Latina political participation appeared strongest in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. A 1997 study of 150 Latina elected officials in California by Paula Cruz Takash noted the following characteristics. Most of the respondents graduated from college with a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and most hailed from working-class backgrounds. Many identified their fathers’ occupations as “laborers, construction workers, gardeners, and agricultural laborers; their mothers’ occupations as housewives or service sector workers.” Given their backgrounds, Takash posits that their personal experiences drive their interest in policies that address poverty. Most of the respondents have experienced significant economic and social mobility and have current family incomes from $50,000 to $100,000. Most of the Latina elected officials were born in the United States and defined themselves as Catholic. A remarkable 82 percent of these elected officials were Democrats, though an increasing number of Latina politicians are Republicans. In terms of political experience, 64 percent had never previously held elective or appointed offices, 85 percent had not served or worked for an elected offi-
cial, and 68 percent indicated that they had never worked for a political campaign. Consistent with other research on female elected officials, the women in Takash’s study often noted that they had been community volunteers, and that became their portal into politics. Nearly half said that they had gained valuable experience in women’s organizations. The top two organizations mentioned by Latina elected officials were the National Women’s Political Caucus and the National Organization for Women. A surprising 61 percent of these individuals stated that their political role models were men. When asked about the most important event, factor, or influence that prompted them to first run for office, most of the Latinas interviewed claimed dissatisfaction with politics or with the incumbents. The remaining respondents claimed a general concern with social change. Latinas have unique political histories, but their party membership can be largely attributed to several key factors: familiarity with the party, the region where they live, outreach by the party, and personal preferences. Typically a Latina will register for the same political party as her parents. Historically the Democratic Party has enjoyed the support of the great majority of constituents of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin, while Cuban Americans have tended to back Republican candidates. Although data on Central American party membership are scant, their party preference seems more linked to regional influences than ethnicity. For instance, voters of Central American origin often register as Democrats in California, while Central American voters in Florida routinely support Republicans. A National Latino Political Survey (NLPS) in 1992 asked Latinos and Latinas about the issues that concerned them. According to the NLPS, Latinos overwhelmingly viewed themselves as moderate to conservative, but indicated a strong preference that the government get involved in solving community issues. Another question asked whether men or women would be more capable in public office during a crisis. The majority of the respondents did not voice a strong opinion, but there were noteworthy differences. Mexican and Puerto Rican women were more likely to say that women would be better in a crisis, while Mexican and Puerto Rican men were more likely to answer that men seemed better suited. Cuban American men and women both tended to indicate that men would be better suited to manage crises. In assessing political participation among Latinas, Carol Hardy-Fanta writes, “Latina women are able to create a more participatory model of political mobilization precisely because of their different perceptions of the nature of politics. Their emphasis on connectedness, everyday needs, and the interpersonal process of political mobilization and personal status—rather than on political posi-
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Politics, Party tions—strengthens their ties to the community and builds political networks.” See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress SOURCES: Garcia, F. Chris, ed. 1999. Pursuing Power: Latinos and the Political System. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Hardy-Fanta, Carol. 1993. Latina Politics, Latino Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Montoya, Lisa J., Carol Hardy-Fanta, and Sonia Garcia. 2000. “Latina Politics: Gender, Participation, and Leadership.” PS: Political Science and Politics, no. 32: 555–561; Pardo, Mary. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Takash, Paula Cruz. 1997. “Breaking the Barriers to Representation: Chicana/Latina Elected Officials in California.” In Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader, ed. Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto. 412–434. New York: New York University Press. Lisa Magaña
POLITICS, PARTY Political party affiliation is based on a variety of factors. A person may prefer a party because of the organization’s stance on social and or ethical issues, such as the death penalty and abortion, to name only two. Party preference may also be determined by parental affiliations. Once they have joined a political party, people generally do not change their affiliation. Therefore, party-sponsored voter registration drives in Latino communities can be crucial in recruiting and sustaining membership. During the 2000 election most Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans identified themselves as Democrats, while a majority of Cuban Americans were Republicans. For Central Americans, however, there appeared to be no clear party preference linked to culture or ethnicity, though regional differences existed. In California a majority of voters of Central American origin support Democrats, while in Florida they often vote Republican. Historically, the role of the federal government has helped solidify party preference for Latinos. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, implemented programs and policies under the New Deal that provided assistance to Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, such as housing, urban development, and public works employment. These programs cultivated a greater affinity for the Democratic Party. In addition, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s financed education, medical assistance, and jobtraining programs that further solidified the relationship between Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and the Democratic Party.
A pivotal event that strengthened the union between Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and the Democratic Party was the Viva Kennedy Campaign of the early 1960s. The campaign was the first concerted effort to mobilize Mexican American and Puerto Rican voters nationwide by emphasizing qualities that were attractive to Latino and Latina voters. For instance, party platforms and campaign issues were specifically tailored to appeal to Latino interests, such as improving education and labor standards. Breaking new ground, the Kennedy campaign ran advertisements in Spanish. The impressive turnout for Kennedy is attributed to these outreach efforts. In some Los Angeles and El Paso precincts Latino and Latina voter support for John F. Kennedy reached 99 percent in some precincts, an astounding figure. In the late 1960s disillusionment with the empowerment strategies of the major political parties escalated in the Latino community. Latino activists, especially among Mexican Americans, felt that the Democratic Party had neglected the special needs of Latinos and had taken their votes for granted. So Mexican American activists, embracing the term “Chicano” as an affirmation of mestizo identity and a commitment to social justice, created a third political party in the late 1960s, La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), which advocated a “Chicano” platform that included Chicano/a political representation at the local and state levels, incorporating educational and bilingual reforms, and the ending of institutional segregation. La Raza Unida Party was established in Crystal City, Texas, in 1970. The party fielded candidates for local races and helped elect fifteen people. In 1972 the party nominated Ramsey Muñiz as its candidate for Texas governor. The short-lived party was most successful in Texas and maintained lesser strongholds in California and New Mexico. However, the LRU soon lost momentum. One of the main reasons for its ultimate demise was a split among the party membership as to the most effective means for achieving its political goals. In particular, one wing of the party supported the creation of strategic alliances with the Democratic Party, while others in the LRU argued that the party needed to remain completely independent. In addition, support for the organization’s officially “inclusive” agenda was hampered by the fact that Latinas were usually relegated to subordinate positions with comparatively insignificant roles. In response, Latinas in the LRUP decided to create their own caucus in the party. Eventually many key members of the party left to create their own organizations, especially around the issue of voter registration. Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, a former U.S. senator from Texas, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 served as a tool to empower voters of color historically blocked from exercising the
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The Voter’s Club, Inc. is representative of political action on the state and local level. Former New York City Mayor Robert Wagner is in the center. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
franchise. As a result, Latino political organizations grew both in size and in numbers. Some of the most visible political organizations today include the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF). Cuban Americans have maintained strong ties to the Republican Party since the early 1960s. In 1966 President Johnson signed the Cuban Adjustment Act. The law allowed Cuban immigrants arriving in the United States, legally or not, to gain permanent residency status in a relatively short period. Because of this piece of legislation, hundreds of thousands of Cuban citizens have migrated to the United States during the past forty years. President Johnson and the Democratic Party, however, garnered little political capital from the passage of this legislation. Instead, the actions of Johnson’s predecessor, President John F. Kennedy, cemented the Cuban American community’s loyalty to the Republican Party. Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs organized by opponents of Fidel Castro in 1961. Embittered that Castro has ruled Cuba for more than forty years, a majority of Cuban Americans have focused their attentions on U.S. government relations with Cuba. Because the Republican Party has espoused views favorable to Cuban American constituents, including a tightening of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, Cuban Americans largely remain loyal Republicans. As with
other groups of Latino voters, this does not mean that Cuban Americans only vote Republican. A growing number of second- and third-generation Cuban Americans have begun to take a more moderate approach to U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba. Since the mid-1990s, Latino support for the Democratic Party has weakened. For some, the Republican agenda on issues such as family values and abortion resonated. Because Mexican Americans constitute the largest and fastest-growing segment of the Latino community and no longer vote as a bloc, they have the potential to become the great swing vote for political campaigns. In the 2000 election exit polling found that George W. Bush made significant inroads among Latinos, especially Mexican Americans. By some estimates Bush earned as much as 35 percent of the vote. Only Ronald Reagan in his 1984 reelection landslide had done as well. Political parties have paid increasing attention to the potential voting power of Latinos as they vote in greater numbers. In Texas, California, and Florida these voters can mean the difference between winning or losing elections. SOURCES: De la Garza, Rodolfo O. 1992. Latino Voices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Perspectives on American Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Garcia, F. Chris, ed. 1999. Pursuing Power: Latinos and the Political System. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Moore, Joan W., and Harry Pachon. Hispanics in the United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985; Shockley, John Staples. 1974. Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
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Lisa Magaña
Popular Religiosity
POPULAR RELIGIOSITY Popular religiosity is a term in vogue in the current study of religion and the social sciences. Historically, anthropology viewed the religious experience and expression of common people as folk religion, and like theology, it deemed the religious expressions derived from it as bordering on naïveté and superstition. Traditionally, folk religion had a greater impact in areas where the scarcity of priests and clerical elites forced the common people to develop familial and communal means of transmitting, nurturing, and celebrating religious fervor apart from institutional centers of religious power and control. The result has been rich religious expressions interpreted by the elite as a shadow of established religion, certainly less pure and sophisticated precisely because they have developed outside direct clerical control. The pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) in the Catholic Church, however, gave folk religion a new name, “religion of the people.” This positive view of the religion of the people was highlighted again in official church meetings at Puebla, Mexico, and Medellín, Columbia. In effect, by defining folk religion as “the form of cultural life that religion takes on among a given people” and “a people’s Catholicism,” the Catholic Church moved it from the realm of superstition and fetishism to a new level of acceptance and understanding. In the social sciences, religious studies, and theology, the understanding of folk religion has gained wider acceptance as an authentic representation of religious beliefs and practices that can serve to underpin individual and communal spirituality, as well as a sense of identity. Nonetheless, the debate over its orthodoxy in theological circles and whether it has historically manifested itself as an alternative or complementary religious system, on the one hand, or resistance and subversion, on the other, continues. Even for some liberation theologians, popular religiosity is a slippery area because of its syncretic and “recycling” nature. Syncretism, the mixing of the beliefs and practices of two or more religious systems, is clearly present in the common practices and celebrations that mark the lives of most Latino families and communities. Catholic theologians have tried to reconcile the stance taken by the Second Vatican Council, Puebla, and Medellín with a new understanding of popular religiosity that subordinates the non-Christian elements to doctrinal rectitude as understood in Roman Catholicism. Theological literature uses the terms “syncretization” and “synthetization,” while anthropology and sociology speak of “synthesis” and “transculturation,” which is the encounter and subsequent coming together of cul-
tural and religious beliefs. Another term used by scholars is “inculturation.” Theologians who accept popular religiosity as an orthodox expression of the Catholic faith are eager to point out that the mixing of symbols and practices in the common observances of the people ultimately does not significantly change the logic of belief; rather, it gives it a new vocabulary. Folk religion is not a static phenomenon but rather a process and, as such, is subject to ongoing change. It can be defined as a moving object, and its effect is somewhat akin to billiard balls whose movements impact each other sometimes in more predictable and other times more unpredictable ways. Popular religiosity has the power to absorb, question, challenge, subvert, preserve, and transform religious traditions and practices. It can be liberating or not. It borrows from official religious forms both dogma and practice, and in doing so it empowers the common people to claim for themselves roles that ordinarily have been set aside by officialdom for the clerical elites. These roles may include the power to lead the people in prayer, to prepare the sick for bien morir (a good death), and to baptize. The role of women in popular religiosity historically has been very strong, particularly in rural areas. Because of the geographic and social distance between urban and rural areas and because men were less eager to take on roles connected to religion, rural women assumed these roles and fashioned them in ways that were relevant to their needs and the needs of their families and communities. The role of la rezadora (prayer leader) was often left to the comadrona (mid-wife) because she more than anyone else in the community knew the value of life and death. By her proximity to expectant mothers and her aid in the process of lifegiving (dar a luz), she became also a centralizing woman and baptizer. Popular religiosity is directly connected to the liturgical calendar with its Christological and sanctoral cycles. This calendar marks special events and celebrations in the life of the church that correspond to the cycles of nature and the need of the people’s spiritual and physical survival. Thus specific saints are implored to aid in healing illnesses connected with different parts of the body (the head, the ears, the stomach), to bring rain, to protect lands, livestock, and workers, and to watch over pregnant women, especially at the time of alumbramiento or birth. There are saints whose watchfulness and blessing one seeks when one leaves home and upon returning. In sum, there are rituals, big and small, for all life happenings, whether they are happy or sorrowful occurrences. Viewed from the perspectives of system and process, the religion people practice in their daily lives and
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Prida, Dolores the resultant spirituality are both organic and holistic. Because it involves not just separate unconnected rituals but is underscored by a way of understanding life— that is, by a cosmic vision that involves the people in relationship to the divine, each other, and their environment—the religion of the people has given rise to a spirituality that is also communal in nature. See also Folk Healing Traditions; Religion SOURCES: Buxó, María Jesús, ed. 1989. La religiosidad popular. 3 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos; Díaz-Stevens, Ana María. 1993. “The Saving Grace: The Matriarchal Core of Latino Catholicism.” Latino Studies Journal 4, no. 3 (September): 60–78; Díaz-Stevens, Ana María, and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. 1998. Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion: The Emmaus Paradigm. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony, and Ana María Díaz-Stevens, eds. 1994. An Enduring Flame: Studies on Latino Popular Religiosity. New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies; Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony, and Andrés Pérez y Mena, eds. 1995. Enigmatic Powers. New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. Ana María Díaz-Stevens
PRIDA, DOLORES (1943–
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Dolores Prida is considered one of the most important playwrights of the contemporary Hispanic theater in the United States. Born in the small town of Caibarién in the province of Las Villas, Cuba, Dolores Prida left the country with her parents in 1961 with the first wave of exiles to the United States following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. In New York she enrolled at Hunter College, where, in the mid-1960s, she studied Spanish American literature. Her writing skills soon developed in a variety of directions. In college Prida worked as a magazine editor for Schrafft’s Restaurants. In 1969 she became an international correspondent for Collier Macmillan International, and from 1970 to 1971, an assistant editor for Simon and Schuster’s International Spanish Dictionary. For two years (1971–1973) she wrote proposals, position papers, and speeches as the director of information services for the National Puerto Rican Forum in New York. Prida was managing editor for the Spanishlanguage daily newspaper El Tiempo from 1973 to 1974, arts and science editor in London for the Latin American magazine Visión in 1975, and in the following year its New York correspondent. Prida was senior editor of Nuestro magazine from 1977 to 1980 and translator, consultant, and literary manager for International Arts Relations (INTAR) for the next three years. In the mid-1980s Prida became the director of publications for the Association of Hispanic Arts. Her wide experience in journalism was not, however, her only incursion into the world of writing.
Cuban American writer, playwright, and journalist Dolores Prida, 2003. Photograph by Helena You. Courtesy of Dolores Prida.
As a teenager in Cuba, Dolores Prida had begun to write poetry and short stories; at Hunter College she published her first literary work, Treinta y un poemas (1967). But Prida is best known for her work in theater. In 1976 she received the Cintas Fellowship Award for Literature, and the following year Beautiful Señoritas, her first play, was performed by Duo Theater in New York. In 1979 Prida’s musical comedy The Beggars Soap Opera (based on Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera) was produced by the same theatrical company. The following year she received the Creative Artist Public Service (CAPS) Award for Playwriting. Five of her most popular works, which have been presented internationally and are regularly staged in New York theaters, are collected in Beautiful Señoritas and Other Plays (1991). Beautiful Señoritas incorporates music, Spanish sayings, songs, and dance numbers within the motif of a beauty contest, creating a spirited call for female liberation. Coser y cantar (1981), “A One-Act Bilingual Fantasy for Two Women,” presents Ella and She—Ella in Spanish and She in English—two aspects of a Cuban emigrant’s culture-slashing split personality. Pantallas (1986) is a sardonic examination of the ever-popular
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Propositions 187 and 209 Spanish-language television novelas (soap operas); Savings (1985) is a musical fable on the theme of gentrification; and Botánica (1990) is a tender and humorous glimpse into the gaps between three generations of New York Latina women. The ambiguity of U.S. Latino identity, the ambivalence about assimilation, and the centuries-old repression of Latinas, expressed bilingually and biculturally, are among Prida’s powerful themes. See also Literature; Theater SOURCES: Davidson, Cathy N., Linda Wagner-Martin, and Elizabeth Ammons, eds. 1995. The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1989. Biographical Directory of Hispanic Literature in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Meier, Matt S., ed. 1997. Notable Latino Americans: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Prida, Dolores. 1989. “The Show Does Go On.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading, ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Margarite Fernández Olmos
PROPOSITIONS 187 AND 209 In the mid-1990s heated debate in California over U.S. immigration and affirmative action policies focused national attention on these issues, but public concern about them dates back to the early 1960s, when a conservative movement began to push its agenda in the political arena. The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, however, marks the onset of aggressive campaigns, largely funded by conservative individuals and foundations, that promoted English-only initiatives, called for immigration and welfare reform and the repeal of women’s reproductive rights, and challenged bilingual education and affirmative action programs. Given the rapid growth of its nonwhite population, especially its growing immigrant population from Latin American countries, it is no surprise that California became the center of legislative reform and public policy that directly targeted its growing Latino population. California’s Proposition 187 (passed in 1994) and Proposition 209 (passed in 1996) were two important initiatives that directly targeted the Latino population. Proposition 187, also known as “Save Our State” (SOS), called for the denial of public services to undocumented immigrants such as education, health care (except for emergency medical care), and disability insurance. Denial of services such as prenatal care, family planning, and foster care was directly targeted at female immigrants. Proposition 209, which banned preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, and
gender in education, public employment, and government contracting, was a direct challenge to affirmative action programs. Underlying both initiatives is a direct ideological assault aimed at Latina women, particularly immigrants, that brings the issues of race, class, and gender to the political realm. In the context of Proposition 187, the imagery of immigrant women as prolific childbearers dependent on the public dole was a key ideological tool to promote racial antagonism in California against its burgeoning Latino population. For example, Pete Wilson, then governor of California and the primary advocate of this initiative, claimed that “[t]wo-thirds of all babies born in Los Angeles public hospitals are born to illegal immigrants.” The fact that this was not true was irrelevant within the context of creating a negative image of Latina women who were populating the state with “undesirables.” He effectively characterized Hispanic women as pregnant freeloaders and questioned their legal status by inferring that all Hispanic women were illegal immigrants. This quotation illustrates the conservative need to racialize Latina women as parasitic and culturally deficient in order to appeal to the fears of the aging white electorate worried about the changing demographics in California. It is not surprising that Wilson and other conservatives were successful in galvanizing public support for this initiative. An important implication of Proposition 187 was the effect it would have on pregnant women, children, and the elderly when they sought to obtain medical care. When it was passed, Wilson immediately moved forward with an executive order to implement this new law. Public officials and health care providers were put in the untenable position of acting as immigration officers—requiring documentation of legal status before rendering public services. A poignant example of the disparate impact on Latina women is portrayed in the following vignette. Soon after Proposition 187 was passed, a Mexican American mother, a legal resident of the United States, took her ailing two-year-old child to the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Hayward, California, and waited, and waited, and waited some more. Five hours later, her son was finally attended, given a cursory examination, and summarily dismissed. The boy, however, did not get better. Perplexed and worried, she found herself taking her obviously sick child back home. It was early morning when she rushed her son to the emergency room of Kaiser Hospital. The boy was dehydrated and near death. The attending physician immediately admitted the child into the hospital and put him on an IV. As the mother sat next to the limp, sleeping form of her child, a nurse came in and asked for her immigration papers.
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Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs Proposition 209 also relied on racializing Latinos and Latinas in a different negative context. The proposition effectively stereotyped the group as being beneficiaries of public programs who are held to lower standards than non-Hispanic whites. Proposition 209 implied that Latinos cannot compete at the same level as non-Hispanics and thus set the tone in the debate preceding the election. This race-baiting is illustrated by an incident in which a newly hired woman of color at a California State University was pulled aside by a male colleague who told her that “she would not have been hired there had it not been for student pressure to bring on a minority faculty member.” These propositions had deleterious effects on women of color because they created an environment in which the educational opportunities for themselves and their children were severely compromised. Proposition 209 also directly affected employment opportunities for women and minorities and created further barriers and occupational segregation for Latinas. A common theme in both initiatives was the ideologically constructed image of Hispanic inferiority to the mainstream non-Hispanic electorate. This was an obvious ploy to galvanize non-Hispanics to support both propositions. Nevertheless, although Latinas were actually threatened with diminished accessibility to educational and medical services, many fought back in order to repeal policies issued shortly after the passage of Proposition 187 and to assert their rights to equality under the law. After Governor Wilson and the Department of Health Services (DHS) cut off emergency medical and prenatal care to undocumented persons with either border-crossing cards or tourist visas, Public Advocates, a public-interest law firm, filed a lawsuit to stop these policies from going into effect, especially the mandate denying prenatal care to undocumented women. In August 1998 a court of appeals reversed a previous ruling against Public Advocates, and in July 1999 Governor Gray Davis reinstated prenatal care for undocumented women. SOURCES: Colino, Stacey. 1995. “The Fallout from Proposition 187.” Human Rights: Journal of the Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities 22, no. 1 (Winter): 16; García-Rivera, Alex. 1995. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Were Illegal Immigrants.” U.S. Catholic 60, no. 4 (April): 32–34; Long, Robert Emmet, ed. 1996. Immigration. The Reference Shelf 68, no. 1. New York: H. W. Wilson Co.; Malveaux, Juliane. 1996. “The Affirmative Action Debate and Collegiality.” Black Issues in Higher Education 13, no. 17 (October): 41; Stefanic, Jean, and Richard Delgado. 1996. No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Maritza de la Trinidad and Adela de la Torre
PUERTO RICAN ASSOCIATION FOR COMMUNITY AFFAIRS (PRACA) (1953– ) The Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), was founded at the height of the great migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City. The creation of Antonia Pantoja and a cadre of Puerto Rican professionals, the organization was launched to offer direct social services and address the needs of the Puerto Rican community in the city. Today it remains one of the most important multiservice organizations serving Puerto Ricans and Latinos and has the distinction of being the first of its kind. Pantoja arrived in the city in 1944 and was enrolled at Hunter College in a baccalaureate program in the mid-1950s when she joined a group of students eager to understand why Puerto Ricans, who had been American citizens since 1917, suffered low standards of living, education, and health care and high unemployment and discrimination. Determined to find solutions for these problems, the group organized under the name Hispanic Young Adult Association (HYAA). Membership in HYAA incorporated both island- and New York–born individuals. HYAA founding members included Luis and Cecilia Núñez, José and Josie Morales, Josephine Nieves, Eddie González, Alice Cardona, and Yolanda Sánchez. All of these individuals became important leaders in their own right. HYAA originally focused on issues affecting students and young professionals, many of whom were social workers. Through informed discussions and organized study groups HYAA developed an analytical framework for understanding the presence of Puerto Ricans in the city. Some members attempted to promote the adoption of American values and mores as a solution to their problems, but others, including Pantoja, who rapidly became an outspoken leader within the organization, pushed for creating an informed leadership that would respond to community needs through action and advocacy. In 1956 the Hispanic Young Adult Association transformed itself into the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA). One of the most important and necessary organizations to appear at that time, PRACA evolved as the numbers of migrants from Puerto Rico swelled the population of the community, nearing a count of 1 million by the 1960s. The theoretical framework for the organization called for the development of a selfreliant community. Pantoja and her associates understood the implications of diversity in a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican society that incorporated recent arrivals with settled pioneers, propagation of a national
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Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York culture and total assimilation, and the syncretism of hybridity. Issues surrounding race, class, and gender were taken into account, and the development of a Boricua leadership needed to be hewn from within the community and not imposed from outside. Over time PRACA became a nonprofit, self-funded organization promoting children’s services, foster care, and leadership development, with particular attention placed on women’s issues. Highly visible among grassroots organizations, PRACA promotes voter registration drives, raises funds for homeless shelters, and organizes high-school student conferences and after-school programs. An advocate and activist on behalf of the Puerto Rican and Latino community, Yolanda Sánchez has served as executive director of PRACA since 1993. From the initial days of PRACA’s founding as the Hispanic Young Adult Association, Sánchez has been involved with the organization. Her dedication to community issues and public policy ranges over four decades. In the 1970s Sánchez was instrumental in developing the first bilingual-bicultural day-care curriculum at PRACA. It became a model for nonprofit and government agencies throughout the United States. She helped students create another of PRACA’s successful programs, Muevete. This program addressed the dearth of information on the history and culture of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the public school curriculum. SOURCES: Pantoja, Antonia. 2002. Memoir of a Visionary. Houston: Arte Público Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 2005. “Antonio Pantoja and the Power of Community Action.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and V. Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
PUERTO RICAN RADICAL POLITICS IN NEW YORK (1890–1960) Radical politics in Puerto Rican New York can be traced to the earliest days of the community. Women often dominated neighborhood-based groups. Puerto Rican women were involved in all kinds of community cultural events, fund-raisers, testimonial dinners, and other events that helped highlight bread-and-butter issues in political terms. Expenditure issues, such as housing and food costs, became important matters for women in working-class homes. Radical politics so permeated Puerto Rican and other ethnic neighborhoods that a wide range of sponsored social and political activities was open to its residents. Avenues of escape from city life took the form of summer camps and
resorts run by the International Workers’ Organization (IWO) and other leftist groups. Two leftist groups with Puerto Rican membership showed signs of life after the Cuban-SpanishAmerican War in 1898, the International Cigarmakers Union (ICU) and la Resistencia, where most Spanishspeaking tabaqueros (cigar makers) could be found. The ICU followed trade unionism in the United States and became affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), opposing the formation of a workers’ party and the idea of social revolution. The more revolutionary la Resistencia advocated the principles of anarcho-syndicalism. Among other things, its members did not accept the concept of a “home country” because theoretically workers had no country; their homeland was the planet Earth. La Resistencia repudiated political parties, although its members called themselves “socialists.” In practice, they supported the struggle for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico based on the grounds of human rights. In mid-1899 the socialists in New York City split into two factions, one led by David de León, who headed the Socialist Labor Party, and the other by Morris Hillquit, who founded the American Socialist Party. When León’s group became more doctrinaire, most tabaqueros followed the Hillquit path. In 1900 union activists Santiago Iglesias and Eduardo Conde attended the American Socialist Party Convention in Rochester, New York. It was the first time that Puerto Rican workers were represented in a convention outside the island. Sympathetic ears heard about the plight of the Puerto Rican worker in San Juan and in New York City, and a resolution of solidarity was easily won. During the first decade of the 1900s the size of the Puerto Rican community in New York City continued to grow, and its leadership was dominated by the most radical sectors. Leaders were members of the Socialist Labor Movement, the Socialist Party of America, and the Communist Party of America. During these years the Socialist Party gained ground in the city and the Puerto Rican community. Its widely distributed newspaper the Socialist Call advocated on behalf of national minorities. In 1912 the ICU moved to recognize a local composed of Spanish-speaking members. More than 100 tabaqueros attended the initial organizational meeting. It had taken years to achieve this recognition. There was plenty of work for men and women in the cigar industry during the years before World War I. Spanish-speaking artisans produced the finest cigars, and many among them were Puerto Rican tabaqueros, including the noted feminist Luisa Capetillo, who worked in New York cigar factories during this period. However, in 1914 that situation changed dramatically.
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Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York As handmade cigars became less affordable, mechanization and the popularity of cigarettes made serious inroads that eroded the industry. Unskilled workers soon replaced skilled cigar makers. The war and the sinking of the SS Carolina on June 2, 1918, by a German submarine slowed emigration from Puerto Rico but did not completely stop it. The following year many new families arrived in the Chelsea area, from Twenty-sixth to Fifteenth Street, and in the Borough Hall area of Brooklyn. A larger contingent settled in the area around 116th Street. Later this section became known as El Barrio. Despite economic hardship, the community expanded. As the 1920s came to a close, Puerto Ricans in the workplace were displaying more signs of militancy through work stoppages and strikes. The depression hit hard, and as economic conditions worsened, Puerto Rican leaders backed the New Deal. In 1932 the community lost its strongest ally in Congress, Fiorello La Guardia, who was swept away by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s victory. The depression diverted the attention of the radical Left for a short time, but by the mid-1930s the social struggle gave new life to the Communist Party. Another split occurred between the Nationalists (those who fought for island independence) and the Communists (those who fought for the rights of workers regardless of the political status of Puerto Rico). The Fusion Party united Progressive Democrats and Republicans behind Fiorello La Guardia’s candidacy for New York City mayor. In 1933 that party also nominated a Puerto Rican, J. M. Vivaldi, for the state assembly from the Seventeenth District and established a Harlem-based Hispanic division. Vivaldi lost that election, but five years later the American Labor Party’s Oscar García Rivera became the first Puerto Rican in the New York State Assembly. His wife, Eloisa García Rivera, played a major role in his campaign. As unrest over the economy continued, the Harlem Communist Party also backed Fusion Party candidates who garnered the support of Puerto Rican leadership. La Guardia became the mayor again, with the support
of the Puerto Rican community. In 1934, after a fierce struggle, Vito Marcantonio became the U.S. House representative for the Twentieth Congressional District. Marcantonio was a hero to many Puerto Ricans, particularly women, whose consumer issues he supported. It was the political combination of the Fusion and Communist Parties that kept Vito Marcantonio in the House of Representatives from 1934 to the 1950s. Puerto Rican tabaqueros and their families, always to the left of party politics, proved instrumental in Marcantonio’s political longevity. At the beginning of the 1950s, suburbanization, the internationalization of capital, closer relations between capital and American labor, and augmentation of the welfare state, together with mass culture and political repression, brought about a decline in the Puerto Rican socialist working-class culture. Community leaders like Jesús Colón appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and political repression against Puerto Ricans altered the sense of continuity. In 1948 Law 53, a gag law designed to stifle anyone advocating overthrow of the Puerto Rican government by force, targeted Puerto Rican Nationalists and Communists. It was not repealed until 1957. The prohibition of the Communist Party of the United States in 1950 and the decline of the American Labor Party ended two important avenues for early Puerto Rican radical politics in the United States. See also Communist Party; Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners SOURCES: Andreu Iglesias, César, ed. 1984. Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York. New York: Monthly Review Press; Buhle, Paul, and Dan Georgakas, eds. 1996. The Immigrant Left in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press; Freeman, Joshua. 2000. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II. New York: New Press; Torres, Andrés, and José E. Velázquez, eds. 1998. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Day trip for members of the Liga Puertorriqueña Inc. Seccion No. 1 de Brooklyn, August 26, 1934. Courtesy of the Jesús Colón Papers Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Linda C. Delgado
Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners
A group at the International Workers’ Order (IWO) Training School in Kinderland, 1937. Courtesy of Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
PUERTO RICAN WOMEN POLITICAL PRISONERS (1898–2001) The U.S. presence in Puerto Rico has generated a diversity of political responses, ranging from acceptance and accommodation to violent opposition and manifestations of armed struggle. Although the two-year military government (1898–1900) and the U.S.-controlled civil government that followed (1901–1952) were successful in achieving hegemonic control in a fairly short period of time, anticolonial opposition not only has been a constant up to the present, but during certain periods has been able to mount considerable challenges to the established order. State responses to anticolonial activism have included legal actions resulting in the incarceration of numerous anticolonial fighters who, because of the political nature of the procedures, are considered political prisoners by the United States. Puerto Rican women have been decidedly present in anticolonial struggles and therefore have significantly shared the trials and sentences served. Four periods of increased activism produced the largest number of incarcerations in the twentieth century. The first period includes dissidents incarcerated between 1898 and 1920. The second was the period of confrontation between the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico and the colonial authorities (1935–1954), followed by a period of renewed anticolonial activism from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The fourth period (1990s to 2004) is characterized by the involvement of large sectors of the civil society in a movement that centers its attention on the termination of military ex-
ercises by the U.S. Navy on the island of Vieques, a municipality of Puerto Rico. There is evidence of repression, harassment, and surveillance of male and female activists during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Ironically, the first political prisoners under U.S. rule were journalists who published articles critical of the new colonial administration. Although arrests did not necessarily lead to actual prison sentences, the second decade of the century brought detentions of labor, student, and feminist activists, including Luisa Capetillo, a pioneer feminist and labor activist. However, the cases documented so far in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as the incarceration of journalists in the early 1900s and of antiwar activists in 1917–1918, included only men. The earliest documented case of a Puerto Rican female political prisoner is that of Candita Collazo, arrested in Ponce in 1937 and sentenced to four years in prison for her alleged participation in a Nationalist clandestine cell that engaged in armed activities. Very little has been recorded in Puerto Rican history books about the Candita Collazo case, but references to her trial and incarceration appeared prominently in daily newspapers of the period. Although political prisoners of the 1930s and 1940s were mostly men, during the 1950s a large number of women also joined the ranks of imprisoned anticolonial fighters. In many cases women faced the double weight of being persecuted for their political activism and for their familial associations. While the role of Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo in the 1950 armed
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Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners attack on Blair House in Washington, D.C., is well known, it is rarely mentioned that Rosa Collazo and Carmen Dolores (Lolita) Torresola, the wives of the two Nationalists, were also arrested and held for several months after the events. Rosa, Lolita, and their husbands were part of the growing Puerto Rican community in New York City. The wives and mothers of other nacionalistas also became political prisoners after the October 30, 1950, uprising in Jayuya and several other townships of Puerto Rico. Monserrate del Valle, the wife of one of the leaders of the uprising, was imprisoned despite the fact that she was not a direct participant in the armed actions. In fact, during the first days of November 1950, the government of Puerto Rico ordered the arrest of more than 1,000 citizens who had no connection with the uprising, including many women, some pregnant or with small children. The illegality and total lack of due process that characterized the mass arrests were the focus of a 1957 inquiry by a civil rights committee that criticized the practice. The committee also condemned the application of 1948 Law 53, a gag order known in Puerto Rico as la mordaza, which mimicked sections of the notorious Smith Act in the United States. After the 1950 nacionalista uprising the mordaza law was used to prosecute and incarcerate leaders and activists unrelated to the violent acts, mostly members of the Nationalist Party. As a result, at least eight women served prison terms, including U.S. national Ruth M. Reynolds. The legal processes were characterized by a degree of arbitrariness that included denial of bail to the accused. This led to situations of extreme injustice like the case of Isabel Rosado, arrested early in November 1950 and accused of violating Law 53. At the end of her trial in April 1952, Rosado was sentenced to fifteen months in prison, but she had already been incarcerated for seventeen months. Even more dramatic was the case of Carmen María Pérez, arrested and accused at the same time: she was exonerated of the charges in July 1952 but had already spent twenty-one months in prison. Another Law 53 case of extreme cruelty was that of Leonides Díaz Díaz of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Her husband, several sons, and a brother were arrested in connection with the October 30, 1950, uprising. It is said that when she was approached at her home by police investigators asking where her sons were, she simply replied that they were where they ought to be: fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico. Doña Leonides was initially accused of being a participant in the uprising and was sentenced to life in prison. Although that sentence was revoked by the Puerto Rico Supreme Court, she had also been accused of violating Law 53 and was sentenced to ten years in that trial. She re-
mained in prison for the sole “crime” of expressing her views until the mordaza law was repealed in 1957. Also accused were Juanita Ojeda, Doris Torresola, and Olga Viscal. Viscal, a student activist at the University of Puerto Rico, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Her rebellious and defiant denunciations of the trial as a mockery of justice and her references to the district attorney and the judge as puppets led to thirtyone cases of contempt, each one with a sentence of thirty days in prison. In addition to the Mordaza incarcerations, there were cases directly connected with the uprising of October 1950, like that of Blanca Canales, who was credited with raising the Puerto Rican flag and proclaiming the Republic of Puerto Rico after the town of Jayuya was taken by the revolutionaries. Canales was accused of the death of a policeman, although when that particular incident took place she had handed her gun to other fighters in order to take a wounded nacionalista to a hospital. Still, she was sentenced to life in prison at the local level and another eight years in a federal prison because the revolutionaries in Jayuya burned federal facilities like the Selective Service office. Canales spent five years in a West Virginia federal prison and then was transferred back to Puerto Rico, where she remained in prison until an executive pardon was granted by Governor Roberto Sánchez Vilella in August 1967. Another large group of political prisoners emerged after the March 1, 1954, shooting at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., by a group of four nacionalistas led by a woman, Dolores (Lolita) Lebrón, along with three men, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Irvin Flores. At the end of the trial Lebrón was sentenced to up to fifty years in prison. In addition to the charges directly related to the shooting, she was also accused of “seditious conspiracy” and sentenced to another six years in federal prison. Lolita Lebrón came to symbolize female political prisoners because she spent more than twenty-five years in federal prisons in the United States. A campaign for her liberation and that of the other political prisoners at the time achieved international proportions and led to the granting of a presidential pardon by President Jimmy Carter in September 1979. In addition to the legal actions initiated against the participants in the 1954 shooting at the U.S. House of Representatives, the occasion was used to implicate other anticolonial activists unrelated to the event. As in 1950, the arrests and incarcerations in 1954 took place both on the island and in places with large concentrations of Puerto Ricans like New York and Chicago. Rosa Collazo, at the time one of the leaders of the New York branch of the Nationalist Party, was again arrested. Although she had no connection to the
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Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners
Rosa Collazo handcuffed after her second arrest in New York City in 1954. Courtesy of the Proyecto de Digitalización del Periódico El Mundo, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
event, Collazo was sentenced to six years in prison after being accused and convicted of “seditious conspiracy.” A similar accusation was used against Lolita Torresola, who also served several years in prison. This vague accusation of “seditious conspiracy,” used in the 1930s against leaders of the Nationalist Party, was used again in the 1980s against a new generation of anticolonial fighters. In Puerto Rico, meanwhile, the notorious mordaza law was again used to submit accusations against dissidents. At least six women members or leaders of the Nationalist Party were accused of violating Law 53. Isabel Rosado, Doris Torresola, Juanita Ojeda, Angelina Torresola, and Juana Mills were sentenced to seven to ten years in prison. This time the government managed to get a guilty verdict against Carmen María Pérez and several men, including the attorney of some of the accused in 1950. The accusations did not claim that acts of violence had been committed, but rather that the accused made public expressions against the government, took flowers to the graves of fellow nacionalistas, or attended a mass at a local church in remembrance of those who had died in 1950. The fierce wave of repression and incarcerations left a decimated Nationalist Party but was far from eradi-
cating Puerto Rican anticolonial activism on the island or in the United States. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of reorganization and renewed forms of activism. The spirit of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s stimulated and expanded the reach of Puerto Rican anticolonial organizations on the island and in the United States. The new anticolonial organizations and activists also faced strong repressive measures, like COINTELPRO, a series of counterintelligence operations introduced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). As stated in a 1976 report of a U.S. Senate committee on intelligence operations, “In COINTELPRO the Bureau secretly took the law into its own hands, going beyond the collection of intelligence and beyond its law enforcement function to act outside the legal process altogether and to covertly disrupt, discredit and harass groups and individuals.” Puerto Rican anticolonial organizations became a COINTELPRO target in August 1960. The program targeted independentista activity in Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago and included wiretapping, instigating discord through the circulation of anonymous documents, planting stories in newspapers, infiltrating informers and provocateurs, and blocking access to the mass media. The secret operations were eventually uncovered and allegedly discontinued in the early 1970s, but not before causing considerable damage to progressive and leftist organizations in the United States and Puerto Rico. The escalating repression of the 1960s, paired with the experiences accumulated in the 1930s and 1950s, generated fertile ground for the emergence of new radical organizations that defended independence for Puerto Rico. The Armed Commandos of Liberation and
From left to right, Carmen María Pérez, Olga Viscal, and Ruth M. Reynolds handcuffed during one of the mordaza law trials in 1951. Photograph by Luis de Casenave. Courtesy of the Proyecto de Digitalización del Periódico El Mundo, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
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Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners the Armed Independentist Revolutionary Movement (CAL and MIRA, respectively, in Spanish) engaged in a campaign of armed propaganda and sabotage against what they identified as symbols of colonial domination in Puerto Rico. Unlike the confrontational approach of many of the previous nacionalista actions, the new organizations assumed an urban guerrilla approach, working in clandestine cells. The inability of the authorities to identify the members of these groups led in many cases to accusations against persons affiliated with legal organizations working in the open. The 1970s saw the emergence of another clandestine group, this time from the core of the Puerto Rican communities in New York City and Chicago. These areas shared a long historical Puerto Rican presence and also a tradition of anticolonial activism. The organization, called Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN, its Spanish acronym), carried out armed operations in New York, Chicago, and other cities in the United States. In some cases, as asserted in their communiqués, the actions were taken as retribution for attacks against Puerto Rican anticolonial fighters. Repeating a pattern established in the 1930s, federal grand juries became a frequently used resource in trying to force members of legal organizations into cooperating with witch-hunt–like investigations. In one such case Lureida Torres suffered months of incarceration in New York City in 1976 for refusing to respond to questions from a grand jury. Dozens of similar cases emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, including women of other ethnic or national origins like María Cueto and Silvia Baraldini. In some cases summonses to appear before a grand jury appeared to be punitive actions, like the December 1990 case of attorney Linda Backiel, who spent several months in prison when she refused to provide information on a client (rightfully arguing that client-lawyer communications are confidential). Backiel had recently provided legal counsel to a Puerto Rican independentista who was exonerated of all accusations. In the 1970s anticolonial activists engaged in a diversity of forms of protest and denunciation that resulted in new political prisoners. In July 4, 1978, for instance, Nydia Cuevas, a Puerto Rican woman, and Pablo Marcano occupied the Chilean consulate in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and demanded the freedom of Lolita Lebrón and the other political prisoners held at the time in U.S. prisons. Cuevas and Marcano were accused of “kidnapping a foreign official” and were sentenced to several years in prison, thus becoming political prisoners themselves. The conflict between Puerto Rican anticolonial organizations and repressive apparatuses of the 1960s and 1970s came to a climax in Chicago in the early 1980s with the arrest and incarceration of more than
twenty activists, in 1983 in New York, and in 1985 in Puerto Rico. Five women were among those arrested in April 1980 and subsequently incarcerated on a variety of state and federal charges that included, once again, “seditious conspiracy.” Dylcia Pagán, Ida Luz Rodríguez, Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, and Haydee Beltrán were joined in 1983 by Alejandrina Torres, who was accused of similar charges and also condemned to a lengthy sentence. These women and several men arrested at the time assumed the position that they were prisoners of war (POWs) and defiantly denounced the trials in a fashion that echoed the Olga Viscal trial of the 1950s. They were sentenced to terms ranging from fifty-five to ninety-eight years. Five of them regained their freedom nineteen years later (sixteen years in the case of Torres) as a result of an executive pardon signed by President Bill Clinton in September 1999 in response to a growing national and international campaign. Still in prison is Haydee Beltrán, who was not covered by the executive pardon. Another group of anticolonial fighters went to prison as a result of a series of arrests in August 1985 in Puerto Rico. The persons arrested, including two women, Luz M. Berríos and Ivonne Meléndez, were accused in connection with an action by the Puerto Rican clandestine organization los Macheteros (the machete wielders) in which $7.5 million in government-insured money was taken from a Wells Fargo armored truck. The charges included the appropriation and transportation of the money and using it to purchase toys that were distributed to poor Puerto Rican children during Three Kings Day. Luz M. Berríos served a five-year prison term, and Ivonne Meléndez, who spent more than a year in prison awaiting trial, was ultimately given a seven-year suspended sentence. The closing of the twentieth century witnessed a significantly different process of political incarcerations involving prisoners of conscience from all three political sectors in Puerto Rico: pro-independence, pro-statehood, and pro-commonwealth. With the expansion of civil disobedience as part of the campaign to stop U.S. Navy military exercises in Vieques, hundreds of persons engaging in nonviolent acts of protest have been detained and in many cases sentenced to terms ranging from several days to several months. Among those incarcerated are dozens of women, including teachers, students, artists, professionals, and even legislators. Because the Vieques struggle has generated significant attention and solidarity in the United States and internationally, the group has included several U.S. nationals who have assumed a share of the prison sentences. One of these was Jacqueline Jackson, the wife of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who spent ten days in the federal prison in Puerto Rico. Significantly, Norma Burgos, a pro-
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Puerto Ricans in Hawaii statehood leader and member of the Senate of Puerto Rico, and Lolita Lebrón, a pro-independence activist and former political prisoner, were both sentenced to sixty days in jail. The route of confrontation, rather than negotiation, that colonial authorities seem to have favored during the twentieth century produced a large number of political prisoners, many of them women. It is still unclear if the new century will bring repression, political violence, and new cohorts of political prisoners, or if U.S.–Puerto Rican political relations will finally be marked by negotiation, respect, and peaceful evolution. SOURCES: Acosta, Ivonne. 1987. La mordaza: Puerto Rico, 1948–1957. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Edil; Bosque-Pérez, Ramón, and José Javier Colón Morera, (Forthcoming) eds. Puerto Rico under Colonial Rule: Political Persecution and the Quest for Human Rights. Seijo Bruno, Miñi. 1989. La insurrección nacionalista en Puerto Rico, 1950. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Edil; Susler, Jan. 1998. “Unreconstructed Revolutionaries: Today’s Puerto Rican Political Prisoners/Prisoners of War.” In The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ramón Bosque-Pérez
PUERTO RICANS IN HAWAII In 1900 and 1901, 5,203 Puerto Rican men, women, and children immigrated to Hawaii. As a result of the annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines by the United States in 1898 and the 1899 hurricane San Ciriaco that left Puerto Ricans destitute and jobless, thousands were drawn to Hawaii. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1886 the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association (HSPA) needed workers other than the Chinese who could serve as cheap labor, and it recruited Puerto Rican labor. The last wave of Puerto Ricans who immigrated arrived in Hawaii in 1921. Eleven expeditions took place in 1900 and 1901. In the first migration 114 men, women, and children set out on the long, difficult journey. They traveled from Puerto Rico to New Orleans by steamship and then by railroad to San Francisco. Because of the difficulties they encountered, half the Puerto Ricans ran away from the expedition and made San Francisco their home. The remainder boarded a ship to Hawaii. Arriving in Honolulu, they were taken to a plantation in Lahaina, Maui, and were later distributed to other plantations on Maui and throughout the Hawaiian archipelago. Conditions on the sugar plantations were difficult. Puerto Ricans found that many of the promises the HSPA had made, such as better wages, bonuses, free
medical care, and education for their children, were broken. Puerto Rican men, women, and children worked long hours to make ends meet. Women earned less than men for their labor, were responsible for the children and domestic chores, and were not legally protected against domestic violence and other kinds of abuse. Although Hawaii was a territory of the United States when Puerto Ricans immigrated, it was not a democracy. An oligarchy of five elite families controlled Hawaii. To manage workers, they fostered inequality and instigated interethnic conflict. The HSPA intentionally recruited Puerto Ricans to break up successful union strikes carried out by Japanese workers in the early part of the twentieth century. After annexation in 1898 Congress prohibited contract labor that had tied earlier Japanese and Chinese immigrants to the land. Unlike these groups, Puerto Ricans were not subject to the labor contracts that had restricted the movement of earlier immigrants. However, annexation did not stop the sugar-plantation owners from attempting to constrain mobility. One of the ways planters did this was by agreeing that laborers could not move from one plantation to another without the planters’ consent. Despite difficulties, some were able to leave their assigned plantations to search for better working conditions. This enraged members of the HSPA, and they branded these hardworking Puerto Ricans as “irresponsible” and “lazy.” In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s Puerto Ricans worked hard to get rid of this stigma. In 1917 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, which changed their worker status in some respects but not in others. Although U.S. citizenship did not automatically improve social status or political power, it did grant them certain rights and privileges, such as the right to vote, increased mobility, and opportunities to obtain other jobs, especially in the defense industry. Initially the HSPA violated the civil rights of Puerto Ricans by denying them the right to vote, even though as citizens they were expected to fight in World War I. Manuel Sánchez-Olivieri, a court interpreter, challenged this breach of civil rights and won the case. Despite hardships and divisive tactics, workers managed to forge alliances and gain better working conditions. Daily contact and subsequent coalitions between Puerto Ricans and Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Koreans, and others led to a high rate of intermarriage and the development of a unique local culture (local refers to a Hawaiian-born person or the culture of Hawaiian-born and raised individuals), a fusion of different ethnic foods, practices, and languages. For example, Pidgin English, the lingua franca of Hawaii, grew out of the intense history of labor struggle engaged in by the various groups. By
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Puerto Ricans in Hawaii
Blase Camacho Souza’s college graduation, University of Hawaii, 1939. Courtesy of the Blase Camacho Souza Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
World War II Puerto Ricans had become part of a unique multicultural society that created its own local culture but maintained some of its members’ unique ethnic traditions. As Puerto Ricans (Boricuas Hawaiianos) moved out of the sugar plantations, their lives improved. In the face of globalization they maintained their ethnic identity by forming social and cultural organizations that enhanced their image and the quality of their lives. Since World War II Puerto Ricans have celebrated successes in the world of sports, such as baseball and boxing, and have occupied a broad range of jobs and professions that contribute to the development of the Hawaiian economy. The two primary Puerto Rican organizations in Hawaii today are the United Puerto Rican Association of Hawaii (UPRAH) and the Puerto Rican Heritage Society. UPRAH originated as a burial society. In addition to providing members with death benefits, it has always been a place to socialize and hold meetings. Members of UPRAH provide scholarships for college students. In 1999 UPRAH made an important contribution by publishing a cookbook, Recipes from the Heart of Hawaii’s Puerto Ricans, compiled by Julie Robley, her mother Laura Martin-Robley, and George García. Puerto Rican food became a mainstay of ethnic identity. Transcending Puerto Rican cuisine, pasteles (meat pies) and arroz con gandules—rice and pigeon peas (ganduli rice) are common dishes in Hawaii eaten by locals year-round. Throughout the years Puerto Rican women have been active leaders and members of UPRAH. Nancy Ortíz, a radio personality for more than thirty years and executive producer of the public radio program Alma Latina, was president of UPRAH from 1990 to 1993. Ortíz was first vice president in 2003. Dr. Norma Carr, also an active leader of UPRAH, is nationally recognized for her historical research on Puerto Ricans in
Hawaii. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she has served on countless committees and boards, including the Puerto Rican Centennial Commission, along with Nancy Ortíz and others. Both of these extraordinary women have made significant contributions to the Puerto Rican community in Hawaii. Blase Camacho Souza and Faith Evans established the Puerto Rican Heritage Society in 1983 to preserve, promote, and record Puerto Rican culture and heritage. They have also supported and encouraged the educational efforts of Puerto Ricans in Hawaii. Blase Camacho Souza, recently retired, was at the forefront of leadership all of her life and was an inspiration to the Puerto Rican community. She was president of the Puerto Rican Heritage Society between 1983 and 2000. A second-generation Puerto Rican born on the Big Island (Hawaii), she was the first local Puerto Rican to attain a degree in higher education. In 1947 she earned a master’s in library science. Among her many accomplishments, Camacho Souza was the project director of exhibits such as Boricua Hawaiiana: Puerto Ricans of Hawaii, Reflections of the Past; and Mirror, Change, and Continuity: Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Camacho Souza also chaired the Puerto Rican House at Hawaii’s Plantation Village. Appointed by President Reagan in 1982, Faith Patricia Ernesto Evans is the first female U.S. Marshal. She has held the highest official title of any Puerto Rican person in Hawaii. Evans, a woman of Puerto Rican and Portuguese descent, is an eminent leader who served in the state house of representatives for three terms. In 1990 she wrote the legislation to create a Puerto Rican Centennial Celebration Commission and was elected chair of the commission. She sits on many boards and commissions and continues her work with the Puerto Rican Heritage Society. She has served as its president or as a member of the board of directors since the society was founded. She is the re-
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Puerto Ricans in Hawaii cipient of numerous awards, and Woman’s Day magazine named her one of 350 outstanding women. Shirley Colón, a distinguished leader of Puerto Rican and Filipino descent, became president of the Puerto Rican Heritage Society of Hawaii in 2001. She is married to John Colón. They and other prominent families, such as the Montalbos, Diases, Pagáns, Almadovas, Sánchezes, and Rodrígueses, play a crucial role in sustaining, preserving, and promoting Puerto Rican culture. Many of these Puerto Rican families are joint members of both UPRAH and the Puerto Rican Heritage Society. Essentially they constitute first, second, and sometimes third generations that have blazed a legacy for upcoming Latino/a generations. Most of these individuals are over fifty, although a few of the women who are actively involved in these organizations are thirty or under. Puerto Rican women have played an active role in the Puerto Rican organizations on the other Hawaiian islands such as Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island (Hawaii). Among these outstanding women, Patricia Koga belongs to the Puerto Rican Heritage Society chapter on the Big Island and served on the Puerto Rican Centennial Commission. Eleanor Morita teaches Spanish in Waikea High School in Hilo on the Big Island and has worked extensively with young people. Dolores Bio was president of the Maui Puerto Rican Association. Eve Sumic and Eleanor Candelario served as presidents of the Kohala Puerto Rican Social Club. Dolores Bio and Eleanor Morita both served on the Centennial Commission.
A former teacher, Marion Ortíz Kittelson, of Puerto Rican and Portuguese heritage, is a community leader on the Big Island. In 1984 she served as chairperson of Boricua Hawaiiana, an exhibit that illustrated the history and contributions of Puerto Ricans to Hawaii’s culture. Boricua Hawaiiana was exhibited at the Bishop Museum and traveled to other parts of Hawaii. Between 1984 and 1985 Ortíz Kittelson was secretary and chairperson of the Puerto Rican Heritage Society of Hawaii. In 1985 she, in conjunction with Blase Camacho Souza, Milagros Hernández from Puerto Rico, and others, led a pilgrimage of Puerto Ricans from Hawaii to Puerto Rico. To honor their ancestors, they placed a plaque at the port of Guánica, from which the emigrants had departed. This pilgrimage was attended by then governor Rafael Hernández-Colón. Sports such as baseball and boxing have played an important role in the unity and cohesion of the Puerto Rican community in Hawaii. Currently, Puerto Ricans still play softball at Lanakila Park in Honolulu. In the 1930s and 1940s baseball became so popular that local Hawaiian companies offered jobs to the most popular athletes; sports served as an avenue of upward mobility for young people, particularly men. Even though women were not directly involved in all of the athletic sports, they played important roles in leading community efforts in this area. For example, between 1987 and 1988 Marion Ortíz Kittelson served as project chairperson for the Joey DeSa Baseball Field project. DeSa was a local Puerto Rican from Hawaii who played for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago
Benito Ortiz and his family in Kauai. Courtesy of the Blase Camacho Souza Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Puerto Ricans in Hawaii White Sox. Ortíz Kittelson’s organizing efforts contributed to the dedication of Lanakila Field to the late Joey DeSa. Although Puerto Rican women did not play baseball, they had their own softball leagues. One popular team was the Jolly Babes, which participated in a league in the 1950s. One of the great softball players was Hattie Torres (formerly Reyes), who still plays ball at Lanakila Park. Rene García is also remembered as an excellent softball player. In an era when women were not encouraged to play sports, the active participation of pioneers like Hattie Torres and other Puerto Rican women inspired young women in high schools and colleges to engage in sports. While there is no doubt that baseball teams provided ethnic continuity and identity for Puerto Ricans in Hawaii for more than two generations, it no longer holds the same social prestige or prospect of upward mobility that it once did. The women’s softball teams have virtually disappeared, and today softball has become almost exclusively a male sport. In the 1980s Nancy Ortíz, Raymond Pagán, Danny Almadova, and Paul Valentine started the Puerto Rican mixed softball league. Each team had a minimum of three women in the league. In 2000 Raymond Pagán organized an excellent historic photographic exhibit on Puerto Rican athletes in Hawaii at the United Puerto Rican Association headquarters. Music offered another venue for Puerto Rican solidarity. Known in Hawaii as jibaro or “kachi kachi,” Puerto Rican music has been preserved on this archipelago. Popular among Puerto Ricans and other locals, this music is played at parties, luaus, cultural celebrations, and shopping malls. Although local bands have traditionally been composed primarily of men, Puerto Rican women have contributed as musicians and vocalists. There were a few early all-women bands, such as the Rhumba Queens, led by Evarista Rodrígues. In 1945 there was also a male and female local band known as the Jolly Ricans. Some current vocalists and musicians include Jeannie Ortíz Bargas of the band El Leo Jarican Express and Joanna Mohika, the lead vocalist and guitar player for the band Second Time Around. At one time Chickie Dias was the main vocalist for Second Time Around. Two other outstanding female vocalists and performers are Julieta AcevedoStephens, who is from Puerto Rico, and Iwalani McArthur. Church choirs are popular for local Puerto Rican music, particularly among women. Among others, Chickie Dias currently sings in el Coro de San Miquel (the San Miquel Choir, directed by her husband Tony Dias) at St. Michael the Archangel Church in KailuaKona, the Big Island. Nancy Ortíz has been active in
the music world for several decades. It is impossible to measure the impact she single-handedly has had in preserving and promoting Puerto Rican culture and music in Hawaii through her radio program Alma Latina. Although recently others have followed in her footsteps, Nancy Ortíz remains the queen of Latin music in Hawaii for Puerto Ricans and other Spanish and non-Spanish-speaking communities. Younger Puerto Ricans are also active in the music scene. For example, third-generation Kathy Marzán, of Puerto Rican heritage on both sides of her family, is a professional dancer and produced the Boricuas de Hawaii–Puerto Rican Folklore dance company. She teaches young women traditional Puerto Rican dances like the plena and bomba and plays an important role in keeping Puerto Rican folk culture alive in Hawaii. Pua Valdéz, another young, talented Puerto Rican/ Polynesian woman who lives on Oahu, is a professional hula dancer. She has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It is significant and unusual to have such a large number of Puerto Rican female leaders in a relatively small community (30,005 Puerto Ricans out of slightly more than a million residents of Hawaii). These active and vibrant women married men who are deeply committed to the Puerto Rican community. In contrast to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, first- and second-generation Puerto Ricans have experienced extensive changes in Hawaii’s economy. In the span of less than 100 years Hawaii transformed from a plantation to a global tourist economy. They have worked hard and proudly watched their children grow. Their grandchildren have intermarried and are more “chop suey” (the colloquial term for mixed heritage in Hawaii) than they are. Like their grandchildren, the majority of them do not speak Spanish (although some of them have learned the language and are fluent in varying degrees); however, they are proud of their local identity and work passionately to preserve their Puerto Rican heritage. Collectively and individually these powerful women and their husbands have played a key role in conserving and transmitting a positive self-image and identity to future generations of Puerto Ricans by preserving their traditional food, music, and holidays and acting as positive role models through their aloha (Hawaiian hospitality), leadership, and community service. SOURCES: Bureau of the Census. 1993. 1990 Census of Population, Social and Economic Characteristics, Hawaii. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce; Camacho Souza, Blase. 1998. “Boricua Hawayano: The Puerto Rican Born in Hawai’i.” In Oral History Task Force, Extended Roots: From Hawaii to New York: Migraciones puertorriqueñas a los Estados Unidos. New York: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter
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Puerto Ricans in Hawaii College, CUNY, Camacho Souza, Blase, and Austin Dias. 2000. A Puerto Rican Poet on the Sugar Plantations of Hawai’i. Rev. ed. Honolulu: Puerto Rican Heritage Society; Carr, Norma. 1989. “The Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, 1900–1958.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii; Dias, Austin. 2001. “Carlo Mario Fraticelli: A Puerto Rican Poet on the Sugar Plantations of Hawai’i.” CENTRO: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College CUNY, 13, no. 1: 94–107; Lopez, Iris. 2001. “Introduction.” CENTRO:
Journal of Centro Estudios de Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY, 13, no. 1:78–81; ———. 2005. “Borinkis and Chop Suey: Puerto Rican Identity in Hawaii.” In The Puerto Rican Diaspora, ed. Carmen Whalen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; López, Iris and David Forbes. 2001. “Borinki Identity in Hawai’i: Present and Future.” Centro 13, no. 1:108–125.
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Iris López
Q q QUESADA, ALICIA OTILIA (1923– ) Born in 1923, Alicia Otilia Quesada descends from a pioneer Mexican Arizona family that founded the town of Wickenburg in 1863. Her maternal grandfather, Teodoro Ocampo, and maternal great-grandfather, Ramón Valencia, voted in 1894 to create the Wickenburg School District No. 9. The youngest daughter of Francisca Ocampo and José F. Quesada, a professional vaquero from La Paz, Baja California Sur, who worked at the Ocampo-Valencia ranch, Alicia grew up with one central task—to attend school. Her literate, bilingual parents espoused education and secured transportation—horses and cars—from the ranch to the town to ensure that their children maintained nearperfect attendance. Quesada was the 1941 high-school salutatorian and enrolled in Lamson Business College in Phoenix, fiftyeight miles southeast, where her sister Josephine already worked and lived with family friends. With shorthand, stenography, and bookkeeping skills, Alicia Quesada advanced immediately to a work-study job as an insurance company stenographer. In the spring of 1943 she temporarily withdrew from college to accept a full-time position for $5 a day as a stenographer for the Arizona House of Representatives, Sixteenth Legislature. She was assigned to Representatives Talmadge McGowan and Frank Robles, and her shorthand and typing speeds often landed her on the house floor to transcribe the public debates. When the session ended, she returned to college, but soon attorney Z. Simpson Cox recruited her as a legal secretary. In 1945 Cox opened a new firm with his father-in-law, retired Arizona Supreme Court justice Alfred Lockwood, and his daughter, Lorna E. Lockwood, who became the first woman appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court in 1961. Quesada joined the new firm and stayed until 1946, when she returned to Wickenburg to care for her ailing mother. During World War II Quesada participated in social organizations, most notably the Flamingo Club, a social circle of young, single, and employed Mexican American women. A founding member, Quesada
helped form the club after the Phoenix chapter of the United Service Organization (USO) denied her participation because its “quota was filled for persons of Spanish origin.” With twenty-six members, the Flamingo Club hosted regular activities, including “church functions,” picnics, parties for returning GIs, and even a formal ball at the Westward Ho Hotel. After her mother’s recovery Quesada returned to Phoenix in 1947, only to encounter similar discriminatory attitudes in employment. Private secretarial agencies declined “hiring Mexicans and Indians.” Instead, she returned to public service, garnering another stenography post at the Arizona legislature. She continued in state employment, working for the Arizona Industrial Commission and Arizona State University (ASU). From 1952 to 1954 she worked with Nicholas “Nick” Dragon, the regional director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. She often translated for Dragon, who did not know Spanish, when he met with Mexican and Latin American labor leaders. A modern “working woman,” Quesada sat for a civil service examination and secured an appointment at the Social Security Administration (SSA), where she worked for thirty years, from 1954 to her retirement in 1984. Hired as a clerk typist, she advanced through the administrative ranks to lead secretary. In 1967 Quesada earned national recognition when she won the SSA’s Commissioner’s Citation for “consistently being a superior and a dedicated public servant.” From 1952 to 1974 she traveled annually throughout Mexico with her friend Mavis Green. She credits those adventures with fortifying her cultural identity. Prevented from political participation during her civil service career, Quesada has dedicated her retirement to public advocacy. In 1987 she joined her sister Dora in a preservationist campaign and lawsuit to save Phoenix’s South Mountain Park and South Phoenix’s Chicano and Native American communities from gentrification and commercialization. When the lawsuit generated referenda, Quesada became a “precinct challenger” for the Democratic Party. She provided financial support to political campaigns and to the Guadalupe Organization, which resulted in the incor-
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Quesada, Dora Ocampo poration of the Yaqui Indian and Mexican immigrant community of Guadalupe, Arizona. Quesada passionately promotes the historical preservation and recuperation of Arizona’s Mexican American heritage. A former board member of Wickenburg’s Desert Caballeros Western Museum, she helped integrate Mexican Americans, their contributions, and their life experiences into permanent exhibits. Quesada family photos, anecdotes, and artifacts, including her mother’s limpiaplatos, tea towels made from flour sacks and fabric remnants, as well as her father’s self-styled horsehair lariats, comprise the ranching exhibits. In 2003 she joined the committee to save Wickenburg’s original Little Red School House, which opened in 1905 on land donated by Mexican American citizens, and where her mother and, later, she and her siblings attended school. Quesada oversees the Ocampo Family Papers, the largest collection of Mexican and Mexican American documents in Arizona, which is housed at ASU’s Chicano Research Collection. With her brother Eugene she also manages the endowed José F. Quesada and Francisca Ocampo Research Scholarship, an annual competition that underwrites Chicana/o studies at ASU. See also Education SOURCES: Ocampo Family Papers. Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe; Quesada, Alicia Otilia. 2004. Interview by Laura K. Muñoz, February 16; ———. “Incidents in the Life of Alicia Otilia Quesada.” Ocampo Family Papers. Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University Libraries, Tempe. Laura K. Muñoz
Dora Quesada in San Antonio, 1945. Courtesy of the Ocampo Family Collection, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
QUESADA, DORA OCAMPO (1921–1998) A quintessential politician, Dora Ocampo Quesada embraced many roles in her lifetime—nurse, teacher, political activist, and philanthropist. A native of Wickenburg, Arizona, and descendant of the Ocampos, a pioneer family that helped establish the town in 1863, Quesada devoted her life to preserving Arizona’s Hispanic heritage and to organizing for social justice issues affecting the state’s Mexican American communities. In 1989 she and her siblings endowed a research scholarship for the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) in honor of her parents, José Franco and Francisca Ocampo Quesada. The family visionary, she was instrumental in donating her family manuscripts and photographs to ASU’s Chicano Research Collection. The Ocampo Family Papers are the largest collection of Mexican and Mexican American historical documents in the state.
In her early adult life Quesada trained as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Phoenix and later graduated with the first bachelor of science degree in nursing issued by Arizona State University in 1951. Stationed at the White Sands Proving Ground nuclear first aid station in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and at the San Antonio Air Command Hospital, Kelly Air Force Base, she served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps Nurses Squad during World War II. Honorably discharged in 1946, she returned to Phoenix and continued her civilian career at several metropolitan hospitals, where she worked in tubercular, surgical, and obstetrics wards. In 1953 local newspapers featured a photo of Quesada, then the nurse in charge of the newborn nursery at Mesa’s Southside District Hospital, holding in her palms a baby girl born two months premature. From 1958 to 1980 Quesada changed careers and
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Quinceañera taught in the Phoenix and Tempe schools, most notably at the Veda B. Frank Elementary School in Guadalupe, a Pasqua Yaqui Indian and Mexican American community on the eastern edge of Phoenix’s South Mountain Park. Students recall her passion for promoting cultural awareness and pride in achievement despite large enrollments, up to forty-five children per class, and the legacy of racial inequity she encountered in those schools. She garnered funding for extracurricular music and literary programs, sponsoring el Folklórico Estudiantil de Guadalupe and producing Poems and Stories to Suit Each Kid’s Mood (1968), a collection written by her sixth-grade class. Teaching spurred Quesada’s political activism. Along with her sister Alicia and brother Eugene, she joined the Guadalupe Organization, a community group that incorporated the square-mile town and sued the Tempe Elementary School District No. 3 (TESD) for its failure to provide bilingual, bicultural education for their children. A union representative of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, Local 3312, Quesada often accompanied teachers in schooldistrict grievances involving racial discrimination, wage disputes, and free-speech issues. In the 1970s she contributed to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on desegregation in Tempe, served on the Mexican-American Educational Advisory Committee to the TESD, and chaired the Minority Elementary School Teachers Association, which promoted educational equality for minority and non-English-speaking youth. She also was a delegate candidate to the Arizona state Democratic Party convention in 1972. In retirement Quesada’s activism increased. As a citizen plaintiff in the Arizona Supreme Court case Hamilton v. Superior Court (1987), she lobbied against the commercial development of Phoenix’s South Mountain Park, the largest city park in the United States and sacred land of the Pasqua Yaqui. A longtime resident of South Phoenix, she and her siblings owned a home near the mountain’s eastern base and challenged the city’s right to develop the preserve without voter approval. The case resulted in a city charter amendment halting land trades after 1989. Despite the political heat, including threats to her home, Quesada continued as a preservationist, representing South Phoenix as a mayoral appointee to the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Citizens’ Advisory Committee. Days before her death the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame honored Quesada in a special exhibit on notable Arizona women. She served on the board of trustees for the Phoenix Museum of History and the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg. She maintained memberships in the Society of Hispanic Historical Ancestral Research, the Arizona Historical Society, the First Families of Arizona, American Legion Post 41
in Phoenix, and St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Wickenburg. See also Education; Military Service SOURCES: Leach, Anita Mabante. 1999. “Portal to the Past Website: A Link to Latino Heritage in Arizona.” The Arizona Republic, November 21, EV8; “Obituaries.” 1998. The Arizona Republic, September 24, D8; Ocampo Family Papers. Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe; “Park Preservationists Won’t Quit Golf Course Taking Shape.” 1987. The Phoenix Gazette, November 13, B1. Laura K. Muñoz
QUINCEAÑERA The quinceañera is a traditional Latin American coming-of-age ritual celebrated upon the fifteenth birthday (quince años) of Latina girls. The term can be used to indicate the celebration or to refer to the young woman herself. It is a rite of passage symbolizing the life cycle from childhood to adulthood. Traditionally in Latin American cultures it has served as a public announcement of the girl’s journey into womanhood, indicating that she is prepared to handle adult responsibilities such as public service to the poor, marriage, and motherhood. Girls were not allowed to wear makeup, go out alone, or date before their fifteenth birthday. Only after this particular birthday could men ask her father (or guardian) for permission to escort her to public outings and ask for her hand in marriage. Some anthropologists have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that the quinceañera is linked to an ancient indigenous tradition from Central America, but rather argue that it is an adaptation from the European coming-of-age ritual that was celebrated upon the girl’s eighteenth birthday. Others claim that its foundation is rooted in the Aztec custom of sending daughters from a noble family to schools called calmecac that prepared them for a life of religious service as a priestess or for marriage, while daughters from a working-class family went to a school called telpochalli, which prepared them for marriage. The particular life decision was to be made at the age of fifteen since the population had a life expectancy of thirty years. When the Spaniards conquered the Americas, all religions except Roman Catholicism were forbidden. It is believed that the Aztec and Roman Catholic traditions merged over time and evolved into the celebration of the quinceañera. The quinceañera can be as expensive, timeconsuming, and extravagant as a wedding; there are families that begin saving and planning for the quinceañera upon the birth of the baby girl, as can be found among Mexican Americans in the Southwest.
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Quinceañera The quinceañera is celebrated with a special Catholic mass (or a Protestant church ceremony), although it is not rooted in church traditions. At the church the parents walk the honoree down the aisle. Her corte de honor (court of honor) goes before her and consists of fourteen couples, aside from the birthday girl and her chambelán de honor (escort of honor); each couple represents one year of her life. The young men are known as chambelanes or caballeros (lords or gentlemen), and the young women are called damas (ladies). All present are dressed in formal attire. Although the color of the dress has traditionally been a pastel shade for honorees in Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, because white is reserved for the wedding day, the color of the dress varies. Nowadays many quinceañeras do wear white, particularly in the United States, Puerto Rico, and some areas in Mexico. The damas traditionally wear pastel-colored dresses, but this has also changed over time, with the exception that white is not worn by the damas. In a tradition that stems from the biblical and preSecond Vatican Council requirement of women wearing a covering over their heads, the quinceañera bears a crown of flowers on her head (either natural or dipped in wax) or a tiara/diadem made of glass or embedded with rhinestones. She carries a prayer book and rosary beads, as well as a bouquet of flowers in her hands. In the Mexican community the flowers are given to honor the Virgen de Guadalupe (the Virgin of Guadalupe), and the entire ceremony is performed in devotion to her. The honoree is also given jewelry and a gold medal that is religious in nature, usually bearing the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. In some ceremonies the celebrant is given a doll, which she either
hands down to her younger sister as a symbolic gesture of leaving childhood things behind or receives as the last doll she will ever receive. Another interpretation for this is that it is symbolic of the new role of motherhood that she will be facing as a woman. In most celebrations the quinceañera also wears flat shoes that are exchanged for shoes with heels to symbolize that she has entered womanhood. This usually occurs during the fiesta that follows the religious ceremony, which is celebrated with foods favored in that culture, live music, and dancing. The quinceañera’s first dance partner of the evening is her father, and they dance to a song titled “Linda Quinceañera” or a song with a slow tempo that has sentimental value and is appropriate for the occasion. The quinceañera celebration differs from one Latin American culture to the next; the U.S. Latina celebrations are distinct from those in Latin America as well, and some Latino/a cultures do not celebrate it at all. Much is known about the Mexican quinceañera because it is a very strong tradition there, perhaps because of its roots in the Aztec religion. In Cuba the quinceañera is celebrated with a fiesta, but not with a mass, because of the political fallout of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The fiesta’s centerpiece is the elaborately choreographed dances accompanied by the honoree stepping out of a huge clamshell. In El Salvador the celebration is known as mi fiesta rosa (my pink party). Some U.S. Latinas have opted to celebrate their quinceañera upon their sixteenth birthday, as is traditional among non-Latina U.S. American girls who celebrate their sweet sixteen, but in the traditional spirit and style of a quinceañera. Latino/a families celebrate the quinceañera as a
The sweet sixteen party is an American adaptation of the Latin American celebration of a young woman’s fifteenth birthday. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Quintanilla Pérez, Selena means of showering the birthday girl with attention and affection and to express pride in who she is and the promise of who she is to become. It also serves to reinforce cultural traditions in a new homeland so that she is firmly rooted in her identity, which will in turn enable her to bloom in her new roles and responsibilities as a woman. SOURCES: Cantú, Norma E. 2002. “Chicana Life-Cycle Rituals.” In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, ed. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Castro, Rafaela G. 2001. Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals, and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Davalos, Karen Mary. 1996. “La Quinceañera: Making Gender and Ethnic Identities.” Frontiers 16, nos. 2/3:101–127; King, Elizabeth. 1998. Quinceañera: Celebrating Fifteen. New York: Dutton Children’s Books. María Pérez y González
QUINTANILLA PÉREZ, SELENA (1971–1995) Selena Quintanilla Pérez (stage name “Selena”) was born in Lake Jackson, Texas, on April 16, 1971, to Abraham Quintanilla and Marcella Pérez. Although Selena followed in the footsteps of a generation of Tejana (Texas Mexican) women solo singers such as Lydia Mendoza, Chelo Silva, Laura Canales, and Patsy Torres and Tejana duets such as Carmen y Laura, las Hermanas Cantú, las Hermanas Gongora, and numerous others, she made significant strides in transforming the sound of Tejano music and Tejano popular culture in general. Selena began singing at the age of eight when her father Abraham discovered her strong vocal capabilities. Abraham was the major musical influence in the family, having been a member of the doo-wop band los Dinos as a young man. Selena’s father quickly engaged the rest of Selena’s older siblings: her brother A. B. became lead guitarist and producer of most of her music, and her sister Suzette became the only Tejana drummer within the contemporary surge in Tejano music. Originally the group was country-and-western influenced and went by the name of Southern Pearl. Selena gained her earliest musical experience by singing in the family Tex-Mex restaurant business, Papagallo’s. She made one of her first live television appearances on The Johnny Canales Show in Corpus Christi, Texas. In 1994 Hispanic Magazine estimated her worth at $5 million. Nonetheless, Selena continued to make her home in the working-class district of Molina in Corpus Christi, living next door to her parents. Selena’s influences included country-and-western, English-language pop, old-school, and especially
African American music, including R&B, funk, and disco. Among the influential artists in Selena’s young life were Donna Summer, Cool and the Gang, and Janet Jackson. Although most of the media attention paid to Selena had to do with her beauty, sexuality, and youthful impact on the Tejano music scene, Selena y los Dinos musically transformed the Texas Mexican music scene. With their rendition of songs such as “La carcacha,” “Bibi bidi bom bom,” and “Techno cumbia,” Tejano cumbias would never be the same. In Selena’s songs young Tejanas/Latinas found a cultural site for articulating movement along with sound, and for the gendered particularities of expressing love and pain, as well as sexuality and passion. Among Selena’s biggest accomplishments was the success she attained within the Tejano music industry itself. Not only did she break open the space for young women of her generation to follow in her footsteps, but she took Tejano music to locations it had never been before. Although Tejano groups such as la Mafia and Mazz had established fans of the music in Central America, northern Mexico, and Mexico City, Selena y los Dinos translocated the unique cultural production of Tejano music to Puerto Rico, Central America, and throughout Mexico. At the time of her death Selena y los Dinos had scheduled tours for Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela. To her credit, Selena, unlike any other Tejano music artist, both transformed and translocated what had originally been a regionally based musical sound. Selena y los Dinos began its recording career in the mid- to late 1980s with Tejano record labels GP, Cara, Manny, and Freddie Records. Its albums included Alpha (1986), Dulce amor (1988), Preciosa (1988), Selena y los Dinos (1990), Ven conmigo (1991), Entre a mi mundo (1992), Selena Live (1993), Amor prohibido (1994), and Dreaming of You (released posthumously in 1995). In 1987 Selena won the Tejano Music Award for Female Entertainer of the Year, the first of many Tejano Music Awards in the years to come. After her performance at the Tejano Music Awards in 1989, a steady flow of Tejano music artists began to sign with EMI Latin Records. With its release of Ven conmigo in 1991, Selena y los Dinos established its dominance in the music industry and never relinquished its top position. With the 1992 release of Entre a mi mundo, Selena became the first Tejana to sell more than 300,000 albums. Selena’s significance in contemporary U.S. popular music was recognized in 1994 when she won the Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album for Selena Live. Moreover, Selena’s creative talents were vast, particularly in the area of material aesthetic production. Selena worked diligently at her talents in clothing design, usually designing and sewing her own costumes. A number of drawings and sketches indicate an early
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Quintero, Luisa goal to develop a clothing line of her own. Selena originally named the clothing line Moon (the translation of the Greek name Selena). In 1992 her dream became reality when she started her own clothing line. That resulted in the opening of the first Selena Etc. BoutiqueSalon in Corpus Christi, Texas, which was followed by a boutique in San Antonio. That same year she married the lead guitarist of her band, Chris Pérez. Selena’s tragic death on March 31, 1995, at the hands of fan-club manager Yolanda Saldívar became one of the most significant historical markers in the public memory of Latinas/os in the United States during the last several decades of the twentieth century. The magnitude of media coverage of the death of this contemporary Mexican American music artist was unprecedented. The New York Times reported the event in a front-page story, and there was brief coverage on nationwide news programs such as Dateline NBC, People magazine ran a commemorative issue on her life that sold out in a matter of hours. In fact, it was this mostly Latina/o consumer response to the People magazine commemorative issue that spawned the creation of People en Español. Musicians also honored her life in music. Familia RMM, a group of Caribbean artists including Celia Cruz, Manny Manuel, Yolanda Duke, and Tito Nieves, produced the CD Recordando a Selena, a collection of some of Selena’s most popular songs reproduced as salsa and merengue tunes. The all-female Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles also included in its CD Solo Tuya a song tribute titled “Homenaje a Selena.” In the years following her death Selena has been remembered through music television tributes by Johnny Canales, VH-1, and El Show de Cristina. Her life has been captured in the Hollywood production Selena and in the Broadway musical Siempre Selena. Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo produced and directed the video documentary Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. Today Corpus Christi, Texas, still entertains a steady flow of fans who visit her grave site, her statue by the ocean, the Selena Boutique, and the museum established in her honor at Q Productions, the family recording studios. SOURCES: Calderón, Robert. 2000. “All over the Map: La Onda Tejana and the Making of Selena.” In Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends, ed. Daniel R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and Maria Herrera-Sobek. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Coronado, Raul, Jr. 2001. “Selena’s Good Buy: Texas Mexicans, History y Selena Meet Transnational Capitalism.” Aztlán 26, no. 1:59–100; Paredez, Deborah. 2002. “Remembering Selena, Remembering Latinidad.” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (March): 63–84; Patoski, Joe Nick. 1996. Selena: Como la flor. Boston: Little, Brown; Vargas, Deborah R. 2002. “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom: Selena and Tejano Music in the Making of Tejas.” In Latino/a Popular Culture, ed. Michell Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero. New York: New York University Press; ———. 2002. “Cruzando Frontejas: Remapping Se-
lena’s Tejano Music Crossover.” In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, ed. Norma Cantú and Olga NaajeraRamírez. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Deborah Vargas
QUINTERO, LUISA (1903–1987) More than a decade after Luisa Quintero’s death, reporters at the El Diario/La Prensa newspaper still met devoted readers of her “Marginalia” column who remembered her impassioned writings and her active involvement in New York City politics. The daughter of Engracia Serrano and Miguel Salgado, Luisa Amparo Salgado was born in the rural town of Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. In a 1952 Mother’s Day article for the weekly Ecos de Nueva York, the journalist included a rare reference to her childhood years: “It is piercing, the yearning for those long-gone days when, with our sister Pepita, we were led by the hand by that beautiful, young, almost childish, happy mother, who was loved by all and indulgently cared for by our father, many years older than her. Then, the agonizing memory of losing her at the hands of a treacherous heart malady, in the prime of her youth; and remembering that it was our name— Luisa Amparo—the last that her lips pronounced on that never-forgotten Palm Sunday, there in our ToaBaja.” After completing studies at a Gregg School in San Juan, Quintero worked for Cafeteros de Puerto Rico, a coffee growers’ cooperative, and was a secretary for poet Luis Llorens Torres in 1926. In December 1928, two months after arriving in New York aboard the steamship Carabobo, she was hired by the newspaper La Prensa, where she initially worked in the advertising department and wrote for a lifestyle section under the pseudonym Beatriz Sandoval. During subsequent decades she continued working intermittently for La Prensa while writing and editing at other publications, such as the United Nations Spanish Bulletin, and kept working for La Prensa after it merged with its rival newspaper, El Diario, in 1963. She was also employed as an assistant publicist by Columbia Pictures. Quintero was one of the founders of New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade and helped establish ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Forum, and other community organizations. But she is perhaps best remembered for “Marginalia,” a daily column that covered wide-ranging themes, including listings of community events, Puerto Rican history, religion and culture, and, above all, politics. In her newspaper column Quintero kept a keen eye on the city’s leaders, reminding them of their obligations toward the growing Puerto Rican population. “We keep waiting, Mr. Beame,” was Quintero’s message when Mayor Abraham Beame was making the first ap-
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Quintero, Luisa
Luisa Quintero’s impassioned writing made her an important journalist for the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
pointments of his administration. When it appeared that Terence Cardinal Cooke would not continue his predecessor’s tradition of participating in the Fiesta de San Juan Bautista, “Marginalia” readers were asked to send protest telegrams to the cardinal. Quintero is credited also with a leading role in the campaign to revoke the death sentence against Salvador Agrón, convicted in the famous Capeman murder case. Many rising Puerto Rican politicians who later became prominent personalities were championed by
Quintero in her writings. Probably none received more favorable treatment in her influential column than Herman Badillo, whom the “Marginalia” creator promoted to the point of asking readers to send monetary contributions to his mayoral campaign fund. In addition to writing about politicians, Quintero sometimes worked for them, participating, for instance, in the senatorial campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, who was said to have felt great affection for her. A founding member of the New York committee of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, Quintero often wrote in favor of causes related to Puerto Rican independence. Some of the articles written by Quintero and her colleagues hint at a difficult personal life. She married fellow journalist José A. “Babby” Quintero in June 1930. The couple divorced three decades later. Upon his death in 1968, Luisa Quintero wrote, “We cannot say that our union was serene and quiet as that of many couples. We had happiness, pain, laughter and tears, enthusiasm and dedication to the good of the community and to the effort of creating honest and constructive journalism.” From her first marriage with Pedro Echeandía of San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, she had one son, Luis Alberto Echeandía Salgado. In 1972 more than 300 people, including many of the city’s political leaders, attended a dinner in honor of Luisa Quintero at Lincoln Center. A few years later Quintero suffered a stroke and stopped writing. She died at St. Luke’s Hospital in August 1987. In an essay about Puerto Rican newspapers published in that year, sociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick wrote, “For a generation Luisa Quintero’s influence was outstanding. No one has emerged to take her place.” See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Atanay, Reginaldo. 1987. “Muere la periodista Luisa Quintero.” El Diario/La Prensa, August 19; Fitzpatrick, Joseph. 1987. “The Puerto Rican Press.” In The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, ed. Sally M. Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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María Vega
R q RACE AND COLOR CONSCIOUSNESS Among Latinas and Latinos in the United States, race and color consciousness are historical fictions that profoundly influence the concrete material opportunities and outcomes persons of dark skin color enjoy. Since the beginning of the twentieth century biologists and anthropologists worldwide have repudiated the concept of race as patently false. It lives on, nevertheless, having taken distinct meanings and forms over the course of time. Skin color, the most commonly recognized aspect of race, is the result of physical adaptation to environment, devolved genetically from one generation to the next. In the Hispanic world race as a concept was first used to explain the putative inferiority of the peoples Spaniards encountered in Africa and the Americas. The word race entered European languages at the beginning of the sixteenth century in tandem with voyages of discovery and encounter to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. European residents in agrarian societies during the Middle Ages had a clear understanding of the role of breeding and heredity in livestock production, and from such understandings they borrowed the concept of race to explain outward physical differences in human appearance, particularly that based on physical color. No one has yet established the exact etymology of the word race. Cambridge anthropologist J. C. Trevor maintains that race derives from the Latin ratio, originally a word used in the classification of animals into “species,” “kind,” and “nature.” The Spanish word raza, the Italian razza, the French race, and the Portuguese raça also came from the Latin ratio. Skin color as a physical assessment of a person’s social worth is unique and yet quite modern in human history as a form of differentiation and discrimination. Scholars of earlier periods in world history are in general accord that while well-known antipathies and stereotypes, due mainly to religious differences, deeply structured how peoples interacted with each other, no real textual evidence has yet been found in Greek, Roman, or
Jewish sources showing low esteem for peoples with dark skin and high esteem for lighter complexions. The particular evolution of the concept of race in Latin America results from the conquest and colonization of America’s Indians and the importation of black African slaves. By the time Christopher Columbus sailed westward seeking a shorter route to India, the dark-skinned peoples of Africa were widely known to Europeans. Beginning with the Crusades and then with the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492, Spain’s Christian kings waged vicious war against the infidel followers of Mohammed, who were marked by their physical color. While religious difference marked the Moors as infidels, it was color that distinguished the black slaves bought and sold by African kings and European merchants. For the native populations of the Americas who became known to the Spaniards as Indians, a similar notion of religious difference was the principal basis upon which the conquerors racialized the conquered. The Spaniards relied on a number of metaphors to describe the difference between conquerors and conquered, namely, that they were cristianos (Christians) and the Indians paganos (pagans), that they were gente de razón (people of reason regarding the precepts of the Christian faith), and the Indians were gente sin razón (people lacking such reason), and that they were cristianos viejos (old Christians) and long protectors of the faith, while the Indians were cristianos nuevos (new Christians), recent converts who were flaccid in their faith. These “us-them” distinctions were thoroughly imbued with notions of race. The Spaniards were Christians, rational and “civilized” men who by force of arms had won titles, honors, tribute, and lands, and were known by their fair skin, their fine clothing, and their refined demeanor and comportment. The vanquished Indians were heathens, irrational, lacking intelligence, mere children before the conquistadores and their laws, and easily recognized by their crude behavior, their physical features, and particularly their dark skin.
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Race and Color Consciousness In medieval Spain families of nobility and wealth guarded their heredity with great care, maintaining their limpieza de sangre, their blood purity, by avoiding mixture with Jew, Moors, and others deemed infamous and vile. In Spanish America men of honor similarly protected their bloodlines against pollution by Indians, half-breeds, and persons of despicable birth, closely monitored the behavior of their daughters, prohibited marriage to racial inferiors, and tolerated cohabitation, but profoundly stigmatized the racially mixed progeny of such unions. The conquering soldiers who accompanied Spanish expeditions to the Americas were largely single men between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five. By European rights of conquest these men could lay claim to the spoils of the land. Because the Indians resisted and did not immediately submit, the soldiers waged wars of blood and fire, unmercifully unleashing horses, guns, and dogs against them. Rapes and acts of sexual violence accompanied every military campaign. Indeed, the conquest of America was a sexual conquest of Indian women further compounded through the sexual exploitation of female slaves. The biological legacy of such conquests was the mixed-race children begotten of acts of violence and domination. To curtail the high levels of sexual violence against indigenous women, the Catholic clergy urged soldiers to take Indian brides. Some did. The majority preferred non-marital liaisons with Indian women through concubinage and cohabitation, especially with domestic servants and female African slaves. Casual encounters, promiscuity, and rapes, as well as stable unions, greatly expanded the number of persons of mixed racial ancestry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From roughly 1500 to the early 1700s the Spanish Crown tolerated unions between Indian women and Spanish men in the Americas as a necessary evil it hoped would stabilize colonial society, improve trade and tributary relations with the Indians, cement military alliances, and promote the extension of missionary work. But prejudice against these mixed unions and particularly against the children of mixed racial ancestry was always present and intensified in the late eighteenth century when French-inspired Enlightenment ideas about social hierarchies diffused from Spain into the colonies. In colonial society children of mixed racial ancestry were despised as vibrant symbols of defilement and were often treated as outcasts by Spaniards, Indians, and Africans alike. Most were born or presumed to have been born of sinful relationships and illicit liaisons between Spanish men and Indian or African women. Simply put, these children were bastards of il-
legitimate birth and were so regarded in custom and law. In 1542 the Spanish legal theorist Juan de Solórzano Pereira noted about mestizo and mulatto children that “generally they are born in adultery and other ugly and illicit unions, because there are few Spaniards of honor who marry Indians or Negroes. This defect of their birth makes them infamous to which are added the stain of different color and other vices.” For Solórzano, racial mixing was synonymous with illegitimacy and infamy. From 1500 to roughly 1700 the castas (mixed-blood populations) in Spanish America seem to have been easily amalgamated, albeit marginally, either into their mothers’ communities or into Spanish colonial society. Mestizaje or miscegenation nevertheless became the norm between the dominant Spaniards and Indians and Africans, both slave and free, resulting in high levels of illegitimacy, particularly throughout the eighteenth century. The children born of interracial unions and liaisons were carefully classified and ranked hierarchically according to the degree of putative mixing between the races through elaborate legal color categories and codes, known generically as the Régimen de Castas. A Spaniard and an Amerindian mother engendered a mestizo. A Spaniard and a black woman begot a mulatto. A mestizo and a Spanish woman produced a castizo. A Spaniard and a mulatto woman produced a morisco. A Spaniard and a morisco woman produced an albino, and so on. Precise legal color categories existed for most known combinations among Spaniards, Amerindians, and Africans, and these distinctions were imagined as rooted in blood and visually manifested in phenotype and color. The racial stereotypes that were deemed to be created through different degrees of racial mixing among Spaniards, Indians, and Africans can still be seen in the casta paintings from colonial Mexico and Peru, which depict the ideal physical types created through miscegenation. Rising levels of illegitimacy in the 1700s throughout Spanish America were met with heightened racial prejudice against persons of mixed ancestry. In the eighteenth century “pure” Spaniards forcefully articulated elaborate explanations of their own superiority and, conversely, of the inferiority of castas. To guarantee that such notions were enforced through law, whenever a person stood before a civil or ecclesiastical court, his or her calidad, literally, his or her “quality” or social standing, was one of the first facts that entered the written record. A person’s calidad usually began with age, sex, and place of residence, followed by the race and birth status, whether legitimate or illegitimate. The type and extent of punishment one could possibly receive was based on this information. Spaniards could not be given vile forms of punishment.
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Race and Color Consciousness Indians, by virtue of their childishness and irrationality, could not be held accountable for certain acts, particularly heresy. Persons of mixed racial ancestry were held accountable, punished, differentially taxed, and prohibited from ostentatious displays of pomp and wealth. Because of the high levels of illegitimacy created through racial mixing or miscegenation during the eighteenth century, physical color distinctions in the population rapidly began to blur, allowing individuals to pass as members of higher or lower castes, depending on what was most in their favor. As the population of Spanish America numerically increased in the eighteenth century, people began to move about more freely. Prestige hierarchies based on color became much more difficult to maintain and even more difficult to enforce. The Spanish Crown during the reign of King Charles III (1759–1788) reinforced legal color distinctions, demanded their mention in all legal proceedings, and promulgated a number of laws that strengthened the power of parents over their children, particularly in the selection of marriage partners. The state reasoned that if parents controlled the selection of marital partners for their children, social hierarchies and the racial integrity of elite families would be maintained. Had the Crown not been strapped for cash and resorted to the selling of titles and the whitening of stained lineages, the laws might have worked. By the early 1800s the biological mixing that had taken place in Spanish America was so extensive that legal color codes were impossible to enforce, to say nothing of visually recognizing distinct physical types or races, except perhaps at the “pure” extremes. As one Spanish American province after another declared its independence from Spain between 1810 and 1821, legal color categories were abolished. Color consciousness remained, incorporating distinct, often class meanings that varied significantly according to regional histories and demography. The particular racial understandings and color consciousness that exist today in each of the Latin American republics, former colonies of Spain, can largely be explained through the historic demographic mix among Indians, Europeans, and Africans during the colonial period. Latin America is generally thought of as composed of three racial regions: Afro-Latin America, mestizo America, and Euro-Latin America. Each region incorporates an understanding of race as a hierarchical continuum of color in which the lighter one’s skin, the higher one’s status, the darker the skin, the lower. Afro-Latin America largely comprises the Caribbean islands and northeastern Brazil, where the indigenous population at the time of conquest was quickly deci-
mated through violence, disease, and Spanish labor demands. African slaves were imported in large numbers to these areas precisely to provide the needed labor for plantation agriculture. Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean republics are thought of as constituting mestizo America. At the time of the Spanish conquest immense indigenous populations existed in the Andean highlands, central Mexico, and Guatemala. While disease and exploitation equally ravaged the native populations gathered here, enough of them survived to meet the labor needs of Spanish settlers. African slaves were also imported into these areas, but in much smaller numbers and in more specifically restricted ecological zones. These were the low-lying coastal areas of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador, where plantation agriculture prospered, but where the indigenous population was either too limited numerically or too poorly suited physically for the rigors of toil in hot humid climes. In these countries the African population blended into the whole and was particularly erased with the rise of nationalist ideologies in the twentieth century that glorified the disappearance of the original races of the conquest and the birth of a new hybrid mestizo race that united the nation. Finally, Argentina, Uruguay, southern Chile, and southern Brazil are often classified as Euro-Latin America. These places neither had dense indigenous populations at the moment of colonization nor developed coastal plantation economies that required African slaves in large numbers. These countries were largely populated during the nineteenth century through European immigration and for that reason largely think of themselves as racially white. The racial system that evolved in Latin America is quite distinct from the one that developed in the United States. In those parts of Latin America that have been characterized here as mestizo and Afro-Latin, racial categories and color consciousness have long been measured along a continuum through gradations that recognize hybridity and fluidity. Indeed, in the twentieth century some Latin American countries such as Mexico and Ecuador celebrated their mixed mestizo character and the simultaneous disappearance of “pure” races. This polychromatic system contrasts sharply with the hegemonic monochromatic racial order of the United States, which sharply differentiates only two races, black and white. In the United States any taint of black racial ancestry automatically made a person black, but the converse was not possible. Although in Latin America the mestizo emerged in the twentieth century as a positive symbol of amalgamation into which all persons could fit, immigrants in the United States who did not easily fit the black/white di-
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Race and Color Consciousness chotomy were progressively placed into a new category of nonwhite that developed in the nineteenth century to categorize ambiguous racial classification of Asian and Latin American immigrants. Race lives on in contemporary times as a significant divide among U.S. Latinos for a number of complicated reasons. Their ancestors came as colonizers to areas that eventually became parts of the United States, were themselves colonized by the United States starting in 1836, and, particularly in the twentieth century, became active agents in the global labor flows that brought millions of Latin American immigrants to the United States. The scholarly literature on the racialization of Latinos in the United States is divided into two discrete traditions. The first addresses Spanish colonial ideas and practices as they developed out of conquered societies. The second treats Latinos as a population incorporated into the United States through conquest and annexation, beginning with the Texas Revolution of 1836 and continuing with the U.S.-Mexican War of 1848 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion into Mexican territory was premised on racist assumptions embedded in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Historians R. Reginald Horsman (1981) and Frederick Merk (1963) make clear that American state nationalism was deeply anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, was anchored in a republican ideology that disparaged feudal and monarchical forms of government, and was wedded to an evolutionary science that deemed it the duty of superior races to eradicate inferior mongrel ones such as the Mexican. Sentiments akin to these are easy to access in such best-selling travel and adventure narratives as James O. Pattie’s The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie (1831), Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies (1844), and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). Studies show that Americans depicted Mexicans as a breed of cruel and cowardly mongrels, indolent, ignorant, and superstitious and given to cheating, thieving, gambling, drinking, cursing, and dancing. The duty of the United States was to rescue such “greasers” from themselves. Indeed, this became a justification for war against Mexico in 1846 and the search for territory to expand American slavery. Mexicans residing in the United States after territorial acquisition lost their lands and power and were residentially segregated, politically disenfranchised, and racialized as nonwhite. Although Anglos viewed Mexicans as a unitary and inferior conquered race, Mexicans saw themselves as complexly stratified by color, class, and generation and constantly emphasized these distinctions in their self-representations. How a system of racial domination that thought of the color line as rigidly divided into black and white
reconciled a Latino population that saw gradations and shades of color is the intriguing story told by Tomás Almaguer in his Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994). He shows how Mexicans occupied an intermediate space in the American racial order, the bottom of which was occupied by Indians, Asians, and blacks. By virtue of Spanish origin, Mexicans could legitimately claim a European genealogy, a Latin-derived language, belief in a Christian god, and thus Caucasian and white status. Neil Foley (1998) points out that while Mexicans may have been considered legally white, in practice they were treated as nonwhites. The term “Mexican” in popular usage from 1870 to the 1950s was persistently deemed a nonwhite racial status. This point was clearly underscored in 1930 when the U.S. census listed Mexicans as a separate race. The politics of racial categories used by the U.S. census over time to describe Latinos is an excellent entry point into the emergence of the “nonwhite” as an inferior and stigmatized racial group between blacks and whites. Because Latinos were first annexed into the United States and ever since have continued to arrive as immigrant laborers and political refugees, their polychromatic understanding of race suffers in the United States. While gradations of color and hybridity are celebrated in Latin American national cultures, in the United States the hegemony of the black/white binary forces Latinos to identify with American taxonomies of race and to discriminate against persons of their own ancestry with darker skin. In the contemporary United States skin color carries significant weight in social outcomes among Latinos of ethnic Mexican and Caribbean origins. Sociologists Edward Telles and Edward Murguía (1990) tested the widely reported observation that darkerskinned Chicanos were economically disadvantaged in the United States. Using the 1979 Chicano National Sample drawn from the Southwest, they asked whether those individuals rated as light skinned by interviewers had higher average earnings than those who were darker. Since the light-skinned group was too small for sound statistical comparisons, it was merged with a group judged to be of medium skin color, and a comparison was then made with the darkest group. The researchers found that there was a strong tendency for the lighter group to earn more than the darker one, and they argued that this could not be explained in terms of educational differences, for the two groups had similar levels of education. Carlos Arce, Edward Murguía, and W. Parker Frisbie (1987) similarly concluded that phenotype—defined in this study as dark skin and Indian facial features— correlated rather closely with socioeconomic status among Chicanos, a result Clara E. Rodríguez (1990,
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Ramírez, Emilia Schunior 1991) also found among U.S. Puerto Ricans with dark skin and “African” features. Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff (1998) tested a similar hypothesis about the relationship between color and class among Latinos by using two samples composed mainly of elites. The first consisted of photographs of Latino directors of Fortune 500 companies. The second sample was photos of the 188 individuals identified by Hispanic Business as the “top influential” Latinos in 1993 and 1994. Two independent panels of reviewers concluded that the Fortune 500 Latino directors were overwhelmingly “white” or “Anglo.” About 50 percent of the influential Latinos were deemed “white,” but the rest were readily identified as “Hispanic.” Social scientists also found that the Latino experience of residential segregation in the United States significantly increased as one’s skin color darkened from apparent mixed race or black ancestry. Nancy Denton and Douglas Massey (1989) found the effects of race on housing discrimination to be most pronounced among Puerto Ricans of this origin. The biological fiction of race lives on, having first been used to discriminate against the conquered residents of Latin America and Africa in the sixteenth century, later to justify the conquest of such putative inferiors as the mongrel Mexicans in the nineteenth century, and to limit the opportunities persons of dark skin color enjoy in the Americas to this day. See also Mestizaje SOURCES: Almaguer, Tomás. 1994. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: University of California Press; Arce, Carlos, Edward Murguía, and W. Parker Frisbie, 1987. “Phenotype and Life Chances among Chicanos.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences. 9: 19–32; Denton, Nancy A., and Douglas C. Massey, 1989. “Racial Identity among Caribbean Hispanics: The Effects of Double Minority Status on Residential Segregration.” American Sociological Review 54: 790–808; Foley, Neil. 1997. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1989. “Aztlán, Montezuma, and New Mexico The Political Uses of American Indian Mythology.” In Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rodolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; ———. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford: Stanford University Press; Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Meléndez, Edwin, Clara E. Rodríguez, and Janis Barry Figueroa, eds. 1991. Hispanics in the Work Force. New York: Plenum Press; Merk, Frederick. 1963. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. New York: Knoph; Rodríguez, Clara E. 1990. Puerto Ricans: Immigrants and Migrants, A Historical Perspective. Washington, DC: Portfolio Project; Solaún, Maurico, and Sidney Kronus. 1973. Discrimination without Violence: Mis-
cegnation and Racial Conflict in Latin America. New York: Wiley; Telles, Edward E., and Edward Munguía. 1990. “Phenotype, Discrimination, and Income Differences Among Mexican Americans.” Social Science Quarterly 71:682–696; Zweigenhaft, Richard, and G. William Domhoff. 1998. Diversity in the Power Elite. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ramón A. Gutiérrez
RAMÍREZ, EMILIA SCHUNIOR (1902–1960) Born in Sam Fordyce, Texas, in 1902, Emilia Schunior Ramírez was one of the few Mexican American women professors before the 1970s. Her parents were George J. Schunior and Angela (Vela) Schunior. She grew up in Mission and Edinburg, Texas, and graduated from Edinburg High School in 1919. She studied at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos and at the University of Texas at Austin and obtained her B.A. at the College of Arts and Industries in Kingsville. At Southwest she was referred to as “Schuniorita.” Her college education was a rarity for Mexican Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1921, at the age of nineteen, she married Rafael R. Ramírez, and the couple had three children. As a married teacher with children, she was an anomaly for her times. She taught in schools in Roma, Rio Grande City, Edinburg, La Joya, and Pharr, all southern Texas communities, and she served as a principal in Rio Grande City and Roma. In Roma she was offered the position of superintendent but declined. Ramírez obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of Texas in 1950. She attended summer school while her son Alfonso pursued his undergraduate degree at the same university. Her thesis was a study of more than 1,000 children in Rio Grande communities, but had the unfortunate title “Wetback Children in South Texas.” Her mentor was the legendary education professor George I. Sánchez, a pioneer in bilingual education. In 1952 she became an assistant professor of Spanish at Pan American College (now the University of Texas, Pan American) in Edinburg. In 1954 she was asked to contribute a chapter to a history of Hidalgo County. She wrote the chapter, but the book was never published. In 1971 her son Alfonso published the work, Ranch Life in Hidalgo County after 1850, a rare account of Mexican-origin women in the late nineteenth century based on interviews with twelve women and three men. She discussed early settlers, folk beliefs, festivities, holidays, and the landscape. Active politically, she ran for the position of school superintendent of Starr County in 1950, but ironically lost to her cousin’s husband. She was a member of the Pan American Round Table, the Texas State Teachers
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Ramírez, Sara Estela Association, and the National Education Association. In 1960 she represented the Round Table at a meeting of the Inter-American Alliance in Guatemala City. She died of pancreatic cancer in 1960 at the age of fiftyeight. A dormitory at the University of Texas, Pan American, campus bears the name of this early Tejana historian and college professor. See also Education SOURCES: Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Emilia W. Schunior Ramirez.” In New Handbook of Texas 5:423–424. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; Ramírez, Emilia Schunior. 1971. Ranch Life in Hidalgo County after 1850. Edinburg, TX: New Santander. Cynthia E. Orozco
RAMÍREZ, SARA ESTELA (1881–1910) Praised as la Musa Tejana by fellow writer and friend Jovita Idar, Sara Estela Ramírez was born in the Mexican state of Coahuila in 1881. Although she lost her mother as a young child, the notable activist, poet, and prolific writer managed to finish her public education in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and to attain a graduate degree in teaching from the Ateneo Fuentes in Saltillo, Mexico. In 1898, fifty years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, at the age of seventeen, Sara Estela Ramírez relocated to Laredo, Texas, where she took a position as a Spanish teacher at the Seminario Laredo and acted as well as a key political supporter of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) that arose in opposition to Porfirio Díaz’s regime in Mexico. From Laredo, young and strong-willed, Ramírez offered her oratory, writing skills, and political support to the PLM and volunteered her home as the Texas headquarters for the party during a time in which political agitators were harassed and arrested. Working to advance the cause of the Mexican Revolution through economic and political means and social writings that boosted Mexican heritage and addressed the needs of the Tejano community in Laredo, Ramírez printed essays, speeches, and poems in the local Spanishlanguage papers El Demócrata Fronterizo and La Crónica and also published her writings in two feminist newspapers, Aurora and Justicia y Libertad. Twenty-one of her poems and essays discussing philosophy, political views, and women’s rights, published between January 8, 1908, and April 9, 1910, have survived. Diamantes negros, A Juárez, and Huye are some of her most popular works. In April 9, 1910, Ramírez published Surge surge, a poem directed “a las mujeres” and emphasizing female power and assertion. “Tu la reina del mundo. . . . Una mujer que lo verdaderamente es, es mas que diosa y que reina” (You are the queen of the world. . . . A woman who is truly a
woman is more than a goddess or a queen). “Solo la acción es vida; sentir que se vive, es la mas hermosa sensación” (Only action is life; to feel like you are alive, that is the most beautiful of sensations). Aside from poetry, Ramírez wrote a play titled Noema and published various speeches written on behalf of the Sociedad de Obreros of Laredo. Sara Estela Ramírez’s involvement in the Tejano community introduced a feminist perspective to the revolution through her political leadership and community activism. Ramírez allied herself with other women in the resistance movement, including Dolores Jiménez y Muro, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, and Elisa Acuña. Most of the essays written by Ramírez expressed her open support for the working classes and stressed mutualismo as a guiding principle in all social relations. In a speech titled Alocución, given on April 17, 1909, Ramírez addressed an organization of workers by identifying herself as a “ferviente admiradora del mutualismo” (a fervent admirer of mutualismo), emphasizing that “para llamar hermano al obrero solo me basta tener corazón” (to call the worker my brother I need only have a heart). Mutualismo, argued Ramírez, represented nothing less than a noble mission of charity. Upon her premature death at the age of twenty-nine friends and supporters bade her farewell, lamenting, “Ha fallecido la mujer Mejicana mas ilustrada de Texas” (The most illustrious woman of Texas has passed). Eulogized in the local newspaper La Crónica, Ramírez was also remembered as “la mas noble, mas sentimental y primera de las poetisas de la region” (the most noble, most sentimental, and the first among the female poets of the region). Her literary career spans the short but fruitful period lasting from 1898 to 1910. Ramírez’s lasting contributions through inspiring literary works serve as testimony that Mexican women intellectuals of her time actively joined the revolutionary movement to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, acted politically to support Laredo’s local labor-unionizing efforts among Hispanics, and contested sexual, racial, and gender expectations of the time. See also Feminism; Journalism and Print Media; Literature SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Hernández Tovar, Inés. 1984. “Sara Estela Ramírez: The Early Twentieth Century Texas-Mexican Poet.” Ph.D. diss., University of Houston; Mora, Magdalena, and Adelaida R. Del Castillo, eds. 1980. Mexican Women in the United States. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California; Zamora, Emilio, Jr. 1980. “Sara Estela Ramírez: Una rosa roja en el movimiento.” In Mexican Women in the United States, ed. Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. Del Castillo. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California.
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Soledad Vidal
Ramírez de Arellano, Diana
RAMÍREZ, TINA (1925–
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Tina Ramírez is the founding director of the most renowned Hispanic dance company in the United States, New York City’s el Ballet Hispánico. The daughter of María Sestero, a Puerto Rican housewife with aspirations of becoming an actress, and José “Gaonita” Ramírez, a Mexican bullfighter, Tina was born in Caracas, Venezuela, where her father was appearing in the bullring. Tina was still a child when her parents separated, and she, her siblings, and her mother returned to Puerto Rico, where María Sestero was able to find work at the board of elections. When Tina was six years old, the family relocated to New York City. She was raised in an Italian neighborhood of East Harlem on the corner of 114th Street and Second Avenue. They lived with her grandmother, who had been a teacher in Puerto Rico. Her mother worked as a dishwasher and later a waitress in Child’s Restaurant. They later moved to the neighborhood called Fort Apache in the Bronx. Tina Ramírez started learning to dance when a doctor recommended that her sickly younger sister take dance lessons to become stronger. Ramírez accompanied her, and by the time she was twelve, she was begging her mother to let her become a dancer. By age thirteen she was entertaining on Sundays at the Spanish mutual-aid societies in New York. She also began performing in actress Marita Reid’s tertulia and variety shows at the Spanish clubs by age fourteen, quite often lining up two engagements for Sundays, making $2 to $5 per performance. At times Ramírez toured with the Spanish variety acts as far west as Ohio. In her teens she began taking ballet lessons, as well as learning Spanish folk dances and flamenco with Spanish dancer Lola Bravo. She also began performing at nightclubs and on the road, making $25 a show at each of three different hotels in the Catskill Mountains’ Borscht Circuit. This was during World War II, when no entertainers from Europe were available. By the age of fifteen she joined Spaniard Federico Rey’s Rhythms of Spain company and toured the United States, Canada, and Cuba. At seventeen she went to Spain to study ballet and Spanish classical dance for two years. During this time she studied flamenco with la Quica and the Príncipe Gitano troupe and even performed a onewoman show at the Ateneo in Madrid. Tina Ramírez returned to the United States in 1963, worried about losing her U.S. citizenship, and again took up performing on the nightclub circuit. She and her sister performed with Xavier Cugat for two years and were later signed by MCA Music Company to perform at supper clubs all over the United States. After that Tina Ramírez signed with General Artists and performed in two Hollywood films, Casa Cugat and No Men Allowed. On her return to New York City she studied
modern dance with Anna Sokalow and began performing in musical comedies on Broadway, including Hello, Dolly! (1964). In 1963 the retiring Lola Bravo requested that Ramírez take over her studio. After a trial year Ramírez had found her greatest calling, and the Tina Ramírez Dance School became a wonderful success. During the War on Poverty of President Lyndon B. Johnson she was successful in obtaining funding from the government to implement her Operation High Hopes, a program in dance instruction for inner-city poor children. From 8 A.M. to 3 P.M., she taught dance to some 130 students in the public schools and then promptly at 4 P.M. returned to her studio to teach her regular paying customers. She was on the way to learning how to raise funds and how to bring dance into the lives of inner-city children. In 1970 she was awarded a grant for $20,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts to start a dance company for young people aged twelve to fifteen. By the end of the year Ballet Hispánico was born. It first concentrated on the dance culture of her own backgrounds: Puerto Rican, Spanish, Mexican, and Venezuelan. As her company evolved, she wanted to present more than “roots” and also concentrated on presenting how Hispanics actually looked and dressed and acted in the United States “so that we are seen on a higher plane, as we really are, not just one type, not just stereotypes.” During the last thirty years el Ballet Hispánico has grown to national prominence, performing at elite venues, as well as in ethnic centers, throughout the United States. It has toured Europe and Latin America and represented the United States at the international exposition in Seville, Spain (1992). Among the graduates of el Ballet Hispánico are such Hollywood actors as Michael De Lorenzo and Rachel and Nancy Ticotín. The graduates also include scores of professional dancers and dance teachers who are making careers far and wide. Among Tina Ramírez’s and el Ballet Hispánico’s many awards are the Hispanic Heritage Award (1999), the Governor’s Art Award (1987), and the Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture (1983). See also Theater SOURCES: Breslauer, Jan. 1995. “Ballet Hispánico: On the Move in So Many Ways.” Los Angeles Times, March 30; Gladstone, Valerie. 1999. “A Culture That Sells Itself.” New York Times, November 21; Kisselgoff, Anna. 1998. “A Simpatico Connection for Two Genres.” New York Times, December 3. Nicolás Kanellos
RAMÍREZ DE ARELLANO, DIANA (1919–1997) Diana Ramírez de Arellano was the author of numerous books of poetry and literary criticism and became
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Ramírez de Arellano, Diana a poet laureate of Puerto Rico. She had a long and distinguished academic career and was a professor of Spanish at City College of the City University of New York and at Rutgers University. She was the president and founder of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York and a leading force in the literary and intellectual circles of Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans in New York. Born in New York in 1919, Ramírez de Arellano was raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Her parents, Enrique Ramírez de Arellano Brau and María Teresa Rechani, were prominent members of Puerto Rico’s social and intellectual elite. Her grandfather, Salvador Brau, was one of the first and most important Puerto Rican historians. Ramírez de Arellano completed her elementary and secondary schooling in Ponce and in 1941 graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a degree in pedagogy. She worked as a high-school teacher in the town of Manatí and in 1944 traveled to New York for graduate studies. In 1946 she received a master’s degree in pedagogy from Teachers College, Columbia University. From 1946 through 1951 Ramírez de Arellano taught at Women’s College at the University of North Carolina and at Douglass College at Rutgers University. In 1951 she enrolled in the University of Madrid, Spain, to complete her doctoral studies. She graduated in 1952. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Genealogical Comedy in the Works of Lope de Vega and a Critical Edition of Los Ramírez de Arellano,” was later published as Los Ramírez de Arellano de Lope de Vega and explored her own family roots. After defending her thesis she returned to the faculty at Douglass College, but moved on from there to City College, CUNY, in 1958 to teach language and literature where she remained until her retirement. Most of Ramírez de Arellano’s published works
were books of poetry. Among them are Yo soy Ariel (1947), Albatros sobre el alma (1955), Angeles de ceniza (1958), Un vuelo casi humano (1960), Privilegio (1965), Del señalado oficio de la muerte (1974), Arbol en vísperas (1987), and Adelfazar (1995). In literary criticism she published several books, including Caminos de la creación poética de Pedro Salinas (1956), Poesía contemporánea en lengua española (1961), and El himno deseado (1979). Ramírez de Arellano was also a frequent contributor to literary publications throughout Latin America and Spain and to Puerto Rico’s El Mundo and Alma Latina. One of her most important contributions, apart from her books, was the creation of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York, which she founded in 1963 “to bridge the gap of silence and loneliness of the Puerto Rican artist and scholar in New York.” She served as the Ateneo’s first president and turned it into a space for nourishing the intellectual and cultural life of Puerto Ricans in New York. Ramírez de Arellano was a member of diverse organizations such as the Modern Language Association and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, which gave her emeritus status in 1983. Among the many awards she received are the Medalla de Oro del Ateneo de Puerto Rico (the Gold Medal of the Ateneo of Puerto Rico) (1958), Medalla de Plata del Ministerios de Educación por Poesía de Bolivia (Silver Medal for Poetry of the Ministry of Education of Bolivia), and the Medal of Honor of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York. La Sociedad de Autores Puertorriqueños de San Juan, Puerto Rico (the Society of Puerto Rican Authors) gave her a special tribute in 1966. Diana Ramírez de Arellano died on April 30, 1997, in New York City. She made significant contributions to
Writer Diana Ramírez de Arellano, founding president of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York. Courtesy of the Diana Ramírez Arellano Paps. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Rape the cultural and literary life of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in New York and left an important body of published works. Her collected papers at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, reveal her work as a poet and literary critic and safeguard the history of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York. See also Literature SOURCE: Ramírez de Arellano, Diana. 1919–1997. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Ismael García, Nélida Pérez, and Pedro Juan Hernández
RANGEL, IRMA (1931–2003) Irma Rangel was a pioneer legislator from Texas. The first Mexican American woman to serve in the Texas legislature, Representative Rangel was instrumental in the advancement of education in the state of Texas in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Irma Rangel was born in the small southern Texas city of Kingsville on May 15, 1931. This was for Mexican Americans in Texas, and almost everywhere else, a time of harsh, Jim Crow–style segregation. Forced to go out into the fields of neighboring Robstown to pick cotton as a young girl, she never lost sight of her community or its struggles. Rangel graduated from Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M University, Kingsville) in 1952, when, in her own words, “you could count the Hispanic students on two hands.” She became a schoolteacher and principal for schools in southern Texas, California, and Venezuela. Rangel eventually changed careers, graduating in 1969 with a law degree from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio. Rangel’s life was a string of firsts. For the next two years she was one of the first female Hispanic law clerks for federal district judge Adrian Spears of San Antonio. From 1971 to 1973, as assistant district attorney for Nueces County, she became one of the first Hispanic women in the state to hold this office. A successful practicing attorney, Irma Rangel ran for and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1976, representing the Kingsville district, thus becoming the first Latina ever to serve in the state legislature, where she remained for twenty-six years until her death on March 18, 2003. Irma Rangel was responsible for the first meaningful positive action taken by the state of Texas immediately following the disastrous Hopwood decision from the federal judiciary that banned the state from using affirmative action both in the higher-education admissions process and for scholarships. In 1997 Rangel, as chairperson of the House Committee on Higher Education, argued in favor of the Top 10 Percent Law that guaran-
teed state university admission for all students graduating in the top 10 percent of all Texas high schools. Although then governor George W. Bush eventually claimed credit for this legislation, it was actually the brainchild of Rangel. It was through her personal leadership and effort that the Texas legislature passed this partial blunting of the negative, exclusionary effects of Hopwood. In addition to education, Rangel also championed the rights and opportunities of mothers with dependent children, better highways and roads, and efforts against malnutrition. Rangel was widely recognized and accumulated many honors and awards: Legislator of the Year by the Mexican American Bar Association in 1997, Latina Lawyer of the Year by the Hispanic National Bar Association in 1998, the García Public Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in 1993, and induction into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. Recalling Rangel, state senator Gonzalo Barrientos of Austin said, “She had to be smart, she had to be articulate and she had to be tough. And she was all of those.” Senator Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio remembered, “She had a terrific way of making us all her children. She had a special feeling about the women who served in this body. Party labels made no difference.” Shortly after her death public officials of both parties named a new pharmacy school, the Irma Rangel School of Pharmacy, at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, after her. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Harmon, Dave. 2003. “Irma Rangel, 1931– 2003: The First Mexican-American Woman Elected to the Texas House of Representatives Died Early This Morning.” Austin American Statesman, March 18; Javelina Alumni Association. 2001. “Representative Rangel Named Distinguished Alumnus for 2001.” Tusk, Summer. www.tamuk.edu/javal umni/tusk/2001/summer/rangel.shtml (accessed May 25, 2003); Leo, Myra. 2003. “It Was Always about the Students.” Texas Observer, April 11; Meighan, Ty. 2003. “Lawmakers Share Their Memories of Irma Rangel: Kingsville Representative Is Remembered as a Teacher Whose Guidance Spanned Party Lines.” Corpus Christi Caller Times, April 1; Orozco, Cynthia E. 2003. “Mexican-American Women.” In The Handbook of Texas Online. www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ar ticles/view/MM/pwmly.html (accessed May 25, 2003). Carlos Kevin Blanton
RAPE Rape is commonly defined in state penal codes as a forceful sexual act perpetrated on a person without that person’s consent that involves penetration of the anus or vagina by any object or penetration of any body orifice by a phallus. Non-Hispanic American
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Rape women experienced a rate of rape or sexual assault of 1.4 for every 1,000 women in the population. For Hispanic women, the rate was 1.5. Moreover, since rape is a largely underreported crime, it is very likely that the actual figures are even higher. Rape can happen to any woman at any time. According to federal crime figures, for 1998 and 2000 there are no significant differences in rates of reported victimization in terms of region (urban, suburban, or rural), although there are slightly more rapes reported in urban areas and in the Midwest. Significant differences were found in terms of marital status, with the majority of reported rapes occurring among single (3.1 per 1,000) or divorced or separated women (2.6 per 1,000). Significant differences were found in age; the majority of the victims were under twenty-five years of age. Specifically, 3.5 per 1,000 women were twelve to fifteen years of age, 5 per 1,000 were between sixteen to nineteen years old, 4.6 per 1,000 were twenty to twenty-four years of age, and only 1.7 per 1,000 were twenty-five to thirty-four years old. Federal figures suggest that young, urban, poor, and unmarried women are more likely to be the targets of rape than married, more affluent, and older women. The majority of reported rapes occurred among women whose household income was less than $35,000, and the largest proportion (3.2 per 1,000) occurred among women whose household income was less than $7,500 per year. There are no data specifying the demographics of Latina rape victims. Sexual crimes against women have been committed by men from the beginning of recorded history, notably during times of war and conquest and as retaliation against opposing tribes, armies, and nations. Rapes are crimes of violence rooted in patriarchal notions of women as booty, male possessions, or dehumanized objects. In inner cities gang rapes are common as rites of passage. The rape of women who are affiliated with or relatives of men in opposing gangs is sanctioned behavior. Feminists argue that as long as women are perceived as second-class citizens, property, or devalued human beings, rape will continue to occur. Many women who are raped do not report the crime. A primary reason for not reporting is the treatment of the rape victim by the police and the judicial system. Often women are not believed. There must be physical evidence that a rape occurred. Many rapists use condoms to eliminate physical evidence. Some rapes are not accompanied by physical violence, and this reduces the credibility of the event. Once a woman reports a rape, a medical examination must follow in order to collect forensic evidence. The investigation of rape is generally carried out by male police officers. After a woman has suffered the trauma of rape, she
may be terrified to speak to another man, particularly one who will ask intimate questions concerning the assault and begin to inquire into her own sexual history. Police departments have increasingly incorporated more sensitive interview techniques. Some departments include women officers who interview victims. Nevertheless, women often feel that they are not believed, particularly when they are asked questions that cast blame, including why they were in the place, situation, or location where the assault occurred. Invariably they will be asked if they know the perpetrator. If a woman does, a question as to whether the rape was in fact consensual sex often follows. If the perpetrator is found and apprehended and prosecution occurs, the woman’s sexual history is brought into the case, whereas the male’s past history of sexual crimes often is not included because it could prejudice the jury. Cases where accused rapists were acquitted because the focus became the victim’s attire at the time of the assault, past sexual history, or use of alcohol serve to deter reporting and further traumatize women. A number of cultural factors may deter Latinas from reporting. Traditional Latino cultures reify virginity and fidelity. These views are influenced by the dichotomization of women into virgins and whores, rooted in the colonial experience of the American continent and the prevalence of Christianity among Latinos. It is generally believed that a Latina’s worth is tied to her morality and purity. Parents are expected to protect their daughters from men’s sexuality to ensure virginity at marriage. While many Latinas are sexually active from a young age, the cultural ideal remains strong. Therefore, the sexual assault of a daughter has multiple implications. She may no longer be perceived as pure and therefore deserving of a good marriage. The honor of the father has been sullied, and great shame has been brought on the family. Often the father’s shame and pain become the focus of the family’s attention, not the woman’s victimization. Her own trauma and the psychological sequelae of the assault may be overlooked. Families may not want to report the assault because they are worried about “el que dirán” (what people will think). Thus Latinas may not report rapes to protect the father from shame. If the woman is married, the same dynamics may operate. She is expected to protect both her husband and her father from the shame of the crime. An additional barrier to reporting is the fact that men of the same ethnic or racial background as the victim commit most rapes. Thus a Latina who reports a rape by a Latino is in fact “turning a brother in” to the authorities. In urban communities where police relations with the residents often are poor, women
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Reid, Marita may be reluctant or discouraged from turning a man in to the police. Thus a combination of cultural and sociopolitical factors may play a role in deterring reporting. Rape is an act of violence that assaults a woman’s sense of self physically, psychologically, and spiritually. She may suffer physical injuries and run the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), including HIV infection. STDs can have long-term consequences if they are untreated, including infertility. A woman may become pregnant as a result of a rape. If she terminates the pregnancy, she will have to face the social, emotional, and familial consequences of an abortion. If she keeps the child, she will have a lifelong reminder of her victimization. While most women are aware of the dangers they face as they negotiate their life simply because they are women, rape is a confirmation of a woman’s vulnerability and lack of safety. Consequently, rape victims often experience tremendous fear and a number of psychological symptoms best described by the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. If the rape occurred in the home, the sense of violation is twofold. The victim’s intimate space, once considered safe, has been violated, as has her body. Hypervigilance, anxiety, panic, and gastrointestinal distress are among the most common sequelae. Furthermore, fear and distrust of men increase. Women who have been raped often experience problems with intimacy and decreased sexual desire. Among the most powerful healing methods to recover from rape are training programs that teach women self-defense. Among these, Worth Defending focuses on connecting women with their sense of agency and efficacy. The experience of feeling safe and of being able to protect oneself against sexual violence can facilitate women’s efforts to recover from rape experiences. In order to heal and to reclaim her sexuality, her agency and her faith, a rape survivor needs to not blame herself and to understand rape as a product of misogyny and racism. See also Domestic Machismo
Violence;
Marianismo
and
SOURCES: Bandura, Albert. 1997. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W. H. Freeman; Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster; Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2000. Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1998. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs; Flores-Ortiz, Yvette. 1997. “The Broken Covenant: Incest in Latino Families.” Voces: A Journal of Chicana Studies no. 2, 1:48–70; Wilde, Susan. 2002. Worth Defending (program description). www.wildelife.com/worth/ (accessed June 28, 2005). Yvette G. Flores-Ortiz
REID, MARITA (?–1980S) From the 1920s to the 1950s Marita Reid was the most renowned primera dama (leading lady) of the Hispanic stage in New York, as well as a distinguished director. Born in Gibraltar to a Spanish mother and an English father, Marita Reid grew up bilingual and initiated her life on the stage at age seven. Her early experience was derived from performing on tours in extreme southern Spain. In the early 1920s she made her debut in Spanish dramatic companies at the National and Belmont theaters of New York City. After 1922 she acted in the companies of Pilar Arcos, Narcisín, and others in a variety of genres, from serious drama to zarzuela (Spanish-style operettas). Sometime later she followed the example of many outstanding women of the stage who became entrepreneurs, as well as artists, and formed her own company. The Compañía Marita Reid performed steadily on a circuit of mutualaid societies, such as the Calpe Americano and the Casa Galicia, as well as at the Ateneo Hispano, a cultural and intellectual center in Manhattan. When the depression and World War II sharply curtailed the opportunities for live performances in theaters, Reid was one of the persons most responsible for keeping Spanish-language drama alive by producing works at numerous halls and mutual-aid societies, as well as at conventional theater houses. Because of her perfect English and biculturalism, Reid was able to cross over to American, English-language mainstream theater. Her career extended to Broadway and to Hollywood, including live television drama in the Armstrong Circle Theatre, the U.S. Steel Hour, and Studio One. During the course of her career Reid wrote four plays, all of which have remained unpublished: Patio gibraltareño (A Gibraltar Patio), Luna de mayo (May Moon), Sor Piedad (Sister Piety), and El corazón del hombre es nuestro corazón (A Man’s Heart Is Our Heart). These ran the gamut from comedic farce to serious drama, but Reid herself was very modest about her playwriting skills. In addition to being a leader in the Latino artistic community, Reid was a staunch activist in support of the Spanish Republic. She produced, directed, and acted in numerous antifascist plays, most of which were fund-raising efforts for the Republican army. The performances were usually followed by rallies and speeches of the diverse ethnic elements in the Latino community of New York. The broadside for one such performance in 1934 openly proclaimed the producers’ and audience’s political sentiments: “La lucha entre el capital y el trabajo, entre el facismo y la libertad ha tomado los caracteres más trágicos en el suelo español. Los valientes campesinos españoles agobiados por el trabajo, se revelan pidiendo justicia” (The strug-
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Reid, Victoria Comicrabit
Marita Reid on the right in Doña Diabla at the Teatro Hispano in New York. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
gle between capital and labor, between fascism and freedom has assumed its most tragic character on Spanish soil. The valiant Spanish campesinos, overcome with work, are shown begging for justice). Reid’s commitment to the cause lasted throughout her life. In 1957, on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Republic (in exile), Marita Reid was paid homage at a special performance of one of the plays that she had made famous in New York: the Alvarez Quintero brothers’ Lo que hablan las mujeres (What Women Talk About). Unfortunately, the evening was marred by supporters of dictator Francisco Franco who barged in and attempted to disrupt the affair. The police had to be called to the scene. Marita Reid died in New York without much notice sometime during the 1980s. See also Theater SOURCES: Kanellos, Nicolás. 1984. Hispanic Theatre in the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press; ———. 1990. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nicolás Kanellos
REID, VICTORIA COMICRABIT (1808–1868) Born around the year 1808 in a ranchería, an Indian village, near the Mission San Gabriel, Victoria Comicrabit came from an elite Native American family and underwent the full cycle of Spanish evangelizing and civilizing practices. The ranchería’s proximity to the San Gabriel Mission ensured that its inhabitants were forced into daily religious rituals and agricultural cycles dictated by the Catholic fathers. Following the prescribed doctrine for female neófitos, baptized Indians, Victoria was allowed to live with her parents until the age of six or seven and then was removed to the mon-
jería (nunnery) of the mission. There she was schooled in the principles of Christianity and was taught reading, writing, and fundamental Hispanic household skills such as cooking, sewing, washing, and gardening. At the mission she received special attention from Eulalia Pérez, the mission’s llavera, or key keeper, who chose her as one of her assistants. Upon reaching sexual menarche, Comicrabit was encouraged by the fathers to marry a fellow neophyte, Pablo María of the neighboring Ytucubit ranchería. Marriage, however, did not remove Victoria or Pablo from service to the mission, and she continued to assist Pérez after her marriage. In 1823, at the age of fifteen, she gave birth to her first child, Felipe. Three more children, José Dolores, María Ygnacia, and Carlitos, followed. As thoroughly Hispanicized neophytes, and with Pérez’s assistance, Victoria and Pablo María received their entitled parajes, plots of land, the Rancho Santa Anita, and la Huerta del Cuati, from the San Gabriel fathers. After Pablo María’s death in 1835, Victoria married Hugo Reid, a Scottish merchant. Reid benefited from the marriage because Victoria’s land turned Reid into a ranchero. Genuine affection did exist between Victoria and Hugo, who adopted all four of her children. In turn, Reid’s European surname gave Victoria and her children access and fuller integration into the elite Californio class. Moreover, Victoria was an active partner in the maintenance and supervision of the two ranchos. Indeed, because of Hugo Reid’s chronic stomach pains, Victoria’s previous supervisory skills were highly useful, if not essential, in overseeing and managing the couple’s properties. Her marriage to an obviously white man deepened the patina of Victoria’s Hispanicization, but neither she nor her children could completely forget their racial origins. Victoria’s “Indianness” caused people to remark on the uniqueness of
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Religion this union. The most intimate and personal account of Victoria and her racial dichotomy came from Laura Evertson King, who was a young child of perhaps eight or nine when she first met Victoria. King noted that everyone called Victoria Doña, with the privileges and respect such a name should invoke; yet, simultaneously, King could not completely erase Victoria’s Indian origins. Lamentably, during the 1840s the Reids faced a steady economic decline that heightened a growing estrangement between them. All of Hugo Reid’s business ventures failed, forcing him to sell both the Huerta de Cuati and Rancho Santa Anita. By the 1850s all the advantages and privileges of being married to Victoria crumbled. Before the onslaught of American hegemony Spanish Mexican society excused and accommodated the union of a white man and a neophyte woman. In the emerging and transforming world of Euro-American dominance interethnic alliances were reluctantly a fact of life but hardly acceptable to EuroAmerican racist, prejudiced mind-sets. Although Spanish Mexican neighbors accepted and supported the Reids’ marriage, with new American neighbors the history and social forces that supported such unions were swept aside, and interest in this exceptional union diminished. However, in an ironic twist the story of Victoria and Hugo Reid became immortalized in one of the most important nineteenth-century novels, Ramona. First published in 1886, Ramona was Helen Hunt Jackson’s attempt to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of California mission Indians. Set in early-nineteenthcentury California, the novel’s plot involved the illfated love between a half-Indian, half-Scottish Indian woman, Ramona, and a full-blooded Indian, Allesandro. Helen Hunt Jackson researched in California and, learning of Victoria and Hugo’s marriage, incorporated them into her novel. Victoria was never named in the novel, but it was her historical reality that allowed Ramona to be born in fiction. On December 23, 1868, Victoria Reid the former señora, died like many other California Native Americans, ignored and destitute. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Casas, María Raquel. “Victoria Reid and the Politics of Identity.” In Latina Legacies: Identity Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press. Dakin. Susana Bryant. 1939. Scotch Paisano: Hugo Reid’s Life in California, 1832–1852. Berkeley: University of California Press; Davis, William Heath. 1929. Seventy-five Years in California, 1831–1906. San Francisco: John Howell; Jackson, Helen Hunt. 1912. Ramona. New York: Grosset and Dunlap; King, Laura Evertson. 1898. “Hugo Reid and His Indian Wife.” Historical Society of Southern California and Pioneer Register (Los Angeles), 111–113; Mathes, Va-
lerie Sherer. 1990. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.
María Raquel Casas
RELIGION Latinas have traditionally assumed a central role in the maintenance and transference of religious beliefs and practices for their families and their communities. Although many Latinas participate in patriarchal religions that attempt a male monopoly over the sacred, Latinas carry on with their own understandings of the sacred and have often carved autonomous spaces for women within these religions. Other Latinas engage in religions such as Santería, in which women maintain equal leadership status with men (although they are forbidden to achieve the position of babalawo or to be deviners), curanderismo, in which “el don” or the gift of healing enables women to transcend gender constructions, or indigenous spiritual paths that are traditionally egalitarian. Although many Protestant denominations ordain women as ministers, obstacles remain as they strive for full acceptance as religious leaders. Catholic Latinas remain excluded from ordination, but many serve as volunteer lay ministers or as professional associate pastors. The legacy of Latinas shaping religion can be traced to women who acted as priestesses, spiritual intermediaries, and healers throughout indigenous preHispanic societies. Christian missionaries demonized native women because their high degree of involvement in spiritual practices threatened the missionaries’ own male authority. Native women dominated the private sphere of the home, where missionaries feared to enter. Domestic rituals performed by women kept daily life and the cosmic order in balance, spiritual practices that the friars could not control. The female legacy continued in colonial Latin America through women religious writers and theologians in Spanish Catholic convents, such as the renowned Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Curanderas (healers) provided holistic healing outside of institutional power structures, and rezadoras (prayer leaders) of rural communities served where male clergy were virtually absent. Independence movements from Spanish rule beginning in the nineteenth century throughout Latin America often meant a rupture in state-church relations that resulted in a decreased visibility of priests and an increased dependence on women’s religious authority within familial spaces. Latina religious authority exercised outside and within institutional structures continued during the various migrations of Latino populations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 the Irish- and
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Religion German-dominated U.S. Roman Catholic Church found itself unprepared to minister to its new Spanishspeaking members, Mexican Catholics. In impoverished barrios and rural towns women carried on the traditional role of teaching religious doctrine in the home and conducting familial and communal rituals. The home altar, as a domestic sacred site, increased in importance. Daily recitations of the rosary became a primary way to pass on the mysteries of Catholicism. Devotions to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the multiple manifestations of Mary, the mother of Jesus, ensured the centrality of female divine powers. Rezadoras assisted the dying in their final prayers and reconciliation with loved ones. These women also helped grieving families by leading the prayers at the velorio (wake) and at the novenario, the nine consecutive days of prayer following a death. Parteras (midwives) took on not only the responsibility of assisting a laboring woman, but also that of baptizing newborn children because of high infant mortality and the absence of clergy. Curanderas, women with specialized and exceptional healing powers, such as Teresa Urrea, healed those who were physically and spiritually ill. Urrea’s powers reached beyond political and geographic borders when she lived in exile in the United States after being accused by the Mexican government of inciting rebellion among the Mayo people of Sonora, Mexico. Other less famous curanderas have played a crucial role in the well-being of barrio residents. The holistic knowledge of curanderismo offers Latino communities access to ancient and natural medicinal knowledge. Religious options widened for Latinos/as through U.S. imperialism in 1898 in Puerto Rico and Cuba. The military and economic power of the United States also represented the power of Protestantism. Anti-Catholic sentiments in the United States flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, and many Latinos converted to Protestant traditions as a way to better their socioeconomic prospects. Others converted out of desire to read the Bible, a practice not encouraged for lay Catholics, and to have greater institutionalized leadership opportunities. Women played a crucial role in a family’s decision to convert. Conversion to Protestant Christianity was not done uncritically. Toward the end of the 1920s the Congreso Evangélico Hispanoamericano del Norte de América Latina came together in protest over the process of Americanization inherent in Protestant missionary work in Latin America. Organized in Havana, Cuba, in 1929, the congress marked a rupture of Latin American Protestantism with imperialist elements. It raised issues about the development of a Latin American identity in the Protestant missionary movement in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Cuba,
and Puerto Rico. For the first time a congress of this nature was organized and led by Latin American leaders. Among the list of leaders involved in this movement were two women, Lidia Huber and Edith M. Rivera. Also during the 1920s the theological journal La Nueva Democracia was published and distributed throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Latino Catholic and Protestant intellectuals contributed to this journal in an effort to join the celebrated Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral in the cause to “exile ignorance and misery, despotism and civil corruption, imperialism and international oppression.” Among the contributors were women such as Amanda Labarca, Margarita Robles, Esthercita Wellman, and Helena Arizmendi. As indigenous Latino/a leaders rethought the faith from the perspective of their national identity and interests, they separated the religion from the cultural wardrobe in which it originally had been dressed. All over Latin America both Catholic and Protestant sectors of the church responded to military interventions by the United States. This included the church in the diaspora, composed of individuals who had immigrated to cities in the United States. A fluid leadership among Protestants in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States ensured that a politicized ethnic consciousness shaped distinctive Latino Christianities. New Protestant churches developed in the United States as the population became more Latin American. The leadership of the churches included women in positions such as treasurers, trustees, religious educators, and community workers. As faith communities acquired buildings for worship and conducted significant outreach in their communities, female leadership and labor supported the development of new churches. It was the understanding of the people in the congregations that in many cases the pastor’s wife was also a pastor who served as the right hand of the pastor in his work. An entry in the history of the Hispanic Baptist churches reads: “Mr. Herminio Quiroga’s wife Mercedes, once their children were grown, returned to school and obtained a B.S. degree at Hunter College. She was at the time, a devoted helpmate of her husband and a leader of every activity in the church. Second Spanish Church owes a great debt of gratitude to Mercedes Quiroga.” Other women leaders in their own right included Eva Torres Frey, who came from the San Juan Baptist Church in Puerto Rico during the 1930s and devoted herself to the work of the Second Baptist Church in New York City. When the pastor of the church resigned in 1953, she became the president of the board of trustees. For the first time a congregation named a woman to take complete charge of its affairs and keep it very much alive and prospering. As a trustee, she
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Religion handled the church finances during the construction of a new church building. Torres Frey also served on the board of the Baptist Society and the Southern New York Baptist Women Association. In these positions she represented the interests of the Hispanic community and led the way in bridging the two communities. She steered her congregation in community outreach and provided significant opportunities for collaborative undertakings for her working-class community. Her death on June 23, 1971, left a void among the American Baptist Hispanic Churches. Mexico also experienced an attraction toward Protestantism when reformers in the nineteenth century modeled new governments on U.S. republican democracy and white settlers brought their Protestant faiths with them into northern Mexico. Pentecostalism blossomed at the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, California, in 1906 and attracted many Mexicans and Puerto Ricans as the spiritual fervor spread. After World War II the massive migration of Puerto Rican Catholics to the United States and the migration of Mexican Americans to cities challenged the Catholic Church to broaden its understanding of Catholicism. Catholic parishes were forced to rely on the expertise of lay Spanish-speaking Latinas to minister to the needs of rapidly growing Latino Catholic communities. As members of volunteer organizations, such as Las Guadalupanas and Ladies of the Sacred Heart, or catechists (lay teachers of religious education), Latinas served their communities despite their subordinate status in the hierarchy of the institutional church. As Ana María Díaz-Stevens points out, these women became indispensable leaders within parish communities. Their duties included visiting the sick in hospitals
and homes, counseling families, gathering clothing and food for the poor, conducting prayer meetings at church and at homes, organizing choirs, and conducting fund-raising activities. Ironically, reliance on the volunteer assistance of women has influenced the practice of Catholicism despite institutional limitations on the authority of women. For example, popular religious practices, such as public dramas of biblical stories, continue to thrive among Latino Catholic communities. Although popular religious rituals involve men and women, women continue to play a primary role in the maintenance of religious traditions. Public processions honoring Mary or patron saints often include a young female portraying the sacred personage accompanied by numerous devotees, both male and female. The mass exodus of primarily Catholic Cubans to the United States beginning in 1960 challenged the Catholic Church to serve another Spanish-speaking population. An increased religiosity among exiled Cubans resulted in institutional support for a Catholic educational system in southern Florida, staffed by exiled Cuban nuns and priests. The public shrine in Miami dedicated in 1973 to Cuba’s patroness, Our Lady of Charity, attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually, the majority of whom are women of Cuban descent. The Madonna in her various Latina manifestations maintains the significance of the female in Latino Catholic popular religiosity. Sociologist Ana María Díaz-Stevens calls women’s dedication to maintaining and molding religious traditions “the matriarchal core” of Latino religious practice. The rapid growth of Latino populations in the United States continues to challenge Catholic parishes and Protestant congregations, both mainline and non-
Latino family during a Roman Catholic baptism. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Religion denominational, to minister in culturally relevant ways. Institutional support for leadership that values the contributions of Latinas appears to be the only way to adequately meet ministerial needs. At the heart of Latina pastoral ministry is agency. To have agency is to see oneself in one’s own eyes and to act in ways congruent with who one believes oneself to be in the world rather than to internalize and act out of the narrative constructed by others about oneself. In the church this takes the form of a “call.” It is the understanding of the church that the Holy Spirit empowers one for ministry through the distribution of spiritual gifts to be used for carrying out different ministries. Prayer and a process of discernment put one in touch with one’s gifts and release them for ministry. This understanding has become revolutionary for women in the Latina Protestant church. A woman will dare to obey what she understands to be the call of the Holy Spirit and go against the authority of others in the church. This has been the way that women have entered the pastoral ministry even when the denominational bodies they belonged to did not affirm their call. One such woman, Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, or Mamá Léo, was like a mother to those to whom she ministered. Born in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, in 1912, Mamá Léo responded to a call to become a missionary and evangelist at the age of twenty. She moved to New York City in 1935, where she visited the sick and became involved in the general ministry of the congregation. She also preached on street corners. When her husband was drafted into the army, she officially took on what had been his pastoral duties at the Damascus Christian Church. The empowerment of the Holy Spirit in her life led her to pioneering work with substance abusers, an ecclesial taboo at the time. Her compassion led her to see the potential of people and to believe that the power of God could make the difference in a person’s life. She established a grassroots program that provided rehabilitation for gang members, addicts, alcoholics, and ex-convicts. Her program preceded better-known programs such as Teen Challenge or secular-based programs such as Odyssey House. Like most pioneering work, this caused much controversy, but Mamá Léo’s strength and resolve to carry out this ministry enabled her to underwrite it with church funds. The program expanded into the five boroughs of the city. Many persons who came through the program later became ministers themselves, and some established similar work in other cities. Another strong pastoral leader was the Reverend Aimee García Cortese, born in New York in 1929. She grew up in the South Bronx and became a “missionary evangelist” for the Assemblies of God. This position, although reserved for women gifted in ministry, does not identify them as ordained ministers, yet they
Popular representation of the spirit protector of the home used by Afro-Cuban believers of Santería. Photograph by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
preach and perform difficult outreach work with some of the poorest people in the city. García Cortese eventually became the first female chaplain to serve in the New York State Department of Corrections. She also founded the Crossroads Tabernacle Church in the Bronx. This church provides a variety of programs for youths, support programs for women, men, and families, and a rehabilitation program for substance abusers. Like these two, other women have become innovative pastors in their communities. Ana María Falcón García is the highest-educated pastor in the Iglesias de Dios Pentecostal. She pastors the largest church of her denomination in Willimantic, Connecticut. Julie Ramírez of the Assemblies of God pastors one of the largest Hispanic churches in Hartford, Connecticut, with a facility that encompasses half a city block. Both of these women were sent to these churches after their male counterparts failed to bring to fruition the work in these congregations. Even with no funds for their work, these women overcame impossibilities and turned around these ministries, converting them into
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Religious procession, circa 1930. Courtesy of the Pura Belpré Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
organizations that have made a tremendous impact in their communities. Other women have worked outside the support of their denominations because of the institution’s unwillingness to recognize their calling or support the vision of their work. One such woman, Esmeralda Collazo, started el Movimiento del Dios Vivo (the Movement of the Living God). Her ministry in Framingham, Massachusetts, involves outreach to children and single mothers, including an after-school program called Mejores Días/Better Days. Among Catholics numerous Latinas have also contributed enormously to ministry programs despite their lack of ordination. Sister Yolanda Tarango cofounded and directs Visitation House, a residence for homeless and battered women in San Antonio, Texas. Sister Alicia Salcido served for many years as codirector of Mission San Alfonso among impoverished Mexican neighborhoods, where she developed small base communities, a housing and food cooperative, and a medical dispensary. Small base communities offer Christians the space to dialogue and link their social injustices with their religious faith, followed by critical action. Sister Margarita Castañeda has for many years lived out her commitment “to walk with the people of God whose faith does not depend on the institution” by organizing small base communities in Texas. Rosa Marta Zárate led the San Bernardino Diocese in California in the development of base communities during the 1970s and 1980s. Her work so threatened the hierarchy of the church that she sued the diocese for wrongful termination. Zárate continues to offer pastoral care to immigrant communities in southern California and to indigenous communities in southern Mexico. Sister Sylvia Sedillo of New Mexico directed the Women’s
Spiritual Center in Santa Fe, an interfaith and multicultural retreat center where, she says, “women of all paths can explore their spirituality together—outside the confines of traditional religious institutions.” Consuelo Covarrubias also coordinated small base communities for the Hispanic Ministry Office in the Diocese of Gary, Indiana, and ministered at Sacred Heart Parish
To commemorate her first communion, Marina Briones poses for a portrait with her beaming madrina (godmother). Courtesy of Vicki L. Ruiz.
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Religion in Michigan City. All of these women understand themselves as agents of change with a commitment to social justice reflected in how they use the relative degree of power they hold within the Roman Catholic Church. For them, as for Latina Protestants, pastoral ministry inevitably intertwines with social justice issues. In the last twenty years Latinas have entered the ranks of Protestant denominational leadership. Irma Violeta Cruz served as the director of Hispanic Educational Ministries for the American Baptist Churches. The Reverend Liliana Da Valle presently serves as an area minister for the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. The Reverend Minerva Carcaño has risen through the ranks of the United Methodist Church and stands a very good chance of becoming a bishop. In Puerto Rico the Reverend Yamina Apolinaris served until 1998 as the first executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Puerto Rico. In addition, the Protestant denominational leadership includes the Reverend Felicita La Salle Vega in the Council of Damascus Christian Churches. The first woman to assume leadership since Mamá Léo, La Salle Vega has been vice president and serves as president. In 2001 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America elected Margarita Martínez the first Puerto Rican Latina bishop in the Caribbean Synod. The Reverend Blanca Ortiz, a Guatemalan woman who was ordained as a licensed evangelist of the Church of God International, is the first woman to assume the position of district overseer in Queens, New York. Marta Cabrera, a Dominican, was the first woman to become the youth director of the Northeast Territory of the Church of God International. Catholic Latinas have also risen to leadership positions within the church, although their positions tend to be regional rather than national. The first Latina to achieve national leadership was the late Encarnación Padilla de Armas. Her career included working in the first national Catholic program for the Spanish speaking, training New York diocesan priests in language and culture, challenging the hierarchy on its responsibilities to Puerto Ricans, helping develop the National Secretariat for the Spanish Speaking, and organizing the First National Hispanic Encuentro in 1972. Many other Latinas have accompanied the efforts of Padilla de Armas. Sister María Jesús de Ybarra directs the Office of Hispanic Ministry for the Yakima Diocese in Washington State. Olga Villa Parra directed the Midwest Hispanic Ministry Office during the 1970s with a focus on immigrant rights, farmworkers, and the urban poor. Sister Consuelo Tovar served as national chairperson of the Third Encuentro, a 1985 convening of bishops and laity regarding Hispanic ministry in the U.S. Catholic Church. Sister María Iglesias directs RENEW, a national organization that focuses on revi-
A home altar to the oricha Eleguá, the messenger of the gods and controller of the roads of the world. Photograph by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
talizing parish communities. In 1992 Sister Anita de Luna assumed the presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the national organization of Catholic nuns. Many of the outreach grassroots ministries that women have initiated have become nonprofit organizations. The Reverand Elizabeth Ríos, a certified minister of the Assemblies of God, was chief administrative officer of the Latino Action Pastoral Center in New York City. She spearheaded a program called the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL). The program seeks to empower women in ministry by training them to create nonprofit organizations. This gives the women freedom to exercise their unique leadership styles without being hindered by the patriarchal structures of their denominations and churches. The Reverend Olga Torres directs Angels Unaware, the only U.S. Hispanic agency in the state of New York that serves special-needs children. Alexie Torres Fleming developed Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, a program that supports young people who seek to be involved in their communities around issues of peace and justice for the poor. Brixeida Marquez is the founder of the Free Forever Prison Ministries program in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Because she had been a successful businesswoman, she did not need assistance from the CEFL. Her program reaches out to incarcerated persons in the state of Connecticut. It also includes a facility that provides care for ex-convicts with AIDS. She works with a board and an extensive group of volunteers. Many Latinas within patriarchal traditions challenge the gender constructions that limit women and carve spaces for themselves in parallel organizations or networks. Las Hermanas, a national organization of Latina Catholic feminists founded in 1971, exemplifies the efforts of Catholic Latinas to transform their church, but also to create spiritual community beyond
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Religion the confines of the institution. Meeting biennially at national conferences, members create the space to conduct women-centered rituals, express a Latina theology and spirituality, and provide a forum to discuss and strategize about issues affecting their daily lives. Latina theologians Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango have stated that a four-part methodology often informs the structure of these gatherings. The interrelated parts include telling participants’ stories, analyzing, strategizing, and liturgizing. Participants engage in a process of self-reflection that gives importance to their experiences, reveals shared experiences, and leads to the recognition that the personal is political and communal. Analysis requires a deeper inquiry beyond the obvious into the forces of oppression in order to make the connections between its different manifestations. Liturgizing enables Latinas to design their own rituals that negate the sense of unworthiness or absence often experienced in patriarchal rituals. Strategizing seeks to find ways to change oppressive situations by transforming a domineering use of power into an enabling and creative use of power. At the 1989 Las Hermanas national conference in San Antonio, Texas, the issue of power held primary attention. Defining power as enablement, creativity, and the ability to act rather than dominate set the framework for the participants to examine their own concepts of power, how they use their power in their daily lives, and what social forces, including religion, attempt to keep women powerless. Using the women’s own experiences as a starting point validated grassroots Latinas who are usually ignored in the institutional church. Recognition of power coming from within the individual, existing between companions in the struggle for liberation, and emerging from the desire to make a difference in one’s life gave the women a deep sense of their own personal power. Conference participant Teresa Barajas describes the impact that redefining power had on her life: “I saw in many of us that the word [power] awakened a fear because we have always associated it with oppression, violence and absolute control that many of us have experienced since we were little. We learned that power is something very good in us if we know how to use it. . . . We also saw that we often use our power without even knowing it.” Amid the stories of abusive power due to the actions of priests, bosses, fathers, husbands, children, and the government, the women also shared experiences of resistance, struggle, and liberation. Discussing power and the limitations of prescribed gender roles imbued the women with the knowledge that they were not alone in the struggle for self-determination. As one participant remarked, “Together we have the ability to plan and act—therefore WE HAVE POWER.” Solidarity among Latinas, relative autonomy from
the institutional church, and a striving for justice in all aspects of life characterize the spirituality of these Latinas. As member Yolanda Tarango states, they understand the struggle for spiritual and social equality to be a struggle Latinas “must embrace and learn to love in order to survive in the present and envision life with dignity in the future.” Their understandings provided the seedbed for mujerista theology, a feminist Latina theology first articulated by Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango in Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church. Other Latina theologians emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. Their writings contribute to the growing body of work that articulates a Latina feminist theological discourse. These theologians include María Pilar Aquino, Jeanette Rodríguez, Daisy Machado, Ana María Pineda, Gloria Loya, Nancy Pineda, Michelle González, Anita de Luna, Loida Martell-Otero, and Joanne Rodríguez. Recent annual gatherings of Latina theologians, sponsored by the Hispanic Theological Initiative under the direction of Zaida MaldonadoPérez, ensure a safe space to discuss gender politics within the production and praxis of Latino/a theology. Latinas who decide to struggle for reform within patriarchal religions understand that if religions were to denounce sexism, it would be a significant moment in the process of the liberation of women. Many do not leave patriarchal religions because they have a strong sense of ownership of their tradition. As Tess Browne of las Hermanas states, “If the boys want me to leave, they are going to have to carry me out, because it is not their church!” Least studied have been Chicanas and Latinas who (re)turn to the spiritual legacy of their indigenous ancestors. Small circles of native-identified women support this evolving consciousness that is nurtured through ancestral spiritual practices such as the temascal (sweat lodge), ritual dances, naming ceremonies, puberty rites, and social justice activism. Women such as Patricia Parra, Linda Vallejo, Rita Marmelejo, and Sybil Vanegas maintain the sweat lodge tradition in southern California and facilitate ceremonies for female prisoners. Others such as Yolanda BroylesGonzález and Patricia Rodríguez are involved in land rights issues and the preservation of sacred sites and burial remains. La Red Xicana Indigena, a network of native-identified Chicanas, organizes “to heal and rebuild our identities as women in resistance of the continued colonization and oppression of our people and Mother Earth.” Chicana writers and artists, including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Naomi Quiñonez, Santa Barraza, Yreina Cervantez, and Celia Rodríguez are in the forefront of expressing through word and image a Xicana/Indigena spirituality. Santería priestesses communing with divinities, cu-
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Reyes, Guadalupe randeras healing the sick, Catholic nuns challenging racism and sexism, Latinas doing theology, laywomen teaching religious doctrine, temple keepers cleaning and beautifying sanctuaries, Protestant ministers preaching and organizing, urban sweat lodge keepers, sun dancers, and ritual planners all replicate the great diversity of Latina religiosity. The commitment of Latinas to shaping their religious traditions reflects their vitality and determination to supplant patriarchal interpretations of the sacred. See also Pentecostal Church; Popular Religiosity SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute; Aquino, María Pilar, Daisy Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez, eds. 2002. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology. Austin: University of Texas Press; Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth. 1997. “Hispanic Protestant Spirituality.” In Teología en conjunto: A Collaborative Hispanic Protestant Theology, ed. José David Rodríguez and Loida I. Martell-Otero. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press; Díaz-Stevens, Ana María. 1994. “Latinas in the Church.” In Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S.: Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; González, Baez Camargo. 1930. Hacia la revolución religiosa en Hispanoamérica. Mexico: Casa Unida de Publicaciones; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, and Yolanda Tarango. 1988. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church: Toward a Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology. San Francisco: Harper and Row; Medina, Lara. 1998. “Los espírtus siguen hablando: Chicana Spiritualities.” In Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkeley, CA: Third World Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1988. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocation before Mid-century.” Oral History Review 16, no. 2 (Fall): 47–63; Silva Gotay, Samuel. 1997. Protestantismo y política en Puerto Rico, 1898–1930. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; Soto Fontanez, Santiago. 1982. Misión a la puerta/Mission at the Door. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Editora Educativa Dominicana. Lara Medina and Elizabeth Conde-Frazier
REYES, GUADALUPE (1918–2000) Born in the farmlands of Oklahoma in 1918, Guadalupe Alcalá was the oldest of four daughters in a family of migrant farm laborers. At the age of three Lupe lost her mother and, along with her father, became the primary caregiver for her younger sisters. When she was twenty, her family left the fields of Oklahoma in search of greater opportunities in Chicago. Two years later Lupe met and married Andrés Reyes, a steelworker in one of the city’s mills. Together Lupe and Andrés had eleven children. The couple began raising their family in the South Side community of Hyde Park until urban renewal forced them to move fifteen years later. The family settled in the Pilsen community, a growing Mexican immigrant port-of-entry neighborhood.
Reyes became one of the earliest and most noted Latina activists in Chicago. Her activism began in 1951 when she received the devastating news that her son, Bobby, only nine months old, had contracted spinal meningitis. Her son became severely disabled, and doctors told Reyes that he would never walk or talk. Determined to help her son, however, Reyes developed her own physical therapy for him at home and taught him how to walk and talk. Her struggle with a disabled child became more difficult when she searched for educational services in her community. After years of searching for a school for her son, she decided to start her own school. She placed a small advertisement in the local newspaper and soon had a group of parents with disabled children meeting in a church basement. Together with these parents Reyes organized and founded the Esperanza School to serve children with disabilities in 1969. When her son reached adulthood and could no longer attend Esperanza, Reyes focused on services for adults with disabilities. Knocking door-to-door in search of other families who could benefit from services for the disabled, she founded El Valor Corporation in 1973, an agency that provides employment and lifeskills training for adults with disabilities. Reyes did not limit her activism, however, to her son’s disability. During this time she became involved in the Mexican community of Pilsen, in particular through the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council. She helped lead the fight for a new high school in the community and was instrumental in establishing the Fiesta del Sol community festival in 1972 to commemorate the new school, Benito Juárez High School. She helped with various other community campaigns, including bringing a library and field house to the neighborhood, establishing a Latina/o senior citizens’ group, and advocating for health care for the elderly in local community clinics. Reyes maintained her tenacity for community work even during the most difficult times of her life. She cared for her ailing father until he died in 1968. Reyes then lost her husband to cancer in 1970. Her disabled son, Bobby, for whom she had advocated over the years, passed away in 1983. Yet her commitment to community activism did not waver. Fifteen years after her son’s death she explained, “Bobby was my inspiration. But just because he has passed on doesn’t mean that other people don’t need help.” In 1991, while still active with El Valor and various other community projects, Reyes accepted an appointment to the Chicago Transit Authority board, where she served until she passed away. She advocated repairing public transit services for low-income African American and Latina/o neighborhoods and supported the expansion of El Valor’s facilities to include services for families and children such as Head Start and par-
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Rico, Angelina Moreno enting programs. Thirty years later the agency has grown into a community organization that serves 1,500 families a day and has several sites throughout the city. Guadalupe Reyes was an extraordinary woman remembered fondly in Chicago’s Mexican community as a persistent and dedicated activist. She instilled a commitment to activism in her children, many of whom continue to be involved in Pilsen’s community organizations. SOURCES: Johnson, Geoffrey. 1997. “Guadalupe Reyes: Founder, Esperanza and El Valor.” Chicago (January): 45, 47; Reyes, Jaime J. 2001. “Guadalupe Reyes: Una vida al servicio de la comunidad.” La Raza News, January 14–20, 6. Lilia Fernández
RICO, ANGELINA MORENO (1898–1984) Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Angelina Moreno Rico formed part of the first wave of Mexican migration to the Midwest. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 left many Mexicans landless, and jobs were scarce. At the same time, propelled by a labor shortage during World War I and debilitating union strikes, U.S. industrial companies sent contractors to recruit Mexican workers. Between 1916 and 1926 Mexican laborers flooded into midwestern railroads, stockyards, and steel mills. Angelina Rico’s husband, José T. Rico, left Mexico City in 1926. Three months later his wife and sons George, Angelo, and Manuel joined him in Chicago. The Mexican presence in Illinois grew in three identifiable enclaves: South Chicago, Back of the Yards, and the Near West Side. Adjustment, however, was not easy. Immigrants faced employment exploitation, substandard housing, poor health, discrimination, and hostility from established European immigrants who resented incorporating Mexican newcomers into the workforce. Often used as strikebreakers, rather than achieving prosperity, Mexican workers found themselves in economic limbo. The Ricos settled in the Near West Side, where José Rico worked primarily as a mechanic. Within their first year they lost their youngest son, Manuel, to rheumatic fever. In 1929 they welcomed another son, also named Manuel, and two years later a daughter, Elena. With two years of university studies behind her, Angelina, together with José, enrolled in night classes at Crane High School. Besides learning English, they completed elementary, high-school, and several college courses. Despite poverty and other hardships, Angelina Rico made sure that all the children attained a strong musical foundation, including violin, piano, and voice. After the onset of the depression, the U.S. government implemented repatriation policies and deported thousands of Mexicans, both undocumented residents
and legal citizens. These actions fueled disparaging stereotypes and fostered fear and shame. As the Ricos became more involved in the community, Angelina noticed that many Mexican youths were passing as Italians and refused to learn Spanish. Under Angelina’s leadership the Ricos began singing Christmas posadas and other traditional Mexican songs as a way of promoting Mexican culture. Additionally, performances were accompanied by a display of Angelina’s Mexican artifacts. The family sang in various Chicago churches during the Christmas season, as well as at Firman House, a Presbyterian-affiliated settlement house on the Near West Side. During the 1940s the Ricos sought other venues to improve sociocultural conditions. They joined the Mexican Civic Committee, which dealt with issues such as high infant mortality, lack of educational opportunities, rising delinquency, poor housing, and substandard health conditions. José joined the board of directors of the Mexican Civic Committee and took charge of the city’s first Mexican Boy Scout troop in 1944, and Angelina served as president of the Mothers’ Club. Still, the family remained committed to presenting folkloric Mexican music and dance to Chicago audiences. In 1946 the Ricos began to perform in the Museum of Science and Industry’s Christmas around the World program, which showcased songs from ethnic Chicago’s native Christmas celebrations. The Ricos presented a three-part rendition of the posadas. The first featured Mary and Joseph’s peregrinación (pilgrimage) through Bethlehem, ending with the couple’s lodging in a stable. The second began after the birth of Jesus and featured hymns dedicated to the newborn Messiah. The third was “La Fiesta,” a celebration complete with the breaking of a piñata and Mexican folkloric dances like el jarabe tapatio and la bamba. The Ricos created the show from the ground up. Without proper sheet music, Angelina sang and her eldest son George wrote the accompanying music. Angelina, a professional seamstress, and other women made all the clothing and accessories, detailing them according to the songs’ regional/folkloric characteristics. The Ricos’ performances quickly became a favorite; they soon gave five hour-long performances in one day. These activities continued for twenty-five years. With Angelina’s encouragement, George Rico created the Chicago Fiesta Guild, a Mexican folkloric dance group, in 1949. It involved the entire Rico family and Mexican youths from the Chicago area. Its members not only took pride in the wealth of their heritage, but were encouraged to learn Spanish. By the 1950s those who had survived the depression and repatriation were already more adapted to an American lifestyle. The Chicago Fiesta Guild provided a way to
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Musician and folklorist Angelina Moreno Rico and her family. Courtesy of Elena Rico.
maintain ties to Mexican culture. Angelina valued their performances for their educational components. She thought it important to challenge prevailing stereotypes and show the “gringos” that “Mexicans did more than sleep under the sombrero.” For more than twenty years the Chicago Fiesta Guild performed year-round and regularly participated in pan-American parades, civic celebrations, Mexican Independence Day, settlement houses, including Hull-House, and local events. Despite various illnesses and nineteen operations, Angelina’s energy did not wane. She extended her love of music to everyone around her and through personal sacrifice and dedication taught Mexicans to be committed to their community. Her children became involved professionally in music: Elena became a soprano with the Chicago Symphony Chorus, and George established several symphonic orchestras and organizes an annual performance of Handel’s Messiah. A teacher since 1949, he has helped develop performers renowned throughout the world. After a lifetime of promoting Mexican values and culture, Angelina Moreno Rico died on June 23, 1984, at the age of eighty-five. SOURCES: Espinoza, Martha. 2001. “Rico, Angelina Moreno.” In Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Rico, Angelina Moreno. Oral history interviews with Martha Espinoza. Hull-House Papers, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. Martha Espinoza
RINCÓN DE GAUTIER, FELISA (1897–1994) Felisa Rincón, or “Doña Fela,” as she was affectionately known throughout most of her political career, was born in the northeastern Puerto Rican town of
Ceiba in 1897. Her parents were an attorney, Enrique Rincón Plumey, and a schoolteacher, Rita Marrero. The family moved to San Juan when she was ten. When she was eleven, her mother died, which forced Rincón, the eldest, to abandon her studies to take care of her seven siblings. She was later sent to live with relatives in the town of San Lorenzo. At an early age Rincón became a prolific and accomplished seamstress. Her tailoring and fashion skills later played a role in her life in New York City and in San Juan. In the 1930s she migrated to New York to improve her financial situation. She returned to San Juan a few years later and opened a clothing store there called Felisa Style Shop. In 1940 she married Jenaro A. Gautier, a well-connected lawyer who, at the time, worked in the Attorney General’s Office. Rincón came from a family with deep political roots. She was active, as a member of the Liberal Party, in the campaign that gave women the right to vote in 1932. During these years she met Luis Muñoz Marín and supported his political ambitions. Rincón was among the founding members of the Popular Democratic Party when Muñoz and others abandoned the Liberal Party. In 1940 she was appointed by party leader Muñoz to be the president of the San Juan Committee of the Popular Democratic Party, a position she held until 1970. In 1946 she was selected to replace Roberto Sánchez Vilella as mayor of San Juan. Sánchez had won in 1944 but had resigned to take another position within the party. Rincón had been nominated for mayor earlier, in 1944, but she declined when faced with opposition from both her husband and her father. Rincón served continuously as mayor from 1946 until 1968, when she retired from public office. During her tenure the city grew from about 180,000 to 500,000 residents. Rincón was a very popular mayor. She called her political philosophy “benevolent maternalism” and focused on populist issues such as street cleaning, hy-
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Former mayor of San Juan, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, at left, supports Mario Procaccino for mayor of New York City. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
giene, restoring the historic section of San Juan, and expanding services to children and to the poor. In Puerto Rico’s political folklore Rincón will always be remembered as the mayor who in 1955 had cargo planes carry ice from the United States for thousands of spectators gathered in a city park waiting for Rincón to keep her promise to bring “snow” to the children of San Juan. She also practiced a politics of “open access,” stressing the need for direct contact between San Juan residents and herself. Every Wednesday Rincón held extensive “open-house” hours in city hall to receive people who wanted to convey their concerns and problems directly to the mayor. Rincón was a relentless ally of Governor Muñoz and a devout defender of commonwealth status. She was also extremely active in mainland Democratic Party politics, participating in nominating conventions and in numerous committees pertaining to urban affairs. Since her days as mayor she had been a delegate to Democratic Party nominating conventions. In 1992, the last convention she attended at age ninety-five, she achieved the distinction of being the oldest delegate at the convention. Rincón died in San Juan in 1994. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: García-Ramis, Magali. 1995. Dona Felisa Rincón de Gautier: Mayor of San Juan. Morristown, NJ: Modern Curriculum Press; Gerber, Irving. 1979. Felisa Rincón: Woman of the Americas. New York: Book Lab; Gruber, Ruth. 1972. Felisa Rincón de Gautier, the Mayor of San Juan. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell; Walzer, Robert P. 1994. “Doña Felisa Rincón Dies at Age 97.” San Juan Star, September 17, 10. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
RIVERA, AURELIA “YEYA” (1909–
)
Aurelia Rivera, born on August 26, 1909, in Cayey, Puerto Rico, and raised in Caguas, migrated to New York City in 1941. Known as “Yeya” to her friends and family, she is one of the many unheralded matriarchs of the pioneer, pre–World War II wave of Puerto Rican migration to New York City. Tenacious, natural leaders, these women frequently provided a broad range of options and accommodations for relatives who migrated after them. Along with others of her generation, she exemplifies the toughness of the pioneer Puerto Rican migrants. Despite her personal hardships and the poverty of her homeland, Yeya Rivera refused to accept the limitations imposed by her environment, whether in Puerto Rico or in New York City. At the age of six, when her mother died, Rivera and her two sisters were separated, and each of the siblings thereafter received a different religious upbringing. The eldest lived with Baptists, the youngest was raised Catholic, and Yeya Rivera went to live with her father, who ran a Spiritist centro. Rivera overcame the effects of poor living conditions, coupled with malnutrition that had increased the incidence and mortality of a deadly tuberculosis epidemic that took her sister and several of her inlaws. Rivera married as a teenager and had two sons, the youngest of whom was raised by her remaining sister, Mary, and her husband, a childless but financially stable couple. After Yeya Rivera’s husband left the family in the late 1920s, she worked in a tobacco factory
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Rivera, Chita
Aurelia Rivera, aunt of former Congressman Hermán Badillo, at her second marriage. Courtesy of David A. Badillo.
curing leaf tobacco. She was one of some 2,500 female and 1,000 male tobacco workers in Caguas who earned an average per capita wage of $183 in the winter of 1928–1929. Fortunately for Rivera, she had completed three years of high school, surpassing most of her contemporaries. She learned to speak a little English, which helped her land a job with the Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Agency (“la PRERA”), a territorial New Deal government agency, where she worked in the countryside distributing goods to impoverished families. The next phase of her life began at the age of thirtyone. Without a husband and with two young boys to feed, her son José Luis and her nephew Hermán, Badillo whom she had raised since his parents died of tuberculosis, Rivera embarked for New York City and settled in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem). As a migrant she became adept at family fund-raising and cementing family networks. She liked El Barrio for its familiar sights and sounds. She soon discovered the vast open market under the train tracks on Park Avenue, spanning several blocks around 116th Street, “where were Cubans, Dominicans, de todo.” Due to unforeseen economic hardships and complicated family jealousies, Rivera felt pressured to place her nephew, Hermán, in the care of relatives in southern California for a few years. When circumstances improved for her in New York City, she again cared for him. Drawing on the political savvy she had gained in Puerto Rico as an activist for the Unionist Party, as well as her gregariousness and neighborhood contacts, she
met many of the Puerto Rican political figures in El Barrio. It was Rivera who introduced Hermán Badillo to a local Democratic club leader and jewelry store owner, Tony Méndez, who helped launch his political career in East Harlem. A graduate of City College and Brooklyn Law School, Rivera’s nephew rose to serve four terms in the Congress of the United States, the first Puerto Rican to do so. His impressive career also included the Bronx Borough presidency and chairmanship of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. In the late 1950s Rivera remarried and moved to southern California, where she lived for another fifteen years. After returning briefly to Puerto Rico she relocated to central Florida, a place that reminded her of southern California. In her later years she returned to New York and spent several years at a senior center in the Melrose section of the Bronx. Rivera’s legacy was not merely that of a catalyst for inexorable developments; she clearly played a vital role in her family’s survival, taking decisive steps at crucial junctures. Despite omnipresent poverty, she retained aspirations for advancement and mobility for herself and for her family: “I always believed in progressing, getting ahead, going forward” (“yo me movía”). In her nineties she retains the tenacity and resourcefulness that made her a family matriarch, an important legacy that involved raising a son and her sister’s son and building a successful life in the United States. Her famous nephew summed up her role, and that of other matriarchs of the migration, pragmatically and concisely: “She had to scrap, she always worked, and she took care of us.” SOURCES: Badillo, David A. 2005. “Titi Yeya’s Memories: A Matriarch of the Puerto Rican Migration.” In Race and Ethnicity in New York City, ed. J. Krase and Ray Hutchinson. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press; Chenault, Lawrence R. 1938. The Puerto Rican Migrant in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. David Badillo
RIVERA, CHITA (1933–
)
Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero better known as the actress, singer, and dancer Chita Rivera, was born on January 23, 1933 in Washington, D.C., the third child of Pedro Julio Figueroa and Katherine del Rivero. From childhood Rivera loved to perform and was fortunate to be enrolled in singing, piano, and ballet lessons. Her brother organized shows in the basement of their home, and Rivera was the major performer. She was encouraged to pursue a career as a dancer because of her talent in this area. At the age of seventeen Rivera auditioned for a scholarship to George Balanchine’s
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Rivera, Graciela School of American Ballet in New York City and was accepted. Rivera had just completed her high-school education at Taft High School in the Bronx when she accompanied a friend to Manhattan for an audition for a road company of the Broadway musical Call Me Madam and won the role herself. Within a year she was back in New York as a featured dancer in Guys and Dolls. Within six years Rivera had played roles in Can-Can, The Imogene Coca Show on national television, the OffBroadway Shoestring Review, and Seventh Heaven on Broadway and a major role in Mr. Wonderful. In addition to critically acclaimed theatrical exposure, numerous appearances on popular network television shows positioned Rivera for what became the first truly major role in her career—that of Anita in West Side Story. The musical ran for 732 performances, and the role of Anita on stage became synonymous with Chita Rivera. She was nominated for her first Tony but did not win the award. During this time Rivera married Anthony Mordente, a dancer in the show. After the birth of their daughter, Lisa Angela Mordente, who became an actress herself, the couple resumed their parts in the London production of the show. In 1959 a second big hit featured Rivera in a costarring role, that of Rosie Grant in Bye Bye Birdie with Dick Van Dyke. She received a second Tony nomination for Birdie and a third nomination for her next role as Anyanka the gypsy princess in Bajour. Not one to rest on her accomplishments, Rivera developed a cabaret act with the collaboration of lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander that she took on the road throughout the United States and Canada. But within a short time her first love, the stage, beckoned her back to Broadway in the late 1960s, where she performed in The Threepenny Opera, Flower Drum Song, and Sweet Charity. On tour once again in the early 1970s, Rivera’s performances included Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Born Yesterday, The Rose Tattoo, and Kiss Me Kate. By now Rivera had developed into a superb actress who could portray either serious or comedic roles, as well as sing or dance. In 1975 Rivera opened as Velma Kelly in the extraordinary Broadway production of Chicago. She received a fourth Tony nomination, but the award was not forthcoming. This happened again with the poorly received sequel to Bye Bye Birdie, Bring Back Birdie, but with the musical The Rink, created especially for Rivera by Ebb and Kander, her riveting performance was finally recognized by the judges, and she garnered the Tony as outstanding actress in a musical. Accolades and awards surround Rivera in recognition of her great contributions and accomplishments on the American stage. Few other actresses are gifted with the talent to perform so well in so many venues.
After her induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, Rivera suffered severe injuries in a car accident that required her to overcome compound fractures at the age of fifty-three. By 1992, however, Rivera was back on Broadway in the smash hit Kiss of the Spider Woman. Almost sixty, Rivera played a series of sensual, beautiful, and complex characters from movie musicals that required her to act, sing, dance, and emote. This role garnered Rivera a second Tony. Now in her seventies, at an age when one contemplates retirement or perhaps slowing down the responsibilities of daily life, Rivera continues to make history. She was honored by the Kennedy Center in 2002. The effervescent and versatile Rivera has also conquered Broadway once more. In 2003 she appeared opposite Antonio Banderas and a bevy of younger female performers in the award-winning musical revival of Nine, acting, singing, and dancing as the definitive queen of the stage that she is. See also West Side Story SOURCES: Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1989. “Chita Rivera.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, ed. Luis Reyes Rivera and Julia Rodríguez. New York: IPRUS Institute; Joseph C. and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
RIVERA, GRACIELA (1921–
)
A spirited description appears in a published profile of Graciela Rivera’s debut in the role of Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1952. “The audience of opera buffs swelled with those unexpected fans who had come to hear the first Puerto Rican ever to sing at the Met. Cries of, ‘Que viva Puerto Rico libre,’ punctuated the applause of seven curtain calls elicited by Rivera’s unprecedented performance.” Rivera’s recollection of the event: “It was unbelievable.” Rivera, who was not all that interested in opera when she was young, was born on April 17, 1921, in the southern coastal city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, and raised in Santurce, a short distance from the capital, San Juan. Rivera concedes that her high-school music teacher almost forced her to attend a performance of The Pirates of Penzance. She had expected to become an English teacher, a professional choice in keeping with her fondness for English-language songs, but exposure to Pirates completely changed her life. From that point on Rivera became immersed in music, joined the chorus, and appeared in numerous operatic performances at Central High School. After graduation Rivera toured the island performing in concert. A chance meeting with a young sailor, Joseph Zumcheck,
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Rivera, Graciela
Opera singer Graciela Rivera. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
was fortuitous for several reasons. An avid fan of Rivera’s, he helped raise funds to pay for her admission to New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Music and eventually became her husband and manager. In addition to voice, Rivera studied harmony, music theory, piano, counterpoint, and composition. She graduated from Juilliard in 1943. Two years later Rivera launched her musical career by interpreting the role of Adele in Rosalinda, a Broadway version of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. She reprised her role in several of the opera houses in France and Germany, but Rivera’s operatic debut actually took place in the late 1940s when she sang the role of Rosina in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the New Orleans Opera. Rivera’s distinguished career as a coloratura soprano soared with critically acclaimed performances throughout the United States and abroad. She sang at the New York City Opera and the San Carlo Opera and with the Havana Philharmonic. In 1952 Rivera opened as Lucia in her historic debut at the prestigious New York Metropolitan Opera, realizing the dream of an operatic career at the age of thirty-one. The press hailed Rivera, comparing the enormously accomplished soprano to the legendary Lily Pons. Considered among the best on the American stage, Rivera solidified a stellar reputation by giving concerts at Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Madison Square Garden, and Radio City Music Hall. The weekly WHOM radio program Graciela Rivera Sings, a semiclassical and popular music offering, was on the air for five consecutive years. In addition, Rivera appeared on national television, NBC, CBS, and WOR. During a fifty-year career in
classical music and performance Rivera has interacted with great conductors and singers: Oliviero de Fabritiis, Francesco Molinari Pradelli, Antal Dorati, Robert Merrill, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. By 1972 Rivera’s personal and family life limited extensive traveling, and she accepted an assistant professorship in music at the City University of New York. Through specialized courses on the history of Puerto Rican music, the Puerto Rican chorus, and music theory, Rivera introduced new generations to Boricua heritage and the classics. She became artistic director and president of the Puerto Rico Opera Company of Hostos College and premiered Nela. Composed by Manuel B. González, Nela is based on the novel Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós and is the first Puerto Rican opera ever presented in the United States. Rivera’s accomplishments have been recognized by countless organizations, universities, and professional music associations throughout the years with awards, citations, proclamations, and other testimonials to her contributions and advancement of classical music and performance. Catholic University in Ponce in 1993 and Lehman College in New York City in 1996 honored her with honorary doctorates. SOURCES: Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1989. “Graciela Rivera.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, ed. Luis Reyes Rivera and Julia Rodríguez. New York: IPRUS Institute; Fundación Nacional para la Cultural Popular, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Toro, Clarissa Santiago. 2004. “Graciela Rivera.” www.prpop.org/biografias/g_bios/graciela_rivera.shtml (accessed July 23, 2005).
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Rivera, Roxana
RIVERA, ROXANA (1977–2003) Roxana Rivera was born in Monterey Park, California, in 1977 to Mexican immigrants Victor Manuel Rivera, a U.S. Postal Service worker, and María Eugenia Baeza, a Los Angeles County Clerk’s Office employee. The oldest of three offspring, she grew up in Lynwood, an area near South Central Los Angeles, with her sisters, Brenda Rivera Lázaro and Ruby Rivera. Roxana Rivera demonstrated an inclination for writing during her early school years when a story she authored about her family won first place in a local writing competition. Her interest in writing continued throughout her childhood, and she emerged as a star pupil. However, when she reached adolescence, Rivera’s dedication to writing began to wane. As her writing faltered, her academic standing also suffered. Her desire to communicate persisted, but it was manifested through graffiti spray cans that her mother discovered lodged under Rivera’s bed. Concerned over her daughter’s questionable activities, Rivera’s mother persuaded her brotherin-law, Daniel Villarreal, to talk to the girl. A wellknown local screenwriter and actor who appeared in the films Stand and Deliver (1988) and American Me (1992), Villarreal appealed to Rivera’s creative energies and handed her several books for inspiration. One was Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984). As Rivera later recalled, this event was a turning point because it introduced her to Chicana writers who shared her experiences and had found constructive ways of expressing themselves. Rivera graduated from Downey High School in 1995 and immediately enrolled at Long Beach City College. In 1999 she transferred to California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and three years later earned a baccalaureate degree in women’s studies and English, with an emphasis in creative writing. During those years Rivera regularly appeared on the list of high achievers and became committed to various cultural and feminist causes. On campus she used her writing skills as a venue to address political issues. She helped organize Movimiento Estudiantil de Teatro y Arte (META), a student theater group whose performances included an act that Rivera cowrote in support of the California Faculty Association’s efforts to challenge unfair labor practices for lecturers. An active volunteer at the Women’s Resource Center, Rivera cofounded Sirens between the Lines, a poetry-reading series that featured the writing of women of color. Rivera’s endeavors were infused with social activism. In 2001 and 2002 she tutored English classes at David Starr Jordan and Woodrow Wilson high schools in the Long Beach area under the Pre-collegiate Academic Development Program and developed lesson plans that included Chicana/o and Latina/o culture
Poet and student activist Roxana Rivera is on the right. Courtesy of Thanya Mercado.
and literature. In April 2002 Rivera and three other students completed a yearlong independent study project on the role of media in shaping identity in young women of color. Their findings were presented at the National Association of Ethnic Studies (NAES) in Vancouver, British Columbia. The feminist themes that Rivera pursued in the classroom also made their way into her writing. As her work developed, her poetry increasingly explored women’s experiences and issues such as the spiritual connections between women and their families, and female friendships. She began to write what she referred to as her “dirty girl” poems, works that possessed a sensual lyricism and addressed bold, intimate topics. In 2003 she was awarded a Long Beach Festival of Authors Literary Women’s Scholarship. After graduation Rivera worked closely with awardwinning novelist and poet Rigoberto González, who provided professional and critical guidance. She enrolled in the master of fine arts program for creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIUC). Attracted by the program’s reputation, its Crab Orchard Literary Magazine, and a fellow poet mentor, Allison Joseph, Rivera held a PROMPT (Proactive Recruitment of Multicultural Professors and Teachers), fellowship and taught English. She continued community outreach in university-sponsored projects and participated in poetry readings. Rivera was scheduled to read her work at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago in March 2004. Sadly, in the prime of her youth, Roxana Rivera was killed in a car crash on November 21, 2003. In recognition of her feminist contributions and creative talent,
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Rivera Martínez, Domitila the Department of Women’s Studies at SIUC created the Roxana Rivera Memorial Poetry Contest. Various commemorative projects in process will honor Rivera’s passion for writing and addressing women’s issues. SOURCES: Peach, Brian. 2003. “Rivera SIUC Graduate Student Killed in Car Crash.” Southern Illinoisian (Carbondale, Illinois), November 22; Rios, Jennifer. 2003. “Third Annual Poetry Night Takes Place as Part of Hispanic Heritage Month.” Daily Egyptian (Southern Illinois University student newspaper), September 25; Youngman, Rochelle. 2003. “Gifted Writer, Former Student Remembered.” 49er (California State University, Long Beach student paper), December 15. Maythee Rojas
RIVERA MARTÍNEZ, DOMITILA (1898–1979) Domitila Rivera was born in Chimalhuacán, Mexico, to Bernardino and Jesusita Villanueva Rivera. In 1906 Jesusita converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints (LDS) and encouraged her daughters to investigate the precepts of this faith. One of the primary assertions of Mormon devotion is that Mormons are duty-bound to return to the service of God the descendants of people known as “Lamanites.” In the modern world their successors are the mestizos of the Americas. Until these progeny are converted, the millennial kingdom will not begin. Thus Mexicanos have a key role to play in bringing people to eternal salvation. For the rest of her life Domitila Rivera served as a missionary, church officer, and religious leader who worked tirelessly to spread her faith among Spanish-speaking people. Although she was warned that friends and neighbors would ostracize individuals who left the Catholic Church, Domitila Rivera and her sisters Agustina and Dolores converted. The fear of being snubbed and ridiculed was not their only concern. The family was also in constant fear of reprisals from both Mexican national troops and Zapatistas. Amid the chaos Bernardino struggled to raise the amount necessary to send his daughters to safety. Through great sacrifice they raised the necessary funds, and the sisters reached Salt Lake City by 1919. Shortly thereafter a church official approached the Riveras and asked if they would be willing to work as missionaries to su gente (their people), many of whom were working for the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company (UISC) in the town of Garland. During the 1910s Utah’s sugar-beet industry grew dramatically, and because of the economic expansion of World War I local labor was in short supply. The UISC recruited about 2,000 workers, mostly Mexicanos, to work in its fields. Between 1919 and 1921 Domitila and her sisters traveled to Garland to spread their faith among betabeleros (beet pickers). By early
1921 such efforts had borne fruit, and about 100 persons were attending Spanish-language services in Salt Lake City. The LDS Church officially recognized the group, naming it the Local Mexican Mission. In 1923 church leaders renamed the mission the Rama Mexicana. This entity served a myriad of functions for Mexican Mormons in Salt Lake City’s west side. It was a spiritual home, a gathering place, and a haven for social activities and networking. The Rivera sisters all met their future husbands at Rama events. Domitila met her husband, Castulo Delgado Martínez, and the couple married on October 3, 1923. They had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood. He died in Salt Lake City in April 1972. Within the Rama, Domitila, Agustina, and Dolores held leadership positions in entities such as the Sociedad de Socorro (Relief Society). This association helped sick or injured members, raised money for the needy, and quilted blankets and other goods for distribution to the poor. During the Great Depression the Rama’s Relief Society provided assistance to the indigent and destitute. Among the Mexican Mormons ethnic ties caused most to overlook denominational differences. As Domitila’s niece, Ruth Torres, stated in a 1996 interview, “We saw good (and need) in all of our people, both Catholics and Mormons.” Between 1923 and 1961 the Rivera sisters were presidents of the Sociedad de Socorro for a total of seventeen years. Domitila directed the organization from August 1942 through July 1943. Each of the sisters also served the group as counselor, teacher, and secretary. In addition to working for the Sociedad, Domitila and her siblings increased awareness and appreciation of Mexican culture and folklore among Mormons. From 1925 through the late 1950s the sisters, often with children and spouses in tow, visited congregations throughout the West and helding “Mexican-style” dinners, stage plays, and traditional dances. These events helped the Rama raise money for a permanent building and increased awareness of the need to convert the descendants of the Lamanites. In sum, the families of the three Rivera sisters formed the core of the Rama between the 1920s and 1960. Domitila, Agustina, and Dolores’s husbands, children, nieces, and nephews sustained the Rama and worked tirelessly to expand the LDS Church’s ministry among the growing number of Spanish-speaking people in Utah. She died in 1979. Several authors have written about the role of mujeres Católicas, but not much attention has been paid to the activities of women in other churches. The story of Domitila Rivera and her sisters shows that Latinas of other denominations have also worked to benefit the spiritual and social lives of their families and communities.
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Robles Díaz, Inés See also Religion SOURCES: Iber, Jorge. 1998. “El Diablo nos esta llevando: Utah Hispanics during the Great Depression, 1930–1940.” Utah Historical Quarterly 66 (Spring): 159–177; ———. 2000. Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Ulibarri, Richard O. 1989. “Utah’s Unassimilated Minorities.” In Utah’s History, ed. Richard D. Poll, 629–650. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Jorge Iber
ROBLES DÍAZ, INÉS (1933–
)
Community activist Inés Robles Díaz was born in 1933 in Barrio Nuevo, Naranjito, Puerto Rico. Her father, Emiliano Izcoa, was a landowner, farmer, and tobacco grower. Her mother, María Magdalena Díaz Cruz, was a homemaker. They lived on the family land in rural Puerto Rico. At the age of six Inés was sent to live with relatives in a less rural area of Naranjito in order to attend better schools. She believes that this early separation from her family made her independent from an early age. In 1950 Robles Díaz attended the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she studied teaching for three and a half years. After her one-year teaching practicum she taught for two years in Naranjito. She subsequently took and passed the government social work exam and became a welfare investigator for the government of Puerto Rico. In this role she became aware of the extent of poverty in Puerto Rico and zealously assisted Puertorriqueños in applying for benefits to which they were entitled. Annoyed by investigators who felt that they were gatekeepers of government money rather than helpers of the poor, she reminisces that “this job made me realize that what I wanted to do were things that involved helping people.” Robles Díaz married Emilio Robles Hernández in 1956, and they moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Sensing that only factory jobs were available to newly arrived Puerto Ricans, they moved to New York and in 1958 settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Within a year Inés and Emilio opened a combination travel agency and insurance brokerage in Brownsville. Emilio also prepared tax returns. They owned the business—which was moved to East New York, Brooklyn, in 1964—until 1999. Robles Díaz’s interest in helping the poor and disenfranchised continued in Brooklyn. Horrified by complaints from East Brooklyn residents about their apartments, she heard tales of falling ceilings, lack of heat, and roach infestations that property owners ignored. While helping her husband in the travel agency, she processed English-language housing forms and welfare applications and called upon agencies to advocate for neighborhood residents. Inés remembers Emilio’s
annoyance when he came to the travel agency in the middle of the day and found it closed, a crowd of clients gathered outside. Expected to mind the business, Inés often left to assist those in urgent need of welfare assistance. Robles Díaz’s commitment to improving the living conditions of Puerto Ricans in New York led to her interest in voter registration and community activism. She felt strongly that if one lived in a community, one had to be interested in it and become involved in school meetings and political affairs. Puerto Ricans were shy and fearful of taking the English-language exam needed to register to vote; many were cynical about the value of politics in helping them. Convincing Puerto Ricans of their electoral duties, she “took them by the hand” to the polling sites and tutored them on passing the test. Denouncing increasing racial and ethnic segregation in Brownsville schools, Robles Díaz advocated for the creation of Educational Park, an integrated juniorhigh-school and high-school complex in Brooklyn that would draw students from white, African American, and Latino neighborhoods. The board of education did not implement the ambitious program, largely because of the objections of white parents.
Community volunteer Inés Robles Díaz. Courtesy of Sally Robles.
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Rodríguez, Hermelinda Morales With community agency funds available from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs, Inés and Emilio Robles helped start a variety of organizations. In 1967 they formed Acción Cívica Hispana, with Emilio as president. The organization existed from 1966 to 1970 and created youth sports and recreational programs. It supplied Spanish-speaking interpreters, processed English-language applications, advocated for Hispanics denied full welfare benefits, provided remedial tutoring for children, assisted with health care and school problems, and collected toys for children. Inés Robles became the secretary of the Puerto Rican Organizations of Brownsville and East New York (PROBE) and the Brownsville Community Council, organizations that assisted East Brooklyn residents with a variety of social service concerns. For two years she directed Brownsville Community Council’s Action Center No. 4, a multiservice agency that assisted residents with an assortment of problems, including social services, housing, and health care. Along with Evelyn Aberson, Robles incorporated the East Brooklyn Mental Health Project in 1967 and received funding to establish a mental health clinic in East New York. Robles recalls that these organizations were male dominated, and “women had to be pushy, even with their husbands. They didn’t think we could do things.” Partly out of the feeling that women were not respected, Inés Robles, along with Felicia Arroyo, Ramonita García, and Marcelina Díaz, proposed the formation of a group, subsequently funded in 1967, called the Ladies Committee for Puerto Rican Culture. The organization sought to infuse Puerto Ricans in East Brooklyn with a sense of pride about their cultural heritage. The founders felt that New York Puerto Ricans quickly lost their cultural connections, and that the mainland-born generation did not speak Spanish. In a state of “cultural limbo,” youths were not accepted as Americans and faced considerable discrimination. By preserving and transmitting Puerto Rican culture in Brooklyn, the organization would help increase selfesteem among Puerto Ricans. In 1967 the Ladies Committee successfully advocated for an elementary school in Brownsville named after Puerto Rican abolitionist Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances. The curriculum included African, African American, and Puerto Rican culture. In addition, the committee had every public library in Brooklyn order books by Puerto Rican authors. The Ladies Committee for Puerto Rican Culture still exists in Brooklyn and provides residents with free GED and English-language classes. Robles feared that her own children would internalize the low academic expectations held by many schoolteachers and administrators about Puerto Ricans. She consequently instilled the expectation that each would attain a college degree. Concerned also
that her children would be victims of discrimination in school, she would say, “You don’t have to like them [the teachers] but you have to respect them.” She spoke about the possibility that teachers would judge them intellectually inferior because of their bilingualbicultural Puerto Rican background. Academic excellence, she reasoned, was the way to establish that one was not only equal but often intellectually superior to one’s classmates. Robles transmitted a sense of Puerto Rican pride by exalting the language, food, music, holidays, and people of Puerto Rico. Sundays were “Puerto Rican Culture Day,” when only traditional foods were served. She made being Puerto Rican seem like a special entrée into a cohesive, warm, and festive community that nurtured its own. Until the children were in their late teens, there were yearly visits to the rural town of Anones, Naranjito, where Robles had spent much of her youth. Robles’s children are Daniel Emilio Robles, Edna Inés Robles-Brutus, Carol Ann Robles-Roman, Sally María Robles-Rodríguez, Melisa Marie Robles, and Frances Teresa Robles. She also has six grandchildren. Inés and Emilio Robles retired in 1999. SOURCES: Brownsville Counselor. 1967. “Puerto Rican Culture Group.” July 28; Pritchett, W. E. 2002. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sally Robles
RODRÍGUEZ, HERMELINDA MORALES (1903–?) Born in Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Mexico, Hermelinda Morales Rodríguez, a Mexican immigrant, became perhaps the most prominent Mexican woman business owner in Texas during the first half of the twentieth century. Her parents were Anastacio Morales and Flora de los Santos. It remains unclear when she arrived in the United States. She married Guadalupe Rodríguez Jr., who with his father established the Rodríguez and Son Bottling Company in 1918 in San Antonio, Texas. Five years later their root beer business was flourishing, and they moved the factory to larger facilities. When her husband died in 1929, Hermelinda Rodríguez joined her father-in-law in business. She proved an excellent businesswoman and by 1933 had bought out her father-in-law and assumed control of the company as its president and chief executive officer. As the business grew, she brought in her brothers Armando and Melchor to assist with the operations. Reflecting the shift in the family business, they changed the name of Rodríguez and Son Bottling to Dragon Bottling Company in 1934, and the company began to
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Rodríguez, “Isabel” Hernández manufacture new soft drinks. Five years later Dragon Bottling was one of the most prominent Mexicanowned businesses in the state. Using state-of-the-art equipment, the company produced twelve different flavors of soft drinks at the rate of 120 cases per hour. Buying the latest trucks, Dragon Bottling distributed its soft drinks within a 160-mile radius of San Antonio. Unlike most business owners of her day, Rodríguez ran a company with regional reach, not a “mom-and-pop” store catering to local neighbors, but like many Mexican American businesses, the company sponsored local sports teams, including a championship baseball team. Hermelinda Morales Rodríguez is one of a few women listed in the Primer Anuario de los Habitantes Hispano-Americanos (First Yearbook of the Latin American Population of Texas), a Latino who’s who of Texas published in 1939. According to the Anuario, she was an unusual entrepreneur, given her involvement in manufacturing and in selling products not specifically geared to women (e.g., cosmetics). In 1942 she expanded her operations, and the result was the Dragon, Hernández, and Rodríguez Bottling Companies. However, by 1962 her companies had ceased to exist, a typical pattern affecting small bottling firms across the United States as soft-drink manufacture and sales became consolidated within a handful of national corporations. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Garcia, Richard A. 1991. Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, San Antonio, 1919–1941. College Station: Texas A&M University Press; Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Hermelinda Morales Rodríguez.” In New Handbook of Texas 4. Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Cynthia E. Orozco
RODRÍGUEZ, “ISABEL” HERNÁNDEZ (1950– ) Born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, Isabel Hernández Rodríguez immigrated with her mother and eight brothers to the United States at the age of seven and settled in public housing in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, California. After briefly attending public school she attended parochial grammar and then high school. In 1968 she entered Pitzer College as a freshman, but later transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1982 she received a J.D. from the People’s College of Law in Los Angeles. Rodríguez’s formal postsecondary schooling went hand in hand with an education in community and political activism through involvement in the Chicano movement. She married Carlos A. Chávez in 1972; the union dissolved in 1996. She has one daughter, Marisela.
Influenced by what is commonly referred to as the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Rodríguez actively participated in various organizations. She began with the student-based United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and later joined more politically radical organizations, the Committee to Free Los Tres and el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA). Her membership in these two organizations reflects the change in her political thought. Although she identified as a Chicana during her involvement with UMAS, Rodríguez later came to identify herself as a Mexicana, which she felt more accurately reflected her experiences as an immigrant and her beliefs in a transnational Mexican working class not bounded by borders between the United States and Mexico. As a member of CASA, she became editor of the organization’s newspaper, Sin Fronteras, served on the governing body of the organization, the Political Commission, and directed study groups. During the Chicano movement Rodríguez viewed feminism as a “narrow” ideology. However, she still worked within CASA to promote what were deemed “women’s issues.” Therefore, she states, “we talked about male supremacy and how to combat it. . . . I dealt with it more on a personal level . . . than on an organizational level.” Yet within its Marxist-Leninist stance the organization did address gender through its political activities, such as sponsoring women’s conferences, promoting film series on women, and devoting special issues of its newspaper to women’s struggles. In the end, however, the organization never succeeded in incorporating these issues into its overall political vision. CASA ceased to exist as an organization in 1978 because of infighting, lack of finances, member disillusionment, and the stress of constant surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition, historian Ernesto Chávez argues that CASA’s attempt to merge cultural nationalism with Marxism-Leninism brought forth a fundamental contradiction in philosophy that also played a major role in CASA’s demise. After CASA’s downfall Rodríguez, like most of the members of the now-defunct organization, continued to work in the political arena by organizing around undocumented workers’ rights and other injustices borne by ethnic and racial people of color. Today Rodríguez continues to involve herself in political issues affecting primarily the Mexican American and Mexican immigrant communities in Los Angeles. She practices civil rights, criminal defense, workers’ compensation, and personal injury law, is a founding member and vice president of the Latina Lawyers Bar Association in Los Angeles and a member of the American Bar Association and the Mexican American Bar Association, founded the Workers’ Compensation
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Rodríguez, Josefa “Chepita” Committee and sat on the Board of Trustees of the Mexican American Bar Association, and sits on the Board of Directors of Proyecto Pastoral, a faith-based community empowerment organization in the public housing projects of Boyle Heights. Rodríguez’s experiences as an immigrant, student, activist, and professional reflect the diversity within one Latina life experience. Yet while Rodríguez’s experiences may be unique, her life parallels the lives of the many women active not only in CASA, but the Chicano movement as a whole. During the movimiento these women who dedicated their lives to work for social change were rarely recognized for the work they did, yet remained active because they wholeheartedly believed in their cause. Like Rodríguez, most of these women continue to work for social change through professional and community efforts. See also Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) SOURCES: Centro de Acción Social Autónomo. Papers. M0325, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA; Chávez, Ernesto. 2000. “Imagining the Mexican Immigrant Worker: (Inter)Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles.” Aztlán 25 (Spring): 109–135; Chávez, Marisela R. 2000. “ ‘We lived and breathed and worked the movement’: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo–Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA-HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 83–105. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications. Marisela R. Chávez
RODRÍGUEZ, JOSEFA “CHEPITA” (?–1863) Though practically no details exist of Chepita, or Chipita, Rodríguez’s early life, the date of her death on November 13, 1863, is very much in the Texas public record. Apparently Chepita came from Mexico as a youth during the 1820s or the 1830s to escape the political turmoil in her homeland, but her mother died soon after the family arrived in Texas, and her father perished in the Texas war for independence of 1836. She grew up without receiving the benefits of an education and never learned to speak the English language. For most of her life Chepita Rodríguez lived in San Patricio County. There she supported herself by using her old shack, located on the Aransas River where Highway 77 intersects it today, as a resting place. Among those who stopped at Chepita’s Inn was John Savage, who in September 1863 was making his way south after having sold a horse herd in San Antonio. Some time after the fateful evening of Savage’s
stopover at Chepita’s, a ranch family discovered the horse trader’s body on the Aransas River. His murderer had apparently used an ax to accomplish the deed and then wrapped the body in gunnysacks. The sheriff soon arrested the old woman, as well as a neighbor named Juan Silvera, whom the sheriff believed had helped dispose of the body. The case against Rodríguez began on October 5, 1863. Little primary evidence exists on the trial proceedings. From what may be pieced together, the sheriff testified that Savage had been killed on the night of his stay at Chepita’s Inn, that blood had been found near the spot where the traveler had slept, and that $600.00 in gold, still in his saddlebags, had surfaced downriver from Chepita’s Inn. Other than to explain that the blood on her porch came from a chicken she had killed for a meal, Rodríguez remained silent. It is possible that Juan Silvera became a witness against her so that he could get a lighter sentence. Folklorists and historians have speculated that Rodríguez said nothing for a variety of reasons, among them that she sought to protect a son, the actual perpetrator. This reasoning holds that Rodríguez had many years before given birth out of wedlock, that the baby’s father had taken the infant from his mother, and that the grown child appeared on the night in question and killed Savage. The jury found Rodríguez guilty, but it recommended mercy, given her advanced age. But the judge ruled that Rodríguez be put to death on November 13, 1863. On that date Rodríguez was hanged from a tree, her body was laid in a coffin and loaded on the same cart that had taken her to the place of execution, and she was buried immediately without ceremony. Chepita Rodríguez’s execution for years concerned many people in southern Texas, and a groundswell for gaining a pardon for her accelerated during the later 1970s. In 1984 Senator Carlos Truán of District 20 initiated efforts to get the Texas legislature to clear her name. On June 13, 1985, the legislature adopted a resolution absolving her of the crime. SOURCES: Guthrie, Keith. 1990. The Legend of Chipita: The Only Woman Hanged in Texas. Austin: Eakin Press; Smylie, Vernon. 1970. A Noose for Chipita. Corpus Christi: Texas News Syndicate Press. Arnoldo De León
RODRÍGUEZ, PATRICIA (1922–1968) An energetic nonconformist, Patricia Rodríguez was a community activist and union organizer during the 1950s and early 1960s in New York City. Born in Puerto Rico on August 25, 1922, in the small southern coastal
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Patricia Rodríguez giving toys to the children on el Día de los Reyes, circa 1965. Courtesy of Milga Morales.
town of Guayanilla, she was the founder of several community organizations in New York, including the Gowanus Youth and Parents Civic Association in downtown Brooklyn, the Puerto Rican Women’s Sewing Organization, and various hometown organizations, such as the Sons of Guayanilla. An activist in the development of the Hospital Workers Union, the current Local 1199, Rodríguez rejected stereotyped notions of Latina female roles through her organizing and participation in demonstrations, boycotts, pickets, and strikes for better wages and working conditions for all people. Following a mostly unsuccessful venture in a takeout food business, or fonda, as it is called in Puerto Rico, Rodríguez left the island in 1947 and came to the United States with her husband, Crecensio. While they sought employment, the couple counted on friends and family members already established in the city for food and lodging. Longing for a career in nursing, the community activist, union organizer, and mother of five struggled with severe asthma, an illness she contended with for most of her life. The daughter of Jose Rodríguez and Inocencia Maldonado, Rodríguez valued the familial traditions she had experienced as a child. After two years in New York City she reunited the family in Brooklyn. Grandparents, uncles, and children all lived in a small apartment on Walton Avenue in the Bronx and shared a kitchen with three other families. Rodríguez’s first job was making artificial flowers in a factory. She also worked as a presser in an industrial laundry, Star Overalls, in Williamsburg, near the Greenpoint section of
Brooklyn. Her daughter, Gladys, recalls the difficulty her asthmatic mother had breathing in that steam-bath environment. Tending to and providing for her family were paramount. Nonetheless, Rodríguez used her home as a neighborhood base, always available to its residents. Most had recently migrated from Puerto Rico and were not fluent in English. She helped them obtain information on welfare, health, other social services, and educational opportunities. In the early 1950s most of her time was dedicated to organizing within the hometown organizations, particularly the group representing Guayanilla. These hometown groups were organizations in the United States that promoted the social and cultural traditions of Puerto Rico, emphasizing the contributions of their native sons and daughters. Rodríguez was involved as well in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Council of Brooklyn Organizations, and la Fiesta Folklórica Puertorriqueña. Rare was the moment that was not dedicated to family or to community. Despite her limited formal instruction, Rodríguez attained a sixth-grade education in Puerto Rico. Her dream of becoming a nurse was partially realized in the late 1950s when she became a nurse’s aide in Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital. However, the dream was short lived. The hospital administration at the time refused to accept responsibility for the existence of dangerous working conditions. It was because of these conditions that Rodríguez sustained a serious head injury while carrying out hospital duties. Her experience with bureaucracy and the insensitivities of
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Rodríguez, Sofía the hospital administration led her to examine the strategies she would employ to fight institutional injustice. She joined the union movement and, with her children in tow, became a fixture on the picket line in front of those city hospitals that refused to recognize the unionization of their workers. Rodríguez admired the activist Antonia Denis. Denis, considered an elder statesperson in the community, was one of the original Puerto Rican pioneer women in Brooklyn’s downtown area. Together they established Casa Puerto Rico, a culturally focused neighborhood oasis located on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen streets. From this office Rodríguez and many of those who followed her leadership supported and actively worked on local campaigns for mayors John Lindsay and Abraham Beame and Congressman Fred Richmond. In addition, she traveled to Washington, D.C., in support of the bilingual voting ballot and visited the Capitol in support of Salvador Agrón, a Puerto Rican youth dubbed the “Capeman” by the media. Agrón faced death in the electric chair, but the community felt that he had been judged unfairly and had been sentenced in an atmosphere of racism and nativism. The community’s mobilization on his behalf resulted in a stay of execution. In 1965 Rodríguez founded the Organization of Puerto Rican Notaries. Because she was able to witness legal statements and documents, her home was constantly filled with neighbors who needed documents witnessed but were afraid to go to lawyers who might overcharge them. Rodríguez was known to charge only the requisite fifty cents and also provided her neighbors with information and resources. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and the federal War on Poverty initiatives provided opportunities for local community members to work in neighborhood projects such as consumer awareness and jobs orientation for young people. Rodríguez’s home served as a lunch distribution center for neighborhood children. Her involvement in the development of the Puerto Rican Community Development Project (PRCDP), a major initiative of the War on Poverty in New York City, was a conflictive one. She criticized spending War on Poverty program funds to support salaries of noncommunity members with academic credentials but little knowledge of local community issues. In August 1968 Rodríguez’s previously undiagnosed breast cancer caused her to be hospitalized. Almost immediately after a mastectomy she left the hospital to join a picket line in front of New York’s city hall protesting the deaths of thousands of young men and women in Vietnam. Rodríguez was buried in a Brooklyn cemetery on Christmas Eve of that year. At her funeral hundreds of community leaders and residents, as
well as her five adult children, reflected on the contributions of this Puerto Rican woman with few material assets but with fervor for justice and an unquenchable desire to serve. See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Alvarez, Gladys. 2001. Interview by Milga Morales, April 3; Ribes Tovar, Frederico. 1968. El Libro Puertorriqueño, vol. 1. New York: Editorial El Libro Puertorriqueño; Rodríguez, Crecensio. 2001. Interview by Milga Morales, June 4. Milga Morales
RODRÍGUEZ, SOFÍA (1922?–
)
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Sofía Rodríguez was the third youngest of thirteen children; the first five had died before she was born. Rodríguez attended James Bowie Elementary School, but as the youngest she had the responsibility of helping her pregnant sister. Rodríguez recalls, “I had to stay there [Fort Worth, Texas] two to three months. Once she was able to get around, they would send me back home. So I went over there about three times during childbirth.” While she was in Fort Worth with her sister, she attended school for a short while. Her sisters married as teenagers, but Sofía Rodríguez decided that since her parents allowed her to make her own choices, she would finish high school. She earned a high school diploma and shortly thereafter began working in the defense industry during World War II, where she remained for eighteen months. Obligated to do her part for the war effort, Rodríguez believed that had she not completed high school, she would not have had the ability to pass the job’s aptitude test. It was while she was living in San Francisco that she began her life in the music industry by singing at local taverns. Rodríguez sang in Chicago for a short time, headlining as “Linda the Cuban Bombshell.” She lost her voice and could not continue with the show or its tour. Returning to San Antonio, she discovered that she had a hand for business and opened the Frisco bar on Ruiz Street. In 1954 she moved to Corpus Christi and opened a lounge. “When I started in ’55 I had a little corner and I started with a little band they called ‘Los Cachitos.’ . . . I converted it into Sofie’s Lounge in 1955.” She also promoted bands and brought orquestas from Mexico, booking them on two- and three-week tours from the South Texas Valley to Houston. She recalls having to take care of business when on the road with a band, having to “take care of the gate, the promotion, the tickets, and everything.” Rodríguez had a reputation for running a strict business, not letting anyone get by for free and collecting a cover charge for the wives and girlfriends of band
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Rodríguez de Tió, Lola members. She believed, “If they’re not in the band, then they pay.” Her hard-nosed business tactics gave her the pull to become active in politics, and she offered her establishment as a meeting place for Democratic supporters. She also served as the first Mexican American woman president of the Coastal Bend Beer Retailers, and during her tenure it lobbied to extend bar hours until 2 A.M. and have liquor served over the bar. Rodríguez married twice, had a son and a daughter, and raised a granddaughter as her own. She believes that her business sense gave her children a better life than she could have otherwise afforded. Retiring in 1995 because bands charged more than a local bar could handle, she explained that making ends meet was not worth the hassle anymore. “It’s not like a grocery store; you have to go get groceries because you have to eat. You don’t have to go to a nightclub.” See also Entrepreneurs SOURCE: Rodríguez, Sofía. 2001. Oral history interview by Mary Ann Villarreal, March 28. Mary Ann Villarreal
RODRÍGUEZ CABRAL, MARÍA CRISTINA (1959– ) Cristina Rodríguez Cabral is an Afro-Uruguayan writer who is presently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and specializes in Afro-Hispanic literature. She received a master’s degree in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In Uruguay she held degrees in nursing and undergraduate studies from the Universidad de la República Oriental de Uruguay. Rodríguez Cabral began to write at the age of twelve but did not become serious about it until the publication of her first book in prose, Bahía, mágica bahía (Bay, Magic Bay), in 1986, for which she won first prize in Cuba’s Casa de las Americas literary contest. Although the author has written nine books of poetry, only one, Desde mi trenchera (From My Trench), has been published. Others include Pájaros sueltos (Loose Birds), Entre giros y mutaciones (Between Turns and Changes), La mujer del espejo y yo (The Woman in the Mirror and I), and the recent Memoria y resistencia (Memory and Resistance), which was written in the United States. Rodríguez Cabral’s poetry and prose reflect a great sensitivity, tenderness, nostalgia, strong passion, and support for freedom and identity. Alberto Britos Serrat has compared the literary work of Cristina Rodríguez Cabral to that of Nicolás Guillén and José Martí in that she expresses a cosmic vision similar to that expressed by these poets in their work. In her work there is a call to unity, understanding, and mutual respect without
the destructiveness of discrimination. Her poetry and prose also reflect a woman-centered, or “womanist” concept similar to that of the African American writer Alice Walker. Rodríguez Cabral believes in “the empowerment of women but without the total exclusion of men.” Rodríguez Cabral is a member of the interim secretariat of the Intercontinental Union of Writers, which consists of representatives from several continents, including America, Europe, and Asia. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as the Afro-Hispanic Review and PALARA. In the United States she continues to be involved in literary and cultural events such as the Afro-Hispanic Research conferences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the Yari Yari Black Women’s Conference in New York. As a female Afro-Hispanic writer in the United States, Cristina Rodríguez Cabral has contributed to making the black experience and culture in Latin America more accessible and visible. Her works are incorporated into anthologies on Afro-Hispanic writings currently in use in college literature courses in women’s and minority studies. Rodríguez Cabral’s literary work has also had the effect of extending the confines of what is generally considered African American literature and what is considered Latin American literature. She expresses both an Afrocentric and a Hispanic perspective when she states, “In the United States, I feel more Afro-Latina, or rather a minority among other minorities. . . . I defined myself as a Black woman, a broader concept than that of an Afro-Uruguayan.” She takes her role in the American and the international community seriously and believes that it is her responsibility “to share her experiences and vision in order to elevate the consciousness of others.” See also Literature SOURCES: Adams, Clementina R., ed. 1998. Common Threads: Afro-Hispanic Women’s Literature. Miami: Ediciones Universal; Britos Serrat, Alberto, ed. 1990. Antología de poetas negros uruguayos. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Mundo Afro; DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, ed. 2003. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle; Rodríguez Cabral, María Cristina. 1983. The Role of Women in Caribbean Prose Fiction. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International; ———. 1990. Bahía, mágica bahía: Antología de poetas negros uruguayos. Montevideo: Ediciones Mundo Afro; ———. 1993. Desde mi trinchera. Montevideo: Ediciones Mundo Afro; ———. 2003. Interview by Wendy McBurneyCoombs, University of Missouri, Columbia, August. Wendy McBurney-Coombs
RODRÍGUEZ DE TIÓ, LOLA (1843–1924) Essayist, poet, and political activist Dolores Rodríguez y Ponce de León was born in San German, Puerto Rico,
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Poet and supporter of Puerto Rican independence Lola Rodríguez de Tió. Courtesy of Proyecto de Digitalización de la Colección del Periódico El Mundo, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
in 1843. Her parents were Sebastián Rodríguez de Astudillo and Carmen Ponce de León. Her father was a distinguished lawyer and law professor and one of the founding members of the Puerto Rican Bar Association. Rodríguez de Tió was educated by private tutors and had access to her father’s extensive library as a young girl. In 1863, at the age of twenty she married Bonocio Tió Segarra, a respected journalist and poet, also from San German. In their household they held numerous intellectual, political, and literary tertulias (gatherings). These get-togethers, usually frequented by abolitionists and by opponents of continued Spanish colonialism, caught the attention of Spanish officials. Rodríguez de Tió was known for her support of independence for Puerto Rico. She considered Spanish colonialism and slavery decadent. Her connections with some of the leaders of the failed 1868 Lares uprising made her the source of constant surveillance. In 1877 Rodríguez de Tió was exiled to Venezuela by Spanish colonial authorities. During her years in Venezuela she befriended the Puerto Rican intellectual Eugenio María de Hostos and served as maid of honor in his wedding to Belinda de Ayala. Rodríguez de Tió returned to Puerto Rico in 1880 to continue her activism on behalf of Puerto Rican independence, only to be exiled again by Governor Segundo de la Portilla in 1889. She, her husband, and their children went to Cuba, where they quickly joined the revolutionary ranks. Their political activities also enraged Spanish
officials in Cuba, and in 1892 the couple was forced to leave Havana for New York City. In New York Rodríguez de Tió joined a sizable Spanish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican community. She continued her literary and political work in New York and was particularly active in several organizations, such as Club Político Ruis Rivera, which advocated for the independence of both Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain. In New York she collaborated with political and literary figures such as José Martí, Pachín Marín, Román Baldorioty de Castro, Sotero Figueroa, Luis Muñoz Rivera, and Rubén Darío, among others. Rodríguez de Tió returned to Cuba after the CubanSpanish-American War of 1898. Later, after a twentythree-year absence, she visited Puerto Rico in 1915. Her return to the island was a very welcoming one that included impressive tributes at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño and the University of Puerto Rico. After some time in Puerto Rico Rodríguez de Tió returned to Havana, where she continued to write. She was a wellknown figure outside the Caribbean. In 1924, for example, she engaged in an extensive European tour, with poetry recitals in Madrid and Paris. Although Rodríguez de Tió is remembered as a romantic poet, she was valued more by her nineteenthcentury contemporaries for her recitals than for her poetry. She was an accomplished performer and enjoyed reciting poetry in bohemian gatherings. She wrote several volumes of poetry, including Mis cantares (1876), Claros y nieblas (1885), and perhaps her most famous, Mi libro de Cuba (1893). A collection of her poetry titled Poesias was published posthumously in 1960. Her writings reflected her love for Puerto Rico and her concerns about the subordinate role of women in society. At an 1884 inauguration of a new school for young women, for example, Rodríguez de Tió lectured on the importance of educating women. Rodríguez de Tió and her husband collaborated as editors of numerous literary journals, many of them short lived, including La Almojabana, launched in 1881. She was also an essayist and a prolific letter writer. Rodríguez de Tió was credited with writing the lyrics of “La Boriqueña,” which was initially conceived as a nationalist inspirational song. “La Boriqueña” later became Puerto Rico’s national anthem. Rodríguez de Tió died in Havana in 1924 at the age of eighty-one. See also Cuban-Spanish-American War; Feminism; Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Acosta-Belén, Edna. 2005. “Lola Rodríguez de Tió and the Puerto Rican Struggle for Freedom.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Community, and Biography, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; Cadilla de Martínez, María. 1936. Semblanza de un caracter (Apuntes biográficos de Lola Rodríguez de Tió). San Juan: n.p.; Rivera de Alvarez, Josefina. 1974. “Rodríguez de Tió,
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Rodríguez McLean, Verneda Lola.” In Diccionario de literatura puertorriqueña, 2:1384–1388. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.
Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
RODRÍGUEZ MCLEAN, VERNEDA (1918–1982) Verneda Rodríguez McLean was born on January 11, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois. To honor all aspects of their daughter’s heritage, Ann and John Rodríguez named her Verneda Gunda Rodríguez. Ann, named Onika Kirstina Rasmussen Hansen at birth, had been born in Denmark, and her father Juan Francisco Rodríguez de Jardín, had emigrated from British Guyana. Verneda was the name of a Native American princess, Gunda a Danish name. Verneda listed 445 East Ninety-first Place on Chicago’s South Side as home in her pilottraining classbook. The family, which eventually included five children, two of whom died before the age of five, lived in a South Chicago colonia that, in 1948, extended from Eighty-fourth Street to Ninety-second Street east of Commercial Avenue. Most wage earners in this part of town worked in the steel mills or for the railroad, but Verneda’s father found work at the Cook County Hospital before moving on to the Welfare Department of the city of Chicago; her mother worked for the wife of the governor of Illinois after emigrating to the United States. The couple decided that their children would speak English exclusively.
After high school Verneda Rodríguez attended a teachers college in Chicago before leaving for Sweetwater, Texas, and army pilot training. She graduated along with seventy-one other women in class 44-W-6 on August 4, 1944, and became one of the nowlegendary Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Classmate Joan Lemley remembers “Roddy” as a good friend, a “beautiful, sweet person” with blonde hair and a fair complexion who was fond of poetry, especially that of A. A. Milne, author of the Winnie the Pooh stories. Indeed, under her photograph in the 44-6 classbook is the inscription “James Morrison Weatherby George Dupre,” the first line of Milne’s “Disobedience.” Persuaded by a friend to leave Chicago and strike out for Texas, Rodríguez had been influenced by the Katharine Hepburn movie Christopher Strong (1933), in which Hepburn played a record-setting woman pilot, and the great women pilots of the 1930s, such as Amelia Earhart, Florence “Pancho” Barnes, and Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran. After pilot training Rodríguez reported for duty at Moore Field in Mission, Texas. The women pilots at the field flew tow target missions for the men who were taking gunnery training at the field, one of the most dangerous jobs any person could hold in the Army Air Forces Training Command. It was not unusual for a WASP’s plane to be shot up during a tow target mission as she trailed a target on a line behind her for novice pilots to shoot at. The women also ferried aircraft from factories to airfields and flew administrative missions.
Verneda Rodríguez, standing in the middle, graduated from army pilot training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, on August 4, 1944. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force, No. 1330 N-1.
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Rodríguez Remeneski, Shirley When the war neared its end and an increasing number of male pilots returned stateside, the army terminated the WASP program in December 1944 and released the women back to civilian life without any of the veterans’ benefits provided to other servicemen and servicewomen. After leaving the WASP Rodriguez returned to Chicago and worked for the weather service, then moved to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, as an aircraft accident analyst. At Langley she married Edward Ridley McLean, who had flown B-25 bombers in World War II and went on to complete a career in the air force. The couple traveled the world, including stops in Tokyo and Manila, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. While living in the Far East, Rodríguez took up and became skilled in Oriental brush painting, and later, when the McLeans lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she, along with some friends, opened a gift store called the Late Possum that featured artworks. In the early 1960s she co-owned a coffeehouse, the Place, that featured folk music. Edward McLean served two tours of duty in the Pentagon at the end of his career, and the McLeans settled in Annandale, Virginia. While living in the national capital area, Rodríguez taught brush painting and held one-person shows throughout the state. In the midand late 1970s she was also active in the successful fight to gain veterans’ rights for the WASP, correcting what many had felt to be a long-standing inequity. In this contest Rodriguez was joined by her daughter MaryLynn, then a college student. It is believed that Rodríguez, who died on March 19, 1982, was the first member of the WASP to be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, a right she earned in the skies over Texas. During World War II women performed many jobs that had traditionally been done by men. New opportunities in aviation and aerospace industries provided work for tens of thousands of women, and many served with the armed forces. By definition, the members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots were exceptional. From among some 25,000 applicants, the army accepted 1,830, and 1,074 actually completed the training. Because they had to prove themselves in a “man’s world,” recruitment standards were high, and many members of the WASP were among the most capable pilots in the nation. In what many considered at that time the ultimate “machismo” occupation, Verneda Rodríguez McLean earned a place among the American aviation heroes of World War II. Helen (Kelly) Drake, who grew up in Sweetwater during World War II, remembered the WASP as role models, noting that “These ‘high class’ women held a powerful fascination for me. . . . They were tan; lithe; bold in appearance, speech, and behavior. . . . They will always
be golden eagles who soar through my memories of other times and other places.” See also Military Service; World War II SOURCES: Drake, Helen (Kelly). “Memories of Other Times and Other Places.” WASP World Wide. http://waspwwii.org/wasp/memories.htm. Howell Granger, Byrd. 1991. On Final Approach. Scottsdale, AZ: Falconer Publishing; Paz, Frank X. 1948. Mexican-Americans in Chicago: A General Survey. Chicago: Council of Social Agencies; Verges, Marianne. 1991. On Silver Wings. New York: Ballantine Books. Bruce Ashcroft
RODRÍGUEZ REMENESKI, SHIRLEY (1939?– ) A lifetime of achievement and service marks the roads traveled by Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski. Born in New York City shortly before the United States entered World War II, Shirley was the youngest of Armando Rodríguez’s and Providencia O’Neill’s three daughters. Her parents came to New York City from San German, Puerto Rico, in the 1920s, fleeing the oppressive economic hardships of an island described as the poorhouse of the Americas by Eleanor Roosevelt. The end of the war and the introduction of inexpensive air flights to New York City triggered a massive migration of Puerto Ricans looking for a better life. Young Shirley served as guide, interpreter, advisor, and social worker for the newly arrived members of her extended family who spoke no English and were ill prepared to meet the challenges of the city. The frustrations, discrimination, and ignorance she encountered fueled her anger as she dealt at a young age with a system that was indifferent to the suffering of its newest residents. A strong sense of service imbued in her by her parents and the importance of helping others served to shape her future path. Her parents worked in low-paying jobs. Armando found employment in a New York hotel kitchen, while Providencia worked in a pocketbook factory. Her grandmother, Elvira O’Neill, came to the city to care for the children and played a significant role in raising young Shirley. A strong-willed woman who stressed independence and a woman’s right to form the future, she bestowed on her youngest granddaughter a virtual road map that instilled in her confidence and a strong work ethic. Shirley Rodríguez was educated in New York City’s public schools. The system provided little motivation for academic advancement to young children of “foreign-language parents.” Rodríguez graduated from school, became a clerical worker, married, and had children, as was expected of a young woman of her generation. During the turbulent 1960s she found herself immersed in the social upheavals of the
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Rodríguez-Trias, Helen period. Events that were often generated by anger about American involvement in Vietnam and the social injustice that marginalized Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, in New York consumed her interests. A meeting in the South Bronx to push the candidacy of a young Puerto Rican–born attorney, Herman Badillo, who was running for Bronx borough president, triggered her desire to change a system of exclusion affecting Hispanics. The campaign gave Rodríguez Remeneski a creative outlet for her need to serve. Her experience and sensitivity learned from a childhood of helping people deal with unresponsive landlords, government officials, and society in general made her invaluable to the young candidate’s campaign efforts. The 1965 election results declared Badillo a winner and, equally as important, signaled a major turning point for Puerto Ricans in New York City politics. In 1966 Rodríguez Remeneski began a career in public service by establishing and directing the first social services unit in the office of the newly elected Bronx borough president. Many young Hispanics were encouraged to enter public service because of her initiatives. Upon his election to Congress in 1971, Badillo invited her to run his New York office. Her many responsibilities included drafting federal legislation that resulted in the Bilingual Education Act and amending the Voting Rights Act. In 1978 she was appointed assistant deputy mayor to Mayor Ed Koch and worked on concerns that affected inner-city residents. Lack of affirmative action programs, limited community development plans, employment, education and health services were the major areas of concern. Rodríguez Remeneski’s main role was the creation of several programs aimed at helping mainstream the city’s poor and marginalized populations. She served as legislative coordinator for the South Bronx Development Organization, working with the nationally known urban developer Edward Logue, and she lobbied successfully for funding and legislative support for new and refurbished inner-city residential units with low interest rates. In 1981 she became a district administrator for the New York State Department of Labor. Five years later Governor Mario Cuomo invited Rodríguez Remeneski to head his newly created Office for Hispanic Affairs. Under her leadership the office became a focal center for cultural and educational advocacy and provided information for the governor and other officials serving Hispanics throughout the state. She initiated programs for government collaboration with officials in Puerto Rico and created highly regarded mentorship programs. Founder and president of the 100 Hispanic Women’s organization, Rodríguez Remeneski provides leadership committed to advocating and promoting the em-
powerment of Latina women. She has received numerous awards for her good works. In 1990 the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City was dedicated to her. In 1997 Governor George Pataki presented her with the New York State Leadership Award, and the Puerto Rican Bar Association gave her its Excellence in Government Award, to cite just a few. Rodríguez Remeneski is currently a senior vice president with the New York State Empire Development Corporation. Her key responsibility is to ensure the continued economic growth of all New Yorkers. In many ways Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski continues to form the future, a mandate handed down to her from her grandmother. See also Politics, Party SOURCES: Maldonado, Adál Alberto. 1984. “Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski.” In Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience, ed. Louis Reyes Rivera and Julio Rodríguez, 139–140. New York: IPRUS Institute; Rodríguez Remeneski, Shirley. 2002. Résumé. Biography Profile. August 8. Edward Mercado
RODRÍGUEZ-TRIAS, HELEN (1929–2001) Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias was born in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929 and came to New York in 1939. The struggles faced by the women in her family inspired her early politicization. Her mother was a schoolteacher who struggled to teach in Spanish, but could not get a license to teach once she was in New York City. She encouraged Rodríguez-Trias to return to Puerto Rico to study. Rodríguez-Trias returned to Puerto Rico in 1948, studied at the University of Puerto Rico, and became a student activist in support of Puerto Rican independence. She joined a 6,000student strike protesting the university’s decision to ban Pedro Albizu Campos’s appearance. Her political involvements created tensions with her brother, who was paying for her education, and Rodríguez-Trias moved back to New York City, where she married and had three children. While she continued her political involvement in the United States, joining her husband in unionizing Puerto Rican steelworkers in Lorain, Ohio, she felt isolated, and seven years later she returned to Puerto Rico to study medicine. Seven years after that, with another child and another husband, she graduated with honors in 1960. In 1963, making the most of her residency and specialty in pediatric medicine, she founded the first clinic for newborns in Puerto Rico. The infant mortality rate at the hospital decreased 50 percent within the following three years. During her medical training Rodríguez-Trias began healing the most vulnerable
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Rodríguez-Trias, Helen Puerto Ricans at a time when physicians were only beginning to acknowledge the correlation of health problems and the island’s economic, social, and political context. She was particularly influenced by the unequal access poor and wealthy women had to safe (albeit illegal) abortions. Increasingly Rodríguez-Trias viewed Puerto Rico as a laboratory for developing birth-control technology and considered health and politics inextricably linked phenomena. Rodríguez-Trias’s return to New York, her involvement in the women’s health movement, and her leadership of the Pediatric Department at Lincoln Hospital became turning points in her life. At Lincoln she served a Puerto Rican community of the South Bronx that had one of the lowest-income populations in the United States at the time. Thus her work grew beyond providing better health care to participating in patients’ struggle for greater political power. She led community campaigns against lead paint, collaborated with the Young Lords on issues of health care delivery to the Bronx community, lobbied to give all workers a voice in administrative and patient care issues, and struggled to raise awareness of cultural issues in the Puerto Rican community among health care workers at the hospital. Rodríguez-Trias used a political approach to promote broader change within the medical profession at various levels. She was a founding member of the Women’s and Hispanic Caucus of the American Public Health Association. In 1993 she became the first Latina elected president of the American Public Health Association, and in 1994 she was named chair of the American Public Health Association’s Standing Committee on Women’s Rights. She taught medicine at the Sophie Davis Center for Biomedical Sciences at City College of New York and was an associate professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, and later at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia and Fordham universities. She was also assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Within the health care system Rodríguez-Trias worked at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan from 1974 through 1985, first as director of primary care and then as director of the Children and Youth Project. In 1985 she directed the Pediatric Primary Care Program at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in New Jersey, and three years later she became the medical director of the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute. In her work at the AIDS Institute and with the New York Women in AIDS Task Force, Rodríguez-Trias not only developed programs for women with HIV and HIV-affected families, but also played an important role in making New York a national model for quality assurance in HIV care.
In addition to her work within medical communities, Rodríguez-Trias served on various executive and advisory committees and organizations, including the IOM (Institute of Medicine) Committee on Unintended Pregnancy, the National Women’s Health Network (1988–1996), the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the Center for the Advancement of Health Scholars, the Health Disparities National Advisory Committee, the Community Anti-drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, the Society of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, Education, Training, and Research Associates (ETR), and the Opening Doors and Fight Back Drug Abuse Prevention Project. She was a member of the Women’s Health Council of the California State Office of Women’s Health and the Policy Committee of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California. At the federal level, in 1970 Rodríguez-Trias was a founding member of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA). Nine years later, in 1979, she testified before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for federal sterilization guidelines. As a founding member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), she helped draft the guidelines that require information provided in a language a woman can understand, written consent for sterilization, and a waiting period between consent and the sterilization procedure. Rodríguez-Trias carried her work on reproductive rights and HIV/AIDS from New York to the West Coast and, indeed, to the rest of the world. In the late 1980s after moving to California, Rodríguez-Trias made numerous trips to Cuba and contributed her skills toward its universal, community-based health care system. In 1996 she helped found the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit research and advocacy group dedicated to improving women’s health and well-being worldwide. She consulted with the International Health Programs’ Public Health Institute on improving family planning and health care in South and Central America. Her latest work involved developing sustainable public health programs and identifying and enlisting local, rural Indian leaders to carry out reproductive health programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. In January 2001 she received the Presidential Citizen’s Medal for her work on behalf of women, children, people with HIV and AIDS, and the poor. During that event, continuing a legacy of political advocacy, Rodríguez-Trias’s granddaughter gave President Clinton a handwritten letter asking him to stop the bombing of Vieques. Helen Rodríguez-Trias died on December 27, 2001, from lung cancer. The National Women’s Health Network named its leadership development program after Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias.
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Romero Cash, Marie Wilcox, Joyce. 2002. “The Face Of Women’s Health: Helen Rodríguez-Trias.” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 4 (April): 566–569.
Nicole Trujillo-Pagán
ROMERO CASH, MARIE (1942–
Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias received the 2001 Presidential Citizen’s Medal for her work on behalf of women, children, and people with HIV and AIDS. Courtesy of the Helen Rodríguez-Trias Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
See also Sterilization SOURCES: Changing the Face of Medicine. “Physicians Biography: Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias.” www.nlm.nih.gov/chang ingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_273.html (accessed July 12, 2004); McNamara, Mary. 2001. “Obituaries: Helen Rodríguez-Trias, 72; Health Care Advocate for Women, Youth.” Puerto Rico Herald, December 29. www.puertoricoherald.org/issues/2002/vol6n02/ObitHRodri-en.shtml (accessed July 12, 2004); National Women’s Health Network: A Voice for Women, a Network for Change. 2004. “The Helen Rodríguez-Trias Women’s Health Leadership Program.” July 12. www.womenshealthnetwork.org/helen.htm (accessed July 12, 2004); Vázquez, Blanca. 1988. “Mi Gente Interview: Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias.” CENTRO: Journal of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Hunter College, CUNY) 2, no. 4 (Fall): 56;
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Marie Romero Cash, a native of Santa Fe, is a multifaceted award-winning artist. Many members of her family are also artists, including her late parents, Emilio and Senaida Romero, both of whom were masters of tinwork. In 1959 she graduated from Santa Fe High School, and in 1997 she received her college degree in cross-cultural studies from Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Immersed in the creativity of the Romero family throughout her life, Romero Cash began to pursue her individual artistic career in the 1970s. At that time she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to apprentice and learn the art of tinwork from her parents. By the mid-1970s she had begun her career as a santera (female maker of saints). Attention, acclamation, and awards quickly followed. Many of these honors have been presented at the Spanish Market held every July on the Santa Fe Plaza. In 1992 she received the Master’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. Her many accolades also include awards for originality and expressive design, first-place awards, and poster awards. Romero Cash creates bultos (three-dimensional religious sculptures), retablos (two-dimensional religious paintings usually on wooden boards), and other works from wood, gesso, tempera, and varnish. In keeping with the Romero family legacy, she often incorporates
Acclaimed New Mexican folk artist Marie Romero Cash. Courtesy of Marie Romero Cash.
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Rosado Rousseau, Leoncia handmade tin accents as well. When she is not creating artwork that meets the criteria of the Spanish Market’s guidelines of what is “traditional” and “New Mexican,” Romero Cash finds artistic inspiration by creating other pieces, such as carved and painted figures of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, the Statue of Liberty, animals, Noah’s ark, and nursery rhymes. She also incorporates women’s themes and issues, both religious and secular, and other religious subject matter. Among her favorite topics are biblical and religious women, including various Marian representations, as well as female saints such as Santa Librada (a crucified female saint). Romero Cash’s works are held in the collections of numerous public museums and private individuals, as well as in churches and chapels both in New Mexico and around the country. The major collections are in the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, the Taylor Museum of Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and Heard Museum in Phoenix. Her stations of the cross are located at St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. During her prolific artistic career Romero Cash has also contributed significant scholarship in the field of New Mexican and Latino art by authoring three books: Built of Earth and Song: A Guidebook to Northern New Mexico’s Village Churches (1992), Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico, with photographs by Siegfried Halus (1998), and Santos: Enduring Images of Northern New Mexico Village Churches (1999). In order to achieve all that she has, Marie Romero Cash has often had to struggle and go against the norm in an area of art that was dominated by male santeros. In addition to her important historical research, Romero Cash often consults on conservation issues and related projects. She unselfishly shares her knowledge and lectures on a wide variety of Hispano cultureand arts-related topics, and her artistic peers and the local community members consider her an expert on New Mexican religious art. See also Artists SOURCES: Pierce, Donna, and Marta Weigle, eds. 1996. Spanish New Mexico: The Spanish Colonial Arts Society Collections. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press; Rebolledo, Tey Diana, ed. 1992. Nuestras mujeres: Hispanas of New Mexico, Their Images and Their Lives, 1582–1992. Albuquerque: El Norte Publications; Romero Cash, Marie. 1998. Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico. With photographs by Siegfried Halus. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press; ———. 1999. Santos: Enduring Images of Northern New Mexico Village Churches. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Tey Marianna Nunn
ROSADO ROUSSEAU, LEONCIA (“MAMÁ LÉO”) (1912– ) The Reverend Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, endearingly called Mamá Léo, was the second of five children born in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, to Gumersinda Santiago and Manuel Rivera. She states that her life is an example of God’s saving grace from the time when she was a little girl thrown accidentally from a truck to the time when a hurricane tore her house apart, but she and her family were able to take refuge in a makeshift house she claims God assembled from the pieces of houses torn apart by the same hurricane, and to the time of her grave illness when Jesus Christ appeared to her and she was healed both physically and spiritually. She became part of the Disciples of Christ denomination and in 1932, at the age of twenty, upon having another vision in which, she states, God called her to preach and to the ministry, she became a missionary and an evangelist. She immigrated from Puerto Rico to New York City in 1935. She felt that her calling was to bring the “good news” of God’s love to the lost and needy of New York City. She eventually became a cofounder, along with her husband, Willie Rosado, who served as the founding pastor, of the Bronx based Pentecostal denomination Concilio de Iglesias Cristianas Damasco (Council of Damascus Christian Churches) in 1940. When her husband was drafted during World War II, the church called her to be its pastor until his return. Although it is not certain, this bold move probably made her the first Latina Pentecostal pastor in New York City. With her authority as pastor, she began to engage in activities that addressed the dire living conditions of the numerous newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrants. Although she believed, as did other Puerto Rican and Spanish-speaking Pentecostals, that the spiritual needs of people are of primary importance, she insisted that the material and physical needs of people must be addressed because these also have an impact on spiritual well-being. She thought that the mission of a church should include being an agent of positive change in society. In 1957 Rosado opened a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program called Cruzada de Jovenes Cristianos de la Iglesia Cristiana de Damasco (Damascus Christian Youth Crusade) in the church and eventually in a separate building where more addicts could receive physical and spiritual liberation from “the strongholds of the devil.” Her work with the addicts, mostly young men, became that of a mother figure, and it was among these young people that she became known as Mamá Léo. Her ministry has served as a catalyst for many other such centers, organizations, and large churches throughout the United States and Puerto Rico that have
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Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana been founded by people transformed from a life of drugs and “gang-banging” to a life of service and community building as a result of her intervention. Following the death of her husband due to illness, one of the young men, Cedric Rousseau, who had experienced transformation under Rosado’s ministry several years earlier, became her husband in 1967. The Concilio de Iglesias Cristianas Damasco has eight churches on the East Coast of the United States, with an average of 100 members each, thirty-nine churches and missions in Ecuador, fourteen in Mexico, and nineteen in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The denomination also founded a school and an orphanage. Although Mamá Léo was a co-founder and a very strong figure in shaping the direction of the denomination, it has had a majority of male leadership subsequent to her tenure. In 2000 Reverend Felicita La Salle Vega, then vice president elect, became president of the denomination because of the unexpected demise of the incumbent. She has been an exemplary leader within the denomination, serving fervently in various capacities, but the more recent conservative slant of the denomination has tended to shy away from female leadership. However, Reverend La Salle Vega became president-elect in the summer of 2001 and is expected to be successful in the August 2005 election. Once again the legacy of Mamá Léo will see a woman as head of its denomination. Mamá Léo continued to preach, teach, and minister throughout the world, well into her nineties. Until then, she continued her roles as founding pastor of the Jamaica Christian Church in Queens, New York City and founding executive director of the Asociación Ministerial de Mujeres Cristianas (Ministerial Association of Christian Women), established in 1986, which trains, equips, educates, and empowers women from various Christian denominations who are called to ministerial leadership. She is assisted in this endeavor by Reverends Elizabeth Gómez and Edith Alomar, women who have served the community through their ministries of outreach to victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, homelessness, and drug addiction. Reverend Rosado Rousseau celebrated her ninety-third birthday in 2005, and although she is a bit frail, when she was invited to preach, her crystal-blue eyes reflected her clarity of mind and her petite body straightened out as she delivered impassioned sermons full of experience and conviction that matched her fiery red hair. She continues to be revered in evangelical circles for her pioneering spirit, her skills as a “princess of the pulpit,” and her bold and challenging statements of reproach to those who attempt to curtail what the spirit of God is doing among women and through interdenominational efforts. In 2005 Reverand Rosado
Rousseau entered a nursing home. She suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. See also Pentecostal Church; Religion SOURCES: Pérez y González, María E. 2001. “Latinas in the Barrio.” In New York Glory: Religions in the City, ed. Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis. New York: New York University Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1988. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations before Mid-century.” Oral History Review 16, no. 2 (Fall): 47–63. María Pérez y González
ROS-LEHTINEN, ILEANA (1952–
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Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 15, 1952. Shortly after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, seven-year-old Ileana and her parents, Amanda Adato Ros and Enrique Emilio Ros, immigrated to the United States. Like many other Cuban refugees, the family settled in Miami, Florida. After earning an A.A. degree from Miami-Dade Community College in 1972, Ros-Lehtinen graduated from Florida International University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1975. She then founded Eastern Academy, a private elementary school where she was a teacher and principal for ten years. In 1982 she was elected to the Florida House of Representatives. During her service in the state legislature (1983–1986) she met and eventually married attorney and lawmaker Dexter Lehtinen. They had two daughters, Patricia and Amanda. Ros-Lehtinen served as a state representative until 1986. In that year she was elected a state senator and served in that capacity from 1986 until 1989. She resigned from the state senate to campaign in the special election held to fill the vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives left by the sudden death of Claude Pepper, who had held the seat for twenty-six years. The race was an especially bitter one that divided voters along ethnic lines. But with the strong support of President George H. Bush, his son Jeb Bush, and the Spanish-language radio stations, Ros-Lehtinen won 95 percent of the Cuban American votes and 53 percent of the total vote. Her victory on August 29, 1989, made her the first Cuban American woman to be elected to Congress. When the seat came up for election the following year, she won 60 percent of the district’s votes. As a member of the House of Representative, RosLehtinen has focused on a number of issues: affordable child care, education, including prepaid college tuition programs, senior citizen concerns, environmental efforts to clean up the Miami River, and foreign policy, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. These interests have led to her participation on committees such as
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Roybal-Allard, Lucille sponsorship of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Act (H.R. 1070). In the 109th Congress, Ros-Lehtinen’s many committee assignments include the International Relations Committee, the Committee on Government Reform, and the Budget Committee. On the International Relations Committee, she is the chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, the first Latina to chair a congressional subcommittee. See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Fernandez, Mayra. 1994. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lawmaker. Columbus, OH: Modern Curriculum Press; Novas, Himilce. 1995. The Hispanic 100. New York: Carol Publishing Group; U.S. House of Representatives. “Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.” www.house.gov/ros-lehtinen/welcome.html (June 28, 2005). Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Courtesy of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
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the International Relations Committee, the Government Reform Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations, the Subcommittee on Employment and Housing, and the Speaker’s Task Force for a Drug Free America. When she chaired the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade, she became the first Latina to chair a congressional subcommittee. As a Republican, Ros-Lehtinen differs significantly from the political views of other Latinos in Congress. While she is liberal on some issues such as child care, the elderly, the English-only movement, and immigration, Ros-Lehtinen’s most controversial stances center on her blanket condemnation of Fidel Castro’s regime in her native Cuba. She has argued against lifting the U.S. economic embargo imposed on the island nation, believing that economic trade would only support Communist rule. She was instrumental in the passage of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, popularly known as the Helms-Burton Law. The latter, intended as a catalyst to the collapse of the Castro regime in Cuba by prohibiting foreign investment, has been widely regarded as a failure. Instead, the economic embargo has been used by Fidel Castro as a political rationale for the nation’s economic troubles. Nonetheless, Ros-Lehtinen has enjoyed significant political support in southern Florida. In 1999, in honor of the congresswoman, six southern Florida cities declared March 19 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Day. That same year Ros-Lehtinen received an award from the National Breast Cancer Coalition for her leadership and
ROYBAL-ALLARD, LUCILLE (1941–
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In 1992 California native Lucille Roybal-Allard made history. She became the first Mexican American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress. Congresswoman Roybal-Allard was born and raised in Boyle Heights, California, the eldest daughter of Lucille and retired congressman Edward R. Roybal. Born into a political family (her father served in Congress for thirty years), Roybal-Allard had served three terms in the California State Assembly before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She lists her earliest career as a public relations and fundraising executive. Her Los Angeles district (the Thirtythird California District) includes downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, and eight southeast cities of Los Angeles County. It is a diverse urban/suburban area with a largely Hispanic hardworking and upwardly mobile constituency. Roybal-Allard represents part of her father’s old district, which was divided by redistricting. In Congress Roybal-Allard distinguished herself as a consensus builder and hardworking champion of working families and won important leadership positions. In 1999 she became the first Latina to be appointed to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sometimes called the “purse strings” of the federal government. Before that, in the 105th Congress (1997–1999) she was elected chair of the twenty-ninemember California Democratic congressional delegation, the first woman and first member to assume that position through election rather than seniority. In the 106th Congress (1999–2001) she became the first woman elected to chair the influential Congressional Hispanic Caucus, composed of eighteen members of
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Ruiz, Bernarda companies, and provide grants to clean up lead-based paint hazards, particularly in schools and day-care centers in low-income areas, as well as other bills to improve the quality of life for her constituents and families throughout the nation. She has spoken out forcefully on the issue of teen pregnancy, citing the country’s highest rate among comparable nations and the particularly high rate among Hispanic teens. On September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, RoybalAllard took the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to console the victims and families directly impacted. “Our hearts and prayers go out to the families and loved ones of the victims, and I assure them that we as a nation will not rest until the enemies responsible for this attack upon our country—and indeed, democracies everywhere—have been brought to justice.” She coordinated with local officials to provide information and assistance in the wake of this tragedy. In the 109th Congress, 1st session, Roybal-Allard is the first Latina to serve on the House Appropriations Committee and, as part of her duties, she serves on the Homeland Security Subcommittee as well as on the subcommittees for Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education. Roybal-Allard is married to Edward T. Allard III and is the mother of two adult children, Lisa Marie and Ricardo Olivarez. She is a 1965 graduate of California State University at Los Angeles.
Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard. Courtesy of Lucille Roybal-Allard.
Congress from throughout the United States and its territories. During nearly ten years in the nation’s secondhighest deliberative body, Roybal-Allard’s legislative priorities have included improving school safety, modernizing and upgrading public schools, increasing the minimum wage, addressing the high Hispanic school dropout rates, saving Social Security, and stimulating economic growth. As chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, she focused on education, economic development, the 2000 census, and health care. Roybal-Allard serves on two influential subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee: the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary and the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. These subcommittees oversee funding issues affecting small business, international trade, the census, national security, law enforcement, the Department of Energy, and several independent agencies of the U.S. government. During the 107th Congress Roybal-Allard sponsored legislation to prevent underage drinking, protect children employed in agriculture, create a tax credit to help low-income working families buy homes, protect consumers from unreasonable practices by credit card
See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Machamer, Gene. 1996. Hispanic American Profiles. New York: One World, Ballantine Books; Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research; Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research; U.S. House of Representatives. “Congresswoman Roybal-Allard.” www.house.gov/roybal-allard/ (accessed July 18, 2005). Bettie Baca
RUIZ, BERNARDA (1802–1880) Nineteenth-century champion of civil rights Bernarda Ruiz was born and raised in a small adobe in the Santa Barbara Presidio. She was the daughter of María Ygnacia Lugo and Sergeant José Pedro Ruiz. Through intermarriage of families at that time, Bernarda was related to many of California’s most prominent Mexican citizens. In 1817, fifteen-year-old Bernarda married José de Jesús Teodoro Rodríguez, a presidio soldier. In time they became the grantees of the Conejo Ranch and the parents of eight children. Sergeant Ruiz died when the children were young. Bernarda’s four sons later oper-
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Ruiz, Bernarda ated a pony express mail service between Santa Barbara and Mexico City. Late in December 1846, during the U.S. war with Mexico, Colonel John C. Frémont arrived in Santa Barbara with a 400-man California battalion, headed toward Los Angeles to battle with the Mexican National Army. Frémont and the California battalion needed to spend a few days in Santa Barbara to recuperate from a torrential storm they had encountered on the journey. Nearly 100 horses had been lost on the trek. Upon arrival Frémont and his men took possession of several dozen horses belonging to the Ruiz family. Rumors had spread throughout Mexican California that Colonel Frémont and Commodore Robert Stockton might impose harsh punishments on the defeated Mexicans because it appeared that the war was coming to an end. The Californios were concerned that their property would be seized and that they might be incarcerated, or worse. While Frémont was delayed in Santa Barbara, Ruiz made arrangements to speak with him. This alone was quite a feat for a woman living in a patriarchal frontier community. Her purpose in seeing Frémont was to use her influence for peace. She persuaded Frémont that it would be to his advantage to win the Mexican Californians over to his side, rather than making them enemies by inflicting harsh sanctions. Ruiz advised Frémont that a generous peace that respected property rights would be to his advantage and political gain. She outlined plans to enable contending forces to be brought together on just and friendly terms. She suggested that residents should receive the same equal rights and protection granted to American citizens. Frémont was impressed by her sincerity, her sound reasoning, and the namedropping that she did of her family and contacts in California. Bernarda Ruiz and Don Jesús Pico, a cousin of the former governor of Mexican California, made arrangements for a special meeting between the colonel and the Mexican authorities. They traveled with Colonel Frémont to the San Fernando Mission to meet with General Andrés Pico and representatives of the Mexican regiment. At that time General Pico was reluctant to meet with the American military commanders and representatives of the United States. He was upset about rumors that were spreading among the Californios that Commodore Stockton and General Stephan Kearny were planning to impose stiff sanctions on the Mexicano residents because the battles were coming to an end. Ruiz alone went to General Pico’s encampment to tell him about the peace agreement she and Frémont had discussed two weeks earlier in Santa Barbara. On January 13, 1847, Colonel Frémont and General Andrés Pico, along with six oth-
Bernarda Ruiz was influential in drafting the Treaty of Cahuenga 1847. Courtesy of Jeff Paul.
ers, signed the Articles of Capitulation at the Campo de Cahuenga near Los Angeles. That agreement became known as the Treaty of Cahuenga. The document, in English and Spanish, included seven articles. It ended the Mexican War in California, defined the terms of the settlement, and promised full civil and property rights to residents in the territory while it was occupied by the United States. It also granted persons the right to leave the territory. Bernarda Ruiz was present when the representatives of the two nations signed the document. Frémont acknowledged in his memoirs that the Treaty of Cahuenga actually started with the conversation with Bernarda Ruiz in Santa Barbara. Bernarda Ruiz was a community leader, an early champion for property and civil rights for Mexicanos and women, and an activist for peace. The agreements she articulated with Colonel Frémont that ended the Mexican War in California served as a model for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. See also Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo SOURCES: Rasmussen, Cecilia. 2002. “Los Angeles—L.A. Then and Now: Woman Helped Bring a Peaceful End to Mexican-American War.” Los Angeles Times, May 5, B-4; Tomkins, Walker A. 1967. Old Spanish Santa Barbara: From Cabrillo to Frémont. Santa Barbara, CA: McNally and Loftin.
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Ruiz, Irene Hernández
RUIZ, IRENE HERNÁNDEZ (1920–
)
Born in San Antonio in 1920, Irene Hernández Ruiz enjoyed a comfortable childhood because of the success of her restaurateur father, Antonio “Tony” Dorado Hernández, and the business sense of her boardingschool-educated mother, María de la Luz Vela Benavides. The second of six surviving daughters, Ruiz attended private Catholic schools until she entered Brackenridge High School, from which she graduated in 1939, and San Antonio College (SAC). While her Mexicano father ran the downtown Liverpool Café, her Tejana mother managed rental properties, a beauty salon, and a household where her daughters spent hours studying languages and practicing for piano recitals. In December 1941 the attack on Pearl Harbor significantly changed Ruiz’s life. A judge who frequented her father’s café asked if his daughters would consider working for the Office of Censorship. With knowledge of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, Ruiz immediately volunteered. From January 1942 to August 1945 she worked full-time as a translator and phone monitor, listening to cross-border telephone calls between the United States and Latin America. After the end of World War II Ruiz resumed her studies at Our Lady of the Lake University, earning a teaching certificate in 1948. A year before graduation Ruiz assumed her first teaching post at a nearby country school in Bigfoot, Texas. Every Sunday evening she commuted with colleagues to Bigfoot, resided at the teacherage during the week, and drove home on Friday. After graduation Ruiz accepted a job at Grulla, Texas, in Starr County. A year later she returned to San Antonio, where she taught at the Edgewood and San Antonio independent school districts. In 1956 she married teacher Francisco H. Ruiz (d. 1998), and the couple had three sons: A. Duane, F. Brent, and R. Bret. Sharing a love of languages, the couple pursued higher education together, attending summer language institutes for teachers at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence. Later Irene Ruiz attended a third institute at Vanderbilt University. However, in 1963 KU Spanish professor Agnes Brady recruited the couple to Lawrence and then to Kansas City, where she helped them gain employment. Ruiz taught Spanish in the secondary schools, while her husband oversaw the school district’s language programs. In the summer of 1969 she began library studies at Emporia State University and also taught evening courses as an adjunct English professor at Penn Valley Community College from 1971 to 1976. When Kansas City schools were wrestling with integration in the 1970s, the district transferred Ruiz to
Lincoln High School, a formerly segregated African American high school, and later to the new Martin Luther King Junior High School, where she continued to teach for four years until she accepted a librarianship at the Kansas City Main Library. Encouraged to pursue her interests in preserving Mexican American community history, Ruiz organized an oral history project of early West Side settlers who had lost family photographs and documents in the infamous flood of 1951, the largest in twentieth-century Kansas history. Ruiz conducted fifty-nine interviews, including six in Spanish, essentially recovering a community history “on tape.” In tandem with historical recovery efforts, Ruiz also transformed the storefront West Branch into a bilingual collection that better served community needs. Attending meetings at churches and the Guadalupe Center, a Catholic women’s settlement house whose papers constitute part of the Hispanic collection, she invited Mexican American residents to join the library. Eventually residents recognized Ruiz as a steady beacon and solicited her assistance with translations for job applications and finally with queries about the library’s Spanish selections. When voters passed a tax levy in 1996 to build a permanent home for the branch, Ruiz finally agreed to retire. In 2000 West Side community leaders successfully lobbied the library board to rename the West Branch after Ruiz for her accomplishments as an educator and librarian. For two decades the popular West Branch librarian had augmented the district’s Spanish-language materials collection to serve the growing Latino, mostly Mexican American, population in Kansas City’s West Side barrio. In 2001 Kansas City residents reopened the West Branch in a new 4,000-square-foot building now called the Irene H. Ruiz Biblioteca de Las Americas. The Ruiz Branch features bibliographic and audiovisual resources related to Latina/o culture in Spanish and English, as well as bilingual staff members who offer dual-language programming. The Main Library’s Special Collections also contain the Kansas City Latino Heritage Collection, which comprises original documents, including organizational archives and the fifty-nine oral histories that Ruiz conducted from 1977 to 1982. In retirement Ruiz continues her educational activism as a “storytime” reader at the Ruiz Branch. Various Kansas City organizations, including Azteca, MANA (Mexican American Women’s National Association), and the Women’s Foundation of Greater Kansas City, have honored her achievements. Ruiz is a past president of the Alpha Chapter of Alpha Delta Kappa, an international honorary sorority for women educators. Her own oral history is part of the History Speaks Project: Visions and Voices of Kansas City’s Past in the
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Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. See also Education SOURCES: Kansas City Latino Heritage Collection. Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, MO. www.kclibrary. org/sc/db/ethnic/latino/resources.htm#Resources (accessed July 18, 2005), Ruiz, Irene Hernández. 2002. Interview by Gene T. Chávez, June 7. The History Speaks Project: Visions and Voices of Kansas City’s Past (KC400). Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Kansas City, University Archives, University of Missouri, Kansas City; ———. 2004. Interview by Laura K. Muñoz, February 9. Laura K. Muñoz
RUIZ DE BURTON, MARÍA AMPARO (1832–1895) Probably the first U.S. Latina to publish her work in English, María Amparo Ruiz, the daughter of Jesús Maitorena and Isabel Ruiz de Maitorena, was born in Loreto, Baja California, in 1832. Her grandfather, José Manuel Ruiz Carrillo, served as a northern Baja frontier soldier and officer and in 1822 retired to Loreto, then the capital of Baja. Shortly after his arrival Don José Manuel was named governor of Baja California (1822– 1825), a post he held until the newly established Mexican republic appointed a jefe político for the Californias. This connection with the cash-poor but socially privileged Ruiz family perhaps explains María Amparo Ruiz’s use of the Ruiz surname throughout her life. The future California writer grew up in La Paz, Baja California, a small village but by then the new capital, where she was schooled in Spanish and French. María Amparo Ruiz was fourteen years old when the United States invaded Mexico in 1846. A year later U.S. troops, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Stanton Burton, an army officer trained at West Point, took over Baja California. The war in Baja saw both resistance and accommodation on the part of the Mexicans. In 1848, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which reduced the Mexican territory by half, but left Baja under Mexican control, U.S. troops departed, along with a number of Baja residents who decided to cast their lot with the invaders. Sixteen-year-old María Amparo, her mother, her sister, and her brother-in-law were among this group. A year later the Catholic María Amparo Ruiz married Captain Henry S. Burton, a Protestant, to the consternation of the Catholic Californios. Her marriage to an army officer provided her with the opportunity to learn English, socialize with prominent army officers and their wives in Monterey and the Bay Area, live for a period in San Diego, where he was later stationed, and travel to the East Coast at the out-
break of the Civil War. Before they went east in 1859, she and Burton had purchased Rancho Jamul, a former Pío Pico rancho in the San Diego area. The mother of two children, Nellie and Harry, Ruiz de Burton lived in various eastern seaboard cities and spent a good deal of time in Washington, D.C., where she met President Abraham Lincoln and his wife and made contact with the Mexican consulate and the leading men of Mexico as well. Indeed, she became a personal friend of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Her sojourn in Washington gave her the opportunity to observe firsthand the federal government and culture, especially during the Civil War, and afforded her a unique critical distance from which to view and critique the transformations taking place in the United States. Ruiz de Burton spent the rest of her life in the United States, living on the East Coast until 1870 and, after the death of her husband, relocating to California, where she fought to retain ownership of Rancho Jamul. After extensive litigation title was confirmed, but the land was ultimately lost to creditors and lawyers. The period between 1848 and 1900 witnessed U.S. imperial expansion, modernization, war, monopoly capitalism, graft, antilabor legislation, and speculative investment, all developments that ground the life and writing of Ruiz de Burton. All of her experiences became grist for her pen. While living in San Diego in the early 1850s, she wrote, produced, and later published (1876) a five-act comedy based on Don Quixote. In 1872 she published her first novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, a bitingly satirical text set during the period of the Civil War that reveals the hypocrisy of some abolitionists, as well as the outright privateering and opportunism of the emerging capitalist class, the “robber barons” of the so-called Gilded Age. This novel may be the first English-language publication written by a Latina. Her second novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885), stands out as the first published narrative—written in English—to give the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being promised full rights of citizenship after the U.S.-Mexican War, was already by 1870 a subordinated and disenfranchised minority. She was a voluminous correspondent, and there exist more than 200 of her letters to and from a wide range of people. These letters reveal her complex, multifaceted personality and the diverse issues with which she engaged throughout her life. Writing from a Latina identity, she articulated the bitter resentment of Californios who endured the onslaught of Anglo-American domination in the period after 1848, and she early on warned against the dangers of an expanding United States. In the end Ruiz de Burton lost most of her property and businesses and died in straitened circum-
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Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo stances; at her death in 1895, however, she was still involved in litigation regarding her claims to property in Baja California. Ruiz de Burton’s novels, articles, and letters provide insights into her own complicated life as well. Her dual identification and nationality, her sense of displacement, her contradictory accommodations to and disidentification with the United States, her sense of a “Latin” race that goes beyond national identity and citizenship, and her strong sense of herself as a woman challenged by gender constraints are all traits that make Ruiz de Burton a very complex and modern Latina subject, worthy of critical study.
SOURCES: Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. 1995. Who Would Have Thought It? Ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press (orig. pub. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872); ———. 1997. The Squatter and the Don. 2nd edition [C. Loyal, pseud.]. Ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press (orig. pub. San Francisco: S. Carson and Co., 1885); ———. 2001. Conflicts of Interest: Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press; Sánchez, Rosaura, and Beatrice Pita. 2005. “María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Power of Her Pen.” In Latina Legacies, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press.
See also Literature
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Beatrice Pita
S q SADA, MARÍA G. “CHATA” (1884–1973) María “Chata” Sada was born in Iraxuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. She and her husband Juan operated a trading post, restaurant, and general store in the Big Bend area of Texas during the 1920s and 1930s, when the area was still relatively remote. Chata’s Place provided a sense of community life for Big Bend because it served as the social hub where weddings, birthday celebrations, and other festivities were held. It even doubled as a Catholic church on occasion. María married Juan Sada in 1901, and they crossed the border at Boaquillas, becoming one of two families to settle in the area. Like Spanish-speaking settlers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they made their own adobe home. However, unlike their predecessors, the Sadas did not rely on a horse and buggy, but on a newfangled automobile. María Sada took charge of Chata’s Place because her husband operated a silver mine in Coahuila. She learned English in order to serve hunters, geologists, engineers, and naturalists who ventured into Big Bend. For those who needed lodging in this isolated area, she provided hot meals and spare rooms. She also kept beer cold in a kerosene-powered refrigerator, even during Prohibition. María Sada also served as an informal bank, cashing checks for customers. She and Juan Sada adopted six children and served as godparents for others. María Sada developed a reputation as a midwife, pharmacist, judge, teacher, and gardener. She also raised livestock and, given the rugged terrain with mountain lions and rattlesnakes, was handy with a rifle. A 1955 Dallas Morning News article described her as a friendly, affectionate hostess who also had a certain regal bearing. When Juan Sada died in 1936, María closed the trading post and moved to Del Rio, Texas, to live with a son. She died in 1973. María Sada was a successful businesswoman who provided services to travelers and created community in a remote region of Texas. See also Entrepreneurs
SOURCES: Orozco, Cynthia E. 1996. “Maria Sada.” In New Handbook of Texas 5. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; Smithers, W. D. 1976. Chronicle of the Big Bend. Austin, TX: Madrona Press. Cynthia E. Orozco
SALSA In Latin America popular music has traditionally been conceived through the bodies and the voices of women. Women have been major icons of romantic ballads, boleros, and folkloric music in various national traditions. From bolero interpreters such as the Argentinian Libertad Lamarque, the Puerto Rican Ruth Fernández, and the Mexican Toña la Negra to the folkloric compositions and performances of the Chilean Violeta Parra, the Peruvian Chabuca Granda, and the Argentinian Mercedes Sosa and to all-women bands such as Grupo Anacaona in Cuba and others in Cali, Colombia, in the 1980s, women have been important agents of popular music, as well as serving as inspiration for the greatest male songwriters. In contrast to this very rich female musical tradition, women in salsa music have been historically excluded as interpreters and instrumentalists. As a musical industry that emerged in New York City among secondgeneration Puerto Rican musicians, salsa music developed all-male networks of musical training and jamming sessions that kept women from participating in its popular, oral transmission. Major musicians such as Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Ray Barretto, and others transmitted a symbolic gendering through the music, its lyrics, its instrumentation, and album designs, which reaffirmed the male voice, subjectivity, and stage presence and the historical narratives about the music itself. Sexist attitudes that perceived women as unfit to play certain instruments and the cultural mores that kept women at home and away from the clubs and the public spaces of musical performance also added to the exclusion of women. It is surprising that, given the rich history of women in Latin American popular music, particularly in countries such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, from
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Salsa singer Merceditas Váldez in New York, circa 1950. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
which U.S. Latino communities have emerged, only a few female names have been associated with salsa music in the United States since the late 1960s. While the name of Cuban exile singer Celia Cruz easily comes to mind when one speaks of salsa, the popular music of the urban Caribbean and of its diaspora, historical revisions and recoveries by cultural critics and feminist scholars have foregrounded the ways in which other women have played important roles in its development. Likewise, since the 1990s there has been a growing number of younger salseras, or female salsa composers, interpreters, and instrumentalists, who are changing the masculine discourse of the music and who will continue to appropriate this style in order to express and perform, through their bodies, their songs, and their voices, their experiences and perspectives as Latinas in the United States. During the second half of the 1960s the early period of salsa music was characterized by a strong, brassy, urban sound that distinguished New York salsa music from more traditional Cuban forms, such as the son,
the guaguancó, and the guaracha. However, the particular sound of salsa—what César Miguel Rondón calls “war-like, aguerrida”—was, ironically, articulated in its early stages by a woman, La Lupe. La Lupe, whose real name was Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond, was born in Santiago, Cuba, and, after achieving national popularity for her transgressive performances in local clubs in Havana, came to the United States in 1962. She became known for her collaborations with Tito Puente, as a major interpreter of Tite Curet Alonso’s compositions “Puro teatro” and “La gran tirana,” and, of course, for her performative excesses on stage, dramatic interpretations, and provocative gestures of voice and body. La Lupe, historians believe, helped reinforce the warlike, masculine sound of early salsa music in New York. Despite this central role in salsa music, La Lupe’s career never developed. Rather, her agency was undermined by male producers, other musicians, and the media. Her personal experiences and drug abuse seemingly led to a perception that she was unprofessional, unruly, and, from a masculine perspective, not really a singer, but more of a performer. Since the music industry rejected her presence and agency, she fought back partly through her own songs, “Dueña del cantar” and “Yo soy como soy,” in which she denounced male musicians who had negatively affected her career and in which she reaffirmed her artistic rights and authorship regarding salsa music. After her death in 1992 La Lupe was memorialized in multiple ways. Through drama and biographical movie projects, the redigitalization of her classics and recovery of her songs by singers like Yolanda Duke and La India, and the reprisal of her artistic style by Cuban American performance artist Carmelita Tropicana. La Lupe’s posthumous fame and popularity have elevated her music to classic standards, revealing the singular talent of this great Cuban singer in exile. This talent was partly recognized during her lifetime, but was mostly shadowed by controversy and abjection. The inverse of the musical career of La Lupe is embodied by Celia Cruz, also a Cuban exile, who arrived in the United States in 1961 after a long and successful singing career with la Sonora Matancera. If La Lupe erotized herself on stage and embodied the puta image, the sexual and sensual woman, Celia Cruz constructed a public persona as la gran dama de la música cubana (the great dame of Cuban music). She was known as the Queen of Salsa, la guarachera de Oriente, and so on, and her fame crossed national borders, hemispheres, generations, and racial and socioeconomic barriers. Musically speaking, Celia Cruz brought the Cuban forms and genres back into salsa music. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s she continued to entertain Latino/a audiences in the
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Salsa United States and cross-cultural audiences internationally with her talent for sonear (the ability to improvise call and response in the musical genre elision) and for improvisation, and with a magnificent alto voice that projected itself with volume and power, just as it had when she was a young girl in Cuba. Cruz began singing in radio shows and winning radio contests and soon became the lead singer for la Sonora Matancera, Cuba’s most important entertainment band and musical ambassador during the 1950s to the rest of Latin America. In this role Celia Cruz became a Cuban icon and, after her exile, an important public voice of the exile community in the United States and of antisocialist Cuba. Celia Cruz sang with major salsa musicians such as Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco, Willie Colón, and Rubén Blades and later with El Canario, La India, and Albita. Although during the 1970s she interpreted boogaloos, nueva onda music from Latin America, and Cuban guarachas, rumbas, and guaguancós, she also performed religious Afro-Cuban chants, Mexican classics and rancheras, and Puerto Rican music, among other Latin American classics. The diversity and impressive gamut of her repertoires, the flexibility of her range, and the cross-cultural, transnational, and pan-Latino elements of her shows and concerts established her legendary status in a musical career that lasted for more than sixty years. At a concert in Chicago in August 2000, Celia Cruz publicly recognized that Albita, her younger Cuban counterpart in the United States, had a wonderful talent for musical improvisation. This comment signals a major shift in the agency and presence of women as salseras. During the early 1980s Celia Cruz had stated in an interview that the lack of women in salsa music had to do with the fear or resistance of women to improvise and sonear. Twenty years later the emergence of younger salsa singers, such as Albita, La India, Brenda K. Starr, Corrine, Lisette Meléndez, Yolanda Duke, Helena Santiago, Jaci Velázques, and others, as well as the burgeoning of all-women salsa bands in Cali, Colombia, attests to major shifts in the role of women in music that have been informed by the increasing power of women in public spaces, and to their growing presence as composers and trained instrumentalists. Youth, young women as potential consumers, and the emergence of particular audiences and fans are also factors that have guaranteed a good level of successful sales figures for these women singers. One cannot forget the impact of the late Mexican American singer Selena (Selena Quintanilla Pérez), whose untimely death cut short a promising career both in Tex-Mex music and in Anglo pop. The age factor of the U.S. Latino population has also informed the centrality of young singers as representatives of the culture.
Thus a new generation of salseras during the 1990s has given salsa a more feminine voice and face. Among them, La India, born Linda Caballero in the Bronx, New York, has stood out for her talented improvisatory skills, feminist lyrics, and powerful stage presence. Her music illustrates a new, generational taste that fuses salsa structures, rhythms, and arrangements with other urban musical forms with which younger Latinos/as have identified: hip-hop, R&B, pop, gospel, jazz, dance, and house music. Her musical development began when she sang freestyle house and dance music in local New York clubs. These forms clearly continue to inform her salsa style, arrangements, and interpretations. Like her generational peer Marc Anthony, La India’s shift into salsa and into singing in Spanish has been incorrectly labeled as “crossover” when in fact this change is the inverse, from English into Spanish. La India’s incursion into salsa, and particularly into salsa romántica, was influenced by contemporary male musicians, such as Eddie Palmieri and her then husband and producer, Little Louie Vega. Moreover, like La Lupe before her, and like other contemporaries, including Yolanda Duke, La India’s development in salsa music was also overtly mediated by the major male figures of the industry. Her first album, titled Llegó la India via Eddie Palmieri (1992), is a testament to Palmieri’s “discovery” of her singing talents. The title song, “Llegó la India,” and “Mi primera rumba” describe La India’s own awareness of her debut as a salsa singer. La India’s struggle for an increasing autonomy is evident in the progression of her musical career and is symbolically articulated in the sequence of her CDs. La India dedicated the CD Dicen que soy (1994) to Celia Cruz and Sola (1999) to La Lupe. These dedications to women singers have served to resituate La India within a history of women salseras, rather than as the musical discovery or product of her salsero male counterparts. She has also expressed this feminist stance in the song “La voz de la experiencia” (in Sobre el fuego, 1997), which she composed as an homage to Celia Cruz and performed as a duet with the Cuban singer and role model. The song is not only a public relations tool for RMM Records that highlights its two major female salseras, but also a complex text that, musically and in its lyrics and performance, attests to the influences of both singers, as well as to the meanings that salsa music has had for both Cuban and Puerto Rican listeners. The fact that La India’s most recent recording is titled Sola suggests that reaching a certain level of autonomy in her musical career and performances has been an important goal for this Puerto Rican salsera. La India’s feminist lyrics in salsa romántica have had a significant impact on female audiences and listeners.
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Salsa Some of her most popular cuts—such as “Ese hombre,” “Dicen que soy,” and “Me cansé de ser la otra”—are overt expressions against patriarchy and against the double standards of male-female relationships. While critics have dismissed salsa romántica as a trend created by the industry to appease and neutralize the cultural politics of the music of the 1970s—what is now being called salsa dura—it is also true that La India’s contributions to salsa romántica offer her listeners strong, feminist denouncements of male behavior in heterosexual relationships. Cuban singer Albita, who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1990s, has become a well-known salsera in the United States. While her reputation and fame in Cuba were based on her talented interpretations of Cuban folkloric music, such as the guajiras, in the United States her musical selections have included more salsa arrangements, jazz-infused cuts, and more traditional Cuban music. Her first CD, No se parece a nada (1995), suggests androgynous and homoerotic discourses on love and sexuality, a perspective that has been historically silenced in the music industry. Other women salseras whose work contributed to the emergence of a Latino/a new salsa in the 1990s are Brenda K. Starr, Corrine, Lisette Meléndez, Helena Santiago, and Yolanda Duke. Together these voices continue to fuse salsa rhythms with other popular dance forms, such as dance, house, R&B, merengue, reggae, and vallenatos. They are singing in Spanish and in English and combining both, linguistic choices that reflect the fluid, interlingual practices of second- and thirdgeneration U.S. Latinos/as. Born in East Harlem, Lisette Meléndez has improvised in both English and Spanish and has interpreted salsa romántica under Sir George Productions in a duet with Frankie Negrón, thus foregrounding the dialogic perspectives of both men and women as they negotiate love relationships. Corrine, whose CD Un poco más (1999) was produced under Ralph Mercado, mixes hip-hop and salsa in rewritings of pop classics, such as Madonna’s “La isla bonita.” Her collaboration with, and the arrangement of, Wyclef Jean offer listeners a hybrid, remix freestyle salsa version of Madonna’s tropical representation of Latino/a culture, one that reclaims the song by using Spanish and English and infusing it with the rhythms and musical language of the Latino/a youth communities themselves. Generational identities are also evoked in Corinne’s version of the classic Cuban bolero “Lágrimas negras,” which is now interpreted as a remix of hip-hop, salsa, and rap. In fact, Corinne’s soneo (call and response improvisation to the music) brings in the woman’s voice, which in this version resists going back to the man, a perspective absent in the traditional boleros of the 1940s and 1950s. Brenda K. Starr has also made signif-
icant contributions to the new salsa with her 1998 recording No lo voy a olvidar, in which she sings “I Still Believe” in a salsa version. This is meaningful because, again, it reclaims a pop song made famous by Mariah Carey, but originally interpreted by Starr herself. Of half-Jewish, half–Puerto Rican heritage, Brenda K. Starr, born Brenda Kaplan, began by singing pop in English and is now gaining popularity as a major female interpreter of salsa romántica in Spanish. She has received numerous national awards as a salsa interpreter, and her career continues to be very promising within the industry. The younger Helena Santiago, who debuted on stage at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on October 11, 1997, has a CD titled Yo vine a cantar and also fuses salsa, merengue, and house music in her work. Given the systematic exclusion of women that characterized the salsa music industry from its beginnings, the emergence of numerous younger salseras since the 1990s is definitely cause for celebration. The presence and contributions of these singers and composers are providing much-needed feminist and female perspectives to the ongoing dialogues and gender politics behind salsa lyrics. Yet the absence of women and Latina producers within the larger music industry reveals that the decision-making power is still in the hands of men. The struggles for autonomy and freedom that have been evident in the musical careers of Celia Cruz, La Lupe, and La India reflect the ongoing struggles that Latinas continue to face in their personal and professional realms and in society in general. Thus it is important to continue to document and trace the contributions of early figures such as La Lupe, to pay homage to the many years of music making of Celia Cruz, and to patronize the musical products of the younger generation of salseras such as La India, whose talents and feminist voices will provide models for the newer generations of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. SOURCES: Aparicio, Frances R. 1998. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England; Duany, Jorge. 1998. “ ‘Lo tengo dominao’: El boom de las merengueras en Puerto Rico.” In Diálogo (Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico), October, 28–29; Puleo, Augusto C. 1997. “Una verdadera crónica del Norte: Una noche con la India.” In Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, ed. Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Rondón, César Miguel. 1980. El libro de la salsa: Crónica de la música del Caribe urbano. Caracas, Venezuela: Editorial Arte; Waxer, Lise A. 1998. “Cali Pachanguero: A Social History of Salsa in a Colombian City.” Ph.D. diss., University of Ilinois at UrbanaChampaign.
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Frances R. Aparicio
Salt of the Earth
SALT OF THE EARTH Released in 1954, Salt of the Earth holds the distinction of being the only film ever banned in the United States. Blacklisted and branded as Communist by conservative politicians and the Hollywood studio system, a small group of filmmakers set out to document a recent strike by Mexican American miners in Silver City, New Mexico. Filmed right after the strike was settled and shot on location, the movie documented a substantial union victory against the powerful Empire Zinc Corporation. Miners, their wives, and their children, people who had actually walked the picket line, played important roles in the film. Clint and Virginia Jencks, the principal union organizers, also collaborated with the production company. The Empire Zinc Company, a subsidiary of the largest zinc company in the United States, owned a company town and mines in Grant County, New Mexico. In 1950 the miners, members of Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), voted to strike for an end to the dual wage structure and for better working conditions. A series of injunctions barred the male workers from the picket line. In their place stood their wives and sisters— women from the Ladies Auxiliary Local 209. Both Virginia and Clint Jencks encouraged women’s leadership and participation. From October 1950 until January 1952 women held the line while men assumed traditional domestic and child-rearing responsibilities, learning what it was like to run a household without indoor plumbing or hot water. Although the women were harassed and arrested by local law enforcement, they refused to budge. Mariana Ramírez remembered, “We had knitting needles. We had safety pins. We had chili peppers.” In the words of historian Vicki L. Ruiz, “The movie documents the changes in consciousness about women’s place within mining families as a result of the temporary role reversals.” Indeed, this new consciousness was reflected in the settlement that was reached in 1952. With women at the bargaining table, the settlement included both higher wages and hot water. What attracted the blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers, Herbert Biberman, Paul Jerrico, Michael Wilson, and Adrian Scott, to this saga of Mexican American women on the picket line was the larger story of vast racial, class, and gender inequalities in the cold war United States. The film also stressed a feminist perspective on social problems, gender, and class issues. It documented a union victory that was rare during the cold war era and a victory by an alleged radical union. But the film never found its way into U.S. cinema distribution because it was blocked by the conservative Projectionists’ Union, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the U.S. Central Intel-
Picketing and knitting during the Empire Zinc mining strike, 1951. This strike was the basis for the film Salt of the Earth. Courtesy of the Los Mineros Photograph Collection and the Clint Jencks Papers, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
ligence Agency, and even business tycoon Howard Hughes on the grounds that it was pure Communist propaganda. The Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested the lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, shortly before the film crew wrapped up the final scenes, and she was later deported. During the late 1960s and early 1970s both feminists and Chicano activists rediscovered Salt of the Earth when it finally received the circulation and acclaim that it had been denied almost two decades earlier. As Ruiz notes, “Salt of the Earth remains emblematic of a long history of labor activism among Mexican women in the United States.”
Children on the line, Empire Zinc mining strike, 1951. Courtesy of the Los Mineros Photograph Collection and the Clint Jencks Papers, Chicano Research Collection, Arizona State University Libraries, Tempe.
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San Antonio, Ana Gloria
SAN ANTONIO, ANA GLORIA (1915–
Elvira Molano, cochair of the union negotiating committee during the Empire Zinc mining strike, 1951. Courtesy of the Los Mineros Photograph Collection and the Clint Jencks Papers, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.
SOURCES: Lorence, James J. 1999. The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Wilson, Michael. 1978. Salt of the Earth. Screenplay with commentary by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press; Wilson, Michael, Herbert Biberman, and Paul Jarrico. 1954. Salt of the Earth. U.S. Independent Production Company and International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. U.S.A. black and white. 94 minutes. Ronald L. Mize and Vicki L. Ruiz
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Ana Gloria Cabañas Villanueva de San Antonio was born on the edges of the Vivi River in Utuado, Puerto Rico, to parents who were descendants of Catalans on the paternal side and Canary Islanders on the maternal side. In the 1940s, after her parents passed away and she herself became a widow with a young child, Susanne, she decided to come to the United States, where she found life very difficult, as did other migrants during that decade. She studied domestic science at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras and later obtained a baccalaureate degree in social work from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She also pursued graduate studies in romance languages and political science at Hunter College, City University of New York. Despite her academic education, she found herself obligated to work in factories until she was able to obtain a position in the Department of Welfare in New York City, where she worked for five years. During this period she met and wed her lifelong partner and mate, Félix San Antonio. He died in 1988. This union resulted in a second daughter, Ana. In 1959 the family went to Cuba, where she was appointed chief of the Department of Special Cases for the Ministry of Social Services in Havana. Returning to New York, she applied and was accepted for a position in the Department of Social Services of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in New York City, where she assisted migrant Puerto Ricans with urban adjustment problems, employment, health, education, and identity documentation. She left
Ana Gloria San Antonio, second row in the middle, with other members of the Orden de la Estrella de Oriente. Courtesy of the Juanita Arocho Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike this position to accept a position with the city of New York as director of area services in Manhattan Valley, the Lower East Side, and East Harlem. She gained recognition by knocking on doors of people in need in order to help resolve their social and economic problems. Always shying away from political favors and patronage, she advanced solely on the basis of her hard work and the civil service exams. Her last position before she retired was that of director of the Office of Evaluation and Compliance with the Housing and Development Administration of the city of New York. A lifelong community activist, Ana Gloria San Antonio was connected to many organizations. She served on the Board of Directors of the John F. Kennedy Library for Minorities and the Board of Directors of the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association and chaired the Northeast Narcotics Association Committee. She was secretary of the Círculo de Escritores y Poetas Iberoamericanos (CEPI), vice president of the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores (APE), and cofounder of the Eslabón Cultural Hispanoamericano (ECHA). She held membership in the League of Women Voters, la Unión de Mujeres Americanas (UMA), and the Puerto Rican Hall of Fame. In 1981 she was elected president of the Hispanic Day Parade and went on to found the Immigrants Day Parade. Together with her husband, Félix, a Mason and grand master of the Gran Logia de Lengua Española in New York City, and her sister, Rosario Cabañas de Aguiar, she founded the Spanish Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star in New York City, where she has remained active.
SOURCES: Arocho, Juana Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY; San Antonio, Ana Gloria Cabañas Papers. Eastern Star Archives, Gran Logia Masonic Lodge, New York. Susanne Cabañas
SAN ANTONIO PECAN SHELLERS’ STRIKE During the 1930s Texas controlled about 40 percent of the nation’s pecan production. San Antonio stood at the center of this industry. Julius Seligmann, owner of the Southern Pecan Shelling Company, initiated a contracting system that proved exploitative. It was common to find 100 pickers sitting around a long table in a space of only twenty-five feet by forty feet, working under poor illumination. Because there was no ventilation, the brown dust from the pecans hung heavy in the air, and many drew a connection between the polluted air and the high rate of tuberculosis among pecan-shelling families. Sanitary facilities in a typical sweatshop consisted of one toilet for workers of both sexes. Workers received pitiful wages in this femaledominated industry. The average annual family income of shellers was $251. An individual might make a weekly salary of $2.73. On January 31, 1938, the Southern Pecan Shelling Company’s contractors announced a pay cut from six to seven cents per pound to five to six cents per pound. Wages for pecan crackers were cut from fifty cents to forty cents per 100 pounds. A spontaneous walkout in-
Mexican women pecan shellers, San Antonio, Texas. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OW1, 1935–1945 (Digital ID: fsa 8b1319).
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San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike volving between 6,000 and 10,000 strikers ensued. The strikers were represented by the International Pecan Shellers Union No. 172, which was affiliated with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union that had granted the pecan shellers a temporary charter. UCAPAWA had also encouraged cooperation with other groups representing agricultural workers. One such group was the San Antonio chapter of the Workers’ Alliance of America, a national organization to protect the rights of the unemployed. Emma Tenayuca, the popular director of the local Workers’ Alliance, emerged as the pecan shellers’ strike leader. Tenayuca, married to Homer Brooks, a onetime Communist Party gubernatorial candidate in Texas, was well known in San Antonio for her fiery speeches demanding justice for workers, leadership in sit-downs at city hall, and public battles against the Work Projects Administration in response to workers’ pay cuts. The pecan shellers’ strike lasted three months. One thousand picketers were arrested. Tear gas was used several times, the police and fire departments were drafted for “riot duty,” and both Mayor C. K. Quin and Police Chief Owen W. Kilday refused to acknowledge the strike. Kilday, in particular, used the local media to ridicule Tenayuca and the strikers. The gross mistreatment of the strikers attracted national attention, and Texas governor James V. Allred ordered the Industrial Commission of Texas to investigate violations of civil liberties. Commission hearings determined that Kilday’s police department had overstepped its authority. Violations of civil liberties by the police occurred in an environment marked by strong anti-Communist and antiunionist sentiment. City officials, as well as representatives from the National Catholic Welfare Council, attacked the strike, characterizing it as Communist inspired and, therefore, illegitimate. Tenayuca became an easy target because of her Communist Party affiliation. Soon UCAPAWA made it clear that in order to maintain its support, Emma Tenayuca had to step down as strike leader. UCAPAWA’s decision fell in line with the CIO’s, and more generally the leftist position on Communists within its ranks during the 1930s. Union leaders were willing, and often eager, to receive assistance from Communists as long as they kept their political and ideological identities hidden. By 1938 Emma Tenayuca’s reputation as an outspoken Communist made her not only the target of reactionaries, but also a potential liability for the Left, which hoped to achieve revolutionary changes in American society by attempting to mainstream its radical programs. Removing Tenayuca from a visible leadership role seemed the safer route for the union.
UCAPAWA president Donald Henderson took charge of the strike, with advice from CIO leader Luisa Moreno. Henderson, Moreno, and George Lambert, the UCAPAWA representative in San Antonio, negotiated the strike settlement. In 1938 the CIO secured the initial wage of seven to eight cents per pound of pecans for shellers, which increased when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act that same year. This act established a minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour for pecan shellers. The settlement came after the governor persuaded Seligmann to negotiate and the union to arbitrate. Soon, however, the pecan-shelling industry turned to mechanization, and as many as 10,000 pecan shellers lost their jobs. The significance of the pecan shellers’ strike is not the short-lived pay increase but the political galvanization of workers and a community. See also Labor Unions; United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America SOURCES: Menefee, Selden, and Orin C. Cassmore. 1940. The Pecan Shellers of San Antonio. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; San Antonio Light. 1938. “Pecan Plant Workers Strike.” January 31; Tenayuca, Emma. 1986. “Interview with Emilio Zamora with the Participation of Oralia Cortez.” San Antonio, TX, June. Emma Tenayuca MSS 420, Box 11, Folder 5, the Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, Denton; ———. 1987. Interview with Gerry Poyo, February 21. Institute of Texan Cultures Oral History Program, University of Texas at San Antonio; Texas Observer: A Journal of Free Voices. 1983. “Living History: Emma Tenayuca Tells Her Story.” October 28; Turner, Allan. 1986. “A Night That Changed San Antonio.” Houston Chronicle, December 14. Gabriela González
SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY COTTON STRIKE In October 1933 more than 18,000 cotton workers went on strike in California’s agricultural heartland, the San Joaquin Valley. Seventy-five percent were Mexicans. The strike in California’s most valuable crop lasted more than a month, eventually covered the 200mile cotton belt of California, and was marked by violent confrontations and the death of several strikers. By the fall of 1933 the economic depression had reached its nadir. New Deal programs seemed to promise government support for union organizing. The toothless section 7a of the National Recovery Act, which supported workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively, excluded farmworkers, yet they interpreted the act as proof that President Franklin Roosevelt wanted them to organize. By 1933 growers had slashed farmworkers’ wages. Between April and December 1933 more than 50,000 workers launched thirty-two strikes in agriculture, creating in effect a
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San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike
Family scene from a strikers’ camp in Corcoran, California, during the 1933 San Joaquin cotton strike. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
general strike in California agriculture. Workers spread the strikes as they migrated from the southern tip of the state north into El Monte’s berry fields, across the Tehachapi Mountains into the San Joaquin Valley, and, in October, to the valley’s 200-mile-long cotton belt. When cotton growers cut wages, workers walked out of the fields. Growers evicted strikers and their families from the labor camps. With no place to go, strikers formed camps on the outskirts of several towns in the San Joaquin Valley. The largest was near Corcoran, California, where 3,500 Mexican workers formed the Corcoran camp. Lines of workers’ cars and tents on the dusty lot formed makeshift streets that were named after revolutionary heroes and towns. Veterans of the Mexican Revolution organized an armed sentry system. Women set up a camp kitchen. In the center of the camp the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) hung out a handwritten sign next to a table that served as a makeshift meeting place. Another sign above it proclaimed, in Spanish, workers’ 100 percent support for the National Recovery Act. To understand Mexicanas’ participation, it is necessary to reexamine assumptions about Mexican women. The rough conditions in rural Mexico had forced Mexicanas to work hard and deal with hardship, hunger, and violence. When men began to migrate to find work or, later, join an army of the Mexican Revolution, women took over the men’s work. During the revolution women faced roving bands of troops and the threat of rape, starvation, and death. Women migrated, usually with men but, as Vicki Ruiz points out, sometimes with only their children or other women. Some worked in factories or sold food in the growing cities of
Mexico. In the United States some took in boarders and cooked for workers; others established food services or ran cantinas. Single women found jobs outside the home. Married women often stayed home to care for children, yet desertion, poverty, and widowhood forced women to find work. Women learned the tricks of survival and made strategic decisions for their family’s welfare. This could include relations with men. Some left one man for another to improve the situation for themselves or their children. Younger women in the strike were savoring the greater freedom of the Jazz Age. Some cut their hair and wore makeup, donned short dresses, and wanted a more companionate marriage. Mexicanas were not new to the idea of struggle and had a long tradition of fighting for the good of their communities and families. Women in Mexico City had rioted for just and fair corn prices since the colonial era. Women in Mexican factories had organized strikes. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 some traveled with male soldiers as soldaderas, who foraged for food, cooked, and nursed soldiers. Others smuggled guns and ammunition, spied, took up guns and fought as soldiers, worked as strategists, and served as officers. These Mexicanas also knew firsthand the hard work of farm labor. Those who picked cotton knew the backbreaking weight of the 100-pound bags of cotton that they carried along mile-long rows of cotton. They watched the effects of the low pay and abysmal conditions on their families. In the isolated labor camps housing was a car, a tarp thrown over a branch, or, at best, a wood-frame house that lacked running water, sanitation, or insulation against cold valley nights. Far from the markets in town, women were forced to buy
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San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike inferior food at inflated prices at the company store or during the depression scrounged for food. They hauled water and cooked on makeshift stoves fashioned over open fires or empty oil barrels. They nursed their family members who contracted diseases caused by these conditions, such as tuberculosis or valley fever. They wept when their children died of illness or were killed in field accidents, such as the child smothered by cotton piled high in a wagon. These wretched conditions galvanized women to organize and in effect politicized their informal social networks. Mexicanas became the core of the strike that enabled workers to survive. They established a de facto child-care system and set up a camp kitchen. Dolores Galvan, a local cantina owner, helped distribute federally supplied food. Women organized and walked on picket lines and harassed and ultimately confronted strikebreakers who remained in the fields. Some women participated in the CAWIU. At least two bilingual “girls” (their ages are unclear) were on the Corcoran camp’s central committee and acted as interpreters. A number attended nightly strike meetings. Yet the union made few attempts to include women or address their specific concerns, and Mexicanas were not part of the leadership structure of the small union. Understandably, while many women remembered women leaders and how women fed their families and confronted strikebreakers, they remembered nothing of the union. Focusing only on the union is misleading. The strikes’ success depended in large part on the informal networks Mexicanos developed among themselves, networks that stretched from home communities in Mexico to their counterparts in the United States and to the cotton ranches, networks among Mexicanos who had been in earlier strikes, and those of anarchists and Communists who organized the strike as part of a broader desire for social change. These networks and experiences were the glue, the connecting link, among Mexican strikers and the base for the union. One of the most important was the network of women. Women met and organized together. Women in rebozos and long braids, younger women with makeup and flapper dresses, and young girls all joined on the picket lines, calling on people to support the strike. Women appealed to strikebreakers working in the fields as Mexicanos, as paisanos, as neighbors or compadres to join the strike. Women who spotted a strikebreaker they had fed at the strikers’ camp threatened to poison him if he showed up again. As the strike wore on, Mexicanas in Corcoran, reasoning that men would be more likely to be arrested or beaten, organized brigades of women to enter the fields and confront strikebreakers. According to Belén Flores, the women appealed to strikebreakers as fel-
low “Mexicanos” and “poor people” to walk out. They cursed strikebreakers who remained, chastising them as national traitors, comparable to those who “sold the head of Pancho Villa.” When supplications did not work, some women went after the strikebreakers with lead pipes and knives. They ripped the cotton sacks and pummeled strikebreakers with the pipes. The male strikebreakers retaliated, and at least one woman was badly beaten. Belén Flores remembered the women as strong, but the male strikebreakers as whiny cowards. When the strikebreakers pleaded that they were simply poor and wanted enough money to go home, Belén Flores remembered that the women responded in one voice, “Yes, we also have to eat and also have a family. But we are not sellouts.” After weeks of striking and the killing of several strikers, the U.S., Mexican, and California governments arbitrated a compromise to end the conflict. Wages increased to seventy-five cents for 100 pounds of cotton. Workers carried the momentum of this strike into a November strike by 1,500 cotton workers in Arizona and the January 1934 strike by 5,000 Mexicans in the Imperial Valley. But the union was not recognized, farmworkers were never covered by national legislation, and the ambivalent victories of the strike were not carried over into long-lasting changes for farmworkers. Yet the legacy of these strikes remained an important memory. Fifty years later strikers remembered the women who “could fight like a man,” the woman who seized the pistols of a highway patrolman, and another who threw the keys of a police car into the bushes. They remembered the Mexicanas arrested throughout the strike. Women’s participation in the cotton strike was not an anomaly. Hundreds of similar confrontations, in which women actively organized and fought for the community, continued to pepper the history of Mexicanas. Women’s actions in this strike emphasize the need to reassess lingering myths of a cultural or church-induced passivity of Mexican women and recognize the diversity of conditions, culture, and experience that helped shape their participation in this strike. See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Weber, Devra. 1994. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press; ———. 1994. “Raiz Fuerte: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed., ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Elhan Carol Du Bois, 395–404. New York: Routledge.
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Devra A. Weber
San Juan, Olga
SAN JUAN, OLGA (1927–
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Recognized as a versatile musical entertainer, Olga San Juan, also known as the Puerto Rican Pepper Pot, was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Puerto Rican parents on March 16, 1927. She married fellow actor Edmond O’Brien in 1948, and the marriage produced a daughter, María O’Brien, also an actress. The couple divorced in 1976, and Edmond O’Brien died in 1985 from Alzheimer’s disease. San Juan began her career on Broadway, where she won a Donaldson Award, precursor to the Tony Award, for Paint Your Wagon. In 1942 she landed a contract with Paramount Pictures when she was only fifteen. Originally a singer, San Juan was featured in musicals as competition to the “Brazilian Bombshell,” Carmen Miranda, and appeared in supporting roles with many stars of her generation, including Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. San Juan offered one of the most memorable performances in Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies, dancing to “Heat Wave” with Fred Astaire. She also skillfully played comic roles in films such as The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), with Betty Grable and Cesar Romero. As was the case for many Latina stars who began their careers in the 1940s, San Juan’s roles often consisted of ethnic dancer-singers, destined to be the female (blonde) star’s best friend and confidante, in B
movies, comedies, and musicals. She played the attractive sidekick to the established star with wit, irony, and discipline, delivering reflective commentary, as when she played Conchita, a Mexican passing as an Indian born in Guatemala, who had trouble staying in her place: “I ain’t pure.” Not unlike other Latina actresses who achieved greater visibility during this period, most notably Rita Moreno, San Juan provided comic relief through her “spicy” accented lines and hip movements, despite being light skinned and American born and raised. While she was largely cast for her Latin sensuality, San Juan’s characters were never considered competition for the main star, and, of course, she rarely got close to the leading man. From the vantage point of the contemporary Latino demographic explosion and pop culture visibility, San Juan’s pioneering work set an important precedent for other performers who later excelled in music, dance, and acting on the screen and the stage. Simultaneously, the limitations imposed on her career by the studios can only allow one to imagine how her talent could have developed under more conducive circumstances. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: Olga San Juan. Filmography. Rotten Tomatoes. 1998–2005. IGN Entertainment, Inc. Rotten Tomatoes.com/p/ olga_san_juan; Olga San Juan. 2005. The New York Times on the Web. July 18; All Media Guide, LLC. http//movies2.nyt.com/ gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=62873; Rivera, Miluka. 1999. “Leyendas puertorriqueñas en Hollywood.” El Mundo (December 16): e–8; Vannerman, Alan. 2004. Blue Skies. Bright Lights Film Journal. (November) issue 46. www.brightlightsfilm.com/ 46/blueskies.htm. Frances Negrón-Muntaner
SÁNCHEZ, LORETTA (1960–
Left to right, Alan Young, actor, Olga San Juan, actor and singer, and TSgt Bill Stewart, USA AFRS producer, circa 1950s. Courtesy of Armed Forces Radio and Television Services.
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Born in Anaheim, California, Loretta Sánchez is one of seven children of Mexican immigrant parents. Her father, Ignacio Sánchez, worked in a Los Angeles steel foundry. As a child growing up in a working-class neighborhood, she attended a Head Start program and may hold the distinction of being the first Head Start graduate ever elected to the Congress of the United States. When her family moved to Orange County, Sánchez learned early lessons about racism against Mexican Americans. “The neighbors on both sides of us put their homes up for sale because we were Hispanic.” Her father counteracted this experience with useful advice: “Never let them tell you, you are a dumb Mexican.” Her first love was business, and she attended Chapman College in Orange County, where she earned a degree in economics. At American University in Wash-
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Sánchez, María Clemencia ington, D.C., she earned an M.B.A. in finance. Sánchez became a financial analyist and also president of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs. She took an active interest in local community issues and in 1990 successfully fought state officials to have a freeway sound barrier built in her Anaheim neighborhood. Putting her financial skills to work, she raised funds for several community agencies, particularly those that brought educational opportunity to disadvantaged Latino students. In 1992 she changed her political party affiliation from Republican to Democratic because “I saw that what was driving the Republican Party was a very extreme agenda to the right—it wasn’t inclusive.” She ran for Anaheim City Council, in 1994 finishing sixth in a field of sixteen. Her hyphenated married name appeared on the ballot as Sánchez-Brixley. In Sánchez’s historic run for Congress in 1996, she dropped Brixley and worked hard for the support of women and Latino voters. Although her two opponents in the Democratic primary (both white men) outspent her by more than three to one, Sánchez won a close victory and went on to face ultraconservative Republican congressman Robert Dornan in the general election. As in the primary, political observers gave Sánchez little chance to unseat incumbent Dornan, a nationally known figure who was then running for president. Sánchez enlisted her six siblings to walk door-to-door, while her mother spoke on her behalf at local senior centers. Orange County Latino activists enthusiastically supported her, and many newly naturalized citizens registered to vote just so they could cast ballots for Sánchez. Counted ballots in the final tally showed Sánchez to be the winner of the Forty-sixth District of California by 984 votes. Sánchez instantly became a national figure because she had unseated one of the most conservative members of Congress, and in the process she became the only Democratic member of Congress from Orange County, a traditional Republican stronghold. Dornan immediately contested the bitter election, alleging that Sánchez had won because large numbers of non-citizen Latinos had voted for her. After a yearlong investigation the House of Representatives upheld the results of the election. Sánchez quickly earned a reputation as something of a maverick. An avid seamstress, she made her own gown to Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball on her grandmother’s sewing machine. Loretta Sánchez embraced education reform as one of the issues closest to her heart and became a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate and conservative Democrats. Women’s labor, pro-choice, and gay and lesbian groups contributed heavily to Sánchez’s 1998 reelection campaign, in which Dornan once again opposed her candidacy. In this election Sánchez won by more
than 14,000 votes. “Adios, Bob Dornan,” she proclaimed on election night. In November 2002 Sánchez was elected for the newly created Forty-seventh District. Her sister Linda Sánchez was elected to represent the Thirty-ninth Congressional District. They are the first pair of sisters to serve in the U.S. Congress. In the 109th Congress, 1st session, Sánchez is the ranking female member on the House Armed Services Committee. She is also the second ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security. See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Fiore, Faye. 1998. “Decision 98: Sánchez Beats Dornan.” Los Angeles Times, November 4, A3; Hernández, Greg. 1996. “Voter Turnout is Crucial for Sánchez.” Los Angeles Times, April 14, B1; Romney, Lee. “Dornan Gets Surprise Challenger.” Los Angeles Times, March 28, B1; U.S. House of Representatives. “Congresswoman Loretta Sánchez.” www.lorettasanchez.house.gov (accessed July 23, 2005); Zoreya, Gregg. 1997. “The Freshman.” Los Angeles Times Magazine, July 13, 8. Virginia Espino
SÁNCHEZ, MARÍA CLEMENCIA (1926–1989) Dubbed “la madrina” (the godmother) of the Latino and Puerto Rican community in Hartford, Connecticut, María C. Sánchez arrived in the city in 1953 and established herself as a neighborhood activist. From her strategically located candy store, María’s News Stand, on Albany Avenue, she knew everyone in the Spanishspeaking barrio. She advised politicians, discussed business, monitored grassroots social services, and lobbied in educational affairs. Before long she was serving on the city’s board of education and was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly. Born in 1926 in the lush green mountains of Comerio, Puerto Rico, to poor, illiterate farmworkers who struggled to make ends meet, Sánchez was a twin and one of six children. Neither of her parents attended school, but Sánchez aspired to become educated. Severe poverty, compounded by the depression, forced her to leave school to care for younger siblings while her parents alternated employment between the fields and the factories. At the age of twenty-seven she decided to end years of child care and left Comerio in search of better opportunities. Along with thousands of other Puerto Ricans leaving the island, Sánchez became a statistic in what was called the Great Migration. She chose Hartford as her destination because she had an aunt who lived there. Sánchez’s first job was in the tobacco fields of Con-
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Sánchez, María E. necticut, and since she possessed natural leadership abilities, she soon became a crew leader. Shortly thereafter she found work in New Britain, Connecticut, in a meatpacking factory. At some point in those early years she met and married a family friend, but the relationship turned abusive and resulted in a miscarriage that robbed her of ever mothering her own children. She turned to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Roman Catholic church on Ely Street, for solace and discovered the first opportunities to engage in group organization and mobilization. Sánchez believed strongly in the power of organization. She founded the Society of Jesus, Daughters of Mary, Women of Our Lady of Providence, Legion of Mary, and Girl Scout Troop 107. But if the church offered her a chance to bring groups together, it unwittingly gave her a taste of organizing for empowerment. Sánchez, with an angry cohort of parishioners, confronted the church hierarchy on the issue of appointing a Spanish-speaking priest to offer mass in Spanish at the main altar and not in the church’s basement, as was the case in other churches. Predominantly a German church, Sacred Heart was headed by Father Joseph Otto. A petition to remove him was circulated, and the Chancery appointed Father Andrew Cooney, a Spanish-speaking priest familiar with the Hartford Puerto Rican community. Sánchez’s candy store, bought with savings accumulated over time, was at the crossroads of the community, a center for political activity and an attraction for schoolchildren who often stopped by at lunchtime and after school. Sánchez ran the establishment like a neighborhood hub, and politicians frequented the store to learn the issues of the community. Involved in voter registration drives and mediating between elected officials and the people they represented but barely understood, Sánchez was soon involved in politics. In 1966 she was treasurer of the Puerto Rican Democratic Club of Hartford and a member of the Latin American Action Project. She sat on the Hartford Democratic Committee and served for sixteen years on the Hartford Board of Education. In keeping with her commitment to empower the Latino and Puerto Rican community through organization, Sánchez helped found dozens of associations. Among them are the Puerto Rican Parade Committee, la Casa de Puerto Rico, the Society of Legal Services, the Spanish American Merchants Association, the Puerto Rican Businessmen’s Association, the Puerto Rican Coronation Ball, and the Puerto Rican state parade. Profiled in an interview printed in the Hartford Courant, Sánchez remarked, “I don’t like publicity. I don’t like newspapers. I don’t do things because I get paid or because I have been promised positions or titles. I do things because I like them. I work
for a goal. I work so someone can benefit from what I accomplish.” Despite her many accomplishments, life was not always smooth sailing for Sánchez. In 1977 she was charged with fraud when state police claimed that she failed to deliver $12,193 to the state gaming commission. She was ultimately cleared of the charges, but the issue was embarrassing and damaged her reputation. Nonetheless, she was reelected to the Hartford Board of Education for a fifth term. A strong proponent of bilingual education, she was instrumental in developing the Ann Street Bilingual School in 1972, the first two-way bilingual school in the city. In 1988 she challenged the incumbent for a seat in the Connecticut House of Representatives and won. However, the victory was short lived. On November 25, 1989, Sánchez, a diabetic, succumbed to poor health and died at the age of sixty-three. To commemorate her life and achievements, a school, the María C. Sánchez Elementary School on Babcock Street, was dedicated in her honor in 1991. See also Bilingual Education; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Glasser, Ruth. 1992. Aqui me quedo: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut. Hartford: Connecticut Humanities Council; Hartford Courant. 1981. “An Institution Called Sanchez: Politician, Role Model, Refuge.” January 15; Ubinas, Helen. “The Life and Times of Maria Clemencia Colon Sanchez: Hartford’s Puerto Rican Community’s Matriarch, 1926–1989.” Paper, Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
SÁNCHEZ, MARÍA E. (1927–1999) María E. Sánchez’s accomplishments as a pioneer in bilingual education, supervisor of auxiliary teachers in the New York City public schools, university professor, and advocate for the fledgling field of Puerto Rican studies craft an impressive legacy. Credited as a mentor with launching the careers of hundreds of students and faculty, Sánchez did not believe in receiving accolades and praise and, when complimented, often commented, “Don’t thank me; go do this for someone else.” Enormously proud of former students or colleagues lauded for their contributions to academia and the Puerto Rican and Latino communities, Sánchez believed in empowering others to widen, organize, and strengthen communal circles for further advancement. The youngest of farmer Julio Rodríguez and Modesta Rivera’s three daughters, Sánchez was born in the picturesque southeastern mountains of Cayey, Puerto Rico, on February 25, 1927. At a time when women married early, she aspired to become a teacher and honed adolescent pedagogical skills by teaching catechism at the local Catholic church. Awarded a full
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Sánchez, María E. scholarship, she was one of only four girls in her highschool graduating class to enroll at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. During her second year of college she accepted a position teaching elementary school in Cayey, a unique opportunity for education majors when hordes of male teachers left the classrooms of Puerto Rico to serve in World War II. She received her normal diploma from the University of Puerto Rico in 1945, and in 1952 she completed the bachelor of arts degree, graduating magna cum laude. Sánchez married José Miguel Sánchez on July 1, 1953, and the couple left for New York City, which became their permanent home. After the births of three daughters, Evelyn, Annabelle, and Madeleine, Sánchez returned to work. During these years the dramatic expansion of the Puerto Rican community in New York City meant that hundreds of newly arrived Spanishspeaking children were coming into the school system and overwhelming instructional resources. Teachers were desperately needed to meet the needs of these children, and with a handful of mostly Puerto Rican professionals, María Sánchez became an educational pioneer in a newly created position, the substitute auxiliary teacher (SAT). Employed to help the monolingual classroom teacher deal with Spanish-speaking youngsters, the SATs connected the schools with the community through reciprocity, rapport, and a bilingual communication network. Essentially these teachers were the precursors to the field of bilingual-bicultural education. Sánchez helped create the Society of Puerto Rican Auxiliary Teachers (SPRAT), the Puerto Rican Educators Association (PREA), and the Hispanic chapter of the United Federation of Teachers. These educational and quasi-political groups produced a cadre of leaders, instructional materials for bilingual education, and
María E. Sánchez. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
classroom methodology; they also lobbied for formal recognition and licensure of the bilingual teacher. In 1972, after some fourteen years of experience as a teacher and supervisor, María Sánchez was recruited by Brooklyn College of the City University of New York to establish a bilingual education program for future teachers. Appointed to the Department of Puerto Rican Studies, a newly created academic unit of the college, Professor Sánchez worked with Sonia Nieto and colleagues in the School of Education, Carmen Dinos and Margarita Mir de Cid, to establish the undergraduate and graduate program in bilingual-bicultural education. But in 1974 the department lost its chairperson, and Sánchez was unanimously chosen by students and faculty as the successor, but not by the college administration. When the president autocratically appointed a professor from Puerto Rico, Dr. Elba Lugo, as the new chairperson, students and faculty mounted a two-year organized protest with massive press coverage that resulted in the arrests of forty students and four faculty members and the takeover of the offices of the vice president and registrar and seriously disrupted campus affairs. During the two years under siege Lugo was never allowed to set foot in the department, while María Sánchez enacted all the duties of chairperson without portfolio. The president capitulated and named Sánchez chairperson. Under her guidance the department stabilized and grew into a significant unit of the college. It boasted an expanded interdisciplinary curriculum that included the Puerto Rican experience within a hemispheric perspective, a strong bilingual program that prepared many of the teachers of the city’s schools, inclusion in the college’s core curriculum, and graduate offerings for master’s degree programs in bilingual education, school supervision, and guidance and counseling. In 1981, after a tumultuous fiscal period that curtailed expansion in the City University’s Ethnic Studies departments and programs, Sánchez spearheaded the rebirth of the field in the first conference on Puerto Rican Studies. Celebrating the department’s tenth anniversary, scholars from Puerto Rico, Chicano Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Cuban Studies deliberated the interconnections and implications for future research in their areas of expertise. In the process this conference laid the seeds for comparative Latino Studies. A firm believer in process, Sánchez excelled in organizing groups for empowerment and enrichment. She created the Student Union for Bilingual Education, the Graduate Association for Bilingual Education, the Latino Faculty and Staff Association, and the Puerto Rican Students Alumni Association. On her retirement in 1990, Brooklyn College named her professor emerita. An endowment was established
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Sánchez Cruz, Rebecca in her name for the Center for Latino Studies, an adjunct to the department. Attended by all of her fellow chairpersons, faculty, alumni, and students, Sánchez’s retirement celebration was a testimony to the many contributions she had made to the college and the community. At the podium the dynamic, green-eyed redhead addressed the audience by recalling that there was a life before Brooklyn College and that there would be a life afterward as well. After nine years of retirement, surrounded by a growing family, friends, and her beautiful garden in Staten Island, María Sánchez succumbed to cancer. She died on December 23, 1999. See also Bilingual Education; Education SOURCES: Malaspina, Anne. “María E. Sánchez (1927– ).” In Notable Hispanic American Women, ed. Joseph M. Palmisano. Detroit: Gale Research; Sánchez, María E., and Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo. 1987. Toward a Renaissance of Puerto Rican Studies: Ethnic and Area Studies in University Education. Princeton, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
SÁNCHEZ CRUZ, REBECCA (1936–2003) A social worker responsible for the first bilingual drinking driver program in New York State, Rebecca Sánchez Cruz was born in New York’s Spanish Harlem on September 21, 1936, the fourth of five children. Her father, Fernando Sánchez, came from Aguada, Puerto Rico, and moved to the United States in 1917 at the age of twenty-one. He worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad for forty years until his retirement. Her mother, Venera Cruz, came to New York City from Maricao, Puerto Rico, in her late teens shortly after her mother died. Rebecca’s parents met and married in the United States. She and her siblings were raised speaking Spanish, but quickly learned to speak English in the public schools and as they negotiated life in the city’s tenements. When Rebecca was four years old, the family moved to the South Bronx, which offered better housing and was quickly becoming an important Puerto Rican enclave. A lively and talented girl, Sánchez Cruz once put together a play by gathering neighborhood children, teaching them their lines, making costumes, and performing at the local high school. Developing creative talents early in life, she painted with oils and acrylics and crafted an artistic technique using layered colored linoleum and then carving out images revealing beautiful pictures. She proudly displayed her artwork in street exhibits in the Bronx and Manhattan. But Sánchez Cruz was also strong-willed, intelligent, and very daring. She ignored boundaries, which
often worried her parents. Passing as sixteen, she worked at the age of fourteen sorting buttons on a factory assembly line and quickly learned that earning money would enable her to pursue her dreams. She attended Jane Addams High School and midway through her course of study unconventionally arranged to take night classes to complete requirements for the diploma. In many ways Sánchez Cruz was ahead of her time. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, she had always been an independent and modern thinker. At the age of twenty-three she briefly followed convention by marrying and starting a family, but could never quite keep up with the customs of the period that dictated women’s roles and behavior. As a single parent, she wanted more out of life. It was this sense of rebellion against conformity that led her to become very passionate about her work and the people she served. In 1970 Sánchez Cruz was employed by the Hospital for Joint Diseases as a social service coordinator. In 1975 Prospect Hospital Medical Foundation in the South Bronx hired her to implement the bilingual drinking driver program and to direct the community resident programs in alcoholism. Highly noted and respected for this work, she also designed the detoxification program for the Spanish-speaking and African American populations, serving more than 7,000 people. She provided counseling for both the patients and their families and often acted as a liaison between outside public and private agencies on their behalf. Because she was a recovered alcoholic herself, her intrigue with alcoholism and desire to learn everything she could about the disease, including the damage it caused within the family, drove her to strive to change the lives of those she counseled. In this quest Sánchez Cruz completed coursework at Hunter College’s School of General Studies in New York City, Rutgers University in New Jersey for alcoholism studies, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice and earned a master’s in social work, specializing in a Hispanic social work program for alcohol abuse and alcoholism, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Long Island. The daunting task of commuting to school, working, and raising three daughters alone never slowed her momentum. She continued her training and became a certified social worker and a certified alcoholism counselor. In an effort to reach more people, she also studied client-counselor relationships, alcoholism and domestic violence, victim and perpetrator, incest and sexual trauma in alcohol and substance abuse settings, and alcoholism treatment with gay and lesbian clients. Throughout the course of her career Sánchez Cruz often appeared in the media on programs such as The Puerto Rican New Yorker, Life Styles with Beverly Sills,
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Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz portunity to implement her own ideas for helping and motivating her clients to improve their lives and achieve their goals. She endured hardships and sacrificed having a “charmed life” to achieve her dreams and become a mentor to her Latino community. Suffering from diabetes and heart disease during the final years of her life, Sánchez Cruz died in 2003. SOURCES: Sánchez Cruz, Rebecca. Personal papers and journal. Celest Smith Private Collection. Clovis, California. 1978. “Hospital Based Drinking Driving Program Established in the South Bronx.” 1978. Journal of American Hospital Association. (September) 1;52 (17): 28–30. Celest Smith
SÁNCHEZ GARFUNKEL, AURA LUZ (1941– )
Social worker Rebecca Sánchez Cruz. Courtesy of Celest Smith.
Rafael Piñera, and The New York Journal with Herman Badillo. She remained committed to the Latino community, embracing her Puerto Rican culture and heritage. She felt a close bond to individuals in need and used whatever means were available to her in order to help them through their addictions and struggles. In her later years she became a psychiatric social worker and worked for the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Division, on Long Island. At a time when bilingual health professionals were scarce, she strategically placed herself in situations where her bilingual abilities could be used to serve the Spanish-speaking population. She was instrumental in writing proposals that benefited Latinos and their communities, and she advocated on their behalf on statewide and federal committees. For her achievements and contributions Sánchez Cruz was lauded by the Hispanic Association of Health Services Executives and Robert Abrams, former president of the borough of the Bronx. She received the Bronx Council on Alcoholism’s Leadership, Commitment, and Consistent Dedication award and Channel 47’s Meritorious Service to the Community award on three occasions. Nonetheless, her greatest personal achievement, according to Sánchez Cruz herself, was starting her own private practice. It gave her the op-
Boston activist and writer Aura Luz Sánchez Garfunkel was born in the South Bronx on September 20, 1941, to Elisa Santiago Rodríguez and Antonio Sánchez Feliciano, Puerto Ricans who came to New York in the mid-1920s. By the time their youngest daughter, Aura Luz, was born, they had moved to the South Bronx. A meld of her Taino and Hispanic ancestry, Sánchez Garfunkel stood out against the blue-eyed blond students, mostly of Irish descent, at St. Anselm’s Elementary School in the Bronx. The daily transition from the warmth and succor of her home, filled with the savory aroma of sofrito (Puerto Rican sauce) frying for the evening meal, to the alien environment of school, narrow-minded students, and strict, intolerant nuns roused in her young mind questions of identity and belonging. It was the age-old battle that ensued between old- and new-world traditions that shaped and complicated her understanding of identity, a theme that permeated her life. Early feelings of alienation, reinforced throughout her later years, contributed to her sensitivity to issues of marginalization and discrimination. The plight of the poor also nagged at her. When she was a little girl, her dreams of becoming an astronaut or ballerina dimmed in the face of her growing concerns about discrimination and poverty, conditions that surrounded her. The Sánchez family lived in the South Bronx until 1952 and moved to Brooklyn to escape the increase in drug use and crime in their neighborhood when Sánchez Garfunkel was twelve. Making multiethnic friends in Brooklyn was easy for her. “It [the neighborhood] was diverse ethnically and homogeneous economically. We were all working-class poor.” Despite her strong desires to “hang out” with her friends, she somehow found the time to do her schoolwork and maintain a high-enough average to get into Brooklyn
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Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz College. Although she recalls strong ties with her friends, “As the metamorphosis from adolescents to young adults took place, our indivisibility began to fracture, at first by the duality of our dreams. Mine were of getaways from the griminess of gray concrete lives, theirs of wedding aisles leading to tiled kitchens and umbrella strollers.” Her “getaway” began with the long train ride from South Brooklyn to Flatbush, where she attended Brooklyn College. Here she studied sociology and anthropology and met her first husband, Jim Monahan. They married after graduation and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Monahan attended Harvard Law School and Sánchez began working for a new antipoverty agency called ABCD, an exciting multiservice agency established in response to America’s War on Poverty. Three years later they went to live in Lima, Peru, where Sánchez worked as a research assistant for an anthropological institute. After a year in Peru, the couple returned to Washington, D.C., and had a child named Dylan. They divorced shortly after Dylan’s birth. A single mother, Sánchez returned to Boston. Determined to “make a difference” in the lives of poor people and minorities, especially Latinos, Sánchez received an M.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She worked as an organizer in the then-transitional district of the South End, where displacement and gentrification were rapidly altering the neighborhood. She also worked for a Boston University research project, assessing the success of Head Start programs aimed at integrating disabled children into their classes. In 1970 she married Frank Garfunkel, a professor at Boston University and a disability rights advocate. They traveled abroad, settling in Israel for a year. On their return to the United States the couple made their home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a bluecollar, mostly white suburb contiguous to Boston. Aura Sánchez Garfunkel worked as a consultant to the Massachusetts State Department of Education evaluating the impact of future desegregation plans on bilingual education classes. Subsequently the couple had two children, Seth and Anelisa. During the ugly Boston desegregation years Sánchez Garfunkel fought to have a metropolitan busing program brought into her Winthrop community that would allow black and Latino children to access Winthrop schools. Although noble, the efforts failed. Her frustration and disappointment influenced her decision to go to law school. As a lawyer, she reasoned, she would have greater clout to pursue her dreams of justice. She attended Northeastern University Law School and graduated in 1980. After graduation she joined Greater Boston Legal Services. She advocated for hundreds of poor and mostly Spanish-speaking
Attorney and author Aura Luz Sánchez Garfunkel. Courtesy of Anelisa Garfunkel.
clients and defended immigrants, welfare recipients, tenants, and children with special needs. She fought for the rights of homeless people before the term had even been coined. She became an associate director with greater say in the organization’s agenda. Eventually she left to become an assistant to the receiver for the city of Chelsea, the only city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ever to be placed in a legislatively created receivership. There she again responded to the demands of a mostly disenfranchised minority community and established a Department of Health and Human Services for the municipality. She stayed in this position for seven years and developed a large and effective municipal response to the enormous needs of the poor and minority population of Chelsea. She created a community schools program and a health outreach “promotoras” program. She expanded a refugee assistance program, integrated the senior center by ensuring that Latino elders were not excluded from participation, assisted in community efforts to establish a culturally sensitive battered women’s program, and helped establish a bilingual mediation program within the police department to address the many conflicts that often ended up on police blotters. All were efforts to alleviate the economic and social scourges of poverty and to ensure dignity for the residents of Chelsea. In great measure her contributions to city government culminated with Chelsea’s selection as an All-American City in 1998. After her husband’s death she took her concerns for the have-nots of the world overseas. Named the country director of the U.S. Peace Corps program in Micronesia, she served for two years overseeing volun-
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Santería teers who were working to improve public health, environmental protection, youth services, and school libraries. Sánchez Garfunkel’s communitarian dedication was not limited to her work. She was a performance artist, and her published essays and poetry focused primarily on Puerto Rican life in the New York of her childhood. She became a member of Streetfeet, a women’s multicultural performing group. Through her writing she was able to reflect on the perennial question that had intrigued her from the start: just how did she fit into the intricate tapestry of America? “I learned to love my Puerto Rican roots even as I came to understand that I was very much east-coast American with an IrishCatholic elementary schooling and a baccalaureate from a predominantly Jewish city college. I came to appreciate my Taino cheekbones, my Spanish name, and the Caribbean emotions that flowed through my veins.” SOURCES: Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz. 2002. Oral interview by Anelisa Garfunkel, January; The Streetfeet Women. 1998. Laughing in the Kitchen. Boston: Talking Stone Press. Anelisa Garfunkel
SANTERÍA Santera, iyalocha, and mamalocha are terms used to designate a priestess of the Afro-Cuban religion called Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha or Regla Lucumí. The best known of Afro-Cuban religions, which also include Regla de Palo, Mayombe, and the Abakua Secret Society, Santería has a large and very visible following. Santería is essentially the religion of the Yoruba-speaking people of southwestern Nigeria who were brought to Cuba as slaves. In Cuba the Yoruba religion underwent dogmatic and functional changes while adapting to the new milieu. It assimilated other African beliefs and practices and borrowed from Spanish Catholicism and European Spiritualism. The Yoruba religion brought to Cuba by enslaved Africans eventually gained a following among the people of non-Yoruba ancestry. Its social, supportive, and magical aspects were exalted, while others lost importance. Some individuals afflicted by disease sought the assistance of santeros. Others were attracted to this religion by its rich mythology, engaging ritual music and dances, accessibility of the divinities, and well-structured oracles that placed at their disposal magical means of controlling situations and solving problems and conflicts. In the 1950s Santería was known in many parts of Cuba, but primarily in and around the city of Havana and in the provinces of Matanzas and Las Villas. In the last forty years it has gained importance and followers throughout Cuba. This trend is due, in part, to the gov-
ernment’s persecution of the more institutionalized religions and its policy of enhancing the African roots of Cuban culture. However, the major reason for its widespread appeal lies in people’s need to rely on magical practices to assume mastery of situations beyond their control, prevalent among people who live under a paternalistic and oppressive regime. Santería has also become quite visible in certain parts of the United States, as well as in other countries where Cuban exiles have settled. Followers include Latin Americans who reside in strong Spanishspeaking communities in the United States and in their own countries of origin. In addition, Santería has also gained a following among many non-Latin Americans, predominantly in areas of the United States such as Miami, New Jersey, New York, Chicago, and California. Santería offers its followers a complex dogma, rich mythology and religious paraphernalia, highly structured rituals, rich and engaging ritual music and dances, and a viable road to priesthood and leadership. The Yoruba religion’s pantheon is presided over by Olodumare, the Supreme Being, who possesses the sublime qualities of creator gods in institutionalized religions. Olodumare, also known as Olorun and Olofin, is eternal, omnipresent, just, merciful, and allknowing. He is all-powerful, but distant and nonresponsive to the basic needs of humans. He distributes his supernatural power or ashé among his children, the oricha/santos, and virtually leaves them in charge of mankind. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, more than 2,000 orichas were worshipped in the past. In Cuba only the cult of the most important generic and creation gods, known throughout Nigeria, was established. The oricha/santo is basically a Yoruba divinity who, after being associated with a Catholic saint, incorporated some of its attributes and characteristics, as well as those of non-Yoruba African gods with whom there was an association or identification. Some of the oricha/santos are the personification of the forces of nature, such as Changó/St. Barbara (thunder), Agayú/St. Christopher (volcanoes), Oyá/Virgin of Candlemas (tornadoes), Ochún/Virgin of Charity (the river), and Yemayá/Virgin of Regla (the sea). Others are patrons of human activities, such as Oricha Oko/St. Isidro Labrador, patron of farmers, and Ogún/St. Peter, patron of soldiers and of people such as mechanics and surgeons who use metal tools. Orunla/St. Francis is the god of wisdom and the oracles, and Babalú Ayé/St. Lazarus is the god of epidemics, while Obatalá/Virgin of Mercy is the god of peace and justice. Eleguá/the Holy Child of Atocha is the messenger of the gods and controls the roads of the world.
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Santiago, Petra The orichas share with humans their emotions, virtues, and vices, are susceptible to human approaches, and can be unconditional allies when they are adequately propitiated with offerings of food, sacrifices of animals, and other things of their liking. However, when they are angered by what they perceive as neglect or disrespect, they can become unmerciful enemies. Even though the oricha/santos are the brokers of Olodumare’s power or ashé, in most instances they act with great independence and seem to be primarily motivated by their quasi-human personality. Some orichas also own or control parts of the human body. For example, Yemayá owns the intestines, Oblatá, the head, and Ochún, the genitals. In this context, if the oricha is enraged with a person, it can afflict those parts of the body and make them sick. Conversely, when a person is afflicted by disease, the oricha, if appropriately propitiated, can effectively heal him or her. Most believers are content with caring for their oricha by offering it sacrifices and attending to the rituals celebrated in its honor. However, there are other persons who, either because they are called to the priesthood or at the request of their oricha, must go through the ceremony of asiento, which means that they are initiated into the priesthood of the oricha that claims their head. Others decide to be initiated because of poor health, since it is believed that if a person is initiated, the oricha will be more prone to help that person recover his or her health. Then there are those who are eager to be initiated because they feel insecure and want to engage supernatural help to cope with their existential difficulties. Santería’s priests perform as officiators in worship ceremonies, as medicine men, and as soothsayers. Priesthood is open to both women and men except the priesthood of Orunla or Babalawe, which is only open to males. The Orunla priest has the highest authority within Santería. However, seniority of the practitioner despite gender is a respected norm. More than half of Santería practitioners are women priests, which has given them a high profile of leadership within the Santería religion and social recognition in the community. Women have achieved a prominent place in Santería. In Miami Olympia Alfaro, who died on January 18, 2001, was a much respected santera and a renowned akpuona, a lead singer in drum festivals. Juanita Baró, who was the lead dancer in the Ballet Folklorico de Cuba in the 1970s, is also much respected. Nery Torres is a renowned dancer of ritual music who leads an ensemble of dancers and musicians of sacred music. Carmen Rodríguez Plá is also very well known. She is the mother of Ernesto Pichardo, the santero who won the case in the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized the use of animal sacrifices in Santería.
Women have also achieved academic preeminence through undertaking research and ethnographic accounts on the subject of Santería. Lydia Cabrera, now deceased, authored books that are recognized as classics in the field. Isabel Castellanos and Mercedes Cros Sandoval, still active, have achieved international recognition for their research and publications about Santería And the Afro-Cuban heritage in Cuban culture. See also Folk Healing Traditions; Religion SOURCES: Cabrera, Lydia. 1954. El monte. Havana: Ediciones Chichereku; ———. 1957. Anago: Vocabulario Lucumí. Havana: Ediciones Chichereku; Castellanos, Isabel, and Jorge Castellanos. 1994. Cultura afrocubana. 4 Vols. Miami: Ediciones Universal; Cros Sandoval, Mercedes. 1975. La religión afrocubana. Madrid: Editorial Playor; ———. 1977. “Afrocuban Concepts of Disease and Its Treatment in Miami.” Journal of Operational Psychiatry 8 no. 2: 52–63; ———. 1979. “Santeria as Mental Health Care System.” Social Science and Medicine 13 B, no. 2 (April): 137–151; ———. 1983. “Santeria.” Journal of the Florida Medical Association 70, no. 8: (August) 620–628; ———. 1994. “Afro-Cuban Religion in Perspective.” In Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism with African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religions among Latinos, ed. Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo and Andrés I. Pérez y Mena, 81–98. New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. Mercedes Cros Sandoval
SANTIAGO, PETRA (1911–1994) For more than forty years Petra Santiago was an activist and well-known community organizer in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Loisaida). Renowned journalist Luisa Quintero of El diario/La Prensa referred to her as the “first woman mayor of the Lower East Side” (October 21, 1963). Santiago mobilized people for community participation, founded key grassroots organizations such as the United Organization of Suffolk Street, and was also deeply committed to working with youth, particularly in promoting recreational programs such as Little League Baseball teams. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Harrison E. Salisbury recognized her work as a youth worker in his book The Shook-Up Generation. Born in Humacao, Puerto Rico, on May 31, 1911, Petra Santiago was the daughter of Arturo Figueroa Miranda and Brígida Hernández. Santiago spent her early youth in her native town, where her father organized for the Socialist Party founded by Santiago Iglesias Pantín and represented the party in the assembly. From an early age Petra Santiago participated in her father’s political activities, accompanying him to meetings and working on campaigns. She attended Ponce de León High School and in 1930 matriculated at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico,
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Santiago, Petra where she completed an associate’s degree in teaching. Graduating from the university in 1933, she traveled to New York, where she stayed for six months. Returning to Puerto Rico, Santiago found employment with a New Deal agency, the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA), and was soon assigned to work in the countryside distributing food to needy families. She also worked as an enumerator for a census of the area Candelaria Arriba in Humacao, carried out by the PRRA in 1935. Her final job with the PRRA was as a social worker in the urban center of Humacao. When her employment with the PRRA ended, Santiago took over the running of her father’s grocery store. In December 1938, after separating from her first husband, Santiago returned to New York on the steamship San Jacinto. She arrived on New Year’s Day and went to live with a cousin on East 114th Street and Fifth Avenue. Her first job was in a factory that manufactured handbags. On June 14, 1941, she married Manuel Santiago, and they moved to 65 East 102nd Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in East Harlem. Santiago stopped working outside the home after her first child, Emanuel, was born in 1942. Her second child, Arturo, was born in 1943. In 1945 she traveled to Puerto Rico with her children aboard the SS George Washington to care for her ailing father. She stayed for ten months and wanted to remain there, but her husband insisted upon her return to New York. Upon her arrival the family settled in Lower Manhattan on Norfolk Street. Santiago’s interest in community work began as a result of her participation in parents’ meetings at her children’s school, where she served as an interpreter for Latino parents who did not speak English. Soon she was active in political campaigns and in organizing the
Latino community in her neighborhood. She was a founder and secretary of the Council of Puerto Rican and Hispanic Organizations of the Lower East Side (1961–1963), the first major Latino organization in that area. Its objective was to improve conditions for Latinos in housing, education, employment, medical care, and recreation. Worry over her young boys and other children led Santiago to form baseball leagues for youths between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. She helped organize the Independent Juvenile Baseball League, which she directed (1950–1962), and the Nativity Mission Center Baseball Team (1945–1963). Volunteer work played an important role in Santiago’s life. From 1959 to 1963 she volunteered for the Lower East Side Neighborhood Association. From 1962 to 1967 she worked as a social worker for Mobilization for Youth, a federally funded agency dedicated to the prevention and elimination of youth gangs. The agency provided training and classes in various areas, including sewing, typing, and photography, and sponsored trips and voter registration programs. As part of her work Santiago organized a group called Mobilization for Mothers. Among the key organizations she helped establish was the United Organization of Suffolk Street (1967–1976), which provided day care, Englishlanguage classes, and other social services. Active in tenants’ rights, she worked for the Coalition for Decent Housing that she helped create. Throughout her life she remained involved in electoral politics and was a member of the New Jíbaro Democratic Club, of which her son Arturo Santiago was cofounder. He was a Democratic district leader in Lower Manhattan and ran for state assembly. Santiago was on the board of directors of numerous organizations, including the United Child Day Care Council (1968–1975), where she served as treasurer.
Petra Santiago. Courtesy of the Petra Santiago Papers Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Saralegui, Cristina She was a member of the steering committee of a group that founded the Community Corporation of the Lower East Side, was named to the Anti-poverty Council, and was elected to Community Board Number 3. For her many contributions, she received numerous awards and tributes. She was honored with the Lena Award for her service to the Lower East Side community (1963, 1964), by the Department of Parks (1965), by Mobilization for Youth (1967), and by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1989 at an event recognizing the “pioneros,” the first Puerto Rican migrants. Petra Santiago was a dynamic leader who remained active in the affairs of the community of the Lower East Side until she was eighty years old. She died on January 13, 1994, after a brief illness. Her collected papers at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, offer insight into the development of the Puerto Rican community of Lower Manhattan and document the history of numerous organizations. SOURCES: Salisbury, Harrison E. The Shook-Up Generation. New York: Harper Brothers; Santiago, Petra. 1935–1995. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Ismael García, Nélida Pérez, and Pedro Juan Hernández
SARALEGUI, CRISTINA (1949–
)
Cristina Saralegui was born in Havana, Cuba, to the scion of a family that owned a journalism empire. Her grandfather, Francisco Saralegui, was the co-owner of the best-known and most widely circulated Cuban magazines in the 1950s, Vanidades, Bohemia, and Carteles. He had a great influence on Cristina. In 1960, when she was only eleven years old, Saralegui left Cuba with her family and settled in Miami. She studied journalism and communications at the University of Miami while doing an internship with Vanidades, the number one women’s magazine in Latin America. Later she worked at three of the most successful Latin magazines published in the United States. In 1979 she was appointed executive director of Cosmopolitan en Español, a very popular magazine with a wide readership throughout Latin America and the United States. After a successful performance as director of this magazine, she was offered the opportunity to host a daily Spanish television show. She accepted the challenge and the risks of this change into a new medium at the height of her professional success in print journalism. She embarked on an experiment that resulted in the incredible success of El Show de Cristina, named after her. It was produced by Univision, the first national television channel in the Spanish language. The program was seen throughout the United
States, Latin America, and Europe on a network of 1,161 channels affiliated with Univision. Saralegui was more than the host of her successful talk show; she was also the executive producer who made all the decisions concerning the content of the programs, the guests, and other matters. El Show de Cristina, during twelve years in production and more than 3,000 programs, was awarded ten Emmys and was recognized as the Spanish talk show with the largest worldwide audience, more than 100,000,000 viewers. Spontaneous, daring, and iconoclastic, Saralegui broke all taboos. Her program was not only informative but also entertaining, and themes and situations that no Hispanic personality, much less a woman, had dared to discuss were openly addressed by this classy popular entertainer. Saralegui is also the editor of the monthly magazine Cristina, published in association with Editorial Televisa, the most important editorial company for Spanish magazines. In addition, she has a daily radio program called Cristina Opina, broadcast by Radio Única, the first and only radio network that broadcasts in Spanish twenty-four hours a day in the United States. The American Broadcasting Company International Network distributes Cristina Opina in Latin America. Since October 1998 Saralegui’s bilingual website on the Internet, Sitio Web de Cristina, has offered visitors information concerning Saralegui’s projects and her business enterprises, C.S.E. More than 90 million visitors have accessed this site. She founded, in addition to her corporate enterprises, the Up with Life or Arriba la Vida Foundation for AIDS research. In 1998 Saralegui completed her autobiography, Cristina! Confidencias de una rubia. An adventure in self-determination, humor, and common sense, Cristina Saralegui emerges as a complex but wellbalanced personality. A rare combination of the traditional and the modern woman, she is pragmatic, energetic, and self-confident. She is willing to take challenges and necessary risks, but at the same time she is a woman who greatly favors and flavors family life and values. Saralegui, despite her modernity, is very proud of her ancestry, appreciative of her husband’s support and protectiveness, and disciplined when it comes to her children. These qualities, her intelligence, and her love of life may be the secret of her success. Her advice to professional women is worth thirty credits in psychology and thirty hours of marriage counseling: “She [the professional woman] must be very careful with the person she chooses to share her life, since it has to be somebody who will feel proud of her success, someone who will consider her success as their success. The woman that chooses a man with an inferior-
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Saucedo, María del Jesús ity complex, is going to have in her home a guy sabotaging her.” See also Television SOURCES: Doria, Luz Maria. 2001. “Una jefa que no se parece a nada.” Cristina (Miami: Editorial Televisa), November; Hernandez, Rubén. 1998. “Cristina Saralegui.” Holá (Madrid), January; Saralegui, Cristina. 1998. Cristina! Confidencias de una rubia. New York: Warner Books. Mercedes Cros Sandoval
SAUCEDO, MARÍA DEL JESÚS (1954–1981) In 1959 Chicana activist María Saucedo immigrated to Chicago from Monterrey, Mexico, along with her mother and two sisters. They reunited with her father, Juan Saucedo, who had arrived four years earlier. The family settled in Pilsen, a low-income neighborhood in the Near West Side of Chicago, a regular port of entry for eastern Europeans since the turn of the century, but which was becoming increasingly Mexican. Despite holding permanent residency, the Saucedos, like most immigrants, faced language problems, low-wage employment, inadequate health care, and harsh stigmatization and discrimination, among other difficulties. In 1962 Saucedo’s mother, María Reynosa, began a lifelong commitment to fight for the rights of the oppressed. Spurred on by her mother’s activism, Saucedo was attending and organizing strikes, rallies, and solidarity marches in Pilsen by the time she reached high school. Saucedo’s activism gained momentum at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU). When she enrolled in 1973, the school had a negligible Latino student population, the majority of whom were Puerto Rican. She joined the Chicano Caucus, a committee within the school’s only Latino organization, the Union for Puerto Rican Students (UPRS). Tension mounted between the two groups because of Saucedo’s efforts to emphasize Chicano issues and the UPRS’s position that two Latino groups would be competing for the same resources. Saucedo and three other members broke away in 1974 and founded the Chicano Student Union (CSU). The author of the CSU’s constitution, Saucedo also published a newsletter, Contra la Pared (Against the Wall). She immediately began to push for increased recruitment of Latino students, hiring Chicano faculty, and providing courses in Chicano studies, particularly history and bilingual education. Through the CSU Saucedo initiated the Noche de Familia, an annual event that encouraged interaction between students, parents, and NEIU faculty. With the intermingling of the community and the institution, the Latino student population
began to increase steadily. Today NEIU is a major Hispanic-serving institution. In 1975 Saucedo graduated with honors in early childhood education. Firm supporters of the Chicano movement, Saucedo and Reynosa endorsed the work of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. By the late 1960s Chicago was responding to the militant ethos fueled by the southwestern Chicano movement that strove to redress the racism and economic deprivation hindering Latinos through grassroots organizations and community-driven services. Saucedo and other young activists recognized the obstacles confronting minorities in education, employment, health, and legal institutions as structural and systemic problems that required fundamental reform both in Chicago and in the broader governmental structure. Organizations such as el Centro de la Causa, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, and Casa Aztlán originated in Pilsen in the early 1970s. Saucedo was involved with Mujeres Latinas during its inception; however, at odds with the organization’s strictly feminist agenda, she left. After 1975 she focused her efforts on Casa Aztlán, which became the headquarters of the Chicano movement in Chicago. Saucedo joined Compañia Trucha, a street theater group that performed political satire. Often used in protests, their skits largely aimed to educate the masses about their rights. Their dramatizations tackled important working-class issues, including educational reform, the quality of medical services, and ruthless harassment by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers. As part of the theater’s leadership, Saucedo and her childhood friend María Gamboa urged Trucha to distance itself from the prevalent virgin/whore stereotype and portray women’s influential roles within the home, culture, society, and the movimiento. Although Saucedo and Gamboa were not feminists, they advocated for a unified struggle that addressed the community’s holistic needs, accomplishments, and struggles. During protests and other travels with Trucha, Saucedo sang corridos and wrote poetry in support of the cause. Politically identifying as a socialist, Saucedo maintained a global perspective and fought for the rights of all oppressed people. During this time Saucedo married Filberto “Cookie” Martínez, another Trucha actor and fellow activist. They had one son, Albizu Emiliano. Saucedo’s lifework was rooted in education. She was involved in efforts to build the Benito Juárez High School, which helped alleviate some of the overcrowding in Pilsen schools. When she graduated from NEIU, she took a teaching position at Kosziusko Elementary School. She later taught at Pickard School, where she was terminated for refusing to ask students to present a green card. To improve the quality of education and
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Schechter, Esperanza Acosta Mendoza support bilingual education, Saucedo cofounded the Mexican Teachers Organization (MTO). Saucedo died on November 12, 1981, when her apartment building caught fire. Blocked access to the fire escapes, combined with the fire department’s tardiness and inadequately prepared firemen, forced the residents to jump from the building. Saucedo’s husband and son both suffered severe injuries, but Saucedo, who was eight months pregnant, died upon impact. A crowd of approximately 300 gathered for her wake and marched through Pilsen carrying a banner that read, “Maria Saucedo: Revolutionary, Teacher, Mother.” Many read her poetry. In 1986 Harrison High School was renamed the María Saucedo Scholastic Academy. See also Education SOURCES: Espinoza, Martha. 2001. “Saucedo, Maria del Jesus.” In Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press: University of Houston. Martha Espinoza
SCHECHTER, ESPERANZA ACOSTA MENDOZA “HOPE” (1921– ) The daughter of Mexican immigrants, labor activist Esperanza (Hope) Acosta was born to Celso Acosta and his wife, María de Jesús Salas, on July 10, 1921, in the copper-mining town of Miami, Arizona. The family soon moved to southern California. The eldest of twelve surviving children, Hope learned responsibility early. Her father deserted the family when she was just a toddler. Hope’s Spanish-speaking mother worked long hours, first as a domestic and then rearing a growing family with her second husband, Edviquez Martínez. “I had to speak for my mother,” Hope remembers, and “I learned to take charge.” Despite missing school frequently to care for her pregnant mother and new siblings, Schechter earned strong marks in school. In the eighth grade, when students chose either an academic or vocational track of study, she elected academics. A racist guidance counselor, looking at her brown skin, changed the selection to vocational. Schechter explains that, bored with cosmetology courses, she “lost interest and coasted.” By the eleventh grade she had dropped out of high school. As a teenager, Schechter went to work in the Los Angeles garment industry in 1938 and later on a wartime assembly line for Lockheed Aircraft Company. Returning to the garment industry after the war, she
became disturbed by the existing labor conditions and joined the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). “The union was the turning point; it exposed me to a different world academically and politically,” she recollects. From her union sisters and brothers Schechter learned social theories that explained exploitative labor conditions and strategies to change them. In 1946 she began working as an “in-shop” organizer for the ILGWU. She would secure a job in a garment factory, befriend the Mexican women workers, explain in Spanish about the union, and sign up new members. When enough workers had joined the union to require an election for the right to collective bargaining, Schechter would quit the job and move to another factory to repeat the organizing process. After two years she was so successful and well known by the factory owners that she could no longer continue as an inshop organizer. ILGWU union official Sigmund Arywitz “insisted” (her emphasis) that Schechter enroll in unionsponsored leadership training classes. In 1948 she successfully completed the Harvard University Trade Union Fellows Program, a three-month intensive curriculum cosponsored with labor organizations. That same year the union hired her as an organizer and business agent in the sportswear division. She had been married to Horace Mendoza since 1940; the couple divorced in 1950. With her union education and labor activism, Schechter had a solid base from which to work for political and social change in the community. In 1949, when Edward Roybal campaigned to become the first Mexican American member of the Los Angeles City Council, she worked for his election and helped found the Community Service Organization (CSO). She served as chair of the CSO Labor Relations Committee, where she supervised educational, strike support, fund-raising, and lobbying activities. Schechter describes herself as “playing a dual-role as an activist in the Mexican American community, and as a part of the labor movement.” After passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act in 1952 she served simultaneously on the CSO Immigration Committee and as the immigration liaison for Congressman Chet Holifield’s district office. Her political activities continued to expand. She served many times as a delegate to national Democratic Party conventions and under the Johnson administration was appointed to both the National Advisory Council of the Peace Corps and the founding Advisory Council of Project Head Start in Los Angeles. Somehow, in the midst of all her political activity, Schechter found time to return to school. In 1957 she
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Scientists Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz, 177–200. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Schechter, Hope Mendoza. 1977–1978. “Activist in the Labor Movement, the Democratic Party, and the Mexican American Community.” Oral history by Malca Chall. Women and Politics Oral History Project, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Nancy Page Fernández
SCIENTISTS
Labor leader Hope Mendoza Schechter and Dr. John Dunlop, Harvard professor emeritus and former U.S. secretary of labor, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Harvard Trade Union Fellows Program. Courtesy of Hope Mendoza Schechter.
graduated as class valedictorian from Hollywood High Adult Evening School. She also learned court reporting and, from 1960 to 1986, ran her own successful deposition intake firm. She found her life partner in Harvey Schechter, a community activist whose forty-one-year career on the professional staff of the Anti-defamation League of B’nai B’rith culminated with the position of western states director. They have been married since March 20, 1955. Of their shared interests and commitments, Schechter explains: “We’re both so active in the community. We both understand the problems of two people who are activists. . . . It works out beautifully, because we both understand each other very well in that sense.” The Schechter family also includes Hope’s nephew Bruce, whom they have raised since he was five years old. After retiring Schechter resumed her education to fulfill an important personal goal. In 1995 she earned a baccalaureate degree in history from California State University, Northridge, graduating magna cum laude. When one has been in politics, she explains, one learns to be “like a racehorse: the gun goes off, and the horse goes!” Hope Mendoza Schechter’s life shows just how far one intelligent and determined woman can go to overcome racism and poverty and improve opportunities for Mexican Americans in her community. See also Community Service Organization (CSO); International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU); Labor Unions SOURCES: Rose, Margaret. 1994. “Gender and Civic Activism in the Mexican American Barrios in California: The Community Service Organization, 1947–1962.” In Not June
Although women have always been involved in scientific pursuits, historically they were not welcomed or encouraged in these activities. The sciences were considered fiercely protected male bastions, and the prevailing view was that the abstract laws of nature could be fully understood only by men. Documented contributions and scientific biographies are virtually all androcentric. For years it was argued that women did not contribute significantly to science because they were deemed to be inferior or were intellectually incapable (the notion was that only men were capable of scientific thinking and experimentation). These interpretations were, at least in part, due to the conception of what constituted “real” science. What counts as science? How does one “do” science? What are the boundaries of science? Clearly, depending on how scientific endeavors are defined and circumscribed, entire groups of people and their activities can be excluded. Women were also barred from attending institutions of higher education until the twentieth century. Popular notions deemed the education of girls a waste of time and money and held that too much schooling could actually harm women’s reproductive health. For Latinas, the barriers to higher education have been even greater. Before the 1960s higher education was not even an option for most Latinas. Once they entered postsecondary educational institutions, Latinas faced a number of cumulative obstacles, including few role models and mentors, inadequate academic counseling, financial hardships, and lack of supportive collegial relationships. Women, in general, tend to leave the “scientific career pipeline” during senior high school and college; Hispanics drop out much earlier. For Latinas, the situation has been particularly challenging because racism converging with sexism enabled systematic discrimination and exclusion from scientific fields. In a study of the intersection of immigration and gender among scientists and engineers, researchers found a series of disadvantages that negatively impacted immigrant women scientists. Many of the disadvantages have a direct bearing on Latinas, for example, migrating primarily for the career advance-
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Scientists
Research physician Dr. Irma Vidal. Courtesy of Jorge Sastre Vidal.
ment of their spouses, having varying levels of English proficiency, and having family responsibilities that may conflict with their careers. Marriage tends to impede women’s scientific careers but to have either a neutral or positive effect on men’s professions. Researchers note that female Ph.D. scientists and engineers are less likely than men to be married and that women earned 79 percent as much as their male counterparts. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 1998 report on the status of minorities in graduate programs revealed mixed trends. The number of Latina/o students who earned bachelor’s degrees in the sciences and engineering had increased by more than 50 percent. A National Science Foundation Study also revealed that the number and proportion of women and minorities earning science and engineering degrees continues to increase yearly. The report also noted that the percentage of Latina/o students taking basic and advanced mathematics courses doubled and that the “gender gap” in mathematics achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is disappearing. Clearly the reduction in ethnic and gender discrimination has led to heartening gains. Yet despite the encouraging news, women, minorities, and Latinas in particular remain underrepresented in the sciences and engineering. The number of Latino students enrolled in science and engineering Ph.D. programs has declined by more than 18 percent. Some explanations have been offered for Latinas’ relatively low representation in graduate science programs. While more minority graduates may choose to enter the workforce rather than attend graduate school,
other factors are more likely to be at fault: decreasing financial support, a politically hostile climate for affirmative action, and an inhospitable environment for minority students on many college campuses. The National Science Foundation reports that of all employed doctoral scientists and engineers, Latinas make up only 5 percent, yet Latinas earn 41 percent of science and engineering degrees awarded to Hispanics. In righting the record, one must also go beyond the formally recognized scientific fields and venues. For example, since women have historically been health care providers, primary agriculturalists, and workers in food preparation and nutrition, it is evident that women have had scientific interests, developed agricultural knowledge, practiced medicine, and observed chemical reactions in foods. Curanderismo, with its attendant knowledge and usage of the medicinal properties of plants, is one obvious example. Also, since gynecology, obstetrics, midwifery, and pediatrics were usually the “natural” domain of women, Latinas no doubt contributed to science not only as medical practitioners, but also as innovators of new techniques, practices, and discoveries. Increasingly the value placed on science and technology by patriarchal societies has begun to acknowledge the importance of the scientific work of women as well. Historian Londa Schiebinger, who has written about the history of women in science, notes: “The legal barriers to progress have been removed. . . . So what we’re left with are the things that aren’t very well perceived. And these are things that can be hard to talk about, not only because they’re unquantifiable, but because they also evoke a lot of hostility when you mention them to men.” Before the twentieth century Latina contributions and inventions—and women’s in general—were not recognized in formal ways and were often preempted by their male counterparts or supervisors. For example, Lady Ana de Osorio, the countess of Chinchón, Peru, introduced the curative powers of quinine to the European medical establishment in the seventeenth century. Quinine was known for a while as pulvis comitessa (the countess’s powder), but the name was soon anglicized, and her contribution was lost to history. The existing record of Latina scientists and Latinas’ contributions to science almost certainly represents only a fraction of the work in which they engaged. One of the few recorded lives was that of Ynés Mexia (1870–1938), a Mexican American botanist who conducted pioneering research into the medicinal properties of plants. On her many trips through North and South America Mexia collected, described, classified, and photographed more than 150,000 plant specimens. A self-proclaimed “nature lover and a bit of an
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Scientists adventuress,” she is credited with discovering one new plant genus and more than 500 new species. While the contributions and achievements of Latina scientists have historically been marginalized, in recent years there have been some high-profile accomplishments in the sciences and engineering. Obstacles notwithstanding, Latinas have contributed to scientific knowledge in a number of ways. Latina scientists in biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and space exploration have been recognized for their breakthrough, pioneering work. Many contemporary Latina scientists credit their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts as the catalyst and support for their own careers. Plant biologist María Elena Zavala (1950– ), for example, grew up in La Verne, California, next door to her curandera (medicine woman) great-grandmother. In her great-grandmother’s vast herbal garden Zavala developed an intense interest and understanding about plants and their properties and uses. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1972 from Pomona College, her master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, and her doctorate in botany from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Her interest in plant root systems is leading to advances in cold-hardy crops that can be planted much earlier by farmers. Another plant biologist, Elma González (1942– ), grew up in Hebbronville, Texas. Although her father was sometimes employed as a ranch hand, more often than not, González and her family were migrant farmworkers. Although she was not able to attend school or learn English until she was nine years old, she nonetheless graduated at the top of her high-school class. After earning degrees in biology and chemistry she was awarded a Ph.D. in cellular biology at Rutgers University in 1972. Her research into the role of enzymes and proteins in plant cells furthers knowledge in the structure of human cells. Elvia Niebla (1945– ) has used her expertise as a soil scientist to inform and advise the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and policy makers about industrial sludge, global change, and other environmental issues. Her knowledge of soils (Niebla was awarded a Ph.D. in soil chemistry in 1979) has also been critical in the preservation of adobe structures in the American Southwest. In addition to winning the EPA Bronze Medal, she was also honored by the Federal Executive Association as Manager of the Year for creating a system that increased minority representation at the federal level. France Anne Córdova (1947– ) is by training an astrophysicist who was the youngest person ever to hold the post of chief scientist at NASA. After earning her doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1979, she worked at the Los Alamos Na-
tional Laboratory in New Mexico and was one of the first astrophysicists to assess the radiation emitted by white dwarf stars. In 1996 she left NASA to serve as vice chancellor for research at the University of California at Santa Barbara to support research in all academic areas. She proved a gifted administrator, and in 2002 France Córdova became Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, the first Latina to head a University of California, campus. Adriana Ocampo (1955– ) is a planetary geologist who has conducted research on Earth, as well as on Mars and Jupiter. She was the first to recognize that a ring of sinkholes in the Yucatán peninsula is related to the Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago that caused the extinction of more than 50 percent of Earth’s species, including the dinosaurs. She has also been the science coordinator on the exploratory missions of the spacecrafts Galileo and the Mars Observer. Ocampo’s tireless support of science education for the general public, as well as mentoring programs for girls and young women, has earned her awards and recognition from a number of professional societies. Lydia Villa-Komaroff (1947– ), who was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, became the third Mexican American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate in cell biology in 1975. Despite having her career choices questioned by some relatives and college counselors, she completed her dissertation on the polio virus at MIT, where women made up only onethird of her small graduate class. As a molecular biologist, Villa-Komaroff specializes in neurology. Her work has led to advanced understanding of how naturally occurring chemicals promote brain cell growth. Her work at Harvard Medical School was instrumental in the development of insulin that has been produced in bacteria. Another molecular biologist, Leticia Márquez-Magaña (1963– ), serves her community as a role model for women and minority students while indulging her lifelong fascination with science. After earning her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, she joined the faculty of the biology department at San Francisco State University. There Márquez-Magaña teaches science using innovative methods such as case-based teaching, and actively motivates students of color to prepare for professional careers in the biological sciences. Aida Casiano-Colón (1958– ) used her Ph.D. in microbiology to diagnose the causative infectious agents of diseases and thus inform physicians about the most effective course of treatment. As a child growing up in Puerto Rico, Casiano-Colón exhibited interests in two career paths, biology and theater, and she has been able to practice both. In addition to family responsibilities, Casiano-Colón has pursued her love of acting by
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Scientists maintaining a part-time theater career. She starred in the feminist comedy Rosa de dos aromas in Rochester, New York, which was performed in both English and Spanish. Evelyn M. Rodríguez (1957– ) credits her mother’s unwavering encouragement as a source of inspiration in pursuing and earning an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. In addition to being a pediatrician, Rodríguez is a physician epidemiologist whose specialty includes perinatal epidemiology and HIV/AIDS. Her work resulted in important public education programs warning mothers of hard-drug use as a risk factor in HIV transmission. Marian Lucy Rivas (19??– ) has applied her expertise in computer science to the field of medical genetics. Her work has led to breakthroughs in human genetic mapping, genetic counseling, and computer applications of clinical genetics. A native of New York City, after Rivas earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in medical genetics from Indiana University, she completed a two-year fellowship in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins. Rivas is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee at Memphis, where she also serves as course director of medical genetics. Latinas such as Margarita Colmenares (1957– ) are noteworthy for infiltrating the traditionally male bastion of engineering. Colmenares has been the president of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, was selected to participate in the White House Fellowship Program (the first Hispanic engineer to do so), and was appointed director of corporate liaison by Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1994. In these last two posts Colmenares worked to improve math and science education in U.S. schools and involve businesses in improving education. Luz J. Martínez-Miranda (1956– ) combines her training in physics with her expertise in engineering to conduct research in liquid crystals. She served as an exemplary role model by teaching and directing experiments in the Materials and Nuclear Engineering Department of the University of Maryland. Additionally, she cultivated her interest and talent in music by earning a bachelor’s degree in music from the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. Victoria Aguilera (19??– ) is another noteworthy engineer who emigrated to the United States from Mexico when she was eight years old, smuggled in the back seat of an American couple’s car. After she was reunited with her parents in California, adjustment to a new life and language proved to be difficult. Language barriers led to Aguilera’s placement in remedial classes, but as soon as she mastered English, teachers learned that she was an able student with a special talent for mathematics. After college training in mechanical engineering she was soon hired by Walt Disney
Imagineering to design rides and attractions at Disney theme parks. For her pioneering work Aguilera was featured in the PBS program “BreakThrough: The Changing Face of Science in America.” Theresa Maldonado (1958– ), currently a university professor, received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1990 from Georgia Institute of Technology despite being one of only two or three women in classes that typically numbered eighty. Among several areas of expertise, she is noted for her work in electro-optics, fiber optics, and electromagnetics. In 1991 Maldonado was named the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. Her excellence in teaching and scholarship has earned her several awards for teaching excellence from the University of Texas at Arlington College of Engineering, where she has been a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. When Argelia Velez-Rodríguez (1936– ) was a child in Cuba, her teachers realized she had a special talent for mathematics after she won a competition about fractions in the third grade. When she obtained her doctorate in mathematics in 1960 from the University of Havana, she was the first black woman to have earned that distinction. She left Cuba soon after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and settled in the United States, where she taught at several secondary schools and later at the historically black Bishop College in Dallas, Texas. She is currently the program manager of the Minority Institutions Science Improvement Program in Washington, D.C., which provides grants to improve science education at predominantly minority institutions and to increase the number of underrepresented ethnic minorities, particularly minority women, in science and engineering careers. Increasingly, because many Latinas find the college campus to be an inhospitable environment, the private sector is becoming an important source of employment for Latina scientists. Diana García-Prichard (1949– ) used her Ph.D. in chemical physics as a research scientist with the Eastman Kodak Company. She has worked with the National Science Foundation and the National Committee on Science and Technology and was a member of the science and technology cluster of the Clinton-Gore transition team. A number of suggestions have been offered to increase the representation of Latinas in science and engineering. Mentorship, role models, a reevaluation of recruitment and retention policies, financial support for graduate study, and student support groups have all been identified as promising practices to encourage Latinas in advanced studies. SOURCES: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 1998. Losing Ground: Science and Engineering Graduate Education of Black and Hispanic Americans. Washington, DC: AAAS; Angier, Natalie. 1992. “Women Swell Ranks of
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Sena, Elvira Science but Remain Invisible at the Top.” Applied Optics 31, no. 3 (January 20): 302; Bernstein, Leonard, Alan Winkler, and Linda Zierdt-Warshaw. 1998. Latino Women of Science. Saddle Brook, NJ: Peoples Publishing Group; Goyette, Kimberly, and Yu Xie. 1999. “The Intersection of Immigration and Gender.” Social Science Quarterly 80 (June): 395–409; Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; National Science Foundation 1998. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. Arlington, VA: NSF; Oakes, Jeannie. 1990. Lost Talent: The Underparticipation of Women, Minorities, and Disabled Persons in Science. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation; Schiebinger, Londa. 1989. The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; St. John, Jetty. 1996. Hispanic Scientists. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press.
Bárbara C. Cruz
SENA, ELVIRA (1925–
)
Elvira Trujillo Sena grew up on her family’s ranch in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the second oldest of seven children, four boys and three girls. Her father, Alberto Trujillo, supported the family by ranching and delivering mail, while her mother was a housewife. Her mother, Lucianita Trujillo, was often very ill, so, as the oldest girl, Elvira became a “second mother” to her younger siblings. When it was time for her to enter the training school at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, World War II was under way, and tough times had gotten tougher. Sena’s family was lucky because they had cows and pigs on their farm that they used for meat, as well as vegetables from their garden they harvested and canned. Her father also received stamps for gasoline because of his job carrying the mail. According to Trujillo Sena, “It was so difficult to buy things; it was very hard for a lot of people. We didn’t go through too much trouble. My father was a very, very good supporter.” Her roles in the family ranged from taking care of her siblings to helping her mother with canning. The whole time she was growing up, her family had no electricity or running water. “It was hard, very hard,” she said. “I guess maybe that’s why there wasn’t so much trouble because everyone was so busy.” Even though times were difficult, her father still managed to put Sena and her older brother through the private training school in Las Vegas. “I wanted to work to help pay because it was a big family but he wouldn’t let me work,” she said. “My father would go out and sell a cow or something and give me whatever I needed for school. Just the essentials, nothing extra. It was very hard, but we pulled through.” Education was very important to Sena, and in the war she saw an opportunity for more. She wanted to enlist in military service, because she wanted to go into nursing and thought that would be a way to pay for her schooling.
Even so, her mother did not like the idea. “She said military is not for women; I did not see it that way, but she did and she said, ‘No, that’s not for you.’ I just wanted an education.” After a blind date in December 1944, plans for her education were put on hold. Elvira was paired with Luis Sena, who had just returned from overseas, and her cousin was set up with his brother. Luis Sena had served in New Guinea, earning many medals, including a Purple Heart. Elvira Sena recalled that they spent a long time talking, and he was “respectable and very nice to me.” Not long after that first meeting Luis Sena proposed, and they were married in January 1945. “It was just a few weeks,” Elvira Sena said. “I have not regretted any bit of it. I have five children, and they are all healthy.” Her husband wanted her to finish school, but her father insisted that she go with her husband because she made the choice to get married. “I missed my parents very much and my brothers and sisters,” she said. “I had never been away from home for that long of time, but we did it and we are still married.” Even though she left school to go with her husband, her dreams of finishing her education and becoming a nurse were not completely shattered. Elvira Sena finished high school after she had her first child; she began college courses but never completed the degree. In 1952 Sena began working for New Mexico State Hospital (now Las Vegas Medical Center) and retired from that job in 1998. She eventually became a licensed practical nurse (LPN), although she never went
Luis and Elvira Sena, 1945. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Sepúlveda, Emma to school to become one. She challenged the board and passed the state board tests. She still works parttime at a doctor’s office. See also World War II SOURCES: Mokry, Allison. “Blind Date Put Education Plans on Hold.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 53; Sena, Elvira. 2002. Interview by Adriana Lujan, Santa Fe Vet Center, Santa Fe, NM, November 3. Allison Mokry
SEPÚLVEDA, EMMA (1950–
)
Noted educator, poet, and literary critic Emma Sepúlveda was born in Mendoza, Argentina, and moved to Chile at the age of seven. Sepúlveda left Chile in 1973 as a result of Augusto Pinochet’s military coup. A university student at the time, she opted for political exile four months shy of earning her university degree in history. She settled in Reno, Nevada, and in 1978 she completed baccalaureate and master’s degrees in Spanish at the University of Nevada. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1987. That year she joined the faculty of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she became a tenured professor in Spanish. A true Renaissance woman, Sepúlveda, the writer, is also an award-winning photographer and a political activist. She published two books of poetry, Tiempo cómplice del tiempo (1989) and Death to Silence/Muerte al silencio (1997). Divided into three sections, the latter explores the central themes of death, life, exile, and social and political denouncement. The overarching theme of the volume, silence, is also a primary concern in many of Sepúlveda’s works. The poetics of silence are explored in Los límites del lenguaje: Un acercamiento a la poética del silencio (1990), in which, for instance, the silence of death is described, and in which she also cherishes silence as the ideal space for communication between intimates. The final section of Death to Silence deals with a form of silence that must be broken by revealing the pain, the suffering, and the loss of victims, both the dead and the living, of the Chilean dictatorship. This commitment to articulating the suppressed voices of the Pinochet regime also has led Sepúlveda to record the testimonies of the arpilleristas (women textile artists) that form the volume We, Chile: Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas (1996), adding to the “silent social art” of the arpilleras. This sense of social obligation, evident in giving a voice to the voiceless, drove Sepúlveda to run in 1994 for the Nevada Senate as the Democratic Party candi-
Writer, poet, and educator Emma Sepúlveda. Courtesy of Emma Sepúlveda.
date. One of the first Latinas to do so, Sepúlveda offers an account of her experience in From Border Crossings to Campaign Trail (1998). Sepúlveda’s critical and creative work benefited from collaboration with another Chilean American writer, Marjorie Agosín. They met as teenagers in Chile, and their friendship has often been channeled into joint projects. These efforts have taken a variety of forms: literary criticism in Otro modo de ser: Poesía hispánica de mujeres (1994); Silencio que se deja oír (1982), with poems by Agosín and photographs by Sepúlveda (then Nolan); Generous Journeys/Travesías generosas (1992), Agosín’s poetry illustrated by Sepúlveda’s images; and Amigas (2001), a chronicle of their relationship, as the subtitle states, in Letters of Friendship and Exile. Sepúlveda also edited a collection of critical articles on the work of her lifelong friend, Las ciudades del cuerpo: Aproximaciones a la obra de Marjorie Agosín (2003). In 1993 Sepúlveda won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy for her role as a consultant in the documentary Threads of Hope. On the national level Sepúlveda has held an appointment to the U.S. Hispanic Task Force since 1994, advising the Senate on Hispanic issues. Locally she founded Latinos for Political Education and is president of Nevada Hispanic Ser-
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Sexuality vices. On more than one occasion she has been recognized by the state of Nevada for her distinguished service to the Hispanic community, and she received the Thornton Peace Award in 1994 from the University of Nevada, Reno, for her work with women’s groups in Chile. She has won numerous awards for her poetry and her photography; most notably she was the recipient of the first Woman of the Year Award for literature in 1997 from the GEMS International Television Network. Emma Sepúlveda is married to attorney John Mulligan, and they have a son, Jonathon. See also Literature SOURCES: Fahey, Kay. 1996. “Sepúlveda.” Silver and Blue, January/February, 14–17; Sepúlveda, Emma. 1998. From Border Crossings to Campaign Trail: Chronicle of a Latina in Politics. Falls Church, VA: Azul Editions; Sepúlveda, Emma, ed. 1996. We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas. Trans. Bridget Morgan. Falls Church, VA: Azul Editions; Sepúlveda, Emma, and Marjorie Agosín. 2001. Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile. Trans. Bridget Morgan. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin Torres
SEXUALITY Recent research on sexuality has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of Latina identities, yet traces of traditional notions of an ideal Latina sexuality can still be seen. These notions draw on traditional gender norms to venerate sexual prowess and sexual dominance for men and passivity, subversion of sexual pleasure, and “purity” for women. In this traditional ideal of Latina sexuality, virginity stands as the embodiment of purity for women and remains central to a woman’s reputation, as well as the reputation of her family. Only after marriage does the ideal of womanhood prescribe that a woman be sexually open, but then only in order to suit her husband’s sexual needs. Such notions can be traced back to Spanish colonization and the centrality of notions of honor. In Spanish colonies honor held at least two roles. On the one hand, honor was determined by the social status one was born into. For instance, one’s perceived “race,” occupation, ancestry, nativity, or religion might determine one’s honor status. On the other hand, honor lay at the heart of Spanish colonial society’s moral system. Thus what was deemed right and good was also honorable and could be attained, and lost, through one’s public conduct. In Spanish colonial society honor was primarily a male attribute. It could also belong collectively to a family and could be secured by men, who were perceived to be the primary guardians of their own or their family’s honor. In Spanish colonial society the feminine counterpart to masculine honor
was vergüenza, or shame. Thus shame and honor shaped acceptable patterns of behavior for men and women. According to the honor discourse of Spanish colonial society, honor could be acquired by the male members of the family and maintained by women’s conduct, but women could only impinge upon the family’s honor. If a woman lost the honor of the family, for instance, by losing her virginity before marriage, it was left to the male to restore that honor (for instance, her brother or father might go to the courts to demand that the partner marry his daughter or sister). While such notions of gendered sexuality persist, they are fluid, varying according to a particular historical context and specific and intersecting ideas about class and race. The traditional trope of gender roles remains constantly negotiated by Latinas in the United States in their varied social contexts. Challenges to traditional ideals of Latina sexuality come from a broad spectrum of women who resist conventional roles through daily expressions of nontraditional identities and for some political mobilization. The most significant period of mobilization occurred with the emergence of Latina feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. For instance, the writings of Chicana lesbian feminist Gloria Anzaldúa helped highlight subjectivities that are formed through interrelations of sexuality, race, class, and gender. In the 1960s and 1970s Latinas in the United States brought attention to the problem of coerced sterilization, the most extreme and aggressive effort to police Latina sexuality. Under the influence of the eugenics movement, some physicians, social reformers, welfare workers, and county hospital workers advocated the sterilization of poor women as a means of controlling what they perceived to be a “population problem.” Poor women of color, in particular, were targeted as “unfit” mothers and coerced into sterilization operations. Because of racism and stereotypical beliefs about Latina women, as well as limited government oversight of hospital procedures, large numbers of women were sterilized without their consent. Several highly publicized court trials, such as the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan in 1978, brought long-overdue attention to an epidemic of forced sterilizations in public hospitals of Mexican, Native American, African American, and Puerto Rican women in the 1970s. See also Feminism; Lesbians; Madrigal v. Quilligan; Marianismo and Machismo; Sterilization SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute; Gutiérrez, Ramón. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Lancaster, Roger N., and Micaela di Leonardo, eds. 1997. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy.
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Silva, Chelo New York: Routledge; Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Julie Cohen
SILVA, CHELO (1922–1988) The oldest daughter in a family of seven children, Chelo Silva was born in 1922 in Brownsville, Texas. She began singing as a teenager at school and church and made her debut during Brownsville’s Charro Days, accompanied by Orquesta Tipica Mexicana’s leader Vincent Crixell. By her late teens she was singing regularly with the local Tito Crixell Orchestra. In 1939, when her career was gaining momentum locally, she was invited to sing on a radio program hosted by the then-unknown poet and composer Américo Paredes. They married in the early 1940s, had a son, Américo Paredes Jr., and divorced shortly thereafter. After a few idle years Silva was singing radio jingles and performing at the Continental Club in Corpus Christi. She married Leopoldo Pérez Morales in 1953 and gave birth to two daughters, René and Garnette, and another son, Leslie. This marriage also ended in divorce. In 1952 she was signed by Discos Falcón in McAllen, Texas, and recorded more than seventy titles with it. In 1955 she signed with Columbia Records and began her long list of hits, including “Imploracíon,” “Está sellado,” “Sabes de qué tengo ganas,” “Inolvidable,” “Amor aventurero,” and “Soy bohemia.” Silva was considered the premier female interpreter of boleros and recorded the majority of her music with the accompaniment of los Dandys or los Principales. Eventually Silva became known as la Reina de los Boleros for her ability to interpret songs and to make them her own through stylized vocals and bent notes. During the late 1950s she was probably the best-selling female recording artist on either side of the border. However, she acquired a reputation for partying, and by the late 1970s her voice became affected by poor health. Nevertheless, she continued to perform and entertain crowds. When she walked on stage and began to sing, her fans would go wild. Like many early cantantes, she did not receive her share of royalties, even though she was one of the best-selling international artists during her peak in the 1970s. Money did not inflame her desire to sing. Rather, she sang for the love of her singing and the response she received from her fans. She was known for her easygoing nature, and whenever anyone requested a song, even if she was not performing that night, she would oblige and sing for the whole crowd. At one of her last public performances at San Antonio’s Rosedale Park in 1983, though not feeling well, Silva carried on with an outstanding performance. In her
opening words she told her audience, “A KCOR, no tengo palabras con que, que feliz me han hecho este día de hoy. . . . les voy a decir una cosa . . . me puse un poco enferma. Y yo dije, yo creo que aquí en San Antonio voy a quedar yo, como dice mi canción. . . . Esto nunca se me olvidará” (I do not have the words for KCOR, how happy they have made me today. . . . I am going to tell you something . . . I got a little sick. And I said, I think I am going to stay here in San Antonio, like my song says. . . . This I will never forget). She died in 1988. SOURCES: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books; Silva, Chelo. Chelo Silva: La reina tejana del bolero. Tejano Roots. Arhoolie Records. Vargas, Deborah Rose Ramos. 2003. “Las tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz; Villarreal, Mary Ann. 2003. “Cantantes y Cantineras: Mexican American Communities and the Mapping of Public Space.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University. Mary Ann Villarreal
SILVA DE CINTRÓN, JOSEFINA “PEPIÑA” (1885–1986) The cultural life of New York’s Puerto Rican community during the 1930s and 1940s was considerably enriched by the contributions of Josefina (“Pepiña”) Silva de Cintrón. She was born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, in 1885 and lived for more than a century; her long life was dedicated to many civic and cultural pursuits. She was a graduate of the select group of women who attended the University of Puerto Rico’s Normal School and were trained as teachers. This was one of the few opportunities for Puerto Rican women of her generation to receive a higher education. Before leaving Puerto Rico and moving to New York in 1927, Silva was involved in the island’s suffragist movement. Along with several other educated women from the middle and upper classes, she collaborated in the publication of the Puerto Rican feminist journal La Mujer en el Siglo XX (Women in the Twentieth Century). She also was a member of the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas (Puerto Rican Association of Women Suffragists). Through the efforts of this and other women’s organizations voting rights were secured for educated women in 1929 and universal women’s suffrage in 1935. In New York Silva married Felipe Cintrón, a minister and head of the Hispanic Episcopal Mission. She founded and edited the Revista de Artes y Letras (1933– 1945), a publication that for more than a decade promoted the work of Hispanic writers and artists to an international audience, since the journal circulated in the United States, Puerto Rico, and other Spanish-speaking
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“Sister Carmelita” countries. Aimed mostly at an educated reading public, the journal provided substantial evidence of the cultural vitality among Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the New York communities by including creative literature, as well as information on theater, cinema, and musical activities by prominent Spanish-speaking performers. It also promoted a panethnic sense of hispanismo (Hispanicism) in the U.S. metropolis. See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Revista de Artes y Letras. 1933–1945. New York; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edna Acosta-Belén
“SISTER CARMELITA” (CARMELA ZAPATA BONILLA MARRERO) (1905–2003) Sister Carmelita was born in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, where her father owned farmland and boats and was an associate in the Pepe Campos Maritime Company, a business enterprise in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands. When her mother died in 1918, she went to live with family members in Mayagüez, seldom seeing her father and experiencing want for the first time. During her formative years in the Immaculate Conception Catholic School, where she was taught English, she saw ads encouraging young women to join the catechists in Indiana, which sparked her interest in helping the poverty-stricken children of Puerto Rico. When Carmelita was in the eighth grade, she volunteered to teach the third-grade boys’ class when the teacher fell ill. Father Thomas Agustin, a Vincentian priest, heard of her interest in the convent and encouraged her to join. She left Puerto Rico a year later in 1923 by ship with a second-class ticket in hand to join the Order of the Trinitarian Sisters, becoming the first Puerto Rican to serve in that religious community. She was a novice for two years in the southern part of the United States, before serving at the Gold Street center in Brooklyn, New York. Sister Carmelita actively engaged in providing community services to hundreds of neighborhood children from mostly Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Italian backgrounds, with a few Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Pilipino newcomers to the neighborhood. Responsible for many, Sister Carmelita particularly felt called to serve the poor immigrants from Puerto Rico. She remembered that she served primarily as a social worker for the children and their families. At that time there was no welfare, people were easily dispossessed from their homes, and there was a high unemployment rate. She became acquainted with the police, who were predominantly Irish Catholic at the
time, politicians, although she tended to stay away from the Democratic Club on Adams Street because of rumored Mafia connections and frequent shootouts, bankers, the staff and administrators at Cumberland Hospital, “boliteros” (illegal numbers runners and gamblers), who among the Spanish-speaking people had access to a lot of money, and the powers at borough hall with the sole purpose of serving her clientele in the best possible way. She was actively involved in many organizations and was a founder of Casita Maria, a community settlement house established in 1934 in Spanish Harlem to serve as translators and advocates for the Spanish-speaking community’s educational and social service needs. She remained in the United States until 1940, when she returned to Puerto Rico. Every weekend for six years Sister Carmelita taught religion in the prison system in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, to the male inmates. She was in Puerto Rico during the 1960s when Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos (Don Pedro), the foremost Nationalist/independence leader of the twentieth century, was imprisoned. She recalls the times when she would encourage Don Pedro to eat to keep up his strength, despite the fact that he was fasting as a means of protest against U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. She considered herself a Democrat, which meant that she tended to lean toward the commonwealth political platform of the Popular Democratic Party because “we lose the island if it goes to the Nationalists. Being a state wouldn’t be good because we would lose a lot of things.” She was referring to the possibilities that independence would bring socialism to Puerto Rico and that statehood would mean that the Puerto Rican culture and the Spanish language would be replaced by the dominant culture of the United States and the English language. In 1967 she returned to New York to work at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Pacific Street in Brooklyn. When she reflected on the changes she had seen in the city since she first arrived in the early 1920s, Sister Carmelita lamented the ways Puerto Ricans viewed themselves. When she first arrived, Puerto Ricans were very proud of being Puerto Rican; there were no Puerto Rican gangs; out of all the groups she worked with, Puerto Ricans were the only ones with no one in jail; and the attitude of the community was one of great reverence and appreciation when she visited their homes to talk about “the things of God and religion.” She firmly believed that what changed all of that for the Puerto Rican community was the amount of freedom they received in New York and welfare, both of which led the new generations to be apathetic and lose respect for authority. What she did not lament was loss of the assumption that every Spanish-speaking person was Puerto Rican. Early on, Puerto Ricans re-
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SLAVERY
Sister Carmelita, circa 1994. Courtesy of Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity Archives.
ceived blame incessantly whenever a Latino/a would do something. It was also unknown that, unlike other immigrant groups, Puerto Ricans had been U.S. citizens since the 1917 Jones Act. According to Sister Carmelita, distinction among Latino/a groups was a positive change. Her educational background included obtaining a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and a master’s degree from Santa María in Ponce in the area of social work. Sister Carmelita continued ministering in New York and New Jersey. In November 1991 she moved into the motherhouse of the Blessed Trinity Mother Missionary Cenacle in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she was assigned to the ministry of prayer. She remained a member of the Trinitarian Sisters until her death on August 21, 2003. Sister Carmelita is widely recognized for her spirit of dedication, perseverance, and love of the work God had called her to in spite of having to wear “este traje feo” (this ugly dress). Her sense of humor helped move her forward. Her legacy is the labor of love that brought about change in the lives of thousands from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. See also Nuns, Contemporary; Religion SOURCES: Ahern, Sister Teresa, archivist of the Blessed Trinity Mother Missionary Cenacle, Philadelphia, PA. 2004. Phone interview by María Pérez y González, August 26; Pérez y González, María E. 2000. Puerto Ricans in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1988. “In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations before Midcentury.” Oral History Review 16, no. 2 (Fall): 47–63; Zapata Bonilla Marrero, Sister Carmela. 1977. Interview February 19. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios, Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. María Pérez y González
Slavery in Latin America was a system of forced labor that pressed large numbers of Native Americans and Africans into service to undertake domestic household chores, agricultural production, mineral extraction, and industrial manufacturing. African slaves accompanied the initial voyages of Spanish discovery to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus spotted land in the Bahamas in 1492, slavery was already a widely known and practiced institution in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. African slavery took root in Spanish America in the early 1500s as an indispensable part of the colonization process. It grew slowly in the sixteenth century and reached its greatest numeric extent during the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Slavery was finally eclipsed in the hemisphere between the 1820s and 1860s, replaced by more efficient and less costly forms of free wage labor. Among the many privileges Spain’s king granted Christopher Columbus and his compatriots as conquering lords was the right to exploit Indian labor under a number of institutional forms equated with slavery. At the time of the conquest the most dominant way to accomplish this was through the allocation of entire Indian communities to specific Spanish conquistadores as encomiendas. Encomenderos, the Spanish holders of encomiendas, were entrusted with the protection of their Indian charges in return for indigenous tribute and labor. Rotational labor levies known generically as repartimientos and more locally as mita in Peru and as cuatequil in Mexico were next in importance. For centuries before the Spanish conquest, natives, particularly in Mexico and Peru, had had to supply labor to state authorities for public works. Repartimiento drafts were likened to these older traditional forms of servile labor. Finally, throughout the Americas, an indigenous trade in captives and prisoners of war existed. Colonialism accelerated this market in two ways. First, the Indians began selling captives to Europeans for guns, ammunition, liquor, and manufactured products. Known in Spanish as rescates, this commerce only led to higher levels of indigenous warfare aimed at obtaining human chattel with which to barter for coveted European goods. Under the doctrine of “just war” the Spanish themselves also staged raids into enemy territory to capture Indian slaves. Spanish law maintained that those who resisted conversion to Christianity and the call for allegiance to Spain’s monarch could be killed or enslaved. Indian enslavement was thus rationalized as justified because of native heathenism, resistance to Spanish authority, and, in some cases, the putative practice of cannibalism.
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Slavery By the early 1500s it became crystal clear that Indian slavery simply would not work as an extensive institution in Spanish America. The island of Hispaniola, which today comprises the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is a good case in point. In 1492 Hispaniola boasted a native Taino population of some 400,000. By 1508 this group had dwindled to 60,000, by 1519 only 3,000 remained, and by 1540 they had all but disappeared. By the end of the sixteenth century the indigenous population of the entire Caribbean had met a similar fate; it was virtually wiped out. The same thing happened to Brazil’s Indians in the seventeenth century. To curtail the level of Indian depopulation, the Spanish Crown instituted the New Laws of 1542, which curtailed the extent of the encomienda system and constrained the levels of the repartimiento’s use. Spanish colonists intensely resisted the New Laws, and it was not until 1720 that the encomienda was finally abolished. Nevertheless, the legal enslavement of Indians and their exploitation through encomiendas, repartimientos, and rescates was allowed to flourish into the nineteenth century in peripheral areas of the empire, like the Amazon, Chile, Colombia, and what is now the American Southwest. Spanish authorities rationalized that without slavery as a human spoil of war and conquest, few colonists would brave the settlement of marginal areas of Spanish control where “wild” Indians deterred settlement. As the supply of Indian slaves disappeared in the Caribbean and on the continent’s coastal lowlands, the European colonizers turned to Africa for labor, on which they had depended only sparingly because of its prohibitive cost since 1441. By 1550 all this had changed. Europeans by then had developed a taste for cigars, coffee, chocolates, and sweets, making the cultivation of tobacco, coffee, cacao, and sugar on lowland plantations in the Americas much more profitable and the cost of importing African slaves much more feasible. African slaves became the principal labor sources throughout the Caribbean, as well as those tropical and semitropical coastal lowland areas of the Americas where the aboriginal population was sparse, nomadic, and completely unaccustomed to intense field labor or traditional labor drafts. In the highlands of Mexico and in the Andes where formerly the Aztecs and Incas had ruled, the Spanish conquistadores found dense settled indigenous populations. Although the number of Indians declined precipitously here too because of the violence of the conquest and its aftermath, the sheer density of indigenous peoples guaranteed that they were not wiped out. These peoples had long been accustomed to state-extracted labor drafts devoted to agricultural, architectural, and mineral production before the con-
quest. Such systems of peasant labor were kept intact by the Spanish, organized, as they had always been, around kinship and residential affiliations and administered by native bureaucracies and indigenous lords. African slavery did not become a major institution in highland areas of dense Indian population because forced labor levies (encomienda, repartimiento) accomplished the same end. Between 1502 and 1867 more than 10 million African slaves were imported into the Americas. Roughly 4 million went to Brazil, 1.7 million to what is now Haiti, 1.7 million to the Spanish American colonies, 1.7 million to the British West Indies, 600,000 to the United States, and 500,000 to the Dutch colonies of Guyana and Surinam. Sociologist Orlando Patterson maintains that three essential features have characterized the slave condition. First, slavery rather universally has been culturally explained as a substitute for violent death in warfare. Imagined as a benevolent act of ransom, slavery nevertheless rendered the individual socially dead. Second, as socially dead individuals who had social personalities only through their masters, slaves were humans who had been alienated from their natal group, ripped from the fundamental fabric of kinship based on ties to family, ancestors, and blood relations. Finally, because slaves were pressed into slavery through a violent act of domination and lacked the most rudimentary kinship ties to a community, the slave condition was one of dishonor. These three characteristics were what made slaves highly coveted as laborers. They could be moved around easily at the will of their master at slight cost because their lives were not enmeshed in the ties of reciprocal obligation that were common among even the lowest free persons of Indian descent. The massive importation of African slaves into the Americas owes its origins to the development of largescale plantation agriculture devoted to the cultivation of tobacco, which became the area’s first major commercial crop. In time indigo became a major plantation crop because of its importance as a European textile dye. Finally came sugar, which became the most lucrative and extensive crop in the Americas. The techniques, capital, tools, and African slaves that ultimately transformed the islands of the Caribbean—British, French, and Spanish—into major sugar-producing areas were drawn largely from the experiences and resources amassed by Dutch planters and merchants through the Dutch West Indies Company in Brazil in the early 1600s. From there the Dutch introduced modern sugar-milling and production techniques in Barbados, Martinique, and Guadalupe in the 1640s and rapidly transformed these islands. By 1680 British Barbados had some 350 sugar estates, worked by 37,000 black
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Sloss-Vento, Adela slaves; similar levels of labor and production were eventually found on Martinique, Guadalupe, and the western half of the island of Santo Domingo, which the French claimed as Saint Domingue in the 1650s. Most of the plantations that evolved on the Caribbean islands during the seventeenth century were in the 200-acre range, worked by 100 or so slaves. This acreage and number of slaves climbed significantly in the eighteenth century. By 1750, for example, about two-thirds of all plantations in the Caribbean were more than 1,000 acres in size, and some reached much greater expanse, each worked at times by as many as 15,000 slaves. Blacks dominated the population ten to one, and well over 80 percent of them worked in the rural cultivation of sugar. By the middle of the eighteenth century sugar was the single crop most extensively cultivated by African and African American slave labor. Before the Industrial Revolution plantation slavery was the most productive form of labor available. All the major tasks involved in planting, cultivation, and harvesting were undertaken without regard to the sex of the worker. Only age mattered, with the old tending to infants and to livestock and the young working at weeding and other minor chores until they were old enough to join field gangs. Slaves were constantly supervised and frequently disciplined with whips and other forms of corporal punishment. Plantations were highly productive units, making use of 80 percent of all slave labor available and of the entire age spectrum of the slave population. African and African American slavery ended in the Americas largely because the institution was increasingly seen as immoral, illegitimate, and economically anachronistic by many of the leading European thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the late 1740s, for example, in his book The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu questioned the legitimacy of slavery. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith concluded that free labor was simply more competitive than slavery. Beginning first with the Quaker clergy and then influential political theorists, the abolitionist movement gained more proponents in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Then countries like Portugal, England, and France enacted legislation that abolished slavery on the Continent. By the time of the American Revolution in 1776 some states less dependent on slaves, like Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts (1780), and Rhode Island and Connecticut (1784) enacted gradual abolition laws that began by freeing newborns. The French Revolution of 1789 accelerated the pace of abolition. The Revolution’s egalitarian ideals clashed with the reality of slavery and eventually led to the emancipation of slaves in Guadeloupe and Saint Domingue in February 1794.
The end of the slave trade was mainly championed by the English Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. By 1820 it had largely managed to stop the transport of African slaves to the Americas, though not without some intense resistance from the Spanish and Portuguese traders. Finally, in the 1860s, through effective blockades by the United States and England, the slave trade to Cuba and Puerto Rico was ended. The end of the slave trade did not automatically mean the emancipation of all slaves. Emancipation was more gradual, beginning first with the passage of “free womb” (children born to slave mothers would be free) laws in 1821 in such newly independent Spanish American republics as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, which guaranteed that slavery would persist into the 1850s. Other countries, like Chile in 1823 and Mexico in 1832, completely emancipated their slaves. Cuba and Brazil were slavery’s last bastions, finally abolishing it in 1883 and 1888, respectively. See also Race and Color Consciousness SOURCES: Bowser, Frederick P. 1974. The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Boxer, Charles. 1957. The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654. New York: Oxford University Press; Davis, David Brion. 1976. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Klein, Herbert S. 1967. Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Cuba and Virginia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Knight, Franklin. 1970. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Palmer, Colin. 1976. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Price, Richard. 1973. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. New York: Anchor Press; Scarano, Francisco A. 1984. Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy in Ponce, 1800–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Schwartz, Stuart B. 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of a Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ramón A. Gutiérrez
SLOSS-VENTO, ADELA (1901–1998) Adela Sloss-Vento was born to Anselma Garza and David Sloss in 1901. Her mother was a midwife and a curandera with a reputation as a self-made woman. Adela graduated from Pharr–San Juan–Alamo High in 1927 and quickly became a young community activist. As a secretary to the mayor of her hometown of San Juan, Texas, she worked to get rid of the red-light district located in the Mexican side of town. She also worked to end corruption in the mayor’s office. In 1931 she organized a benefit to raise funds for a school desegregation case litigated by the League of United
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Smeltertown, El Paso Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Although the case was unsuccessful, Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District was the first class-action lawsuit against the segregation of Mexican schoolchildren in Texas. While LULAC argued that Mexicans were “white” and thus did not merit segregation, the judge disagreed, remarking on the “decided peculiarities” of Tejano children. In 1932 Vento wrote an essay highlighting the significance of LULAC, even though the organization did not permit women as full members until 1933. That year she founded a Ladies LULAC Council in Alice, Texas. Like her contemporary Alicia Dickerson Montemayor, she was a vocal feminist who condemned machismo. She wrote “Why There Exists No True Happiness in Many Latino Homes,” a stinging critique of women’s subordination in the home. In her late thirties she married Pedro Vento, a man who encouraged and supported her political activism. The couple had two children, and she frequently brought her children with her to political functions and community meetings. An aspiring writer, she penned newspaper articles in both English- and Spanish-language newspapers from the 1920s through the 1980s. In 1943 her article “The Problem of Many Texas Towns” condemned “hatred against people of Mexican descent.” In addition to her writing, community work, and family life, she worked as a prison matron beginning in 1949. She held strong political opinions. She refused to support Lloyd Bentsen as state representative. She wrote letters to President Eisenhower condemning the Bracero Program and was critical of the exploitation of farmworkers. During the cold war she expressed strong anti-Communist views. Twenty years later she was a strong supporter of the Chicano Movement and bilingualism. She gave J. Luz Saenz money for his civil rights activism and wrote a tribute to him. At the age of seventy-five, she wrote a tribute to lawyer and LULAC founder Alonso S. Perales. This book, Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican Americans, is a gold mine for Chicano scholars. Perales’s widow acknowledged Vento’s decades of civil rights work: “Mrs. Vento has been a collaborator since she was young. She’s a brave woman and decided very early on to get to work. She too recognized that our community pleaded to bring forth justice.” Unlike many community organizers who never saved any of their documents, Adela Vento scrupulously preserved her correspondence, articles, and ephemera. In 1968 she was the only women to receive a Pioneer Award at the Fifth Annual Statewide LULAC Founders’ Pioneers and Awards Banquet in San Antonio. Adela Sloss-Vento died at the age of ninety-seven in 1998. Her son, Dr. Arnoldo Carlos Vento, a professor of Spanish and Chicano literature, has written several
novels, referring to her in La Cueva de Naltzatlán and En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo. See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCES: Sloss-Vento, Adela. 1978. Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican Americans. San Antonio: Artes Gráficas; ———. 1934. “Por que en muchos hogares latinos no existe verdadera felicidad.” LULAC News, March, 31– 32; ———. 1978. “To Speak English and Spanish Means We Are Better Prepared to Know Our Culture.” La Verdad, June 23. Cynthia E. Orozco
SMELTERTOWN, EL PASO With the arrival of the railroad and firms such as the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company, El Paso, Texas, emerged as an important center for mining and smelting activity in the U.S. Southwest in the late nineteenth century. Purchased and incorporated by the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) in 1899, the smelter processed lead, copper, and other ores transported by rail to El Paso from mines throughout the Southwest and northern Mexico and became the largest employer of ethnic Mexicans in El Paso by the turn of the twentieth century. The smelter’s need for a large labor pool, coupled with the social, economic, and political upheaval caused by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), precipitated the migration of thousands of Mexicans to El Paso. From the plant’s inception workers and their families began to establish homes around the smelter, giving birth to a dynamic and vibrant community called Smeltertown, or la Esmelda, as its predominantly ethnic Mexican inhabitants called it. Other industries established operations in the area, including a brick plant, a cement plant, and a quarry, that provided additional employment opportunities for Smeltertown’s residents. With an estimated population of 5,000 residents at its height in the 1920s and 1930s, Smeltertown was one of the largest residential and occupational centers for Mexicans in El Paso. Located on the banks of the Rio Grande approximately three miles northwest of downtown El Paso, Smeltertown was divided into two major sections. Upper Smeltertown, or El Alto, sat on plant property on a bluff overlooking the river. Mexicans resided in company-owned tenements in the Mexican section, while the predominantly Anglo managerial staff and their families lived in homes in what was called Smelter Terrace. Lower Smeltertown, or El Bajo, was situated below the plant, between the County Road (now Paisano Drive or U.S. Highway 85) and the river. Residents of El Bajo rented small parcels of land from private individuals, upon which they built adobe and
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Smeltertown, El Paso wood-frame homes. El Bajo was further divided into smaller neighborhoods with which residents identified. Smeltertown was more than a labor camp or a company town; it was a virtual city within a city. Although the residents did not own the property upon which their community was built, they claimed ownership of their community in a variety of ways. They built permanent homes and beautified them with gardens and other personal touches, established a significant Mexican-owned business district with restaurants, small grocery stores, barber shops, taverns, and bakeries, formed athletic leagues, musical groups, and community organizations like the Smelter Community Center Association (1936), and organized dances, bazaars, and other social and cultural activities through the schools, the local YMCA chapter, and the Catholic parish. After World War II they renamed the streets after local young men who had died in service in the U.S. armed forces. From the beginning women played a vital role in the formation of community in Smeltertown. For the most part, Smeltertown was a community of families—nuclear and extended, male and female headed. According to the 1920 census, women constituted more than half the population of Smeltertown. These women contributed directly to the industrial economy of the community. Although the workforces of the neighboring industries were exclusively male, the industrial character of the work at the various plants created important employment opportunities for women. The 1920 census reveals that many Smeltertown women worked as maids and laundresses for private families and in the smelter hospital, as seamstresses, and as merchants, store clerks, and street vendors, and some women rented rooms to workers in the neighboring plants. In addition, women participated in the economic life of Smeltertown in ways not captured by the census. Several women ran informal “restaurants” for workers out of their homes, sold homemade items like cheeses, and worked as midwives in the community. Some women who had been educated in Mexico ran small preschools out of their homes known as escuelas particulares. For a small tuition the women taught children how to read and write in Spanish, prepared them for religious sacraments, and introduced them to enough English for their entry into the El Paso County school system. According to ASARCO employee records, between 1942 and 1946 a very small but significant number of women found their way into the smelter to fill labor shortages caused by the war. In the early part of the twentieth century immigrant women were often the targets of Americanization efforts. In Smeltertown the establishment of the Smelter Vocational School in 1923 provided a means by which
to create not only a self-replenishing, better-trained male workforce for the smelter, but also a more Americanized family for workers. A joint venture between the county of El Paso and ASARCO, the Smelter Vocational School offered courses for both men and women in an effort to transform perceived “idleness” into “industry.” While male students took courses in industrial topics, women learned skills such as dressmaking and homemaking. Students also took classes in subjects such as mathematics, English, science, citizenship, and personal hygiene. In addition, the school sponsored evening courses and workshops for mothers on topics including food for children, millinery, and food preservation, advertised to the community through the Catholic parish. Despite the negative connotations of the Americanization efforts, the students of the Smelter Vocational School used the lessons and skills learned at the school to help create a sense of identity and to help foster their sense of community. Some women earned vocational teaching credentials and returned to teach at the school. In addition, women became actively involved in social and community service activities—teaching sewing and homemaking courses, assisting the distribution of milk and food to the community, becoming involved with depressionera aid organizations, and participating in organizations like the Smelter Community Center Association, a group dedicated to the welfare of the community. Women also played an active role in the social and cultural life of the community through the various activities of the San José del Río (later San José de Cristo Rey) Catholic parish. Through their work in a number of devotional societies, women were at the center of the social and religious life of the predominantly Catholic community. They organized bazaars and sold homemade food and other homemade items to help raise money for church improvements and other expenses; they lent their voices to los Trovadores, a choir sponsored by the church that gained citywide acclaim; and in the 1930s they and their fellow parishioners labored to erect the monument of Cristo Rey (Christ the King) in the neighboring hills. Women carried sand and other materials in their aprons and in pails to the top of the hill, where a forty-three-foot sandstone sculpture of Christ with outreached arms now stands. Adopted as a diocesan and international project in 1937 and dedicated on October 17, 1940, Mt. Cristo Rey is one of the most prominent features on the El Paso skyline. By the 1970s Smeltertown was home to roughly 100 families and was no longer the bustling community it had once been. Many families relocated in the postwar period when they were able to buy houses in other parts of the city. Others were forced to move because of plant expansion and when the county widened what
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Smith, Plácida Elvira García is now Paisano Drive into a four-lane highway. Smeltertown’s demise came in the early 1970s. After an air-pollution suit was filed against ASARCO, health and environmental officials discovered dangerously high levels of lead and other contaminants in the ground and in the homes of Smeltertown residents. More alarmingly, they discovered that a number of children in the area had high lead concentrations in their bloodstreams. Response to the environmental and health hazards was mixed. While residents complied with testing and medical treatment, many longtime residents of Smeltertown also fought relocation and attempted to preserve the community that had been their home for generations. After two years of litigation, testing, medical treatment, and public debates, the company and city officials decided to demolish Smeltertown and ordered the remaining residents to move by January 1, 1973. Although the physical structures of the community are long gone, Smeltertown residents continue to celebrate their community through annual Smeltertown reunions, a testimony to their enduring sense of community. See also Environment and the Border SOURCES: García, Mario. 1981. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Perales, Monica. 2003. “Smeltertown: A Biography of a Mexican American Community, 1880–1972.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University; Romero, Mary. 1984. “The Death of Smeltertown: A Case Study of Lead Poisoning in a Chicano Community.” In The Chicano Struggle: Analyses of Past and Present Efforts, ed. Theresa Cordova and Juan R. Garcia, 26–41. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press. Monica Perales
SMITH, PLÁCIDA ELVIRA GARCÍA (1896–1981) Born on August 7, 1896, Plácida García hailed from the elite Hispanic gentry that had migrated from New Mexico to southern Colorado. She became a career educator whose commitment to education came from her father, a vocal political advocate for public schools. She attended elementary school in Conejos, Colorado, and then continued her education at Loretto Academy, graduating as class valedictorian in 1915. She received her certification to teach second grade that year and accepted a teaching position in Antonito, Colorado. García taught there for the next three years until 1918, when she became principal of Conejos Grade School. In 1921 she left that position to serve as the deputy county treasurer of Conejos County. In 1924 she left Conejos for the University of Utah, where she had a teaching fellowship and earned a bachelor’s degree with a major in Spanish language and a minor in soci-
ology in 1927. In 1928, after briefly undertaking graduate work in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, she and her husband, Reginald G. Smith, moved to Phoenix, where he took a position at the Arizona Republic. He died in 1938 of a heart attack, leaving her with a young son, Reginald García Smith. Even before her husband’s untimely death García Smith worked outside the home, an unusual occurrence among financially secure, middle-class American women and especially among Latinas. In Phoenix García Smith initially worked as a substitute teacher at Phoenix Elementary School and at Phoenix Union High School. By 1931, however, she had moved away from the sphere of public education to begin a second career as the director of Friendly House, a community center for immigrants seeking to learn English, gain citizenship, and develop job skills. As director of Friendly House from 1931 to 1963, García Smith continued to be an educator, but of adults instead of children, as well as a community builder and promoter of Americanization. Within her first five years at Friendly House García Smith organized Phoenix’s first Spanish-American Boy Scout troop, established the Mexican Dance Project, and with New Deal funds started the Mexican Orquesta and organized the Southside Improvement Club. Between 1929 and 1934 more than 500,000 Mexicans in the United States, an estimated one-third of the population, were deported or repatriated to Mexico, even though the majority of those affected were U.S.-born children. In a controversial move García Smith and Friendly House supported the repatriation effort and facilitated the relocation of hundreds of Mexican residents of Phoenix. During the summers of 1937 and 1939 she attended the University of Denver, taking classes at the School of Social Work. During World War II García Smith was instrumental in establishing a pilot program for a well-baby clinic and a prenatal clinic in cooperation with the U.S. Public Health Department. In 1945 she served as a social worker at the Gila River Japanese Relocation Center in Chandler, Arizona, helping former Japanese American internees rebuild their lives after they were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. During her tenure at Friendly House García Smith was quoted as stating that “[t]he best way to help people is to help them to help themselves.” Many of her programs specifically targeted the practical needs of Mexican and Mexican American women and teenage girls by offering classes in housekeeping skills and English, helping them obtain citizenship, connecting women and girls with both temporary and permanent employment opportunities, and providing day care for preschool children. García Smith not only coordinated the classes, but taught several of them as well. Her fa-
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Soldaderas vorite self-introduction when beginning classes reportedly was “My name is Plácida García Smith. A good American name; a good Mexican name.” In 1961 García Smith was named the Phoenix Advertising Club’s Woman of the Year, not only for her work at Friendly House but also for her overall community involvement. She was, among other things, a charter member of the Phoenix Community Council, an organizer of the Spanish-American Minute Maids during World War II, and a member of the Phoenix Parks Board. Other honors included an award of merit from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1953. After her death in 1981 her accomplishments were described in the Arizona Republic newspaper as having “helped 1,400 people to learn English and to become American citizens.” She also was admitted to the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame in 1982. See also Americanization Programs; Friendly House, Phoenix SOURCES: Marquardt, Frederic S. 1981. “Plácida García Smith: A Life Lived through Teaching Self-Help.” Arizona Republic, July 24, A6; Titcomb, Mary Ruth. 1984. “Americanization and Mexicans in the Southwest: A History of Phoenix’s Friendly House, 1920–1983.” M.A. thesis, University of Santa Barbara.
in the armies. Official military recognition of corn grinders came during a 1700 Spanish expedition against the Mayans when “every fifteen-man squad had an Indian woman to make the nixtamal, grind it and make the dough into tortillas and tamales.” A Spanish army officer noted the sorry condition of the “palms of the women’s hands and the joints of the fingers, raw and festering from the continuous grinding.” Because so many women were in the army camps, there arose a tradition among soldaderas to gravitate toward the battlefields and trenches and engage in combat on a spontaneous basis. These women’s actions made them “part-time” soldiers when they crossed the line from camp followers to warriors. By 1910 soldaderas had become a regular feature in most Mexican armies. Military officials considered them a “necessary evil” because the armies did not provide commissary corps to forage for and grind the corn or use corn mills to feed the soldiers. Soldaderas provided these services and in so doing decreased the number of desertions by soldiers. In 1912 the Mexican army (los federales) threatened to revolt when orders arrived that prohibited soldaderas from accompanying them. The order was rescinded, and the soldaderas followed their soldiers.
Eve Carr
SOLDADERAS Soldaderas were women who served in Mexican armies primarily as corn grinders, cooks, foragers, nurses, and servants to soldiers from indigenous times until 1925. Mexicanas became soldaderas either by joining their male relatives in armies or by being kidnapped and forced to follow soldiers to cook, clean clothes, and provide other “services.” They were known by many names—women warriors, mociuaquetzque (valiant women), auianime (pleasure girls), camp followers, capitanas, coronelas, Adelitas, Juanas, cucarachas (cockroaches), viejas (old ladies), and galletas (cookies). The practice of armies using women as corn grinders can be traced back to Aztec armies. The Spaniards inherited the practice when Hernán Cortés received twenty women slaves in 1519 to cook and grind corn for maize bread, including Malinalli Tenepal, who would later become known as La Malinche. She can be considered a famous soldadera, a woman who rose from the ranks and became the equivalent of a conquistadora. Called india molenderas, women corn grinders accompanied most military expeditions, but often not in adequate numbers. Statistics for the numbers of women corn grinders and servants range from 20 to 30 percent of the total recruits
A soldadera during the Mexican Revolution. Photograph by Agustín Victor Casasola. Courtesy of Foteca del INAH.
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Solis, Hilda L. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) probably the most fascinating woman soldier to emerge from the ranks of the soldaderas was General Petra Herrera. A former corn grinder, she disguised herself as “Pedro,” a male soldier, and became a heroine of several battles. She proclaimed herself generala and led her own army of 1,000 women. Many soldaderas died during the Mexican Revolution, and many soldiers’ accounts lament the tragic vision of thousands of dead women on the battlefields. Not surprisingly, the most popular corridos were often about strong, valiant soldaderas such as La Adelita, La Valentina, and Juana Gallo. The soldaderas were eliminated from Mexican armies in 1925. From the 1930s to the 1990s they gained notoriety in films and books about the Mexican Revolution. Their reputation became part of a national identity formation as “patriotic heroines” and at other times as “backward, wanton whores.” Mexicans who migrated to the United States added additional views of the soldaderas as survivors. During the Chicano student movement the soldadera image was popular among both men and women. For men, the soldadera implied a woman struggling for justice alongside her man, and for women, it applied a safe space between feminist and loyalist, a strong independent revolutionary figure that did not threaten their men. Chicana feminists also embraced soldaderas like Petra Herrera as visionary woman warriors. The armed rebellion by the Emiliano Zapata National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the state of Chiapas on January 1, 1894, changed the name of women fighters from soldaderas to Zapatistas demanding equality in the military and promotions to top leadership ranks. Infantry Major Ana María gained the attention of the world as the officer in command of the capture of San Cristobal de las Casas. Mexicanas have proven that women have always been a part of armies in a variety of roles and that a vibrant warrior spirit continues to be part of their heritage.
represent the Thirty-second Congressional District of California. California state senator Richard Alarcón of the Twentieth District endorsed Solis in her congressional race, citing her courage and dedication to issues of importance to women. As a member of Congress, she has been the first Latino to serve on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, where she is the highest-ranking Democrat on the Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee. This Subcommittee oversees cleanup of the nation’s most polluted communities. Throughout her political career in California and in the United States Congress Solis has advocated for the issues important to working families, including the environment, health, labor, and immigration. When she was elected to the newly reapportioned Twenty-fourth Senatorial District in November 1994, Solis also made history as the first Latina elected to the California State Senate. Her successful bid for office proved that Latinas could be elected on their own initiative. Solis was born in 1957 to a Mexican father, Raúl Solis, and a Nicaraguan mother, Juana Solis. She attended elementary school in the San Gabriel Valley, Sparks Junior High School, and La Puente High School. Her parents, Solis affirms, “view my career in a positive way. . . . they still live in the house where I was raised.” Her husband Sam, a small-business owner in the San
See also Mexican Revolution SOURCES: Alatorre, Angeles Mendieta. 1961. La mujer en la revolución mexicana. Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación; Poniatowska, Elena. 1969. Hasta no verte Jesús mio. Mexico City: Ediciones Era; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Salas, Elizabeth. 1990. Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Austin: University of Texas Press. Elizabeth Salas
SOLIS, HILDA L. (1957–
)
In November 2000, after a tough battle against an incumbent Latino politician, Hilda Solis was elected to
Congresswoman Hilda L. Solis. Courtesy of the Office of Congresswoman Hilda L. Solis.
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Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza Gabriel area, is equally supportive of her endeavors. The first of seven children to attend college, she earned a baccalaureate degree at California Polytechnic, Pomona, and a master’s degree at the University of Southern California. As editor in chief for the Office of Hispanic Affairs during the Carter administration, Solis also worked for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. From 1985 to 1992 she served two terms on the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees. In 1991 Solis was appointed to the Los Angeles County Insurance Commission. In 1992 she was elected to represent the Fifty-seventh Assembly District, El Monte, California. As majority whip in the California Senate, Solis was an integral part of the senate Democratic leadership. She chaired the Senate Industrial Relations Committee, the Senate Subcommittee on Asia Trade and Commerce, and the Select Committee on Bilingual Education. She was vice-chair of the Committee on Finance, Investment, and International Trade and was a member of the Budget and Fiscal Review, Energy, Utilities, and Communications, Environmental Quality, and Health and Human Services committees. As a California state senator, Solis built a distinguished record, particularly in terms of health care and the environment. A strong advocate for battered women and senior citizens, She is associated with the passage of legislation that provided approximately one million dollars to the Department of Justice to support nursing home investigations and prosecutions in partnership with local district attorneys in the state of California. Solis’ concerns about environmental health, women, children, and farmworkers is evident in the legislation she supports. She coauthored bills to ban the use of the short hoe and to make stoop labor illegal in California. As a Senator, Solis appropriated issues other legislators feared to touch, such as crime, domestic violence, education, living wages, sweatshops, and welfare reform. In Congress she got legislation passed that prioritized ways to clean up the San Gabriel River in her community, which has been devastated by industrial pollution. The San Gabriel River Watershed Study Act, a model for the nation, was signed into law (Public Law No. 108-042). In 2005, Congresswoman Solis is the first Latina to serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee and the ranking member of the Environmental Hazardous Materials Subcommittee. She is associated with the passage of the Military Citizenship Act that makes it easier for immigrants serving in the U.S. armed forces to become naturalized citizens. Along with Jeff Bingaman, senator from New Mexico, they have cosponsored a congressional resolution about the 400 women murdered in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua
Mexico over the last decade as a way to raise greater American public awareness and, in a symbolic manner, to prod Mexican law enforcement to implement effective measures to stop the violence. Solis is an important role model for young Latinas. In demand as a speaker, she draws upon her personal struggle as a minority woman from a working-class family to reach her goals. In 1996 California Polytechnic at Pomona, her alma mater, established the Hilda L. Solis Scholarship to honor her support of and dedication to the university. It also named a library room in her honor. Solis has been recognized and honored for her contributions by many organizations, including the San Gabriel Valley Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the California State University Alumni Council, the American Diabetes Association, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Environment California, the California League of Conservation Voters, and the California Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In addition, Solis was honored with the Profiles in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in 2000, the first woman to receive the award. See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Amnesty International, USA. “Take Action. Help Bring Justice to the Women of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, Mexico.” http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/action (accessed July 23, 2005); Hernández, Daniel. 2003. “Military Citizenship Act Hailed.” Los Angeles Times, December 4, B3; Pringle, Paul. “The River that LA Forgot.” 2003. Los Angeles Times, December 23, A1; Solis, Hilda. 2001. Telephone interview with Merrihelen Ponce; U.S. House of Representatives. “Congresswoman Hilda. Solis.” http://solis.house.gov/ (accessed July 23, 2005). Merrihelen Ponce
SOSA-RIDDELL, ADALJIZA (1937–
)
Notable educator and scholar Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell’s philosophy of life and commitment were greatly influenced by her early experiences. A critical influence on Sosa-Riddell was her father, Luz Paz Sosa. SosaRiddell’s parents, Luz Paz Sosa and Gregoria López, came to the United States from Mexico sometime between 1918 and 1920. Paz Sosa came first through Matamoras and worked in Texas and then in the Kansas meatpacking industry. He returned to Mexico to get Gregoria and her older sister. The family settled in New Mexico, where Paz Sosa worked on the railroad, but they separated soon afterwards. Paz Sosa left for California with friends and there joined the flow of migrant workers “pescando todo lo que había” (picking up all kinds of jobs) from southern California to San
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Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza Jose and farther. Around 1925 Gregoria came to Los Angeles, where she was reunited with Luz. Together they went to live in a shack in Colton, California, that was made of railroad siding. Ada, as those close to her called her, was born in Colton on December 12, 1937. Though both her parents had little formal education, they were self-taught and highly literate people. They taught their children to do well in school. Politics also played an important role in the household. SosaRiddell’s father, a revolutionary in Mexico, was arrested several times in the United States for his radical socialist activities. Sosa-Riddell called him a trade unionist. For Sosa-Riddell, the summer was about work; the rest of the year was about school. Having a sister who studied at the University of California at Berkeley, she made up her mind that she, too, would go to Berkeley. Although she did not excel in school sufficiently to become valedictorian like her sister, she did well enough to graduate in 1955 and get accepted at the new University of California campus at Riverside. A fellow classmate, however, was going to Berkeley. He convinced Sosa-Riddell that this was her lifelong dream. She applied to the University of California at Berkeley and was accepted. With a $200 scholarship and $200 from summer work, Sosa-Riddell set off to Berkeley to stay with her sister and attend the university. She received a B.A. in political science and later her master’s degree. While she was a junior at Berkeley, she married William Riddell. Completing their graduate studies, Ada and William returned to Colton, where she taught elementary school for seven years. It was during this time that she accomplished what she regards as her greatest life achievement: building her parents a comfortable home and providing for them emotionally and financially until their deaths. Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell was the first Chicana to receive a Ph.D. in political science in the United States. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside. In 1971 she began teaching at the University of California, Davis, and two years later she was named director of the Chicano Studies program. She was responsible for course development, faculty recruitment, budget decisions, and community outreach efforts. She created and taught courses such as Introduction to Chicano Studies, Chicanos in Contemporary Society, Women in Politics, Political Economy of Chicano Communities, and U.S./Mexican Border Relations. Commitment to Chicanas/os and Chicana/o studies led Sosa-Riddell to become a founding member of several internationally and nationally recognized organizations, including the National Association for Chicana
Prominent Chicana feminist educator Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, 2000. Courtesy of Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell.
and Chicano Studies (NACCS) and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS). The mission of both organizations is to foster the development of Chicana/o and Latina/o scholarship and nurture young scholars. MALCS specifically is organized to confront the predominantly Eurocentric patriarchal bases of contemporary knowledge. Lobbying efforts by Sosa-Riddell and MALCS helped establish the Chicana/Latina Research Center. MALCS sponsors a yearly institute and publishes a journal titled Voces. During the 1990s SosaRiddell was general editor of Voces. In addition to her scholar/activism, Sosa-Riddell has numerous publications. Among these are “Chicanas as Political Actors: Rare Literature, Complex Practice” in National Political Science, 1993; “The Bioethics of Reproductive Technologies: Impacts and Implications for Chicanas/Latinas” in Chicana Critical Issues, 1993; “Parlier California: A Case of Chicano Politics” in Journal of Aztlán, 1978; and “Chicanas en el Movimiento,” Journal of Aztlán, 1974. The recipient of numerous awards, Sosa-Riddell was Woman of the Year in Education for the Sacramento Area YWCA in 1992, Scholar of the Year for the National Association for Chicano Studies in 1989, and Scholar of the Year for the Business and Professional Women’s Association in 1988.
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Soto Feliciano, Carmen Lillian “Lily” Although Sosa-Riddell has been battling Parkinson’s disease in recent years, this has not hampered her activity. She retired from the University of California at Davis, in 2004 but still mentors students, works closely with MALCS and NACCS, and continues writing and enjoying her family, and community. See also Chicano Movement; Education SOURCE: Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit: Gale Research. Linda Apodaca
SOTO FELICIANO, CARMEN LILLIAN “LILY” (1933–1997) Carmen Soto Feliciano was a lay associate in the Iglesia Luterana La Trinidad in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, as well as a community organizer. She was born on November 19, 1933, in Florida, Puerto Rico, the oldest of Eulugio Feliciano and Rosa Sotomayor’s three children. Along with her siblings, Julia and José Manuel, Carmen received much of her education in Puerto Rico. In 1954 she earned a normal school teaching degree from the University of Puerto Rico and taught school in Barrios Yune and Ceiba until she married Cecilio Soto in 1957 and moved to the northwest side of Chicago. Soto Feliciano viewed the move as temporary; instead, she stayed in the city for the rest of her life. In three years, 1958–1960, the couple had three children, Evelyn, Roberto, and Pablo. Life in Chicago was not easy for the young family. Soto Feliciano was employed at the Western Electric Company for many years. Once the children were older, she added another responsibility to her busy work and home schedule by returning to evening school in a baccalaureate degree program. Eighteen years after becoming a teacher in Puerto Rico, she received a bachelor of arts degree from Chicago State University in 1974. Employed by the Chicago public school system, she became a bilingual teacher at Davis Elementary School, a position she held until 1976. During the next ten years, 1976–1986, Soto Feliciano was employed by the Division for Mission in North America of the Lutheran Church in America as a lay associate. Her familiarity with the city and neighborhood and its institutions and diverse cultures made her an excellent choice to provide social services for la Iglesia Luterana La Trinidad. She became a community worker for the Lutheran Social Services in Illinois, particularly involved with the Humboldt Park community. In 1980 she completed a law program course for community developers and social workers at the John Marshall Law School sponsored jointly by the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation and the law school.
Lay minister Carmen Soto Feliciano is on the right. Courtesy of Evelyn B. Soto Straw.
Soto Feliciano’s broad experience served her well when she was called upon to play numerous roles. She was a community organizer, evangelist, supervisor of an outreach ministry, and a friend to all who needed her. Having lived in the Humboldt Park community for more than thirty years, she knew its residents, their problems, and how to work with the city’s bureaucratic obstacles. She handled families in crisis. She provided emergency food and clothing when needed, helped secure public assistance, organized motivational and tutoring sessions, counseled families on a myriad of problems, and still had time to organize various women’s groups and a Girl Scout troop. In that way she sought to cement and encourage community spirit. A brochure describing Soto Feliciano’s dedication, the inspiration behind Iglesia Luterana La Trinidad, states: “Carmen even made contact with the Latin Kings, a notorious teenage gang. ‘It’s better to work with them, than to ignore them,’ she explained. ‘I know those kids and they’re not bad. If you treat them as if they’re somebody, they’ll treat you well. When they’re with me . . . they act like my kids.’ ” Soto Feliciano’s recognitions and awards were many. Among them was the Confessor of Christ Award in 1984 from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. This award was presented to her for her “exemplary witness to Christ Jesus and the Gospel by selfless
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Souchet, Clementina service to others.” Other awards include the Distinguished Service Award for Outstanding Volunteer Support from United Way and a Certificate of Recognition for Active and Cooperative Participation in a Latin American Senior Citizen Organization in 1979. Carmen Soto Feliciano died at the age of sixty-three on January 28, 1997. SOURCE: Soto, Evelyn. 2003. Oral history interview by Hector Carrasquillo, January 24. Hector Carrasquillo
SOUCHET, CLEMENTINA (1932–
)
Clementina Souchet, who rose to be a governor’s advisor, was born in Peñuelas, a coastal town in the southern part of Puerto Rico, in 1932. In the first chapter of her autobiography the author reminisces about life in her native town of Peñuelas. The poetic gaze of the migrant woman depicts an idyllic paradise of flamboyanes (a tree in Puerto Rico), chickens, and other local characteristics. She describes her life as “feliz” (happy) and herself as a delicate, fragile girl who loved to daydream. Yet there are signs of trouble in paradise when she describes the double standard characterizing Puerto Rican culture where “para el hombre habia menos restriciones y mas oportunidades” (men faced less restrictions and had more opportunities). As a woman, Souchet felt restricted by all the gender rules and codes she had to live by. She observes that she felt confused by traditional Puerto Rican gender roles. She was told to distrust all men, yet she did not know whether this also included the men in her family. She asked what the difference was between los hombres de afuera (the men outside) and los hombres en la familia (the men in the family). In doing so, she captures the predicament that women of her generation endured and the gendered double standard that has characterized Puerto Rican culture. This became more pronounced when she declared to her parents her dreams and aspirations to be an actress. One of the most insightful moments in her memoir is when she states that “during that time there was little discussion about the feminist movement but I definitely was born free.” Like other Puerto Rican women, Souchet used migration as a way to escape gender oppression and assert the female agency denied to her because of her upbringing and culture. As a young woman, she first moved to Chicago under the pretense of spending a summer vacation with male relatives who had moved to Chicago to work. Once in the city, through correspondence with her parents, she managed to negotiate a more permanent stay. To escape the restrictions placed by her family in Chicago, she married a young Puerto Rican man she met in a movie house. Though
she first saw him as “mi libertador” (my liberator), eventually he became abusive. As a married woman, Souchet strategized about how to leave her husband and have control over her own actions. One of the most important moments in her life occurred when she had a back-alley abortion that nearly cost her life. In this context her autobiography becomes a narrative that must be read as a series of boundary crossings, not as a fixed ethnic or migration story. She is part of a generation of women who with each departure, return, and migration were pushed into a movement of continuous exile and return that is fundamental to understanding the gendered dimensions of the Puerto Rican diaspora. As an immigrant narrative, her book contains some elements of the “rags-to-riches” stories that are popular in the United States, but overall it belongs to the larger choir of diasporic voices articulating the Puerto Rican experience. At another level her life story is important because it comes from the margins of the margin. Most of her life takes place in the Puerto Rican community of Chicago. Although Puerto Ricans have lived in the city of Chicago for more than half a century, autobiographical narratives are rare. Souchet’s autobiography also opens a window into the development of the Puerto Rican community of Chicago from the 1950s through the 1980s. Her story shows the many positions and roles that women played (and continue to play) in constructing community across a transnational space that involves New York, Chicago, and the island. Her involvement in communal activities began when she was selected Miss Puerto Rican Chicago in 1951, the first beauty pageant held in the early stages of community development. Today, the election of Ms. Puerto Rican Chicago has become a tradition of the Puerto Rican Parade celebration. In addition, Souchet’s husband was one of the founding members of the Chicago branch of the Nationalist Puerto Rican Party, which suggests that the connections between political activists in Puerto Rico and mainland communities are much deeper than previously imagined. Yet her political convictions placed her at the opposite end of the spectrum from her husband. As a woman who celebrated Puerto Rico’s connection to the United States, she felt that her husband’s activities were a threat to their family and the nation. She tried to dissuade him from these activities, but to no avail. In a desperate attempt she sought help outside her own network of family and community members. Souchet became an informant for the FBI. After the Nationalist attack in Congress by Lolita Lebrón and others, her husband was arrested and incarcerated for a short time. Eventually Souchet divorced her husband and after a short stay in Puerto Rico returned to Chicago. Souchet’s autobiography can also be read as an essay
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Southwest Voter Registration Education Project about the struggles of Puerto Rican women workers in Chicago. She describes how she dealt with sexual harassment and job discrimination at a time when women had no recourse against perpetrators. Her work experiences placed her in a range of work opportunities, breaking new ground and making history as she moved along. Souchet was nominated to become the first Latina to hold the position of aide to the lieutenant governor of Illinois, Dave O’Neal, to represent the needs of the Latino community, a position that brought her much visibility and many responsibilities. Through this position she became an important leader in Chicago Latino and Puerto Rican politics. Carole Boyce Davies proposes that “if we see Black women’s subjectivity as a migratory subjectivity existing in multiple locations, then we can see how their work, their presence traverses all of the geographic/national boundaries instituted to keep our dislocations in place.” Similarly, Souchet’s story also traverses national, racial, class, and gender boundaries in a way that allows her to negotiate and renegotiate them throughout the different stages of her life. Clementina Souchet belongs to a generation of women who were shaped by tradition, but were not deterred by it; through personal and collective strategies they sought to redefine what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman. Like other women of color, Latinas have used autobiographical narratives as a way to write themselves into history. Through both fictional and nonfictional accounts Latinas have introduced people to powerful and exciting narratives of self-discovery, in the process giving voice to new politicized subjects and agents. Souchet’s autobiography places her in a category of her own, a Puerto Rican migrant woman’s narrative, as she gives voice to the experiences of older immigrant women, who until recently have been known only through accounts written by their daughters. The retelling of Souchet’s story asserts voice and agency, which have been culturally denied to Puerto Rican women of her generation. SOURCES: Davies, Carole Boyce. 1994. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge; McCracken, Ellen. 1999. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Souchet, Clementina. 1986. Clementina: Historia sin fin. Mexico, D.F.: Imprenta Madero. Maura I. Toro-Morn
SOUTHWEST VOTER REGISTRATION EDUCATION PROJECT (SVREP) (1974– ) Founded in 1974, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) is the largest and oldest orga-
nization of its kind in the United States. SVREP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, civic education organization that was founded by William C. Velásquez. After several years of planning Velásquez opened the doors of the organization in an effort to increase the political and civic participation of Latinas/os. In 1984 SVREP opened regional offices in California and the following year chartered a partner organization (known as the Willian C. Velásquez Institute since 1997) dedicated to researching the Latina/o electorate’s opinions. Since its inception SVREP has cultivated more than 50,000 Latina/o civic leaders and activists; 30,000 of them are in the Los Angeles area alone. SVREP continues to increase these numbers through its school for community organizers, the Latino Academy. The organization’s primary activities include voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns. In addition, SVREP sponsors publications, including a working paper series, The Mexican American Electorate. The project has also successfully litigated more than eighty-five voting rights legal suits and has conducted more than 2,300 nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV campaigns in more than 200 communities. In 1974 there were 2.4 million Latinas/os registered to vote. This number grew to 7.7 million in 2001, in no small part because of the work of thousands of grassroots activists from this project. Antonio González heads the SVREP’s current leadership. Previously González served as a SVREP organizer from 1984 to 1990 and as policy program director of the SVREP from 1991 to 1994. There are several prominent Latinas in the SVREP leadership ranks: Patricia González serves as national director of development, Sandra Pérez as the California regional director, and María Acevedo as the California Regional Staff’s data processing clerk. Lydia Camarillo, who formerly served as the executive director of SVREP, made history as the first Latina chief executive officer of the Democratic National Convention Committee in 2000. Since the 1960s, when voter participation across the country reached an all-time high of 63 percent, it has been on a steady decline. In 2000 the percentage of the voting-age population that cast ballots was only 51 percent. Among Latinas/os there are 13,158,000 voting-age citizens; however, only 45 percent reported voting in the 2000 elections. Voting rates also vary according to age and gender. For example, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four are generally least likely to vote, and in recent years women have begun to vote at higher rates than men. Only 26 percent of Latinas/os between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported voting in the 2000 elections. Although the gender gap does not seem significantly large among Latinas/os—44 percent of Latinos reported voting in 2000, compared with 46 percent of
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Spanish Borderlands Latinas—Latinas who are eligible to vote outnumber eligible Latino voters by almost a million. These facts are of particular importance to Latina/o communities because there is a large proportion of Latinas/os who fall into the eighteen to twenty-four age category or will soon do so. Latinas can no longer be underestimated as a political force in this country. Political organizations will do well to focus attention on this often ignored constituency. Therefore, the value of the work done by SVREP cannot be understated because political decisions can and will be strongly influenced by the growing Latina/o population. See also Voting Rights Act SOURCES: De la Garza, Rodolfo O., Martha Menchaca, and Louis DeSipio, eds. 1994. Barrio Ballots: Latino Politics in the 1990 Elections. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; SVREP.com: Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. http://www .svrep.org/ (accessed July 14, 2005); Yáñez-Chávez, Aníbal, ed. 1996. Su voto es su voz: Latino Politics in California. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Gabriela Sandoval
SPANISH BORDERLANDS The southern tier of states extending from California to the Carolinas constitutes the Spanish borderlands, so named because Spain explored and settled parts of this region soon after the time of Columbus. Along with the families of soldiers and settlers, Spanish conquistadores made the first permanent borderlands settlements in Florida (1565) and then in New Mexico (1598) in order to defend their colonies in the Caribbean and the rich mining districts in New Spain (Mexico). Eventually Spanish settlements emerged in today’s southern Arizona and Texas and along the California coast, as well as in French Louisiana, which Spain acquired in 1763. The United States took charge of this vast area by both military conquest and purchase in the first half of the nineteenth century. Spain incorporated much of the Indian population into its colonial communities. The rationale for doing so included religious as well as practical considerations. Spain’s Roman Catholic monarchs believed that they had a religious mission to Christianize the native population and funded the work of religious orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans. In turn, the missionaries taught Indian converts the Spanish language, inculcated Spanish cultural values, and trained them in Spanish manual arts. The practical reasons for acculturating native peoples included the need for Indian labor and the simple fact that Indians outnumbered Spaniards in most places. The Indians had their own strongly held religious traditions and often stoutly resisted missionary efforts
and Spanish domination. The Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, where the processes of Indian resistance and accommodation are best understood, outwardly conformed to Catholic norms but continued to practice their own religion in secret. The exchange of cultural traits was a two-way affair. Spaniards and Mexicans were influenced by their Indian neighbors as they mingled, traded, and intermarried. Distinctive societies predicated on mestizaje emerged. Demography also affected the social and cultural life of the Spanish borderlands. Spanish/Mexican soldiers and settlers were few in comparison with the native population, and Spanish-speaking women were scarcer still. Consequently, there were many sexual liaisons between Spanish men and Indian women. These connections included legitimate marriages, concubinage, brief affairs, and rapes. The outcome was a society that was racially and culturally mixed. This pattern began in sixteenth-century Mexico and extended into the borderlands as Spanish settlements advanced. A traveler to Texas, Juan Agustín Morfi, referred to area colonists as “a ragged crew of all colors.” Indeed, historian Quintard Taylor points out that in the first census for the struggling pueblo of Los Angeles (1781), more than half the families “were of African or part African ancestry.” The experiences of women in the borderlands varied according to class, caste, and culture. Indian women were most likely to be vulnerable to sexual assaults, but in some cases Spaniards regarded “highcaste” native women as desirable marriage partners. Elite women in borderlands society (who were likely defined as “Spanish” even if their genealogy was racially mixed) lived in sequestered conditions in order to protect family honor from the stain of sexual misconduct. Poor women, especially Indians, worked in their own fields and houses or as servants and slaves for others. As Vicki L. Ruiz notes, mestizas and mulattas “over the course of three centuries . . . raised families on the frontier and worked alongside their fathers or husbands, herding cattle and tending crops.” Anglo-Americans began to move into the borderlands in the early nineteenth century when Spain’s grip on the region began to loosen. In the 1820s these newcomers blended uneasily into the borderlands population. From Texas to California Anglo-American men married the daughters of Mexican families, took up the Catholic religion, and swore their allegiance to Mexico. They had many reasons for doing so. Marriages and friendships were good foundations for commercial relationships. Naturalized citizens could take advantage of Mexico’s very liberal land laws, which provided free grants of thousands of acres to encourage settlement of the frontier. Nevertheless, many of these new immigrants were uneasy with Mexican government and so-
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Samuel Augustus Mitchell’s “A New Map of Texas, Oregon, and California: With the Regions Adjoining, 1846.” Courtesy of the American West Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California, 90, 253, 289.
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This photo represents the hardscrabble pastoral life typical of New Mexico during the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, Las Cruces.
ciety and clung to familiar religious and social practices. From Florida to California Anglo-Americans rebelled against and deposed Spanish and Mexican authority. With the help of these insurgents during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) the United States completed the process by conquering Mexico and buying the Southwest. The Spanish borderlands have captured the attention of historians for more than a century. Historians have usually concentrated on the more adventurous stories of priests, missions, soldiers, and Indian wars set in the context of Spanish, French, and British and
U.S. territorial competition. Herbert E. Bolton (1870– 1953) was the most important of these early scholars. He taught at the University of Texas (1901–1909), Stanford University (1909–1911), and the University of California, Berkeley (1911–1943). Bolton wrote dozens of books and trained more than 100 Ph.D. and 300 M.A. students, including many elementary- and high-school teachers. Bolton’s classic volume The Spanish Borderlands gave the field its name, and his interpretation dominated the field long after his death. Bolton saw the Spanish settlement in North America as a great saga that was peopled with venerable explorer-heroes like
Hispanic woman in Colorado beside her horno (oven), late nineteenth century. Trinidad Colorado Collection. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society.
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Spanish Borderlands sity of Oklahoma Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1996. “From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in the United States.” OAH Magazine of History (Winter): 15–18; Taylor, Quintard. 1998. In Search of a Racial Frontier. New York: W. W. Norton; Weber, David. 1992. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Albert L. Hurtado
Colonial Law
Mission Concepción, 1900–1920. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection (Reproduction no.: 04144).
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Juan Bautista de Anza and prominent missionaries such as Junípero Serra and Eusebio Kino. Bolton’s work gained a wide popular audience for borderlands history. The historical vision of Bolton and his students, however, was limited. They celebrated the missionaries’ efforts among the Indians but ignored the negative impact of these institutions. Consequently, in recent years Indian and Mexican scholars have criticized Bolton for presenting a narrow, Hispanophilic view of the borderlands past. Also, women were far more than bit players in the stories Bolton and his students told. The histories of borderlands women generally, and especially poor women, received scant attention from historians. More recently scholars such as Ramón Gutiérrez, Antonia Castañeda, María Raquel Casas, and Vicki Ruiz have done much to correct the distorted picture that Bolton painted. Their work includes imaginative histories of Indian societies, women, and families. They consider not only the Spanish, but also the Mexican past. Anglo-American immigrants are set in the context of a long and vibrant history, rather than being presented as pioneers with a God-given license to conquer the West. Once seen as peripheral to American history, the borderlands now are central to the understanding of the multicultural American West. SOURCES: Bolton, Herbert E. 1921. The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Hurtado, Alberto. 1999. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Kessell, John L. 2002. Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. Norman: Univer-
Women of Hispanic, indigenous, and African descent residing in the present-day southwestern United States lived in Spanish (1550s–1821) and Mexican (1821– 1846) society whose laws were derived from Spain. Las Siete Partidas and Leyes de Toro, thirteenth- and sixteenth-century compilations of law, as well as subsequent royal decrees and canon law, defined women’s legal status in marriage, the family, and society. Mexican and, earlier, Spanish legal and social norms were permeated with a patriarchal ideology that recognized men as the heads of the households to whom wives and children owed their obedience and pledge of honor. A foundation of Spanish law was the widely held tenet of paternal authority (patria potestas) that came from deep in the Iberian past and was embedded in Las Siete Partidas and Leyes de Toro, which located familial authority in male heads of household—fathers and husbands—on the assumption that this delegation of power assured a well-ordered family and stable society. A man had virtually complete authority over his dependents—wife, legitimate children, and any servants in the household—who, in turn, owed him their obedience in all matters. Qualifying a man’s authority was his obligation to support, protect, and guide his spouse and legitimate offspring. The law and social mores also required a husband to respect a wife’s person, but it conceded him the right to dole out mild punishment—the meaning of which varied with time, locale, and circumstance—to her and his other dependents as a way of guiding or teaching them. The ideal home (casa de honor) was a place where husband and wife, regardless of socioeconomic status or racial and cultural identity, treated each other well, supported their dependents, practiced their religion, remained faithful to one another, and otherwise set a good example for their children. Men who abandoned or neglected the livelihood of their households or engaged in excessive punishment violated not only the law but also the norms of their communities. Those same patriarchal values also placed restrictions and responsibilities on men: They had to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families and were forbidden to use excessive force in guiding and instructing their wives, children, and household servants. Illegitimate children,
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Spanish Borderlands or hijos naturales, those born out of wedlock, or hijos espurios, those born as a result of adultery, on the other hand, derived few, if any, benefits from patria potestas. Fathers were expected to support and rear them but not to provide them with any inheritance. Mexicans inherited from Spain strong convictions about the centrality of marriage, sexuality, and the family to the survival of civilized Catholic society. These convictions seemed self-evident to Mexicans living on the northern frontier. Though most local officials lacked formal legal training, they familiarized themselves through custom handed down by previous generations with the relevant civil codes on marriage and the family. At the most elemental level stable marriages and families produced the children who would secure the future and also assure continuity in cultural and moral values. Except through death, a churchsanctioned annulment, or an ecclesiastical divorce (which allowed couples to separate but not to remarry others), marriages, preached the padres, remained indissoluble, even when one spouse was extremely cruel to the other. Regional differences sometimes occurred. In central Mexico, for example, ecclesiastical divorces were permissible in extreme cases, when one spouse was extremely cruel or had physically abused or threatened to kill the other. Additional grounds for divorce were abandonment and inadequate support that forced a spouse to commit a crime, such as prostitution. Absolute proof in the form of eyewitness accounts was necessary to substantiate the transgression. A spouse’s confession was insufficient. In the colonial Southwest, for example, in California, however, these grounds were not sufficient for ecclesiastical divorces, because religious leaders agreed that even in cases of extreme cruelty limited divorce was unacceptable. The priests’ reluctance to grant divorces and to break up unhappy households underscores the weight given to the family in maintaining order, reproducing the population, and developing the region, particularly on the northern frontier, where the growth of a stable society was in its early stages. Closely regulated female sexual behavior before, during, and after marriage was key to maintaining and reproducing honorable and legitimate families, as well as children necessary in the inheritance and transfer of property. Sociosexual codes required women to maintain their sexual virtue (or honor) in and outside marriage: virginity before marriage, fidelity during marriage, and chastity in widowhood. To violate these cultural norms brought shame (vergüenza) to them and dishonor to the men in their homes and to their families in general. Men, in contrast, faced less severe expectations in their sexual behavior. Legally, they faced no repercussions for their sexual activity unless they
committed crimes such as rape or adultery. Their role was to defend female honor and, if necessary, restore the loss of honor to their household brought about by a wife or daughter’s sexual improprieties. A male had the right to place a female in seclusion, often in a convent, to protect his or the family’s reputation and social standing in the community. Males thus enjoyed the benefits of a double standard of sexual propriety that reinforced their authority in marriage and the family. Women, in particular, including wives and daughters, were expected to maintain their marital fidelity during marriage and sexual purity before marriage. Those who dishonored husbands or fathers with sexual indiscretions brought dishonor to the entire family. Honorable men, for their part, maintained their authority over the family and embodied masculinity. Threats to their authority through rape, which was viewed not only as a grave offense against a female’s reputation or sexual virtue, but also as a stain on the husband’s and family’s honor and social standing, were remedied through the law. Hispanic law reflected this attitude, because it allowed male members of a family to kill a perpetrator who was caught in the act of rape. Spanish-speaking women who had children out of wedlock and lived with men who were not their spouses or consorted with married men faced personal and public accusations that tarnished their and their family’s honor and social standing in the community. In the Spanish era authorities sometimes publicly shamed women for leading immoral lives by shaving their heads and one eyebrow and forcing them to stand in and outside church during and after mass on Sundays. One widow who experienced this humiliation was Anastacia Zúñiga, a resident of Los Angeles, California, who had an extramarital relationship with a carpenter from Mission San Gabriel, José Antonio Ramírez, that resulted in the birth of a daughter in 1818. After she appeared in church with her head and eyebrow shaved, the governor ordered Comandante Militar José de la Guerra y Noriega, Los Angeles’ comisionado (a military official with authority over local affairs) to remove her to the presidio of Santa Bárbara and place her in seclusion in an honorable home for six months, where she would be obligated to serve in the household and “lead a religious life as a Christian woman.” Ramírez, on the other hand, faced a less severe punishment. The governor encouraged him to marry Zúñiga and, if he refused, to pay for the child’s support. In the meantime, Ramírez would have to labor for one month in public works. In contrast to Spanish-speaking women, Mexican men who had children out of wedlock or consorted with females who were not their spouses or were married faced few legal or social repercussions for their il-
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Spanish Borderlands licit sexual behavior. Unlike women who belonged to the gente de razón (rational people), men de razón benefited from a double standard of sexual mores that nearly excused them from sexual misconduct yet vilified females for it. Even when a Mexican woman openly identified a man as the father of her child, he was not publicly shamed and was allowed to retain his honor, reputation, and social standing in the community. In all likelihood, fathering an illegitimate child brought some dishonor to a man and, if he was married, to his wife and any children. Despite patriarchal attitudes and laws that restricted women in marriage and the family, females had the legal right to acquire and use their own property. Widows and single women over the age of twenty-five could do so without interference from male family members. Married women and minor daughters, however, needed their husbands’ and fathers’ permission. Women’s rights to land in Spanish/Mexican California derived from decrees and statutes, especially those in the Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las indias, a seventeenth-century compilation used to govern New Spain, and in Las Siete Partidas and Leyes de Toro, summaries that supplemented the Recopilación. During the Spanish era the monarch, as owner of all lands and natural resources in New Spain, held ultimate authority in allocating rights to such property, but the Crown frequently delegated authority to viceroys and other subordinates who, in turn, sometimes vested the power in others. Grantees, whether corporate bodies or individuals, had to fulfill stipulations for acquiring and holding on to land, beginning with an affirmation that no one else claimed the property and that it did not infringe on another’s possession. A grant usually conferred on the recipient a usufruct right, not title in fee simple as in the English colonies. To obtain title, the grantee had to use and develop the land, sometimes in quite specific ways. If these requirements were met, the grantee could retain the property in perpetuity and bequeath it to family members or others. Failure to meet the requirements could result in the property being “denounced” (denunciado) and acquired by others. Women, like men, had the right to acquire and retain property not only through grants but also through endowments, purchases, gifts, and inheritances. A widowed woman, for instance, inherited half of the community property (bienes gananciales) accumulated during a marriage, while daughters shared the remaining half of the property with other siblings. Women could also administer, protect, and invest their property, which they did in a variety of ways: initiating litigation, appearing in court and, if they so wished, acting as their own advocates, entering into contracts, forming business partnerships, administering estates,
and loaning and borrowing money and other goods. A woman’s marital status, however, determined the extent of her control over property, earnings, and domestic activities. Women subject to paternal authority— married women and women under the age of twenty-five, regardless of marital status—needed their husbands’ or fathers’ permission to conduct business related to their holdings. Only widows and single women over the age of twenty-five had freedom from these restrictions. Though unmarried women had the right to carry out their own negocios (businesses), they, as well as their married counterparts, often elected husbands and fathers or other men in the community to represent them in their property transactions. Women did so by giving men power of attorney, which allowed their representatives to conduct all of their money matters, which included the right “to claim, collect, receive, and demand of every person the amounts due,” as well as “to file suits in writing, prosecuting same through all courts to final legal decision.” Unlike widowed and single women over the age of twenty-five, married women who appointed an attorney needed their spouses’ permission to do so. Failure to obtain it nullified the appointment and any transactions carried out. The practice of giving men power over women’s affairs, however, did not diminish a woman’s ability to oversee the management of her assets. Rather, the men who advocated on their behalf did so through the authority their female clients granted them. Therefore, the men were accountable to the women and were expected to carry out their dealings with honesty and integrity, though occasionally the men strayed from their obligations. Women who believed that their representatives had neglected to carry out their duties, either inadvertently or deliberately, could have local officials revoke their power and replace them with other persons. Women’s ability to carry out a wide range of business transactions, either through a representative or on their own behalf, was not limited by the inability of the majority of them to read and write or even sign their names. Illiterate women (as well as men) went to scribes or had literate family members pen their contracts, petitions, and letters. In other cases women handled their business matters in person and went before the proper authorities to articulate their needs or decisions. Nevertheless, the inability to read and write sometimes presented grave risks for women who had to rely on others who could potentially take advantage of their inability to oversee and verify written transactions. In the colonial Southwest Hispanic law governed most aspects of women’s lives, especially in marriage and the family. Legal and social codes defined the extent to which women could wield power over their
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Spanish Borderlands property, children, and their sexuality in and outside marriage. Women who transgressed sociosexual codes of female behavior, for instance, faced serious consequences, while men who committed similar violations of sexual mores encountered few, if any, repercussions. Despite frequently oppressive cultural norms and laws, many women sought a better life for themselves and their families. See also Marianismo and Machismo SOURCES: Arrom, Sylvia Marina. 1985. The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Chávez-García, Miroslava. 2004. Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Lavrin, Asunción. 1989. “Introduction.” In Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Stern, Steve J. 1995. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Miroslava Chávez-García
Comadrazgo Spanish-speaking women who settled in the Spanish colonial borderlands beginning in the early sixteenth century formed women’s networks based upon ties of blood, but also established fictive kinship through bonds of comadrazgo (comothering) that proved central to the settlement of the Spanish Mexican frontier. A close study of these complex relations reveals women’s agency as both settlers and comadres. Women settlers participated in activities such as stock raising and cultivation; however, settler women also acted as midwives to mission Indians and served as godmothers to Indian children through bonds of comadrazgo formalized through the Catholic Church. Children received godparents at birth and later at the holy sacraments of confirmation, first Communion, and marriage. Bonds of comadrazgo enabled the rise of local and regional networks that reinforced the Spanish colonial government’s goal of claiming territory, forming community, and enticing other Spanish colonials to undertake the journey to the borderlands. Ritual kinship relations, or comadrazgo, extended beyond daily routines, care of the sick, celebrations of marriage, baptism, birth, and death. Bonds of comadrazgo brought immigrant and local families together and broadened family ties through the creation of dynamic communities that over time developed precious traditions and customs in an area that was socioeconomically isolated and subject to larger administrative control. Frontier women proved extremely
resourceful in settling the borderlands through complex interactions of race, class, and geography. Yet Indian and Spanish families did not stand on equal footing. Hispanic Catholicism was intended to supplant local native religion, and racial difference between Spaniards and Indians remained a marker of separation. However, racial differentiation during the late colonial period along the northern frontiers lessened in importance as a symbol of discrimination because of the shortage of an easily exploitable native labor pool and the nature of working in the fields side by side with mestizos, Indians, blacks, and whites. Thus the practice of racial mixing between farmers, servants, soldiers, Indians, artisans, and “mixed bloods” became more prevalent along the border. These complex networks birthed a regional history marked by tradition, obligations, duty, respect, love, and inequality. Kinship arrangements buttressed everyday life in the Spanish colonial borderlands. Although men acted as soldiers, agriculturalists, farmers, and artisans, women held their own influence rooted in these intricate female networks. Acting as midwives and as godmothers and baptizing sick or stillborn babies, they extended protection to indigenous people and in turn adopted many of the herbal remedies used in indigenous cures. However, while bonds of baptism tied Spanish settlers with indigenous women, patterns of reciprocity allowed women to care for one another as family and as neighbors under unequal arrangements, since indentured servitude was prominently practiced along the colonial frontier. Although comadre relations fostered ties between colonists and indigenous people, a study of fictive kinship reveals that bonds of comadrazgo helped extend social control over Indians and reinforced a tradition of influence emphasized and extended through female networks of social and spiritual interdependence. Traditions of compadrazgo similarly extended familiar blood ties through godparenting rites formalized through Catholic ceremonies. Compadres would also be responsible for giving advice, financial assistance, and taking over parental duties in instances in which godchildren’s parents passed away. SOURCES: Haas, Lisbeth. 1995. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press; Hurtado, Albert L. 1988. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. 2005. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press; Weber, David J. 1982. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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Soledad Vidal
Spanish Borderlands
Early Settlement Life in the Borderlands To understand the total complexity of Spanish Mexican settlement along what is now known as the Spanish borderlands, one must look beyond the physical evidence left behind, such as missions, presidios (Spanish forts), or towns, and the Spanish names of states, towns, rivers, and mountain ranges that mark the map of the United States of America. When the first Europeans set foot on North American soil, the history of these Hispanic men and women changed the human and natural geography of the region. An understanding of this phenomenon has only recently begun to be woven into the fabric of American history. Spanish attempts to establish physical control and cultural hegemony from California to Florida and for a time from Florida to New England followed similar patterns and processes. However, as the northernmost and often most remote region of the Spanish Empire, the borderlands had distinctive differences and regional identities that distinguished them from other Spanish territories. Throughout the Northern and Southern Hemispheres the Spanish encountered and negotiated with indigenous peoples, but geography and climate also flavored and influenced the resulting colonial settlements. In many ways exploration was the first and easiest phase of initial Spanish encounters; far more troublesome was the process of settlement. The length of time and the geographic expanse of the Spanish settlement greatly influenced the success and means of Spanish colonizing practices. Contrasted with English settlement patterns, the Spanish settlement narrative is often told in overgeneralized terms of missionaries and soldiers cruelly subjugating indigenous peoples, demanding spiritual obedience and labor tribute. Spanish settlement was often seen solely as a male prerogative, in which explorers, soldiers, and friars faced the hardships of conquest and exploration without the solace and support of their womenfolk. Fortunately, recent histories are inserting women and gender perspectives into the processes and patterns of borderland settlement. Women always accompanied Spanish conquistadores, in image if not in body. As Ramón Gutiérrez writes of New Mexico and Virginia Marie Bouvier points out for California, the female images were important symbols and useful icons in establishing the dialogue and pageantry of conquest. In New Mexico Don Juan de Oñate invaded the territory, leading soldiers who marched under a banner depicting Our Lady of the Remedies identical to the one Hernán Cortés had carried into Tenochtitlan in 1519. An Indian woman, Doña Ines, accompanied Oñate as if to mimic the role of the original La Malinche, Cortés’s Indian mistress, interpreter, and invaluable cultural broker during the
conquest. In the 1536 Panfilo de Narváez Florida expedition ten women did accompany the Spanish explorers but were left behind on the ship as Narváez pushed inland. Two women were among Coronado’s expedition, from 1539 to 1543, across the Southeast of North America, and one woman, Ana Méndez, survived the entire ordeal. While most women followed as wives and helpmates, a few distinguished themselves through more “masculine” behavior. The most notable was Catalina de Erausco, who fled her forced convent captivity and disguised herself as a male ensign in the Spanish army. She saw service as a soldier from Panama to Peru. When her female identity was discovered, she was sent back to Spain, but rather than being punished, she became famous and notorious as the Ensign Nun. In California the gendered and sexual nature of conquest was epitomized by the myth of the Amazons, which, according to Bouvier, formalized the policy of conquest regarding gender and race relations. Gender and race provided ideological justifications for a hierarchy of power within the changing social order. As the final wave of colonization, the remote colonies of New Mexico, Texas, Southern Arizona, and California drew settlers mostly from the administrative province of Nueva Viscaya, the so-called heart of the North. The discovery of silver in Zacatecas, Durango, and Chihuahua soon after the Conquest of Mexico fanned out Spanish settlement in these remote regions. After 1734 Nueva Viscaya remained the keystone of the northern frontier because it would supply the model of settlement, as well as the majority of settlers to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. Settlements replicated the settlement of Nueva Viscaya and followed a general pattern of an initial entrada, then the establishment of mining settlements and a small number of haciendas. Agriculture and raising livestock soon developed, dominating the regional economies. Evangelizing indigenous people and increasing the settlement population were both slow processes. The establishment of various civilian settlements, ciudades, villas, pueblos, and parajes, encouraged the recruitment of a small number of settlers. Living in these varied municipalities granted settlers the rank of vecinos (neighbors), along with entitlement to land lots within the municipalities. Housing the largest populations, ciudades were the seats of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Presidios also attracted settlers but were administratively different from other civilian settlements. Population grew steadily and included a mixedblood group of Europeans, Indians, and Africans. During the colonial periods an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 African slaves were imported to four main areas in Mexico: Mexico City, Tlaxcala-Puebla, Mi-
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Spanish Borderlands choacán, and Zacatecas. Arguments against slavery by the Catholic Church were muted by the depopulation of the Indians from disease and demand for a secure source of labor by the affluent elites. In 1646 there were 130,000 Afro-mestizos, compared with nearly 125,000 Spaniards, mostly criollos, and 1,269,607 Indians. Under Spanish law slavery was subject to manumission; therefore, free children could enter the marriage pool, assuring a triracial mixing in the areas of heavy slave importation. The development of a casta (caste) system to categorize and describe the emerging mestizo and mulatto population allowed Afromestizos a degree of social mobility from a lower class into a higher one. Statistics show that migration within certain provinces was a fact of life. By the mid-eighteenth century the majority of inhabitants were native born and of mixed-race ancestry. As in other sites of colonization, the distinctive names used in racial identification often led to confusion. Spanish-born individuals could be called españoles, gauchupines, criollo (a Spaniard born in the colonies), or peninsulares (a Spaniard born in the peninsula of Spain), with each distinction connoting varying degrees of social status and possible prestige. An español born in Spain was more advantaged socially than a colonial-born gauchupine. After the Spaniard came the various castas, whose designations were crude yet often lyrical. In a series of casta portraits produced throughout the eighteenth century, people were categorized according to degrees of racial mixture. Three of the more interesting casta categories were coyote, lobo (wolf), or no te entiendo (I do not understand you). Casta designations numbered from fourteen to twenty depending on the region, and while a general hierarchy existed, with full-blooded Spaniard as the most elevated racial position and full-blooded African as the lowest, the remoteness of frontier settings mitigated how this hierarchy was enforced. Local conditions and local sensibilities distributed status and honor based on race and class; therefore, how one’s community described a person’s race and class varied throughout the Spanish borderlands. In the borderlands colonial conditions tended to erase the more complex and nuanced casta system that made sense in central Mexico, and by 1800 the majority of borderland people were officially referred to as being either indios or no indios. Another catchall phrase used for castas was gente de razón, literally people of reason, thereby excluding all Indians in the borderlands. Another important cultural component in understanding the early settlements of the borderlands is the implementation of the Spanish honor and shame system regarding race and gender. Because Spain was a Catholic nation, the Spanish honor system was heavily steeped in the cult of the Virgin Mary, or marianismo,
which valued female sexual chastity over male. During the Reconquista of Spain, the period when the Moorish invaders were removed from Spain, Spanish society developed a complex set of social attitudes dictating how social mobility could be achieved through definitions of honor and shame. Embodying status and virtue, the Spanish American honor system fluctuated. Men inherently had and could achieve more in their culturally bound honor bank accounts, but women also manipulated, contributed to, and protected their personal and social honor depending on the means they had at hand. Their proper actions in maintaining their personal and public reputations allowed them to maintain or even ascend the social hierarchical ladder if they married well and remained sexually virtuous. Furthermore, honor was assigned at birth and through race, but it also influenced how Spanish subjects conducted their courtship, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, marriage, access to political office, and employment. Unlike other European women, Spanish women exercised legal privileges that included the right to own, buy, sell, inherit, and convey property in and outside marriage. Increasingly scholars are emphasizing the importance of local conditions and distributions of honor and social status in understanding the experiences of the Spanish New World. Women are often depicted as pawns in the honor system, but the fact that women protected and guarded their honor from malicious gossip either by personally confronting their defamers or especially through the legal system gives evidence of both the values and actions of women. Whether women acted through a well-placed slap to tighten a salacious tongue or through a lawsuit, and everything in between, they were highly conscious that local conditions and local communities were the final judges and arbitrators of honor, and as local actors, women were central to the play. Communities throughout the Spanish world practiced a sexual double standard that admired men’s virility and sexual conquest, yet punished a woman who brought vergüenza, shame, to her family’s honor. Like race, social status was highly fluid in frontier communities; therefore, improper behavior by all members of the family was chastised, but women’s sexuality was under far more parental control and supervision than that of male members. In the initial stages of colonization parents often chose the marriage partners of their children. The scarcities of women often led to the betrothal of girls as young as three or four to men twenty to thirty years their senior. In California the parents of María Antonia Isabela de Lugo betrothed her to Ygnacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo on the day of her birth; he was twenty-six years old. This practice changed over time as the sex ratio became more balanced, and by the early nineteenth century it was common practice
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Spanish Borderlands for children to select their own marriage partners. Although parents heavily guarded their female children, the countless legal cases throughout the borderlands involving the loss of virginity through seduction or consensual illicit sex and the illegitimacy rates indicate that women expressed and controlled their sexuality, but often paid a heavy social price for these actions. Most often the decision to resettle along the frontier was made by men as husbands or fathers. If the 1776 Anza expedition is indicative of frontier settlers, then statistically women were on the average twenty-eight years old, had married in their mid-teens, were married an average of twelve years, and averaged four children. Rather than being young mothers, most of the women were in the middle of their childbearing years and traveled with their nuclear families. The scarcity of women varied over time and place. Few places were as extreme as the presidio of San Marcos de Apalachee, where in 1802 there were only three women to 168 adult males. This scarcity of women made marriage a crucial decision throughout the borderlands. In New Mexico, before 1739, the majority of men married younger women; at least 34 percent were six years or more older than their brides. But after 1770 the proportion of persons marrying someone their own age steadily increased and reached 50 percent by 1800. By 1790 women outnumbered men in New Mexico not only because of natural increase through settler marriages but also because of the number of children produced through legitimate and illegitimate unions with female Indian slaves. Illegitimacy was more common in the frontier. Twenty percent of children born in Texas in 1790 were illegitimate; in Pensacola in 1820, 25 percent were illegitimate. In New Mexico between 1693 and 1848, 82 percent of all children born to Indian slaves who were baptized were illegitimate. As wives and mothers, frontier women faced harsh conditions. If they were soldiers’ wives, they lived within the walls of the presidios. Adequate housing was a chronic problem in the presidios, and women made do in houses that averaged twenty-one by twenty-four feet. Within this small space a woman took care of her husband, their four to six children— the average family size along the borderlands—and possibly one or two servants, depending on the status of the family. If the family had not brought the necessary household items with them, the women had to survive on the provisions distributed by the military authorities. Supplies of food and clothing were very often inadequate, and the household talents and skills of the women were crucial to survival. Military concerns rather than familial concerns were a priority. Women could not leave the presidios without written permission; therefore, caring for a garden outside the presidio
walls and supplementing the family diet often proved difficult. Only officers or wealthy settlers received property deeds to land outside the presidio, and only because they promised to construct a house, cultivate the land, and permanently inhabit the property. The fathers provided small plots of land but rarely property deeds for the use of the colonists who lived within or near missions, thus encouraging colonists to settle within pueblos or presidios where landownership was more likely. María Ignacia Amador, who lived near the San Gabriel Mission, earned the respect of other women because she knew how to “cook, sew, read and write, and nurse the sick—she was a good curandera—was employed [by the mission] in sewing and taking care of the church robes.” Furthermore, “she taught some children how to read and write in her home, but she did not have a formal school.” The amount of land granted to colonists ranged in size, but the average rancho was at least one square league, or 4,437 acres, but some ranchos were several square leagues and ran into the tens of thousands of acres throughout the borderlands. The crowded presidio conditions also made disease a constant concern, as attested by the high mortality rates, both for infants and adults. More men than women died in the presidios, in some places by a ratio of two to one, which led to an unusual number of orphans, single widows, remarried widows, and widows who served as heads of families. The lack of medical personnel forced the women to provide rudimentary nursing to those in need, as well as being the midwives, parteras, to one another. Countless women relied on and used the various home and herbal remedies they were taught by their mothers to alleviate various illnesses and maladies. Women also relied on Native American medicinal herbal knowledge to battle the new illnesses with which they were unfamiliar, and on the knowledge and services of curanderas, folk healers. If a soldier’s wife survived her husband, she inherited his property and retirement pension. A few soldiers were even awarded parajes, small plots of land, upon retirement, and if the Indians had been adequately pacified, families could escape the overcrowded conditions of the presidio. Landownership was the most dramatic step in achieving social and economic status. The material conditions for women who were rancheras and landowners steadily improved, but even by the 1840s conditions in the borderlands remained harsh. One of the advantages to living on a rancho was more luxurious accommodation as settlers expanded from a one-bedroom house to multiroom homes. Homes were usually simple and unadorned constructions whose materials depended on the geography and native resources. For example, in
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Spanish Borderlands the Southwest adobe bricks, sun-fired earthen bricks often one to two feet in width, were used to build a one-story structure surrounding a central courtyard or patio with small windows and doors. The thick walls provided warmth in the winter and coolness in the summer. The interiors were often devoid of furniture, and only the wealthy could afford beds, cabinets, chests, chairs, benches, mirrors, or religious paintings. Most colonists slept on the floor on mats or rolled their bedding during the daytime to provide seating for the family and visitors. Local craftsmen built the necessary home furnishings, which were often of crude but utilitarian design. The other economic component of rancho life was the growth of livestock herds, which provided a healthier and more abundant diet. By raising either sheep or cattle, along with the necessary horses and mules, small rancheros were able to provide small inheritances to their children. In Laredo, Texas, the wills of small rancheros give an indication of these material comforts. Rather than living in adobe homes, they lived in jacales, houses with a roof or walls of straw, and owned several thousand head of sheep, goats, or cattle that they distributed equally to their surviving children. The distribution of household goods included furniture, clothing, and tableware; for example, in Nicolás de Campo’s will, “a shotgun with its case, a sword, some silk stockings, a short undergarment, cloth trousers, a white undercoat, two large trunks with their keys, two pairs of scissors for shearing sheep, two large books and another of medium size, and two religious pictures” were left to his children. María Nicolasa Uriburu left a trunk each to her two daughters and split between them “a bed, two copper kettles, six plates, a dress of blue silk, one blouse, and her jacale.” Wealth was highly relative along the borderlands, and any goods, regardless of condition or use, were highly prized. Childhood for women was dictated by a close and communal family life that often extended beyond the individual households and into their communities. Family celebrations, family visits, weddings, baptisms, religious and secular holidays, dances and fiestas, horse races, cockfights, and bullfights marked the social life of these remote communities. Because of the small number of settlers, borderland communities were extremely interrelated. Extended and multigenerational families were commonplace and added to social unity. Children learned the proper social, religious, and sexual behavior from their elders, be they parents, grandparents, uncles, or aunts. Formal education for young girls was rare; instead, they were taught the household skills necessary to survive frontier conditions, such as cooking, sewing, cleaning, supervising
Indian servants, maintaining household livestock, and gardening. If education was available, girls were usually taught by neighborhood women. Young women along the borderland had to pay more attention to maintaining their sexual chastity and virtue than to formal education. The strength of family ties was tested when parents died and left orphan children. Traditionally grandparents assumed responsibility for raising orphaned children, but in the absence of grandparents, older siblings or extended relatives left few children unprotected. In the rare case when no relatives existed, neighbors or compadres accepted the Catholic custom of comadrazgo which established coparenting relationships through the rituals of baptism, first Communion, confirmation, and marriage. One of the few orphans who left a personal narrative of her life was Apolinaria Lorenzana, who arrived in California in 1800 at the age of seven. From age ten to her early teens Lorenzana was handed off from household to household, until the fathers hired her as a nurse in the San Diego Mission. Besides nursing, she also assumed supervisorial responsibilities over the Indian neophytes and servants in a variety of necessary mission duties. Apolinaria Lorenzana never married, instead becoming a beata, a pious and devout woman who preferred to remain single; after all, with some pride she stated how she “maintained me through the labor of my own hands.” Sewing and working in the mission allowed her to escape the burdensome duties of wife and mother, a path few women chose along the frontier. Although Apolinaria Lorenzana never married, she was still an important community member. In her lifetime she estimated that she had either baptized, confirmed, or stood as madrina in weddings to approximately 200 persons, whether Indian or gente de razón (persons of reason— usually Spaniards). For this she “had the satisfaction that all young or old, rich or poor loved me, maybe for the good disposition in which I served them all as well as I could.” As stated earlier, the dangers along the frontier often left women alone and unprotected as widows, or what Deena J. González more accurately terms “women without men.” Precarious frontier conditions strained marital and personal relationships to the breaking point, and in New Mexico as many as 10 percent of all women before 1848 were never legally married. At the same time an estimated 20 percent of all New Mexican women had outlived their husbands and were the heads of households. Without the economic support of a man, New Mexican women steadily and consistently remained the poorest social group within New Mexican society. If the single woman heading a household had no property or livestock, wage labor
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Spanish Borderlands was her only resource, along with forcing her children to contribute to the family economy. By 1860, 50 percent of all families headed by a woman had children working. Working as seamstresses, laundresses, or providers of other household services to richer people, as well as using familial and community resources, allowed women without men to survive the onslaught of American invasion, but they remained in greater states of poverty as American control solidified, a condition systematic throughout the borderland after 1848. See also Marianismo and Machismo; Race and Color Consciousness SOURCES: Alonzo, Armando C. 1999. Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Bouvier, Virginia Marie. 2001. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; González, Deena J. 1999. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500– 1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Menchaca, Martha. 2001. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press; Monroy, Douglas. 1990. Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Berkeley: University of California Press. María Raquel Casas
Encomienda Encomienda was a tax imposed on the indigenous peoples as subjects of the Spanish king. It allowed the recipient, called encomendero, to collect that tax in the form of labor, goods, and eventually cash. The tribute collected was a reward for service to the Crown and the conquest of new territories. Encomenderos were obliged to “protect” their wards, Christianize them, and be ready to bear arms for the king. Encomienda had its roots in the territorial reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims who had occupied it beginning in 711. In the New World encomienda did not entitle the settler to land, which had to be acquired independently from the Crown, and did not give the encomendero juridical jurisdiction over the Indians, who remained subjects of the Crown. First used in the Antilles, by the 1520s encomienda was transferred to all territorial acquisitions in the continent. Encomiendas meant a loss of taxes for the Crown, which had no better choice for rewarding its conquistadores in the sixteenth century. Hernán Cortés, as conqueror of Mexico, and Francisco Pizarro and his brothers, as conquerors of Peru, granted encomienda to their followers. When Cortés married Doña Marina (Malintzin) off to Juan de Jaramillo in 1524, he gave her the tribute of the town of Xilotepec as an encomienda. Tributes were also
granted to Isabel and Leonor Moctezuma, who transferred them to their children after their deaths. In Yucatán Leonor de la Encarnación, a relative of Moctezuma, inherited an encomienda from her husband and used it as a dowry to enter the Convent of Our Lady of the Conception in Mérida. In 1583, in Peru, two of Atahualpa’s daughters and a third Inca noblewoman held extensive encomiendas and 2,714 tributaries. In that viceroyalty four Spanish encomenderas held 11,390 tributaries, while thirteen others held good encomiendas. These facts notwithstanding, the number of women encomenderas was never large. Most received encomiendas as heirs of their husbands and had the right to transfer them to their children, irrespective of gender. If an encomendera widow remarried, the encomienda passed to her second husband, and few women succeeded in standing as sole owners. In Peru some viceroys opposed the holding of encomiendas by single women, arguing that through remarriage the encomienda could pass to unworthy men. The Peruvian viceroy the Marquis of Cañete obliged some wealthy encomenderas to remarry in the mid-1550s to forestall this situation. The Crown remained ambiguous about marriage policies, and while it did not revoke the right of a woman to inherit an encomienda, it required royal approval of the intended husband of single encomenderas. Encomenderas held significant power for short periods of time, but in the long term transferring entitlement to sons or husbands eroded their privileges. Some members of the church were opposed to encomienda because it encouraged the exploitation of Indian labor, which was acute in the Caribbean islands. Bartolomé de Las Casas (c. 1474–1566) was the bestknown opponent of encomienda and persuaded Charles V (1517–1556) to side with him and approve an end to encomienda as their holders died. Arguments over the rights of the indigenous people and those of conquistadores and settlers continued until 1542, when the Crown issued the New Laws, which abolished the enslavement of the Indians as a result of warfare and forbade new encomiendas. It deprived royal officers, religious orders, and ecclesiastics of encomiendas and reiterated the exclusive rights of the king to award them. It reduced the number of Indians entrusted to some encomenderos, divested those with illicit titles, and abolished the right to inherit encomiendas for two successive lives. The Crown expected all vacant encomiendas to revert to itself (escheatment) and sought to regain sovereignty over its Indian subjects. The New Laws were not enforced in New Spain (Mexico), where the viceroy asked the king to reconsider enforcement. In Peru they induced a rebellion against the king. Charles V revoked the New Laws, but
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Spanish Borderlands a revised version was applied in 1545. The assessment of taxes by royal officials was integrated into the institution. Eventually the enjoyment for two lives was recognized. By the end of the sixteenth century the encomienda was a declining institution. A demographic catastrophe produced by numerous pandemics reduced the indigenous population drastically, depriving encomenderos of their main source of income. Encomenderos were only a fraction of the Spanish population that settled in the New World since not everybody could prove a key role in the conquest. Encomiendas were still legally held by a few in the core areas of the Spanish Empire in the seventeenth century. In peripheral areas such as Yucatán, northern Mexico, Venezuela, and Paraguay, encomiendas lasted through the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. See also Slavery SOURCES: Himmering y Valencia, Robert. 1991. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555. Austin: University of Texas Press; Martín, Luis. 1983. Daughters of the Conquistadors: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Simpson, Leslie Bird. 1960. The Encomienda in New Spain. San Francisco: John Howell; Zavala, Silvio. 1973. La encomienda indiana. Mexico D.F.: Editorial Porrúa. Asunción Lavrin
Women in California As in other Spanish settlements throughout the New World, settlement in California began in 1769 with an entrada, a militarized excursion in conjunction with Catholic priests to exert military and spiritual conquest and to defend New Spain’s northernmost border against foreign enemies. Sixty soldiers and nineteen Franciscans constituted the initial presidio and mission settlements established in San Diego and San Francisco; however, outbreaks of violence by the Spanish soldiers, particularly sexual violence against indigenous women, hastened the need for civilian and female settlers to maintain social order. By 1773 all branches of royal authority recognized and supported the recruitment of Spanish Mexican women and families to normalize social conditions in California. The majority of colonial Spanish Mexican female settlers, pobladoras, arrived in California between 1774 and 1781, recruited mainly from the Sinaloa and Sonora provinces by both the church and the Crown. Spanish Mexican women in California were seen as essential settlers and helpmates in advancing the Spanish hegemonic, colonizing efforts. Women’s multifaceted contributions included teaching indigenous women domestic skills such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning, supervising and disciplining the labor and spiritual lives of the natives, thereby supporting the Christianiz-
ing efforts of the friars, and finally, becoming the wives and helpmates of Spanish soldiers and settlers. An illustration of the scarcity and desirability of single women was the union of María Antonia de Lugo and Ygnacio Vallejo on September 2, 1776; he was literally present at her birth and negotiated his betrothal with her parents the same day. They married in 1791; she was fourteen, he was forty. Living conditions in the presidio, mission, and pueblo settlements slowly improved, but colonists continuously faced sickness, Indian raids, delayed arrivals of often inadequate supplies, overcrowded housing, and inflated prices on poorly made goods. The majority of Spanish Mexican women in California were both mestizas and military wives accustomed to the harsh frontier settings, often being second- or thirdgeneration frontier people. The Spanish frontier was expanded not by raw recruits from central urban areas, but by generations of settlers born and raised along the frontier. In terms of race, Sinaloa and Sonora developed fluid casta societies through the practice of assigning people into prescribed racial categories, but as Antonia I. Castañeda points out, in California “compound designations dropped off and español, mestizo, neófito, and gentil became the most frequently used terms, with some individuals moving across the spectrum from indio, or mulato, to español.” Women’s scarcity privileged them in negotiating this racial and socioeconomic “pigmentocracy,” privileges they used depending on their individual means and social status. Beyond reproduction in the settlement population, women’s labor was vital to the various settlement populations and was thoroughly integrated within the labor system of both the military and mission institutions. As Antonia Castañeda points out, “Wives and daughters instructed Indian women in Hispano women’s domestic work, thereby advancing the project of Hispanicizing the indigenous population.” As the llavera (key keeper) of the San Gabriel Mission, Eulalia Pérez began her work days at daybreak, supervising the making of pozole (hominy soup) for breakfast, and her day did not end until she locked the neophyte girls into their sex-segregated dormitories at night. Like their menfolk, women were heavily invested in the success of conquest and made vital contributions to these hegemonic efforts. Throughout frontier settlements marriage and family were the cornerstone of successful settlement, but a few did choose to remain single. For example, Apolinaria Lorenzana, who supported herself as llavera in the San Diego Mission, was rewarded for her labor and diligence with two small ranch grants in 1840 and 1843. Initially, rancho grants were awarded by the Crown to retired military personal to encourage continued settlement, but in time women were also granted land
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Spanish Borderlands rights. These ranchos eventually became the means for the development of a Californio rancho elite that dominated social, economic, and political life. Under Spanish legal tradition women could own, sell, and buy land or property, as well as enter into binding contracts. All property brought into a marriage by either partner became communal property, and this transformed women into important economic agents. As wives and mothers, Spanish Mexican women were integral to the successful maintenance of the ranchos. The life cycle of Spanish Mexican women usually entailed being taught household skills such as cooking, sewing, cleaning, and gardening by their mothers, marrying as early as twelve or thirteen, bearing an average of six to seven children, and, if they were raised on a rancho, learning to supervise the labor of numerous Indian servants. Collectively, women were crucial to the stability, growth, and success of this remote colonial society. SOURCES: Casas, María Raquel. 2006. “Married to a Daughter of the Land”: Interethnic Marriages in California, 1820–1880. Reno: University of Nevada Press; Castañeda, Antonia I. 1990. “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11:8–20; ——— . 1990. “The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californianas.” In Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo, 213–236. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press; ——— . 2000. “Hispanas and Hispanos in a Mestizo Society.” OAH Magazine of History (Summer): 29–33; Monroy, Douglas. 1990. Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Berkeley: University of California Press. María Raquel Casas
Women in New Mexico (1540–1900) Until the past few decades Spanish Mexican women’s history had not been well understood nor explored. Central figures in New Mexico’s history, Spanish Mexican women experienced harsh environmental and social conditions from the settlement of the first Spanish colonies in the sixteenth century through the U.S. conquest in the nineteenth century. Their survival testifies to each generation’s endurance and strength. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s 1540 expedition into New Mexico included at least three women. Little is known about them, but they were likely the first “Spanish” women to see New Mexico. Their journey was short lived because the expedition retreated within two years after failing to locate substantial wealth. Spanish expeditions did not return to New Mexico in force until 1598, when Juan de Oñate established the first imperial settlement in New Mexico at San Gabriel del Yunque. Official records note that at least two dozen women accompanied Oñate’s soldiers
“Portrait of a Girl,” painting by Henri Penelon of a Sepúlveda family member, circa 1860s. Courtesy of the American West Collection, Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California. Acquisition made possible by the Ramona Chapter, Native Sons of the Golden West.
as wives and daughters. An additional unknown number of mestizo and Mexican indigenous women also accompanied the expedition as servants. During the seventeenth century colonization developed slowly. Because of the limited number of Spanish women who accompanied expeditions into New Mexico, male colonists formed relationships with indigenous women or with black slaves. Although New Mexico’s later generations frequently claimed “pure Spanish blood,” racial and cultural intermixture was the historical reality. In 1631 a Franciscan priest characterized New Mexico’s colonial population as “mestizos, mulattos, and zambohijos (a racial classification).” It is almost impossible, however, to document the specific racial origins of most seventeenth-century women in New Mexico. Many indigenous women joined the colonial community and were considered “Hispanicized” (españolada). Official records did not always note this racial and cultural mixing. Often these women and their descendants were listed as “Spanish” to contrast them with the indigenous communities. Nonetheless, women of all racial and cultural backgrounds faced harsh conditions in Spain’s expanding imperial territories. Oñate’s successors became em-
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Spanish Borderlands broiled in conflicts over the division of civil and religious authority that resulted in political and military instability. Indigenous Pueblos, moreover, suffered under constraints set by Catholic priests for religious conversion and colonists’ demands for labor. The ensuing tensions escalated into a massive revolt by Pueblo communities in 1680. One of the best-organized and most successful native rebellions in North America, the Great Pueblo Revolt effectively eliminated Spanish settlement in New Mexico between 1680 and 1692. Pueblos killed several hundred Spaniards, including numerous women, during the initial days of the revolt. About 2,000 colonists fled to El Paso along with their dependents and allies. After twelve years Spaniards returned to New Mexico, and the balance of authority shifted from religious leaders to civil authorities. The number of European women arriving in New Mexico continued to be scant after 1692. Franciscan friars and government authorities kept occasional records of settlement in New Mexico, but the best demographic information derives from the census report ordered by Vicerooy Revillagigedo (Juan Vicente Giremes Pachecoy Padilla, Count of Revillagiged) in 1790. By that time the 31,000 people designated españoles (nonindigenous) accounted for about half of New Mexico’s population. Santa Fe appeared unusual in this census because women outnumbered men (53 percent of the population versus 47). In the rest of the colonial settlements men outnumbered women, although usually by a small ratio. Although they were almost half the population, Spanish Mexican women occupied ambiguous positions as they negotiated conflicting social and economic demands. Spain’s eighteenth-century legal system did not overtly limit women’s rights as severely as the English system. Women in New Mexico retained their property after marriage, conducted business in public, and filed suits in local courts. Husbands could not claim any property that a woman owned before marriage. Widows who managed their property or poor married women earning wages in public spaces were not seen as particularly unusual in New Mexico before the Mexican-American War. Women’s legally defined access to public venues did not translate into egalitarian relationships with men. New Mexico’s legal and social codes limited women’s rights and privileges on the assumption that women “belonged” to a family headed by a man. Ramón Gutiérrez’s work remains the most widely cited study of gender and sexuality in colonial New Mexico. As Gutiérrez documented, social and legal practices in colonial New Mexico prescribed women’s behaviors based on notions of honor and shame. Most Spanish colonists believed that women were more susceptible
to temptations and therefore would be unable to resist men’s desires. To preserve the honor of the family, men were expected to “protect” women from shame by enforcing their seclusion. Women found guilty of adultery, for example, were severely punished, while men faced few legal penalties for the same offense. Legal codes could also require women to stay in marriages regardless of abuse. The ideal woman was expected to limit her duties to her home, her family, and the Catholic Church. Some have argued that New Mexico’s remoteness escalated the importance placed on this moral code. In practice, though, only the very wealthy could afford to keep women completely secluded. New Mexico’s limited economy meant that most women performed some type of labor outside their home. Harsh agricultural conditions, for instance, often required all available household members to plant and harvest. When Zebulon Pike passed through New Mexico in 1807, he noted that men, women, and children all cultivated the fields. Census records also indicate that a sizable number of women worked in paid occupations as servants, bakers, weavers, gold panners, shepherds, laundresses, stocking knitters, healers, midwives, ironers, and venders. Moreover, men in the most common occupations (soldiers, muleteers, shepherds, and hunters) frequently left their home for much of the year. During these absences women supervised households and defended the family’s public rights. Many women took advantage of the frontier conditions to act independently within the legal code and to defend their own positions. Belief in Manifest Destiny and economic expansion brought nineteenth-century Euro-Americans flooding into New Mexico in 1821. Spain’s imperial policies had previously forbidden New Mexico from trading with the United States. Mexican independence ushered in an era without such restrictions. Euro-American merchants seized on the opportunity and formed the lucrative Santa Fe Trail. By the time the United States annexed Texas in 1845, New Mexico’s Euro-American merchants had become vocal advocates for appropriating New Mexico as well. In the decades before the Mexican-American War traders frequently used stories about local Mexicans’ gender and sexual behavior as justification for U.S. expansion. M. M. Marmaduke’s 1824 journal, for instance, asserted that the Mexican community lacked “decency.” “The men and women,” he complained, “will indiscriminately and freely converse together on the most indecent, gross and vulgar subjects that can possibly be conceived, without the least embarrassment or confusion.” Spanish Mexican women, in particular, preoccupied the first Euro-American visitors to
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Spanish Borderlands New Mexico. Euro-Americans complained that local Mexican women did not conform to expected gender roles. That lack of conformity, Euro-Americans claimed, was evidence of local Mexicans’ inferiority and status as “uncivilized.” A Euro-American visitor asserted that Mexican women spent their lives in “one incessant round of dalliance, dancing, and devotion.” Euro-Americans also pointed to the large number of women who worked in public as troubling. Married women, under the Euro-American legal system, lost their property and were expected to avoid political or economic activities to preserve their “purity.” Although similar expectations did exist in New Mexico, women commonly pursued business and commercial activities. Merchants and travelers often wrote about Mexican women’s involvement with economic pursuits as the most shocking evidence of racial difference. Doña Gertrudis “La Tules” Barceló was one of the most discussed women in nineteenth-century New Mexico. Barceló became a prominent business leader in Santa Fe by successfully capitalizing on the influx of Euro-American traders in the 1830s and 1840s. When she died in 1852, she had accumulated more than $10,000. Barceló made her fortune serving liquor and dealing cards to traveling Euro-Americans. Politicians and military leaders frequently appeared at her establishment seeking Barceló’s advice. Her prominence, however, created scorn among Euro-American travelers, as well as some local Mexicans. On several occasions Barceló defended her honor in court against slanderous allegations brought by neighboring Mexican women. For many Euro-American traders, soldiers, and adventurers who traveled to New Mexico, Barceló’s success and independence elicited harsh anti-Mexican stereotypes. On the eve of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) EuroAmericans equated Barceló’s success with “loose habits”
and “unbridled passions.” The successful businesswoman became one of Euro-Americans’ favorite examples of Spanish Mexican “degeneracy.” Given this hostility toward them, Mexican women’s ambivalent reaction to U.S. troops’ 1846 invasion is not surprising. The Mexican governor abandoned the territory shortly before the American military arrived in Santa Fe on August 19. Mexican women and other citizens were left without military defenses as they faced a new imperial authority. According to reports from U.S. soldiers, Mexican women wailed with grief as the U.S. flag rose above the governor’s palace. The majority of these women faced increasing hardship after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized U.S. control over New Mexico. Historian Deena González’s pathbreaking work uncovered Mexican women’s changing circumstances as New Mexico became a U.S. territory. Some of those changes appeared subtly in women’s day-to-day management of business affairs. Because the U.S. legal system gave greater consideration to men’s property rights, for instance, Mexican women increasingly wrote wills and conveyed property to their elder sons. Other changes appeared more dramatic. Mexican women (and the Mexican community in general) faced a steep economic decline as a result of U.S. imperialism. By 1880 the entire Spanish Mexican population had lost 90 percent of the land granted under Spain and Mexico. At the same time the number of Spanish Mexican women working for wages steadily increased. Ironically, Euro-American men had often criticized Mexican working women before the war, but U.S. economic policies resulted in almost 90 percent of Mexican women working as domestics, laundresses, or seamstresses by the end of the nineteenth century. On average, these women earned substantially less than
Traditional native dances performed by Hispanos. Fiesta, Taos, New Mexico. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection (Digital ID: cph3b42885).
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The elite Amador family on a picnic, circa 1905–1910. Courtesy of the Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, Las Cruces.
similarly employed Euro-American women. The average wage for a white domestic ranged from $1.50 to $2.00 per day, while Mexican domestics earned between 50¢ and 85¢ per day. Because of rapid inflation, many of these laborers found it difficult to maintain their families on such limited wages. Most histories, though, have ignored Spanish Mexican women’s harsh experiences with U.S. imperialism. Instead, attention has been given to intermarriage between Euro-American men and Mexican women in the early territorial period. Some have celebrated these unions as evidence of the “peaceful” incorporation of New Mexico into the United States. Yet these marriages proved much more important for the EuroAmerican population than for Mexicans. Indeed, while 63 percent of Euro-American men in Santa Fe married Mexican women in 1870, only 2 percent of all Mexican women married Euro-American men. The emphasis on intermarriage points to a larger problem in the historical literature on New Mexico. Spanish Mexican women in New Mexico have been mentioned only in passing in most historical works. At best, traditional histories of New Mexico relegated women to a footnote or an occasional anecdotal reference. Likewise, the few images of Spanish Mexican women in U.S. popular culture have been highly romanticized or crudely stereotypical. Ruth Laughlin’s 1948 novel The Wind Leaves No Shadow, for instance, portrayed historical Mexican women, like Gertrudis Barceló, as murderers, gamblers, prostitutes, and the victims of cruel Mexican men. Much remains unknown about women’s lives in colonial and territorial New Mexico. Recent research has only just started to bal-
ance these inconsistencies by uncovering women’s critical role in New Mexico’s history. SOURCES: González, Deena J. 1999. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press; Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Lecompte, Janet. 1981. “The Independent Women of Hispanic New Mexico, 1821–1846.” Western Historical Quarterly 22 (January): 17–35; Leyva, Yolanda Chávez. 1997. “ ‘A poor widow burdened with children’: Widows and Land in Colonial New Mexico.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed.
Women of the Amador family, Las Cruces, New Mexico, circa 1900. Courtesy of the Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, Las Cruces.
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Spanish Borderlands Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, 85–96. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Tjarks, Alicia V. 1978. “Demographic, Ethnic, and Occupational Structure of New Mexico, 1790.” Americas 35 (July): 45–88.
Anthony Mora
Women in St. Augustine Women of Spanish descent born in the Americas have been a critical part of the present-day United States for more than 400 years. Long before the founding of the United States, St. Augustine women helped build an American settlement that survived environmental and economic catastrophes for almost 200 years. These women served as the stalwarts of their community and were thoroughly resourceful in maintaining its everyday activities. Their active participation transformed a military outpost into a viable settlement. Maria Ximenes de Laquera, born in 1594 to María Meléndez and Juan Ximénes de Laquera, is the first known Hispanic woman born in St. Augustine, Florida. Latinas populated, stabilized, and enhanced this area’s wealth before the founding of the United States. Although frequently overlooked in accounts of the historical development of the Americas, Latinas made significant contributions to early Spanish settlements. From St. Augustine’s beginnings as a Spanish colonial frontier in 1565, women’s roles were paramount in creating a long-standing settlement. Two key factors help explain women’s importance to St. Augustine. The first was longevity. Women outlived their spouses, married multiple times, and thus were able to accumulate wealth. Second, women owned land. In stark contrast to British society, women under Spanish law held landowning rights and thus occupied a broad array of positions within society. Women’s diverse societal positions can be understood by examining how power was shared, transferred, and limited in St. Augustine. Women’s unique experiences stem from the community’s pivotal position as an eighteenth-century Spanish frontier colony. At that time St. Augustine consisted of the town and three surrounding settlements. The considerable diversity of its population resulted from the inclusion of these settlements. Two were the Christian Indian villages of Nuestra Señora de la Leche and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Tolomato. Blacks who fled slavery in the Carolinas populated the third, Fort Moze. Working for the Spanish in St. Augustine, they gained freedom in Florida. Together these three towns shielded St. Augustine, helped protect local Spanish interests, and enlarged St. Augustine more than would have otherwise been possible in this frontier locale. In the 1760s St. Augustine was among the largest cities on the North American East Coast. Situated within the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain with a
good harbor, the town was well suited to act as a buffer to French and English incursions and guard New World treasure fleets. St. Augustine served the dual purpose of a military fortification, controlling the waterways surrounding Florida, and a frontier settlement, hindering the territorial gains of other European powers in the region. One objective demanded the primacy of the military, and the other the cultivation of a civilian population. Nonetheless, St. Augustine was a very low priority for the Spanish Crown. As early as the seventeenth century Spain found itself unable to subsidize colonies like St. Augustine. Survival depended upon Spain’s provision of a situado or subsidy—monies given to all settlements that were not self-sufficient but strategically important to the Crown. The number of soldiers in the town’s total population generally determined the subsidy’s amount and significantly affected the material circumstances of most inhabitants, almost half of whom were not employed by the Spanish government. The situado—an insufficient amount for St. Augustine—never arrived on time and required an awkward interaction with officials in Mexico City, Puebla, Vera Cruz, and Havana. Left on its own, the colony resorted to using scrip and barter in place of hard currency, which placed the majority of inhabitants in continually dire economic conditions. The situado’s inadequacies directly affected St. Augustine women, since many were dependent on it for daily sustenance. Spain provided insufficient financial support for widows and orphans. Mere survival required an ongoing negotiation of the social environment. St. Augustine had the problems of a harsh frontier environment and the attributes of a developing Spanish American community. Its location posed significant challenges to its residents. From the hurricane of 1707 that leveled most homes to severe British attacks in 1702 and 1740, St. Augustine witnessed many disasters, both natural and human created. Finally, the population boom that occurred in the 1700s, in conjunction with British-induced land contraction, presented social burdens. The population increased from 800 in 1710 to 3,000 in 1736, and hence more people depended on the situado. The rigors of life in a neglected settlement impeded economic development. Survival on the frontier depended upon behavior that was treasonous to the Spanish Crown. Although Spain was at war with Great Britain, St. Augustinians traded with British American colonists to get cheaper prices and surer delivery for foodstuffs, clothing, and luxury items, practices that circumvented the Spanish trade system. Enduring hardships, settlers continued to operate under an established social system that differentiated
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Spanish Borderlands women’s experiences along lines of race and marital status. For example, a Creole woman, born in the New World of Spanish parentage, had a very different life than an Indian woman; likewise, most married women’s circumstances were better than widows’ experiences. A description of various segments of the population provides glimpses into the lives of distinct groups of women. By 1763, when the Spanish Crown ceded Florida to the British in accordance with the Treaty of Paris, St. Augustine had 3,096 inhabitants, who included 544 families and an unspecified number of household units. In 1755, 59 percent of the garrison was married, and collectively it had 520 children. Though the average family size for Spanish Floridians in 1763 was five, for almost half the population it was below four, the smallest family size being among Catalans, Christian Indians, and free blacks, which reflected the difficulty of the immigrant experience. There were various household types within St. Augustine. Many households incorporated recent arrivals into the community. Absorption of immigrant groups from other parts of the empire caused local demographic changes. The immense diversity of St. Augustinians was unique for a Spanish settlement of that time. Also, the integration of many Indian populations, free blacks from the Carolinas, and both Spanish and non-Spanish immigrants led to the absorption of new people. Nevertheless, St. Augustine negatively affected the surrounding Indian communities. Over time, as the general population of St. Augustine increased, the indigenous population declined by 17 percent within one year (1760). In virtually every subgroup of St. Augustine’s population except Christian Indians, there was a relative lack of women, which facilitated intermarriage among the St. Augustine population. This community’s social structure incorporated numerous groups and situated individuals based on race, gender, marital status, and usefulness. Women of different racial groups and marital statuses had distinct social positions within eighteenth-century St. Augustine society. Because salaries were primarily based upon military or religious jobs, a woman’s economic situation was largely dependent upon the status of her family of origin or her marital status. Many Indian women, for example, were either servants or the wives of soldiers. Although married women were better off than widows, they were still in a very different economic position from that of their husbands because they were economically dependent upon them. Gender and racial diversity existed among the majority—living at subsistence level—and the landowners. Because documentary materials about the lives of the poor are unavailable, detailed information about most of the
population is absent. However, there is historical documentation of those for whom the Crown provided assistance. Approximately 10 percent of the population consisted of widows and orphans, who were some of the poorest in the community and were financially supported by the situado. In stark contrast to the pittance widows and orphans received, the members of a small group of women were highly compensated for their services to the Spanish military. Eight women in the population were identified as mujeres mercenarias, an interestingly official female role. These women were paid by the Crown and received higher salaries than most soldiers and many military lieutenants and commandants. Mujeres mercenarias were women who performed sexual services for the military. The social position of these women is unknown. However, their roles as sexual objects/actors placed these women outside the standard pay scales and provided them with a more prosperous life. These women’s higher economic status demonstrates how some women were privileged and others disadvantaged within the same social system. For instance, one mujer mercenaria, Juana Ana María Paniagua, owned a large home and slaves. Such women accounted for a small portion of the population, but their income was substantially above the St. Augustinian average. Other women occupied a high social status through landownership. Women were 26.2 percent of all landowners; the vast majority of these women were single. By comparison, 21.2 percent of all St. Augustinians owned private land. The percentage of women landowners is unsurprising for eighteenth-century Spanish America; however, the numbers for British America pale in comparison. Single Spanish American women were neither discouraged nor barred from owning land, and they might accumulate property through a series of widowhoods, pensions, and remarriages. This accumulation of wealth enabled some to attain fair-sized estates and independence from marriage of necessity. Despite the continual state of deprivation and war, a potential for social mobility existed for some women and men, making land acquisition more likely in St. Augustine. The percentage of nonwhite landowners was very significant as well. In 1763, 8.3 percent of the landowning population was nonwhite, when nonwhites comprised 17 percent of the total population. Of the free black and mulatto population, 16.4 percent owned land, compared with 10 percent of the total white population. Diversity ceased at the top of the social ladder with the homogeneous Creole elite who held a disproportionate amount of the colony’s wealth. Those in the
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Spanish Borderlands elite were differentiated from the general landed population by the amount of land owned, types of homes, and ownership of slaves. Like their British American contemporaries, the elite enjoyed the finest goods and services. The key difference between the landowners and the elite was simply a matter of opportunity. Many Creole elites had attained greater wealth through exploiting the traditional trade process to their advantage. The wealthiest were those who controlled how needed supplies were distributed. Because the majority of the population depended on elite merchants for their sustenance, these elites remained in positions of power. Although this distribution system fostered a highly inequitable social system, it provided the best supply source to the colonies at the least cost to a substantially indebted government. This trade not only rewarded elites with money, land, and status, but extended upward mobility to merchants and traders, who previously had been excluded from upper-class Spanish society. These Creole elite consisted of a very close kinship network in which many persons were familial relations by blood or marriage. Approximately one-third of all landowners were blood related. Within this network the primary means of incorporation was marriage to a Creole woman. Several men married Creole women who owned considerable amounts of land themselves and whose families were able to assist politically and financially in their spouses’ advancement; half were marriages to widows. Overall, frontier life allowed for a less rigid social hierarchy than that of Spain and the British colonies. Landownership was available to women and free blacks, two groups prohibited from ownership rights in British America. Women’s ability to own property made them more economically independent than women in many other eighteenth-century locales. However, the society was by no means egalitarian, distinctions based upon gender and race permeated social relations, and slavery was legally practiced. Despite these social inequities, the demographics and location of St. Augustine fashioned a complex and multiracial community that provided some economic opportunities for women, free blacks and mulattos, and Indians. Women’s economic stability soon became irrelevant when their entire community was completely disrupted by St. Augustine’s evacuation. As a result of Great Britain’s seizure of power in 1763, the majority of these women were uprooted and transported to Cuba. Thus ended a unique social experience that accentuated Latinas’ role as a critical force within the first Hispanic community in what would later become the United States.
SOURCES: Landers, Jane G. 1999. “Female Conflict and its Resolution in Eighteenth Century St. Augustine.” The Americas 54, no. 4: 557–574; Pickman, Susan L. 1980. “Life on the Spanish-American Frontier: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Mid-18th Century St. Augustine, Florida.” Ph.D. diss, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Susan L. Pickman and Dorcas R. Gilmore
Women in Texas (1716–1890) Spanish Mexican women’s participation in public life has grown throughout Texas history since the Spanish conquest in the eighteenth century. Although domestic responsibilities consumed much of their time during the era of Spanish colonization, women began to assert their rights to own property and to contribute to economic productivity. Opportunities for paid work and interethnic cooperation emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century. As Texas became integrated into the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century, women’s participation in the labor force grew, and they became more involved in civic organizations. From 1716 to 1721 Spanish women participated in two of three expeditions to found permanent colonial settlements in Texas. Women accompanied their soldier husbands who were part of an expedition to reestablish missions among the Tejas Indians. Along with missions and presidios, the colonists established ranchos and pueblos for the civilian population. The presence of families distinguished the second colonization effort and increased women’s responsibilities. Among their duties were raising children, preparing food, making and washing clothes, tending gardens, and making soap. Women and their families figured prominently among the settlers who established the town of San Antonio as well as its presidio and five missions. In 1721 several hundred colonists, including twenty-eight families, established a presidio at Los Adaes to protect eastern Texas from further French expansion beyond Natchitoches, located only eighteen miles away. In all, some 500 Spanish settlers lived in Texas by 1731. During the colonial period the Spanish population of Texas increased steadily and spread to other settlements. The majority of early settlers came from New Spain’s northeastern provinces of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Nuevo Santander. The Spanish pioneers struggled against the isolation of settlement life, which exposed them to continued attacks from enemy Indian nations. Harsh frontier conditions contributed to high levels of infant mortality, which suppressed population growth and increased the necessity of immigration to the region. Immigrants from the Canary Islands came to San Antonio, as well as Europeans and Anglo
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Spanish Borderlands (North) Americans who eventually fanned out across the Spanish settlements of eastern Texas. In 1777 the diverse population of Spanish subjects reached 3,103 people, distributed among the principal settlements of San Antonio, La Bahía, and Nacogdoches. Colonial officials classified people into several racial categories, including Spaniards, mestizos, mulattoes, blacks, and Indians, but these categories functioned more as indicators of social status than as lifelong racial identities. Because the ethnic origins of most settlers were diverse, it was common for a colonist to transcend racial categories as her or his wealth increased. By the end of the colonial period this varied mix of colonists numbered only 4,500, placing Texas among the regions with the fewest Spanish subjects. Because of the region’s isolation and small Spanish population, social life in colonial Texas revolved around the family. Women and men married young (averages in San Antonio were eighteen for women and twenty-four for men), but also tended to be widowed at an early age. The majority of Spanish women were married (82 percent), and widows made up more than 10 percent of all adult women in 1784. In some communities widows outnumbered widowers, but both usually remarried within a few years because life on the frontier was difficult for single heads of household. Rudimentary housing, the scarcity of household goods, and the demanding chores of life in Texas forced wives and husbands to cooperate in their domestic responsibilities. Although women were principally responsible for domestic chores, they also assisted their husbands with ranch, farm, and craft jobs. In some cases women temporarily carried out political duties for their husbands. María Gertrudis Pérez Cassiano, for example, managed the affairs of the governor’s office between 1810 and 1820 during her husband’s absences. Similarly, Josefa Becerra Seguín assumed her husband’s role in a dispute with San Antonio city authorities over water rights while he visited Mexico City to attend congressional sessions. Men’s military or ranching duties often took them away from home and forced women to assume the double duty of maintaining the household and caring for the family’s land and livestock. These characteristics of frontier society, according to some scholars, decreased the degree of female subordination and lessened the sharp sexual division of labor that existed elsewhere in New Spain. Spanish law granted women specific legal and property rights that allowed some to maintain their independence. Women were governed by both restrictive and protective legislation. Restrictive laws prevented women from exercising control over men. According to this legislation, women could not vote, hold office, serve on local tribunals, serve as witnesses
in legal transactions, or appear in court on behalf of another. Unless they obtained permission from a maledominated court, women could not adopt children or serve as legal guardians. Protective laws, on the other hand, were designed to prevent women from becoming victims of economic or social adversity. Inheritance laws stipulated that daughters receive the same amount of property as sons and also required the courts to give a widow a portion of her spouse’s estate. The law allowed adult women to own their own property and to maintain this ownership even after marriage to safeguard their economic status if their husbands died or encountered financial difficulties. Moreover, the courts did not hold wives accountable for their husbands’ debts. Spanish women actively exercised their property rights, obtaining more than sixty Spanish and Mexican land grants in Texas before 1848. One of the most successful women was Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, a widow who amassed a fortune in land and livestock. After receiving a Spanish land grant (1790) near the Rio Grande (part of the province of Nuevo Santander during the Spanish period), she skillfully managed her property and acquired large herds of cattle, sheep, and horses. She continued to apply for additional land grants and to purchase property, and by the time of her death in 1803 she owned more than 1 million acres, thus becoming the first “cattle queen” of Texas. Widows in San Antonio also successfully managed large livestock herds. In 1779 María Ana Curbelo and Leonor Delgado were among the top five cattle owners in San Antonio. Indeed, more than one-fifth of all civilian households in the city were women headed, and their wealth was largely dependent on land and livestock ownership. Landowning women not only managed extensive livestock and property, but also supervised considerable numbers of employees. Some owned African slaves, and most hired a variety of servants to perform the large number of domestic and ranch duties required on their estates. Although their legal rights were limited, women used protective legislation to pursue their interests. A young woman remained under her father’s control until she became an adult. Nevertheless, with her father’s permission, she could sue a man over insults or inappropriate courting that might decrease her social mobility or her family’s honor. Unmarried women could also initiate seduction lawsuits if their suitors broke off marriage plans after initiating sexual relations. In cases where a man broke promises to marry after his female partner became pregnant, the young woman often sued the man to obtain child support payments. Married women also used the courts to defend their interests. Women could protect their financial interests by filing lawsuits to stop their husbands
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Spanish Borderlands from mismanaging their property or selling their property without permission. Wives also pursued legal action if husbands did not provide for their families’ financial need and to protect themselves against physical abuse. Occasionally the threat of a lawsuit was enough to persuade a recalcitrant husband to mend his ways. If the abuse or neglect continued, wives could sever their marriage bonds by asking for a divorce, but would face significant odds since the Catholic Church rarely granted divorces. After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 women witnessed gradual changes in their legal and occupational status. Mexican law followed the model of Spanish statutes; therefore, unlike women living in the United States, Mexican women retained ownership of their property when they married. Any property that a couple obtained while married became community property; a husband had to obtain his wife’s approval before selling any property held in common. Mexican law also allowed widows and unmarried adult women to litigate and to establish business contracts independently. Spanish Mexican women had faced limited occupational opportunities outside the established towns. Domestic service on the ranchos or in towns was one of the few paid jobs available for Indian women and mestizas. As the population increased, however, new opportunities opened in urban areas for women who worked as seamstresses, planchadoras (clothes pressers), launderers, and tortilleras (tortilla makers). Some became petty entrepreneurs in a burgeoning urban economy as small-shop owners, handicraft saleswomen, and food peddlers. The population of Texas changed dramatically during the period of Mexican rule (1821–1836). Unable to attract additional colonists to settle in Texas, the Mexican government began a colonization program to attract Anglo-American and European settlers. Although the colonization program was a big success for U.S. citizens, it proved disastrous for Mexico because Anglo-Americans came to outnumber Mexicans two to one. When the Mexican government moved to restrict immigration, enforce laws against slavery, and impose taxes, Anglo Texans and Texas Mexicans launched a successful separatist rebellion and established the Republic of Texas in 1836. Women were active on both sides of the conflict, accompanying Mexican troops sent to suppress the rebellion and helping care for Tejano and Texan rebels at the Alamo and Goliad battles. Several of the noncombatants at the Alamo were women and children who survived the battle and subsequently received state pensions for their service. Because of increasing military and interethnic tensions during the Texas Revolution, women often acted as in-
termediaries between Anglo Texans and Mexicans. Francisca Alavez, for example, was known as the Angel of Goliad for intervening to save the lives of several Texas rebels from execution by Mexican troops. Patricia de la Garza de León and her family, founders of the predominantly Mexican colony of Victoria, supported the Texas rebels with smuggled weapons. Unfortunately, the Leóns had to flee to New Orleans to escape the anti-Mexican violence that swept the state after the revolution. Like many other Spanish Mexicans, the Leóns had family members killed and property confiscated by vigilantes who believed that Spanish Mexicans had supported Mexico during the armed conflict. As ethnic tensions increased following the Texas Revolution, Spanish Mexican women assumed larger roles as intermediaries between Mexican and white Texans. The surge in the Anglo-American population created more interethnic marriages, mostly between Anglo men and Mexican women. Intermarriage was more common in areas like eastern Texas with a small population of white women, but it also occurred in central and southern Texas among Mexican families who believed that interethnic unions might protect their property and political rights. Interethnic accommodation became an important safety strategy for Mexicans after Texas gained its independence because the Texas Mexican population was suspected of disloyalty and complicity with Mexico’s troops. Unruly Texans acted on their suspicions by violently attacking and dispossessing Tejanos of their property. The outbreak of war between Mexico and the United States in 1846 further inflamed ethnic tensions as Texas Mexicans’ loyalty was questioned again. It is not surprising that elite Tejano families made conscious decisions to establish interethnic alliances with Anglo Texans through intermarriage. In many wealthy Mexican families in San Antonio, including the Seguins, Navarros, and Cassianos, at least one daughter married an Anglo between 1830 and 1860. Tejano families with less status and wealth established ties with the new elite by asking Anglos to become patrons or godparents in marriages, baptisms, or confirmations. Whereas Texas Mexican families gained a measure of economic protection from an Anglo in-law or godparent, white men also benefited socially and politically from their familial ties to the Mexican population. This benefit was especially valuable in regions with a majority Mexican population, like the border communities, where some Anglo politicians won elective office because they garnered the overwhelming support of the Mexican electorate. During the second half of the nineteenth century Spanish Mexican women in Texas entered the labor
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Spanish Borderlands force in larger numbers. This was partly a result of an increase in population caused by the rapid growth in immigration from Mexico. The Texas Mexican population grew from some 18,500 in 1850 to approximately 165,000 by 1900. Most of the new arrivals settled in southern and western Texas, where the Mexican population remained the majority throughout the nineteenth century. As the state’s economy changed from self-sufficiency to a system geared toward industry and commerce, the Texas Mexican population lost skilled jobs and became concentrated in the lowest-paid occupational fields. The resulting loss of earning power forced more Mexicans into the labor force, including single women and female heads of household. From 1850 to 1900 the number of Spanish Mexican women in the paid labor force increased forty-three-fold. The number of female-headed households also increased, from 5.2 percent in 1850 to 19.6 percent in 1900, as women swelled the ranks of domestic servants, peddlers, seamstresses, and field laborers. A few women also entered the workforce as schoolteachers, entertainers, and shopkeepers. In border cites from El Paso to Brownsville, Spanish Mexican women were prominent among the schoolteachers listed in the 1900 census. The Spanish Mexican community became more politically involved during the last decades of the nineteenth century. While men could directly participate in electoral politics, women’s participation was limited because the state barred them from voting or seeking elected office. Nevertheless, Spanish Mexican women’s civic participation increased. Elite women donated money and land to establish schools, often with religious affiliations. Among others, Paula Losoya Taylor in Del Rio and Josefa Flores de Baker in Floresville gave land to establish or enlarge towns. Adina Emilia de Zavala of San Antonio became a teacher, an advocate for historic preservation, and a writer of folklore and history. Spanish Mexican women founded several mutual-aid societies (mutualistas) in the 1890s, such as the Sociedad Beneficencia in Corpus Christi and Laredo’s Sociedad Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez. Others became members of auxiliaries of all-male mutualistas. Some women assumed leadership roles by serving as officers, heads of committees, and even presidents of these self-help groups. Luisa M. González became president of the Alianza Hispano-Americana, a mutual-aid society that welcomed women and men. The mutual-aid societies provided members with medical benefits, funeral expenses, and low-interest loans. Women were active in support networks that provided child care and childbirth assistance, and organized fund drives for needy residents. While many mutualaid societies supported labor organizing, others took
up diverse causes such as advocating for temperance and criticizing the subordination of women. Most important, the mutual-aid societies provided a forum for members to discuss politics and express pride in their Mexican cultural traditions. By the end of the nineteenth century Spanish Mexican women in Texas had become increasingly involved in the public life of their community. Their participation blossomed into myriad activities, from organizing labor unions and advocating for additional educational opportunities for schoolchildren to supporting Mexican exile organizations and creating civil rights organizations. Women continued to play an integral part in community and political organizations as Mexican Americans struggled to claim their rights in the United States. SOURCES: De León, Arnoldo. 1999. Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History. 2nd ed. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson; Downs, Fane, and Nancy Baker Jones, eds. 1993. Women and Texas History. Austin: Texas State Historical Association; Griswold del Castillo, Richard. 1984. La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press; Handbook of Texas Online. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online (accessed March 29, 2003); Orozco, Cynthia E. 1992–1993. “Beyond Machismo: La Familia and Ladies Auxiliaries: A Historiography of Mexican-Origin Women’s Participation in Voluntary Associations and Politics in the United States, 1970–1990.” In Renato Rosaldo Lecture Series Mongraph 10. Tucson: University of Arizona Mexican Studies and Research Center; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press. Omar Valerio-Jiménez
Women’s Wills Women in the Spanish borderlands retained a degree of independence and autonomy unheard of among their counterparts on the Atlantic seaboard. Mexico, which gained its independence from Spain in 1821, based its legal system on Roman codes and not English ones. These legal codes gave women access to the judicial system, including the right to sue and be sued and the right to record their last will and testament. This power allowed women to pass on inheritances, no matter how small, and to participate in their communities in ways often denied women in the British colonies and later in the United States. As part of the legal system, women had certain civil rights; sometimes they sought redress from the courts for slanderous comments and at other times leveled more serious charges of battery, robbery, and murder. Records of the period are filled with women’s names and complaints, indicating that Spanish Mexican women were neither subservient nor passive.
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Spiritism For example, Gertrudis Barceló or La Tules, owner of a popular Santa Fe saloon and gambling hall, often made use of the courts before and after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. She sued her tenant, another woman, for “cohabitating with another woman.” Barceló also went to court to assume full title of her home and to clarify the boundaries of her property with a proper deed, to which the judge agreed. She submitted a will leaving property to her adopted daughter, a niece, and her brother and his wife. In their wills Spanish Mexican women revealed an inventory of their belongings with very clear instructions on inheritance. For example, Bárbara Baca bestowed her home and small plot of land on her son because “she had no daughters.” She then listed in great detail all of her worldly possessions down to her five mattresses, two cast-iron skillets, and five bushels of beans. Not every woman who left a will was a widow. A wife could use a will as an instrument through which to distribute the separate property or dowry that she brought to her marriage. Often with flowery religious introductions, wills reveal much about the importance of Catholic spirituality in women’s daily lives and the centrality of female kin and friend networks. These wills may be characterized as ritualized “female gift giving” in that women bequeathed possessions, such as clothing, land, household goods, and religious icons, to their sisters and to their comadres. In New Mexico after 1848 the orchestration of will making displayed by rich and poor alike in the probate courts and at the church or in neighborhoods can ultimately be understood as a symbolic intervention in the disorder of a new political, social, and economic order dominated by Euro-Americans. Wills could be symbols of community, resistance, and resilience.
perceived as one in which women are confined to the private realm, women’s activities are limited to responsibilities for family and household matters. Thus they can, by extrapolation, extend their responsibilities to the “temple” that is considered a kind of ceremonial house. Moreover, anthropologists such as Melville Herskovits have argued that Brazilian women are more active in religion than men because they have more free time. This rather weak argument is not substantiated. In many Latin American and Caribbean societies women actually work more than men, and in the United States, as well as in some sectors of Latino and Puerto Rican society, women also work outside the familial sphere. How then does one explain the gender division in Puerto Rican Spiritism, the shift from equal participation to female domination? Spiritists in Puerto Rico agree that women and men are equal as humans and as spirits; indeed, there is no female dominance in Spiritism. Every spirit and, therefore, every human being is assigned the same value. Membership in the spiritist groups, or centros, is highly diversified. They include lawyers, schoolteachers, doctors, and entrepreneurs, as well as housewives and unemployed people. Social status or gender does not seem to have an impact on Spiritism as practiced in Puerto Rico. The situation is different, however, in studies of Spiritism in New York City. The main interest of researchers, including Michael García, among others, is the high rate of mental illness among Puerto Rican migrants, referred to as the “Puerto Rican syndrome.” They describe this phenomenon as a form of paranoid schizophrenia linked to specific cultural roots. While they describe Puerto Rican Spiritism in general, the
See also Legal Issues SOURCE: González, Deena J. 1999. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press. Deena J. González
SPIRITISM Studies of Puerto Rican Spiritism often mention female spiritists as “mediums” for the manifestation of spirits. This religious practice constitutes the center of spiritistic rituals, just as in African American religions. The majority of studies on African American religions describe the dominance of women in the so-called possession cults. The explanations offered for this female dominance are controversial, however. Religion is seen as an extension of the domestic sphere. Because the female role in Latin America and the Caribbean is
Paraphernalia of Puerto Rican Spiritism. Photograph by and courtesy of Bettina E. Schmidt.
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Spiritism in New York City focus is mainly on female patients at medical centers, hospitals, or consultation offices. Only rarely has research been undertaken with a spiritistic group or center. Conclusions regarding the dominance of women in Spiritism have resulted from these limitations, even though other studies have found spiritistic communities centered on male spiritists. Because the work on Spiritism has continued to be linked to female clients in medical institutions, aspects of the religion have been reduced to a Puerto Rican female “syndrome.” Although researchers cannot support claims of female dominance in Spiritism, they reinforce the discriminatory perception of women’s role in the religion. They have created the impression that only women are allowed to experience spiritistic manifestation, because it is too embarrassing for men to lose control. Even while researchers did not actually investigate women’s role in Spiritism, they believed beyond any doubt that spiritistic communities were “naturally” dominated by women. The argument that women are better mediums than men is, therefore, based on the perception of Puerto Rican Spiritism as a “syndrome” or mental illness. Nevertheless, in the late 1980s and 1990s this perspective influenced Puerto Rican Spiritism in New York City. Male believers became afraid of the negative image of the manifestations because of the association with femininity, so they withdrew step-by-step from the leading level of the communities, making space for women. Today an increasing number of women work as mediums or have founded new spiritistic communities. They dominate the ritual practice of Spiritism in New York City, although there still are many male believers. Current developments within Spiritism, espe-
A botánica in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Photograph by and courtesy of Bettina E. Schmidt.
cially the presence of an increasing number of female leaders, are thus clearly the result of adaptation to life in New York City. While connected to the appropriation of stereotypes, this process is sustained by social and economic factors. Living in New York City has not improved the economic and social situation of most Puerto Ricans. Women, especially those with darker skin color, still suffer from double discrimination—as women and as blacks. In this context Spiritism has become a form of empowerment. By dominating spiritistic consultation, women are able to generate an income through private consultations and to strengthen their selfconfidence by leading a spiritistic community. In New York City Spiritism has emerged as reemphasizing both women’s roles and African American influences within Puerto Rican culture. See also Folk Healing Traditions; Religion SOURCES: García, Michael Anthony. 1979. “The Effects of Spiritualism and Santería as a Cultural Determinant in New York Puerto Rican Women as Reflected by Their Use of Projection.” Ph.D. diss., Adelphi University; Schmidt, Bettina E. 2000. “Religious Concepts in the Process of Migration: Puerto Rican Female Spiritualists in the United States.” In Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Jacqueline Knörr and Barbara Meier, 119–132. New York and Frankfurt: Campus, in cooperation with St. Martin’s Press; Singer, Merril, and Roberto García. 1989. “Becoming a Puerto Rican Espiritista: Life History of a Female Healer.” In Women as Healers: Crosscultural Perspectives, ed. Carol Shepherd McClain, 157–185. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bettina E. Schmidt
SPIRITISM IN NEW YORK CITY In the early decades of the twentieth century a significant number of Puerto Ricans began to migrate to New York City. Most of them identified as Catholic, but their everyday religious practices have not been documented. The founding year of the first spiritistic centro (center) in New York City cannot be determined with any degree of certainty because centers do not officially register or even announce their existence in the media. Most are hidden in private apartments and can be found only with the help of insider information. Although Puerto Rican Spiritism is likely to have arrived in New York City during the first decades of the migration, its presence increased significantly with the first massive wave of airborne migrants during the 1950s. Between 1940 and 1960 the number of Puerto Ricans in New York City increased heavily, and with them the presence of Puerto Rican Spiritism. At the same time in which it increased in New York, the importance of Spiritism in the island declined.
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Spiritism in New York City
A typical botánica in New York City. Photograph by and courtesy of Bettina E. Schmidt.
Beginning in the 1950s, more botánicas existed in the New York City barrios than on the island. The botánica, a small store that sells religious paraphernalia and literature, often included a resident spiritist healer for consultations. Sometimes the botánica is even connected to a spiritistic community. Some centers emphasize the African tradition, while others combine Spiritism with Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion. Nonetheless, the purpose of each centro is to offer help. A new center is usually started in a medium’s apartment. Unlike the botánicas, these spiritistic groups do not normally advertise their existence. Their members usually belong to the same neighborhood and meet two or three times a week. The importance of the community and the development of the individual’s power and well-being constitute the central aspects of Spiritism. This alternative healing is the main objective of every spiritistic group, and unlike the consultations at a botánica, the centros do not charge money for helping people. Alan Harwood noted that for many Puerto Ricans living in an alien place like New York City, the centro becomes an important primary group outside the family. Harwood compared the centro to voluntary organizations for migrants that perform many of the same functions. In the absence of a traditional sphere of social interaction (like ritual kinship, such as the compadrazgo system), Spiritism offers a structure for ordering the migrants’ social world. In a case study of a centro in Brooklyn José Figueroa describes how Spiritism constitutes an integral part of the believers’ social reality. The members of this group live together in a building that had been neglected by its owner. During and after several meetings they dis-
cuss their problems, like the lack of heating caused by the landlord who ignores his obligations. Finally the members decide to clean the building spiritually and to cast a spell on the owner in order to throw his guardian spirits off balance. Later they organize a rally against the landlord, who is now spiritually unprotected and finally agrees to fulfill his obligations. The members’ common belief has thus prepared the ground for joint action, namely, the creation of a tenants’ association; on this level they then become aware of their common interests as a group. During the late 1960s and the 1970s Puerto Rican Spiritism in New York began to receive scholarly attention. Medical anthropologists and psychiatrists, in particular, became aware of the alternative healing system associated with Spiritism. They labeled this phenomenon the “Puerto Rican syndrome” and began to conduct large-scale research on Spiritism among Puerto Ricans living in New York City. Its rising popularity notwithstanding, spiritism was portrayed in a negative manner. Most of the studies of the 1970s, and even some in the 1980s, overlooked the fact that Spiritism represents much more than a culturebound therapy. To describe Spiritism as a “healing-cult,” as a “psychiatry of the poor,” or as “Puerto Rican group therapy” in order to accommodate the religion to the “modern” Western worldview means degrading a sophisticated system of beliefs and practices. Spiritism is a part of Puerto Rican life and culture. Harwood even compares Spiritism with soul among African Americans: both concepts form the basis of ethnic identity. SOURCES: Figueroa, José E. 1981. “The Cultural Dynamics of Puerto Rican Spiritism: Class, Nationality, and Religion in a Brooklyn Ghetto.” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York;
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Sterilization Harwood, Alan. 1977. Rx: Spiritist as Needed: A Study of a Puerto Rican Community Mental Health Resource. New York: John Wiley; Sánchez, Franklyn D. 1984. “Puerto Rican Spiritualism: Survival of the Spirit.” In The Puerto Rican Struggle: Essays on Survival in the U.S., ed. Clara E. Rodríguez, Virginia Sánchez Korrol, and José Oscar Alers, 140–151. Maplewood, NJ: Waterfront Press.
Bettina E. Schmidt
STERILIZATION Female sterilization is an irreversible and controversial form of fertility control that most often involves the surgical cutting or tubal ligation of a woman’s fallopian tubes. Although it is considered a reproductive choice by some women, Latinas have been targeted for numerous sterilization programs by a variety of public agencies and social reformers. Under the influence of the eugenics movement, sterilization surgery was originally performed on the “undesirable” classes or categories of persons considered “unfit” to propagate. Many in the medical profession believed that one could reduce criminality, “feeblemindedness,” and degeneracy—all thought to be inherited traits—by sterilization. Reducing the progeny of such individuals was believed to improve the genetic makeup of society. By the 1970s this theory had evolved into the coerced sterilization of poor and minority women. Early eugenic sterilization focused on incarcerated and institutionalized people, particularly in the twelve states of California, Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin, that had enacted sterilization laws by 1913. At first only a small number were sterilized, but three decades later eugenic sterilization in the United States reached its peak when 27,869 individuals were sterilized in a single year. At the same time Puerto Rico was included in eugenic sterilization laws, passed in the United States and the island on May 13, 1937, which also authorized the formation of a Eugenics Board to help organize sterilization programs in public hospitals. Some states curtailed eugenic sterilization programs in response to public revulsion over the Nazis’ policies of forced sterilization in the 1930s, through which up to 3,500,000 people were forcibly sterilized. But in other U.S. states eugenics advocates hailed the “German program” for its liberal sterilization guidelines; American sterilization programs continued well into the 1950s. Not until the death of prominent eugenics advocates like Ezra S. Gosney in 1942 and a gradual shift in public attitudes toward the incarcerated and the mentally ill did the numbers of eugenic sterilizations decrease significantly.
By the 1950s the overall debate around sterilization evolved with the changes in the political climate after the war and a growing reproductive rights movement. American women began to fight for voluntary sterilizations that were not then readily available to them. Eugenics rhetoric gave way to neo-Malthusian notions of population control and poverty reduction. No longer holding to the hereditarian thesis, eugenics advocates found a more acceptable theory in the idea that overpopulation was the root cause of poverty. Women in poor communities became the victims of medical practitioners and judicial officials who believed that the reproductive habits of poor and minority women needed their control. These new advocates of coercive sterilization did not belong to a national movement but shared class and race prejudices similar to those of previous eugenicists. In some cases officers of the court targeted poor Latina women for sterilization surgery in exchange for release from jail. Victoria Tapia of Santa Barbara is one of the earliest documented cases of a Latina being coerced into surgical sterilization. In 1965 Tapia was offered a reduced sentence with probation if she consented to sterilization. Her crime was defrauding the county welfare department. She consented to sterilization and was released. In 1966 Nancy Hernández was offered a suspended sentence and probation if she would submit to surgical sterilization. The judge believed that Hernández “should not have more children because of her propensity for an immoral life.” She rejected these terms, appealed the ruling to a higher court, and was released without having to undergo sterilization surgery. In 1969 the fear of a population crisis generated new government policies that opened the door for sterilization abuse by individuals who worked in publicly subsidized agencies. Federally supported familyplanning services expanded to include sterilization surgery, even though abortion still remained illegal. In this same year the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) liberalized its guidelines for women seeking sterilizations by allowing the procedure regardless of their age and the number of their children. In 1970 the ACOG dropped its criteria that two doctors and a psychiatrist be consulted before sterilization surgery. Because sterilization surgery was paid for with government funds and no agency monitored abuses, Latinas and other women of color became victims of forced sterilizations. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of widespread political protest. Latinas, including activist Chicanas and Puertorriqueñas, expressed their outrage at sterilization abuse in the media, in the courtroom, and on the streets. In a Los Angeles Times article Chole Alatorre
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Sterilization from Centro de Acción Social Autónomo Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA), a Chicano activist group in the Southwest, called a 1973 pilot program to sterilize low-income women at “bargain” rates racist because she believed that the women signing up for the procedure did not fully understand the consequences. The Los Angeles Regional Family Planing Council had organized the program to give poor women access to a legal form of birth control. It used two Los Angeles hospitals, John Wesley Hospital in South Central Los Angeles and Glendale Adventist Hospital in Glendale. The program planned to sterilize up to four women a week with funds provided by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. While strict guidelines were implemented to secure protection for each patient’s rights, the politics of sterilization remained linked to class and race—only poor women, most of them Latinas, were being offered this “free” service, but they were still being denied other options such as contraception and abortion. In the 1970s some doctors in county hospitals performed sterilizations on poor Latinas after they had come to the facilities to give birth to children. Two landmark lawsuits, Madrigal v. Quilligan and Andrade v. Los Angeles County, brought to public attention the coerced sterilization of Mexican women at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center. Andrade v. Los Angeles County was filed in 1974 as a civil suit seeking $6,000,000 in damages for the plaintiffs. Antonia Hernández and Richard Navarette from the Model Cities Center for Law and Justice filed Madrigal v. Quilligan in 1975, a class-action suit that sought punitive damages, as well as a change in federal guidelines and procedures for sterilization surgery that would protect Latinas’ medical rights. These cases revealed that when the women were under the duress of labor, sedated, and sometimes confined to the table, the doctors would perform sterilization surgery. Madrigal v. Quilligan named eleven women in the case, but the experience of Jovita Rivera typifies how the women were sterilized at the County Hospital. Rivera was approached by a staff doctor after receiving general anesthesia for a cesarean section. He told her that she should have her “tubes tied” because her children were a burden on the government. As a monolingual Spanish speaker, Rivera could not have understood the consent forms presented to her. Instead, she signed under coercion and fear rather than informed consent. It was never made clear to her what tying of the tubes meant, and it was only some time later that she learned of the operation’s irreversibility. Three women who shared experiences similar to that of Jovita Rivera were represented in the Andrade v. Los Angeles County case filed by the law firm Cruz, Diaz
and Durán. Melvina Hernández was also unaware that she had been sterilized in 1972 after the birth of her last child and wore an IUD contraceptive device until 1974. She does not recall the events that took place to lead to her sterilization surgery because of the sedation and physical exhaustion of labor. Her husband, who was waiting in a nearby room, was never consulted about the procedure. The women named in both lawsuits all regret having undergone sterilization surgery, and some believed that it was only temporary. All agreed that they would like to have the option to have more children. Some Puerto Rican women on both the island and the mainland attached very different meanings to this form of fertility control than their Mexican and Chicana counterparts. While both groups suffered from sterilization abuse, an overwhelmingly large number of Puerto Rican women chose to become sterilized. On the island sterilization was promoted by a government eager to curtail population growth and emerged as the most popular form of fertility control after the passage of the 1939 law that legalized the teaching and practice of birth control. By 1954 one-sixth of all island Puerto Rican women of childbearing age received “la operación.” Even today Puerto Rican women have one of the highest documented rates of sterilization in the world. In order to understand this phenomenon, one must examine the social and historical forces that shape and constrain Puerto Rican women’s fertility options. Race, class, and gender shape the reproductive experiences of women in the United States and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican women, while opting for sterilization surgery, make the decision to become sterilized within the limits of their options. Because Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, both the Puerto Rican government and U.S. population controllers expressed concern about Puerto Rico’s “surplus population” and continuous population growth during the 1930s. Eugenic thinking also permeated the thinking of government officials and elite families who wanted to slow the population growth of the “undesirable” classes on the island. In 1937 birth-control legislation was passed, and as many as fifty family-planning clinics opened on the island. Sterilization, or “la operación,” waxed and waned until the 1950s, reflecting the economic cycles of the island and philosophical challenges from Catholic Church officials. Although birthcontrol clinics opened in the early part of the twentieth century, many closed because of a lack of government funds and church support. In some cases the Catholic Church publicly condemned this permanent form of fertility control, and that prompted some women to seek it out. From their earliest experiences with sterilization, women began to speak about “la operación” to
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Street Vending neighbors, friends, and family members. In some families both mother and daughter have undergone sterilization surgery with no regrets. Aside from its early introduction as a form of fertility control on the island, other factors led to the popularity of sterilization among Puerto Rican women. The familiarity with sterilization surgery has had the greatest impact on predisposing them to it. The term alone, “la operación,” illustrates that an unspoken cultural awareness is associated with sterilization surgery. It becomes part of the social repertoire of women’s cultural and colloquial terminology. While many women choose this surgery (others were coerced into having the procedure, as were the women cited earlier), the history of the procedure on the island and in urban Latino communities throughout the United States illustrates how reproductive choice can be manipulated and has different meanings for women of different social and economic backgrounds. SOURCES: Briggs, Laura. 1998. “Discourses of ‘Forced Sterilization’ in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern.” Differences, no. 10 (Summer): 30–66; López, Iris. 1997. “Agency and Constraint: Sterilization and Reproductive Freedom among Puerto Rican Women in New York City.” In Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Lives, ed. Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone, and Patricia Zavella, 157–174. New York: Routledge; Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. 1984. “ ‘Reproductive Choice’ in the Contemporary United States: A Social Analysis of Female Sterilization.” In And the Poor Get Children: Radical Perspectives on Population Dynamics, ed. Karen Michaelson, 50–88. New York: Monthly Review Press; Reilly, Phillip R. 1991. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Shapiro, Thomas M. 1985. Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive Choice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Virginia Espino
STREET VENDING The growth of informal-sector participation, such as street vending, is partially attributed to recent global economic processes. The restructuring of global labor markets changed the formal employment landscape and resulted in the rise of street vending in large urban centers. Thus street vending emerged as an alternative to low-wage underemployment in factory work. The relationship between the formal and informal economic sectors that ensures production and distribution is a fluid process in much the same way that street vendors, who participate in the production and distribution of goods, are seemingly fluid agents in both economies. Hence a street vendor might work in the garment industry in the morning and sell food on the street in the afternoon. Workers who participate in the informal economy are often led into that sector to aug-
The informal sector: This Latina makes a living as a street vendor. Photograph by and courtesy of Lorena Muñoz.
ment unsatisfactory or inadequate employment conditions. Often it is the more vulnerable populations, people of color, immigrants, and women who, lacking adequate wages and benefits, find themselves in this situation. The state plays a role in the expansion of the informal economy through legislation. Policies at the local, state, and national levels often have contradictory mandates. In some cases these may create unregulated spaces of opportunity at the local level, which can encourage a vendor’s engagement within informal production and distribution of goods. Not unlike the experience in third-world countries, there has been a dramatic increase in street vendors, many of whom are women, in urban centers of the industrialized, developed world. The reemergence of street vendors in major urban cities shows that vending is not based on remnants of former economic models of redistribution. As economists who have studied the subject point out, it thrives in the midst of modern trade systems. However, the increase in the numbers of street vendors causes concern among retail merchants in cities across the United States, and they are looking to city officials to restrict them. For the most part, cash wages, unregulated health and safety, and long working hours characterize informal-sector employment as an economic survival strategy. Hence much of the literature on street vending in developed countries indicates a complex relationship between low-wage labor, gender, immigration, and the informal economy. The rise of the informal sector in the United States since 1972 is often linked to the increase of the urban poor. Deindustrialization restructured the nation’s labor economy in a way that accounts for the shrinking of unionized bluecollar workers, high unemployment, and gender and racial division of labor, thereby creating spaces where the informal economy can expand. Gender often or-
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Street Vending ganizes the economic space of informality; the rise of street vending hence creates a situation where labor and child care can share the same space. A Latina vendor explains how street trading is flexible and allows her to take care of her children while she is working. The vendor elaborates that she does not have help taking care of her children because her entire family still lives in Mexico. She takes care of them after school in the street while she is selling. She finds it challenging at times because she is constantly watching them so they will not get into trouble. Yet she describes how she could not have a regular job and take care of her children at the same time. In the late 1980s there were an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 street vendors in Los Angeles, but by the late 1990s that number had grown to 10,000. It is estimated that approximately 90 percent of the street vendors in Los Angeles are Latino/a immigrants from Mexico and Central America. However, it is unclear what percentage of the vendors are recent arrivals from Latin America, or how many have dependent children with little or no access to affordable child care. In the late 1980s numerous studies focusing on immigrants’ participation in the informal economy shed light on the rise of the informal sector. According to Saskia Sassen, the fact that immigrants increasingly participate in the informal economy “is not the result of immigrant survival strategies but of structural patterns or transformations in the larger economy. Immigrants know how to seize the ‘opportunities’ contained in this combination of conditions, but they cannot be said to cause the informal economy.” Nevertheless, there are common misconceptions about street vendors in media and film venues that perpetuate stereotypes of “illegal” immigrants as “illegally” fueling the informal sector. The regulation of vending is implemented differently across the globe. In most Latin American countries vending is part of daily life. Although it is highly visible in the urban landscape, vendors often suffer acts of brutality from local law enforcement. Hence vending on the streets is often tied to local policies that enforce restrictions on street vending. For example, in Mexico City the local municipality controlled the growth of street vendors by enforcing brutal restrictive codes. Los Angeles also has a history of restrictive vending codes. In 1988 a group of Mexican and Central American street vendors in Los Angeles joined forces with professional organizers and community legal services attorneys to build a movement centered on street vendors’ rights. The outcome was an organization called Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA). AVA was created to respond to police harassment and legitimize a marginalized economic
strategy that affected between 5,000 and 10,000 people. In 1989 there were 2,700 street vendor arrests in Los Angeles. The following year there were twice as many arrests. Street vendors organized a coalition with city council officials and other nonimmigrant groups that produced limited success in affecting local policies. After a ten-year struggle the city of Los Angeles created street-vending districts where sellers with special permits could conduct their microbusinesses. The only district so far to have permits is MacArthur Park, where in 1999 fifteen permits were granted to street vendors. For most street vendors, purchasing a permit involves overcoming numerous barriers, specifically a capital investment that ranges anywhere from $500 to $2,000. This investment is particularly hard for vendors whose daily profits do not exceed the minimum wage. A typical Latina vendor describes her attitude toward obtaining a vending permit. She explains that not only is the investment more than she can afford, but the daily profits are not always steady. In addition, profits can be scarce, and there are also losses to account for when the code enforcers remove the vendors from the streets. Furthermore, local policies do not equally enforce all vending activities. In certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles street vending policies are loosely enforced, while in more affluent areas they are highly enforced. Nevertheless, “illegal” vending areas continue to gain strength not only within the central core of Los Angeles, but also in the San Fernando Valley and South East Los Angeles County, where Latino communities are transforming the urban landscape. Street vendor activism has been present in these communities as well. Hence, in addition to AVA, there are three other organizations in Los Angeles County that have responded to harassment and police brutality: the Los Angeles Street Vendors Association (AVALA), the San Fernando Vendors Association (SFVA), and the Huntington Park Vendors Association (HPVA). These organizations not only serve as vehicles to empower street vendors by mobilizing workers against police brutality and unfair law enforcement practices, but also give street vendors a space for economic organization, such as informal credit unions. Such organizations provide vendors with a source of pride and cultural citizenship by reinforcing the concept that street vending is an honorable way of making ends meet. As a result, street-vending associations take on the daily struggle to provide better working conditions for many Latina entrepreneurs.
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See also Entrepreneurs
Student Movements SOURCES: Chen, Martha Alter. 2001. “Women in the Informal Sector: A Global Picture, the Global Movement.” SAIS Review 21, no. 1:71–82; Hamilton, Nora, and Norma S. Chinchilla. 2001. Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorians in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press; Spalter-Roth, R. M. 1998. “Vending on the Streets: City Policy, Gentrification, and Patriarchy.” In Women and the Politics of Empowernment, ed. A. Bookman and S. Morgen, 272–294. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Weber, Clair M. 2001. “Latino Street Vendors in Los Angeles.” In Asian and Latino Immigrants in a Restructuring Economy, ed. Marta López-Garza and David R. Diaz, 217–240. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lorena Muñoz
STUDENT MOVEMENTS (1960S AND 1970S) Latino student movements emerged as part of the social ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. Mexican American and Puerto Rican students demanded access to quality education, an end to discriminatory practices, and a “relevant” and inclusive curriculum. They continued a long tradition of educational activism, because earlier generations had struggled to end segregation and had advocated for bilingual education. At high schools, colleges, and universities students now used confrontational tactics, such as walkouts, sit-ins, and demonstrations. As part of a larger movement for community control of the institutions that affected the lives of Chicanas/os and Puerto Ricans, students also participated in and shaped other movements of the era. On college campuses Mexican American students held conferences, sit-ins, and demonstrations, formed organizations, and demanded Chicano studies departments and support services for Chicana/o students. In May 1967 students met at Loyola University in Los Angeles and formed the organization United Mexican American Students (UMAS). In 1968 the first Chicano studies program was founded at California State University, Los Angeles. Growing out of a 1969 youth conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) emphasized that students should use their educations to benefit their communities. As more Chicano studies departments and programs were established, they linked academia and local communities through the curriculum and experiential learning. Despite their active participation from the beginning of the movement, Sonia A. López noted in 1977, “Chicanas generally continued to fill the traditional roles
assigned them within the Mexican culture and the American-Anglo society.” Instead of leadership positions, Chicanas provided the “invisible labor by being the cooks, secretaries, and janitors.” Some Chicanas left MEChA organizations, formed their own groups, such as Hijas de Cuauhtémoc at California State University, Long Beach, and continued to work for educational reforms. Still, López concluded, “It was their direct participation in the movement that made them aware of the Chicanas’ double oppression,” based on race and gender. Puerto Rican students joined forces with African American students on the campuses of the City University of New York. On April 22, 1969, an estimated 150 to 300 students took over the south campus of City College and closed it until May 5, 1969. The Black and Puerto Rican Student Community and the Committee of Ten demanded access and “relevant” education. Admissions, they insisted, should reflect the racial composition of the high schools, and special admissions programs should better meet the needs of incoming students. They wanted a separate school of black and Puerto Rican studies and a requirement that all education majors take black and Puerto Rican history and Spanish courses. In response, the college instituted the requirements for education majors, introduced open admissions several years earlier than planned, and established a Department of Urban and Ethnic Studies, which continuing activism transformed into a separate Department of Puerto Rican Studies in 1971. Student movements affected Lehman, Queens, Brooklyn, Hunter, and Bronx Community colleges, as well as some of the state university campuses and Livingston College of Rutgers University in New Jersey. Beginning in 1969, Puerto Rican studies departments and programs were established in most of those campuses. Puerto Rican women were involved, though the historical record is scant. At City College Iris Morales, later a member of the Young Lords, cofounded Puerto Ricans in Student Activities (PRISA) in 1968, which was key to campus activism, while Esperanza Martell organized evening students. At Lehman College in 1969 women constituted the majority of the Puerto Rican campus organization, UNICA, according to Federico Aquino-Bermudez, who later chaired the department at City College. In the fall of 1969 the Puerto Rican Student Union emerged as an intercampus organization that linked the student movements in Puerto Rico and the United States. It promoted independence for Puerto Rico, opened its office in the South Bronx to confront community issues such as housing, and organized a conference at Columbia University in September 1970 that was attended by more than 1,000 Puerto Rican and Latino student activists.
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Substitute Auxiliary Teachers
A committee demanding students’ rights demonstrates at Brooklyn College, 1969. Courtesy of Center for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY.
High-school students also protested, challenging discrimination, inferior education, and limited opportunities. In March 1968 more than 10,000 Chicano students walked out of five East Los Angeles schools after the school board ignored their petitions. They demanded an end to the tracking of Mexican American students into vocational education, termination of corporal punishment, more Mexican American teachers, bilingual education, and the revision of the curriculum to include Mexican/Chicano history and culture. There were other “blowouts” or walkouts in Denver, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Crystal City, Texas, where a 1969 walkout of more than 700 students was an impetus to the founding of a third political party, La Raza Unida. In 1969 New York City’s Black and Puerto Rican Coalition, a citywide group, demanded the removal of the police from schools and questioned the use of racist textbooks. It advocated self-defense classes, holidays in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the hiring of more black teachers, and the establishment of student-faculty councils to address discipline and the curriculum. Protests occurred at several New York City high schools. High-school students also joined City University of New York (CUNY) students when an estimated 11,000 students protested in Albany on March 18, 1969, against budget cuts for the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program, which increased African American and Puerto Rican enrollments at the university. Some high school students participated in the Puerto Rican Student Union. Student movements challenged institutional racism
and boldly asserted that the histories, experiences, and cultures of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were important. In the process they questioned the relationship between academia and their communities, as well as the ways in which traditional disciplines could privilege certain knowledge and present biased perspectives on others. Although the height of student movements was in the 1960s and 1970s, Latina and Latino students have continued to demand access, effective services, and an inclusive, transformative curriculum. See also Chicano Movement SOURCES: García, Alma M., ed. 1997. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Torres, Andrés, and José E. Velázquez, eds. 1998. The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Carmen Teresa Whalen
SUBSTITUTE AUXILIARY TEACHERS (SATS) From the mid-1940s to the 1960s, at the height of the Puerto Rican migration to New York City, the school system was inundated with non-English-speaking children. The situation was so pervasive that it was said that the arrival of a flight from San Juan on a Sunday meant that scores of youngsters would be registered for school on Monday morning. City teachers had not
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Substitute Auxiliary Teachers faced a cohort of non-English speakers since the large European immigrations at the turn of the century. The favored approach to instruct non-English speakers in the past had been total immersion, and methodologies like bilingual education or English as a second language were not in use. Language was not the only consideration. Puerto Rican youngsters were American citizens. Those formally schooled in the island were educated under American policies, often using English-language texts, but that did not guarantee fluency in the language or ability to negotiate mainland culture. In 1949 a committee of the Association of Assistant Superintendents identified some 13,914 school children “for whom at least a year’s time is needed before they are ready for preliminary instruction and language work . . . [and] ready for complete assimilation in the regular program.” In response, the Elementary Division of the New York City Board of Education appointed ten Puerto Rican teachers under a new rubric, substitute auxiliary teacher (SAT), to assist those children and act as intermediaries between the community and the schools. Some 234 individuals worked as SATs from 1949 until 1971, when the position was redesignated bilingual teacher in school and community relations. One hundred and fifty-five Spanish-speaking teachers available for employment in elementary and secondary schools applied for jobs between 1950 and 1957. Their applications, filed at the Office of Puerto Rico, Division of Migration, offer insights into their academic backgrounds, ages, gender, marital status, English-language proficiency, experience, and length of residency in the city. Most applicants were between the ages of thirty and thirty-five. Thirty-nine applicants were male, while 116 were female. One hundred and fifty-two held university degrees. Of these, 132 earned baccalaureates, and twenty held degrees at the master’s level. Eighty-eight claimed Englishlanguage fluency, and fifty-eight listed their proficiency as moderate. Twenty-nine received university degrees from U.S. institutions. One hundred and thirty-eight were licensed teachers in Puerto Rico, and three held teaching licenses from the United States. All but eleven applicants had some classroom experience. By the early 1960s 109 individuals were employed as SATs, and the board of education issued a license examination reclassifying SATs as auxiliary teachers. Stringent requirements for the position mandated that auxiliary teachers master coursework beyond the baccalaureate in guidance, social and educational services, and the cultural background of the Spanishspeaking children they taught. Additionally, they were
obliged to bridge the gap between the schools and Spanish-speaking community parents. Through personal contact and a series of after-school and evening programs, auxiliary teachers worked hard to develop rapport and reciprocity. These aspects of the job faced obstacles because parents often worked during the day and were not available to attend school-oriented activities. Nonetheless, teachers provided parents with information about health, nutrition, housing, workers’ rights, and the school system. Successful in developing leadership skills, parental groups became strong advocates for social and educational reform at board meetings, political rallies, conferences, and lectures. Some of the earliest Puerto Rican community leaders emerged from this experience. As members of a tightly knit professional community, the teachers met often to share ideas, evaluate their experiences, and promote their commitment to legitimize bilingual education. They identified themselves as pioneers in unknown territory. SATs, and later auxiliary teachers, generated curriculum, created instructional materials, and wrote books to augment content material. Pamphlets, booklets, and articles on the history and geography of Puerto Rico complemented filmstrips like Puerto Rico Today, Children of Puerto Rico, and The Bilingual Teacher in School and Community Relations, and their accompanying teacher guides, which informed classroom instruction, also documented the progress made by the auxiliary teachers in the new field. They joined study groups, attended professional retreats, created innovative learning activities, and eventually formed a professional association, the Society of Puerto Rican Auxiliary Teachers (SPRAT).
A gathering of substitute auxiliary teachers, circa 1968. Courtesy of Virginia Sánchez Korrol.
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Swilling, Trinidad Escalante SPRAT organized academic conferences to disseminate new scholarship. The group assessed the status of the profession and lobbied for recognition and permanent licensure. Until then the license for auxiliary teachers was temporary and was subject to periodic renewal. SPRAT argued for visibility and institutionalization of the position. In time SPRAT members helped create the Puerto Rican Educators Association and the Hispanic chapter of the United Federation of Teachers. Among the SATs and auxiliary teachers, many rose to prominence in the field of education. Nilda Maldonado Koenig became director of substitute auxiliary teachers and non-English coordinator at the New York City Board of Education. María E. Sánchez became a supervisor in District 14. After becoming a licensed principal, she accepted a position at Brooklyn College to develop the bilingual education program at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She ultimately became chairperson of the Department of Puerto Rican Studies. Dolores Nazario worked with the Department of Welfare before becoming an SAT. She became supervisor and director of bilingual programs for District 4. Carmen Rodríguez and Laura Maldonado became district superintendents, and María Power and Pura Bonilla became principals in the school system. In the early 1970s the adoption of the professional license for the bilingual teacher in school and community affairs in New York City marked the culmination of a twenty-year campaign led initially by Puerto Rican SATs, community supporters, and other educators. See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1996. “Towards Bilingual Education: Puerto Rican Women Educators in New York City Schools, 1947–1967.” In Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor, ed. Altagracia Ortiz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Santiago Santiago, Isaura. 1978. A Community’s Struggle for Equal Education Opportunity: ASPIRA vs. the Board of Education. Princeton, NJ: Office for Minority Education, Educational Testing Service. Virginia Sánchez Korrol
SWILLING, TRINIDAD ESCALANTE (1847–1925) Pioneer woman Trinidad Escalante Swilling was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in 1847 to Ignatius and Petra Escalante, natives of Cádiz, Spain, and may have been the first woman to live in the early settlement of Phoenix. After her father’s death the thirteen-year-old Trinidad traveled north with her mother to the small town of Tucson. At this time Anglo-American men were beginning to settle and intermingle in the long-
established Mexican settlements in present-day southern Arizona. Since very few Anglo-American women lived on this western frontier (the census recorded only forty-four in the Arizona area in 1860), men often took Mexican or American Indian women as wives. One such individual was Jack Swilling of Missouri, a former Confederate soldier, who met Trinidad in Tucson. She married Jack at the age of seventeen, in 1864. An ambitious man of questionable integrity, Swilling pursued mining claims in the central and northern Arizona area. After their marriage they moved to the Prescott area, where Jack Swilling worked a mining claim with the well-known Arizona mountain man Pauline Weaver. Moving once again to Wickenburg, Swilling obtained financial support to organize the Swilling Irrigating and Canal Company, a group that dug the first modern canal system in the Phoenix area, and established the town site of Phoenix, earning him the name the Father of Phoenix. His wife Trinidad moved to her new Phoenix homestead, called Dos Casas, in 1868, in time to witness the celebration when the men turned the first water from the Salt River into the town’s main canal, the Swilling Ditch. Trinidad’s home served both a private and public purpose. Early Phoenix residents held the first town election in her home, as well as masses for local Catholics, who were primarily from the Mexican American community. Father André Eschallier of Florence held services in the homes of Trinidad and the Otero family until a church was built in 1881. Several accounts name Trinidad Swilling as the first woman to live in the Phoenix settlement. A few months after her arrival several other Anglo-American women moved with their husbands to the small farming community located north of the Salt River. Trinidad raised seven children, two of whom died early in childhood, and cared for two Apache children as well. After Jack Swilling’s death in 1878 in the Yuma territorial prison, Trinidad worked as a seamstress to support herself and her children. With this money and income obtained through her ownership of Jack’s ranch in Wickenburg, she was able to build a new house in Phoenix. At the age of thirty-three Trinidad married a German immigrant named Henry Schumaker, who operated a local bar. She stopped working and raised three more sons. Nine years later, in 1896, her second husband also died. Trinidad again resumed seamstress work. She died in Phoenix in 1925 and was survived by one son, two daughters, and six grandchildren. Little is known about her life in general, but an Arizona Republic article published at her death called her “one of the best known pioneer figures of the Salt River Valley.” She understood the significance of history and, before
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Swilling, Trinidad Escalante her death, donated to the present-day Phoenix Museum of History her mother’s rosary, prayer book, and shawl, as well as a rifle owned by Jack Swilling. One of her daughters, Georgia, became a well-known “lady doctor” in Wickenburg, providing informal health care and midwife services to many residents in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
SOURCES: Arizona Republic 1925. “Pioneer Woman of Early Period Dies Following Illness.” December 28; Shoemaker, Trinidad. 1923. “Statement of Mrs. Trinidad Shoemaker (Formerly Mrs. Jack Swilling).” Oral History transcript. March 2. Salt River Project History Services, Salt River Project Offices, Phoenix, Arizona.
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Jean Reynolds
T q TABAQUEROS’ UNIONS (1880S–1950S) Cuban and Puerto Rican women cigar workers in the United States had one great advantage over women in most other occupations: they were highly unionized. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, the tabaqueros’ (tobacco workers’) unions accepted women as full members. The largest U.S.-based organization, the Cigar Makers’ International Union (CMIU), initially denied women membership and then offered them a form of second-class membership. A craft union, the CMIU focused primarily on recruiting skilled white men. The tabaqueros’ unions, however, functioned on anarchosyndicalist principles. La Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT) in Puerto Rico and la Federación Cubana de Tabaqueros in southern Florida and New York City accepted workers regardless of race, sex, or skill, including women and Afro-Caribbeans. The tabaqueros’ unions organized workers in the different sectors of cigar production into separate gremios, or locals. Given the sexual division of labor in the industry, women tobacco stemmers and cigar banders generally established and worked within singlesex locals. Some women were elected to serve as officers of these gremios or as delegates to unionwide gatherings; all members voted on whether to go on strike and when to accept a settlement; and woman played significant roles in specific strikes. During an industry-wide strike in Ybor City, Florida, in 1901, for instance, Altagracia Martínez and Luisa Herrera, officers of the stemmers’ local, led a mass march on the mayor’s office to protest vigilante violence and vagrancy arrests that targeted their male co-workers. In addition, women’s presence led tabaqueros’ unions to view advances in women’s rights as an important component of workers’ struggles. They recognized that improvements in working women’s educational, legal, and political rights would improve the status of cigar workers in general. Thus at its 1908 annual convention the FLT became the first organization in Puerto Rico to demand voting rights for women. Although cigar making was difficult work, and many Cuban and Puerto Rican women labored at low wages
in hot, humid, and dirty conditions, they did have higher and steadier wages and more opportunities for occupational advancement and collective action than did most Latinas employed in the United States in this period. They benefited from three developments that sustained the radical character of the tabaqueros’ unions. First, the tradition of hiring el lector, a reader, to educate and entertain workers at the rolling benches was introduced in Caribbean factories in the mid-nineteenth century and was sustained in the United States until the early 1930s. Second, the embrace of anarcho-syndicalist or socialist principles by late-nineteenth-century union organizers in Spain, Puerto Rico, and Cuba assured that women would not be excluded from participation. Third, the battle for independence from Spanish rule in Cuba and Puerto Rico in this same period opened spaces for women’s political mobilization and necessitated their employment in the exile communities that formed in the United States. Employers were convinced that readers fueled labor agitation, but they were unable to eliminate the practice in places where highly organized Cubans and Puerto Ricans held a monopoly on cigar-making skills. Readers were paid by the workers and kept them apprised of political struggles throughout the Spanishspeaking world, introduced them to anarcho-syndicalist and socialist texts by a range of European and American writers, and enlivened their afternoons with serial readings of popular, often socialist realist, novels. Women who worked bunching tobacco leaves or rolling cigars listened to the reader alongside men. Only in Puerto Rico, however, were women hired as readers. One FLT organizer, Luisa Capetillo, carried this tradition to Ybor City, Florida, in 1913–1914, where she became the first woman chosen as a reader by local workers. She regularly advocated women’s, as well as workers’, rights, and her presence sparked women’s militancy. Yet even before Capetillo’s arrival women in southern Florida’s tabaqueros’ unions considered themselves part of an international struggle for justice. During an industry-wide strike in Ybor City and West Tampa in 1910, for instance, Cuban and Italian women in Key West sent a manifesto to their striking
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Talamante, Olga sisters, calling on them to sustain the legacies of French martyr Joan of Arc, French Communard Louise Michel, and Spanish anarcho-syndicalists Teresa Claramunt, Belén Sarraga, and Soledad Gustavo. Still, despite all the ways in which the tabaqueros’ unions supported women’s political mobilization and women’s rights, they rarely accorded the two sexes truly equal status. During Ybor City’s 1901 strike, for instance, union spokesmen declared themselves “the voice of virile labor,” and women like Luisa Herrera only gained leadership positions after a significant number of male leaders had been deported or arrested. Similarly, in Puerto Rico, although the FLT demanded rights for women and women participated enthusiastically in strikes, marches, and protests, Luisa Capetillo was for a long time the only woman allowed into the top ranks of union leadership. By the early 1900s, however, women stemmers began to recognize the power that inhered in their control of the first step in the cigar-making process. Several times they threatened to stop production unless their concerns were addressed. In addition, representatives of the CMIU, who tried repeatedly to organize Latin workers in southern Florida in the early 1900s, were forced to accept women (and AfroCubans) as full members of the union if they were to have any hope of success. Women also increased their leverage in the union as more and more entered the ranks of cigar rollers during the 1910s and 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s they became the mainstay of cigar production and cigar workers’ organizations as automation transformed the industry. Machines infiltrated the industry only slowly in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and southern Florida because of the power of tabaqueros’ unions. Even in early-twentiethcentury Tampa and Key West, where employers refused to grant union recognition, workers’ organizations were strong enough to delay installation of machines. When the combined forces of the Great Depression and the growing cigarette industry finally crushed union resistance, it was mainly Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Italian women who made the transition to machine work. By the 1950s women formed the majority of the workforce in factories that employed Spanish-speaking workers, and they slowly expanded their power in the unions as well. For example, second-generation immigrant Maria Pescador of Ybor City served as a vice president of the CMIU in the 1940s. In 1974, believing that only consolidation of the various cigar locals into one organization could sustain their power, Pescador formed and was elected president of Local 533, which affiliated with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Employees Union. The new consolidated cigar union finally negotiated pension rights for cigar workers, assuring that many of
the Cuban and Italian women who had made the difficult transition from hand work to machine work in southern Florida would be rewarded for their long years of service. Thus, despite the decline of the cigar industry in the United States, Puerto Rican and Cuban women sustained their commitment to collective action and workers’ organization. See also Cigar Workers; Labor Unions SOURCES: Azize, Yamila. 1985. La mujer en la lucha. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cultural; Hewitt, Nancy A. 1990. “ ‘The Voice of Virile Labor’: Labor Militancy, Community Solidarity, and Gender Identity among Tampa’s Latin Workers, 1880–1921.” In Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Rodríguez Castro, María E. 1991. “Oir leer: Tabaco y cultura en Cuba y Puerto Rico.” Caribbean Studies 24, nos. 2. 3–4: 221–239. Nancy A. Hewitt
TALAMANTE, OLGA (1949–
)
Olga Talamante was a political prisoner in Argentina from November 10, 1974, to March 1976. She was charged with subversive activities and weapons possession, and the police inflicted physical and mental torture to force her to admit guilt, without success. In the United States her parents, friends, and other activists started a movement that quickly reached national proportions, touching many levels of government, and spread abroad, which ultimately led to her release. Talamante was born on December 3, 1949, in Mexicali, Baja California. Her parents raised four children, and Talamante was the only daughter. The family migrated to the United States when she was twelve years of age to join other farmworkers picking fruits and vegetables in the fields around Gilroy, California, where the family eventually settled. Despite linguistic and cultural differences, Talamante excelled in school. At the end of her senior year she received the Outstanding Student Award. After high school she was one of a few Mexican students who went to college. As a high-school student, she was selected, along with other leaders, to address the local school board to demand an increase in the numbers of Chicana/o students placed in college preparatory courses, and a culturally relevant curriculum. Through a local priest she learned of the broad social injustices at home and Latin America, the plight of the farmworkers, the organizing efforts of the United Farm Workers (UFW), and the political and social issues affecting Mexico and Latin America. In 1969 Talamante enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), majoring in Latin American studies. At UCSC she was active with el Movimiento
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Tarango, Yolanda Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), the UFW, and a migrant children’s breakfast program. Talamante joined in pickets of stores, boycotts, distribution of leaflets, and marches. In 1971 Talamante traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, to study the effects of the government’s grain reform program on the indigenous people. She described this event as a time when her “class awareness became more defined.” In Mexico City she met an Argentine couple traveling through North and South America documenting political struggles. The three planned to travel to El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Argentina to continue the documentation. However, in Nicaragua, the trio was deported for collecting information on the Sandinista movement. Talamante returned to UCSC to finish her studies and planned to join her friends in Argentina after graduation. In 1973 Talamante arrived in Argentina with the desire of enrolling in graduate school, but the political climate forced her to abandon the plan, and instead she became embroiled in the social and political unrest of the time. Argentina held its first democratic election after eighteen years of military rule in 1973. Juan Perón was reelected president, and the Peronist party was reestablished. Talamante joined some friends who were active members of the Peronist Youth, a branch of the Peronist party, to work in a government project to organize health centers in the barrios. However, Argentina’s social and economic fabric was shaken and in turmoil because of exorbitant inflation and worker unrest after Peron’s death in July 1974. Armed resistance from the political right and left led his successor to declare a state of siege and suspend civil liberties. On November 10, 1974, Talamante and twelve friends were arrested for violating the National Security Act. Talamante was detained in a prison in Azul, Argentina, and was tortured for four days with electrical prods, beaten, and psychologically abused. She later wrote, “Aside from the physical pain inflicted, one has to suffer the sadistic, denigrating repertory of those men.” The physical and mental torture deepened Talamante’s political commitments. In the United States her working-class parents and friends learned of her detention and immediately created the Olga Talamante Defense Committee (OTDC). Talamante’s mother, affectionately referred to as Doña Cuca, brought together the various integral workings of the committee. The defense committee began as a local campaign and quickly grew to a national level of substantial scope in human power, financial resources, and political support. The OTDC used the national media to alert the public about Talamante’s arrest and the injustice. The committee organized vigils, held fund-raisers, and sent members throughout the nation to disseminate news about her imprisonment. Some
members were sent to meet with ranking officials in the U.S. State Department, U.S. embassy bureaucrats in Argentina, and U.S. congressional leaders. Local and national government officials joined in to demand that the U.S. government pressure Argentina to release Talamante. For sixteen grueling months the members worked relentlessly to keep a national focus on Talamante’s detention and to seek support at all government levels. Upon her return to the United States Talamante continued to be involved in social and political causes important to her. Her arrest and the national movements that followed later brought attention to the abuse and torture inflicted by the Argentine government’s “Dirty War.” She joined with the American Friends Service Committee to campaign for the release of her Argentine friends who remained imprisoned and to educate the American public on the violations of human rights. In San Francisco Talamante became involved with a neighborhood health center, Head Start, the American Friends Service Committee, and continued to advocate for higher education for underrepresented youth. Olga Talamante remains one of the most recognized Latina leaders in California. Still living in the Bay Area, she serves as Executive Director of the Chicana Latina Foundation, an organization dedicated to advancing educational and professional opportunities for young women. Through workshops, conferences, scholarships, and mentoring, the Chicana Latina Foundation seeks to empower women as individuals and as a members of Latino communities. She has received a number of awards including “Heroes and Heroines of the Latino Community” awarded by KQED-TV, the San Francisco-based PBS affiliate. SOURCES: Chicana Latina Foundation Web site. “Board of Directors: Olga Talamante.” www.chicanalatina.org/direc tors.html#talamante (accessed July 24, 2005); Cortez, Alicia M. 1999. “The Struggle of the Mujeres to Liberate Olga Talamante, a Political Prisoner.” M.A. thesis, San Jose State University; Del Olmo, Frank. 1975. “Christmas in an Argentine Prison.” Los Angeles Times, December 25, sec. 1, pp. 3, 34, 36; NACLA’s Latin American and Empire Report. 1975. “Free Olga Talamante.” 9, no. 6 (September): 30. Alicia M. Cortez
TARANGO, YOLANDA (1948–
)
Yolanda Tarango was born in Texas in 1948. Her ancestors, Hispano refugees from the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, helped settle Ysleta near El Paso in 1682. Alongside the Tewa people, many refugee families remained in the area for generations. Tarango represents a fifth generation of Tejanos in this community. Since “her first choice to become a priest was impossible,” Tarango joined the Sisters of Charity of the
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Telenovelas Incarnate Word in 1966. She credits her involvement in the church to her grandmother, who taught her that “loving God is loving and forgiving others, pure and simple. . . . She left me with an image of God as grandmother, with open arms, ready to draw me into her embrace.” Sister Tarango resides in San Antonio, where she directs the Visitation House of Ministries, a transitional housing program for homeless women and children that she cofounded in 1985. As a doctoral candidate in ministry at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Tarango also teaches religious studies at the University of the Incarnate Word. She completed a six-year term as general councilor of her international religious order, the first Latina to fill that position. She also served as national coordinator of Las Hermanas, a national organization of Latina Roman Catholics, for three consecutive terms (1985–1991). Sister Tarango, the first twentieth-century published Chicana theologian, writes extensively on the spirituality of Latina Catholics. Her book Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (1988), coauthored with theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, made a significant contribution to an emerging Latina theological discourse. They were the first to synthesize the religious understandings of grassroots Latinas after several small-group retreats organized by Las Hermanas. Their work in articulating Latina experiences of the sacred has far-reaching implications. As feminist theologians, they emphasize “doing theology” as a liberating practice versus solely an intellectual exercise. For Tarango and Isasi-Díaz, the goal of a Latina feminist theology is to maintain Latino/a cultural values, but with a commitment to struggle against sexism in all its manifestations and to reach “not equality but liberation . . . [from] socio-political-economic oppression.” Tarango has since authored several articles on Latina feminist spirituality and coedited two books on Hispanic pastoral care. Her naming of Latina spirituality as “transformative struggle” offers important insights into Latinas’ daily struggle to survive and prosper spiritually, culturally, and economically. For Tarango, relating to the struggle in a transformative way rather than in a passive mode or with a victim mentality is fundamental to Latina liberation. She states, “Hispanic women do not envision themselves apart from the struggle. . . . La vida es la lucha, implies the struggle we must embrace and learn to love in order to survive in the present and envision life with dignity in the future.” Tarango views her religious vocation as “the best tool to force changes in the structure of the Catholic Church, which . . . ‘espouses white male superiority.’ ” Despite discrimination, her sustained commitment as a sister has led to a lifetime of activism focusing on
women’s issues. Her many years of experience in Latino pastoral ministry, her leadership skills, and her service on numerous advisory boards for health care systems have earned her several awards, including the Estrella Award from the Mexican American Business and Professional Women Association in 1998 and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of the Incarnate Word in 1996. See also Mujerista Theology; Nuns, Contemporary SOURCES: Davis, Kenneth G., and Yolanda Tarango, eds. 2000. Bridging Boundaries: The Pastoral Care of U.S. Hispanics. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press; Deck, Allan Figueroa, Yolanda Tarango, and Timothy Matovina, eds. 1995. Perspectivas: Hispanic Ministry. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward; Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, and Yolanda Tarango. 1998. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church. San Francisco: Harper and Row; Keller, Rosemary Skinner, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds. 1995. In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing. San Francisco: Harper. Lara Medina
TELENOVELAS Telenovelas, Spanish-language television serials, are a defining feature of U.S. Latino life even though few are U.S. produced. More than 80 percent of U.S. Spanish television network broadcasting consists of telenovelas and related productions: tabloid news, game, and gossip-variety shows. In the United States they connect Hispanics of all social classes and nationalities as they adopt or maintain a Latino identity. Despite the modest amount of U.S.-produced Spanish-language programs, telenovelas figure prominently among the most popular television content. Many telenovela celebrities are well-known singers and performers, and these productions combine the Spanish-language music, television, and film industries. Telenovelas are essentially formatted along the lines of old American daytime radio serials. This is not to say that U.S. commercial broadcasters invented serial fiction aimed at women but rather that they converted its narrative devices into an advertising system. As role models, the characters on these shows advertise the products that they use on stage and the lifestyle implied in their consumption. By the same token, the intermission frames advertisements that are often directly or indirectly connected to the story. When multinational corporations such as Procter and Gamble, Lever Brothers, and Colgate-Palmolive exported this radio format to Latin America and Spain, they gradually infused indigenous narrative traditions into the telenovelas that today are a formidable parallel to American television soap operas. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, telenovelas normally end their stories after twelve weeks and feature a protagonist
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Television couple that presides over the community of characters. Although the story lines in these shows come to an end, the programs maintain continuity through fixed time slots and by typecasting actors bound through the studio-system type of contracts. The stories may change, but the format, schedule, and cast continue, by virtue of which the old shows attract viewers to new ones. Telenovelas are U.S. television’s greatest rival in the international market, primarily because these serial dramas are often closer to the popular dramas of most countries. With traditional values, predictable plots, and melodrama, telenovelas tend to be less foreign than most U.S. television shows in countries throughout Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. The international expansion of the telenovela market during the 1ate 1980s inspired several countries to develop their own versions of the format, sometimes as the catapult to launch a national television industry, as in the case of India. Today telenovelas and similar serial dramas that have emerged worldwide sell social development values with the same calculated efficacy with which they have purveyed detergent and lifestyles. Latinas constitute one of the most interesting and important audiences in television history because of the circumstances in which they watch telenovelas. Telenovelas emerged from a format primarily aimed at women, for whom they retain their gendered nature, regardless of the diverse audience to which they now appeal. Second, powerful U.S. Hispanic media of international impact weaken the melting-pot type of assimilation that in the past vanquished immigrant media in the United States, especially as demographics and market forces brew vested interests in strengthening a distinct Hispanic culture. Hispanics or Latinos are the largest minority in the United States and represent a $600-billion consumer market. As voters, they may determine the fate of presidential elections. Third, telenovelas affect a new kind of acculturation and Latino identity based on maintaining strong connections with the countries of origin. Although acculturation has always been the function of immigrant media in the United States, Latino assimilation does not lead to cultural dissolution but rather to cultural affirmation. Telenovelas are intrinsically didactic. Although they may not incorporate educational intentions, they always have educational effects that are cumulative and often liberating. Depending on the context of reception, a viewer may read a story against the grain. For example, a Latina in the United States may not identify with the traditional female behavior that a telenovela sanctions as a role model, but instead view it as a negative image inherent in the culture of her country of origin that she was fortunate to escape. On the other
hand, telenovelas are—within their predictable simplicity—complex and elastic stories that promote social change. In fact, Mexico’s Televisa and Brazil’s Globo devised widely used systems to educate audiences in matters of reproductive health, addiction prevention and treatment, AIDS education, eating disorders and breast cancer prevention, domestic violence, racism, and homophobia. Much has been written about the impact of Globo’s “marketing social” and Televisa’s “entertainment-education” formulas on their countries of origin, as well as in those regions where they have been implemented. Though networks create programs with target audiences in mind, these shows do not lose their informative value in foreign markets. Stories call attention to social agendas that, while novel in their countries of origin, are often highly visible public policy issues in the United States. To immigrate means, more often than not, a search for progress, education, and freedom. By underscoring social progress, telenovelas fuel the aims for which Latinas come to the United States. At the same time telenovelas reinforce a cultural distinction that the host country permits and fosters. SOURCES: Allen, Robert C. 1992. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Fadul, Anamaría, ed. 1993. Serial Fiction in TV: The Latin American Telenovelas. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, Escola de Comunicação e Artes; López-Pumarejo, Tomás. 1995. “The Stripper and the Chief of State: On Soap Operas, and the Presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello.” In The Destiny of Narrative at the End of the Millennium, ed. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca and Rafael R. Tranche, 184–197 and 345–353 [original in English]. Valencia: Archivos de la Filmoteca; ———. 1997. Aproximación a la telenovela. Madrid: Cátedra; ———. 1999. “La naturaleza educativa de los seriales: Los soaps y las telenovelas” (The Educational Nature of Serial Drama: Telenovelas and Soaps). Archivos de la Filmoteca 31 (February): 8–31; Mazziotti, Nora. 1996. La industria de la telenovela: La producción de ficción en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós; Quinones, Sam. 1997. “Hooked on Telenovelas.” Hemispheres (United Airlines), November, Show Business sec., 27–29; Sherry, John L. 1997. “Prosocial Soap Operas for Development: A Review of Research and Theory.” Journal of International Communication 4, no. 2 (December): 75–101. Tomás López-Pumarejo
TELEVISION If the Latino presence in television has been small, the presence of Latinas in the medium has been even smaller. From its inception television has been at the forefront of image making. Like other forms of communication, television reflects the dominant ideology of the birthplace of the industry, the United States. The medium tends to portray an idealized image of the na-
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Television tion: an upper-middle-class white world where, more often than not, families, businesses, and institutions are headed by white, English-speaking males. Television has ignored essential components of the social and economic makeup of the United States, virtually dismissing the racial, class, and ethnic diversity brought about by the great immigration movements in the history of this country. Furthermore, the absence of Latinos and Latinas in television creates a void in images that reflect the diversity of experiences within Latino communities themselves. Viewers are thus deprived of the elements that are essential in forging a realistic image of the U.S. Latino experience. As a result, stereotypical portrayals of Latinos in general and Latinas in particular tend to dominate. When Latinas are portrayed, most roles position them as loose, hot-tempered women, suffering mothers, virginal girlfriends, or victims of male dominance. These images persist even though, ironically, women are generally the primary targets of the advertising that fuels the television industry. Soap operas, for example, are so named because the genre was targeted at housewives and paid for by the soap-product industry. The struggles of millions of Latinos/as, foreign born and native, are seldom represented, much less the essential role they have played in constructing the U.S. economy. In the case of Latinas, their role in the industrial and rural workforce has not been acknowledged. The experiences of women in the garment sweatshops
of Los Angeles and New York, fruit pickers in Oregon and Florida, domestic workers across the country, and second- and third-generation educated Latinas who have been steadily joining the ranks of professionals and the middle class have been overlooked by the mass media. During the first decades of television programming African Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other people of color were practically nonexistent. Interestingly, however, one of the most noteworthy exceptions came during the early years (1949–1953) when television programs promoted a certain ethnic diversity. Because television programming originated by transplanting some of the most popular radio shows, many had ethnic story lines. Among these crossover series were The Goldbergs, which followed the life of a Jewish immigrant family, I Remember Mama, about a Norwegian family in San Francisco, and later the all-black Amos and Andy and Beulah, which starred a black maid to a white middle-class family. Interestingly, in the original radio version of Amos and Andy the voices of the black characters came from white actors. But by 1953 these shows were off the air, and, with the exception of the short-lived Bernie Loves Bridget in the early 1970s, it would take several decades for such diversity to be seen again on television. One show that portrayed Latinos during the early years, The Cisco Kid (1950–1955), was modeled after the successful western film of the same name set in
The whole family watches Spanish-language programs on television. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Television Spanish California. The series included Latino Leo Carrillo as the sidekick to the protagonist, Duncan Renaldo. The two battled the bad guys, often other Latinos. Even though Latino actors played the leads, there were few Latina characters, and these were often played by non-Latina actresses. The Cisco Kid set the stage for the high-profile television series El Zorro, which portrayed Latino characters and was also set in Spanish California. As el Zorro, Guy Williams, a nonLatino actor, played the protagonist Don Diego. In 1951 the blockbuster I Love Lucy (1951–1957) came on the air. It starred Desi Arnaz as bandleader Ricky Ricardo, who immigrated to the United States and was Lucy’s Cuban husband. Arnaz was Lucille Ball’s husband in real life when the network approached her to do the show. After producers turned down her request that her husband costar in the series, Ball and Arnaz decided to form their own company, Desilu Productions. Innovators in television production, Arnaz and Desilu pioneered the three-camera technique for situation comedy that is still in use today. He also oversaw the development of such shows as The Untouchables (1959–1963), Star Trek (1966–1969), and Lou Grant (1977–1982). But while Arnaz played an important role both as an actor and a producer, this did not open the doors to the medium for Latinos in general, much less for Latinas. As a result of the protest movement against the Vietnam War, the civil rights and the feminist movements, and the Puerto Rican and Chicano mobilizations for social justice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ethnic diversity became more visible on television. Argentine-born Linda Crystal was among the first to play a lead Latina character in a television series, Victoria Cannon, the strong-willed wife of rancher John Cannon, in the western High Chaparral (1967– 1971). She received two Emmy Award nominations as Best Actress in a Drama Series for the role. Strong and dignified, the character was nonetheless confined to the role of a traditional wife. The character, Victoria, came from a wealthy Mexican family, and her sophisticated manners were often contrasted to the rougher manners of her white husband. Another strong-willed and dignified Latina character of that period was played by Elena Verdugo in the role of Nurse Consuelo López in Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976). Verdugo was born in Los Angeles, a fifth-generation Californian of Spanish ancestry. In the early 1970s there were also several sitcoms with African American leads, such as The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son, both spin-offs of All in the Family. However, nothing similar happened to Latinos, and no network series was built around a Latino family. During this period Latina characters appeared sporadically in popular programs, and their presence in some cases
served as a stimulus for discussion of racial prejudice. An episode of All in the Family (1971–1983), for example, dealt with a Puerto Rican family moving into Archie Bunker’s neighborhood. Barney Miller (1975– 1982), considered one of the most multicultural shows of the time, included a Puerto Rican detective, Chano, and even a Latina detective. These characters at least served to offset the portrayal of Hispanics as the criminals often arrested by the detectives. Chico and the Man (1974–1978) was the first series set in a Mexican American neighborhood and told the story of a white garage owner and his Mexican American employee. The series was much criticized, however, because there were no Chicanos in the cast. Chico was played by Freddie Prinze, a Puerto Rican. Although some Chicano actors were added to the cast, no Latinas were featured prominently on the show, other than veteran character actress Alma Beltrán, who played Prinze’s aunt. In the 1980s Latinos and Latinas gained no new ground. In fact, during that period the general depoliticization of television programming led to fewer shows that dealt with racial or other social themes, and most Latinos were portrayed as criminal elements in the growing genre of police shows such as Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), and Cagney and Lacey. More often than not, Latinas were portrayed as prostitutes, drug dealer groupies, drug addicts, and petty criminals or the suffering wives or mothers of criminals. Although Miami Vice (1984–1989) included several Latino characters that were on the “right side of the law,” such as Edward James Olmos, who played Detective Lt. Martin Castillo, and Saundra Santiago as Detective Gina Navarro, Latinos mainly played drug lords or petty criminals. Other shows such as The Cosby Show (1984–1992), about a middle-class black family, occasionally included Latino characters portraying positive roles. Brazilian actress Sonia Braga, for example, was featured as a Latina doctor on one of its episodes. Evelina Fernández had a small role in the first season of Roseanne (1988–1997). The sitcom I Married Dora (1987–1988) featured Latina Elizabeth Peña in the role of a housekeeper for widower Peter Farrel and his family. When faced with deportation, a Salvadoran, Dora, marries Farrel in order to get her papers. This series stands out as one of the few to deal with a real problem facing hundreds of thousands of Latinos who came to the United States from Central America during that period. A year later the series Trial and Error (1988), based on Latino characters from East Los Angeles, came on the air. Both of these dramas had a short life. A small number of Latinas have portrayed nonLatina characters. Elena Verdugo starred as the allAmerican Millie in the hit CBS series Meet Millie (1952–
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Television 1956); Lynda Carter played the lead in Wonder Woman (1976–1979). Ruth Britt played a native island girl on Operation Petticoat (1977–1979), and Catherine Bach costarred as Daisy in the comedy The Dukes of Hazard (1979–1985). Victoria Principal played Pamela Ewing in Dallas (1978–1991). A handful of other Latinas were also featured in daytime television. Argentina Brunette had a part in the long-running soap opera General Hospital (1963– ), and Gina Gallegos, Karin Marcelo, and Carmen Zapata were in Santa Barbara (1984–1993). One of the outstanding Latina actresses to make her mark in the entertainment industry is Rita Moreno. Born in Puerto Rico in 1931, she worked regularly on television throughout her productive career, which also included radio, film, and Broadway. In television she earned an Emmy Award for her portrayal of a Polish hooker on an episode of The Rockford Files. She also starred in the short-lived series The Rita Moreno Show (1976) about an aspiring actress, Googie Gómez, a role written especially for her, based on a character she portrayed in the Broadway production The Ritz. After winning an Oscar in 1961, Moreno chose her roles carefully, avoiding those that portrayed Latinas stereotypically. This may have contributed to her unemployment for about seven years of her career. For two seasons she starred as Violet on 9 to 5 (1982–1983) and as Burt Reynolds’s estranged wife on B. L. Stryker (1989–1990). Moreno also appeared on the HBO series Oz (1997–2002) where she played nun and counselor Sister Peter Marie. Among the few Latina leads in television series are Lauren Vélez in New York Undercover (1994), Moreno in Oz (1997), and Jessica Alba, who starred in Fox’s Dark Angel (2001). However, most Latinas are relegated to guest or limited appearances. Alma Martínez played a police sergeant in the syndicated series Adam 12 (1989–1990). Patricia Martínez guest-starred twice on Magnum P.I. (1980–1988), and Belita Moreno appeared in Roseanne and Melrose Place (1992–1999). Jacqueline Obradors guest-starred in an episode of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (1990–1993) and Vanishing Son (1995). Lupe Ontiveros had a recurring role on Veronica’s Closet (1997–2000), and Dyana Ortelli played in the short-lived syndicated series Marblehead Manor (1987–1988). Victoria Racimo, Maria Richwine, and Chita Rivera also had limited appearances of this kind. A few Latinas stand out for their work behind the cameras. Nancy de los Santos was associate producer and later producer of Siskel and Ebert at the Movies, a syndicated television show. Graciela Mazón and Laura J. Medina have worked on features and documentaries, as have Daisy Fuentes, Rosie Pérez, Nelly Galán, and María Pérez Brown. In the summer of 1999 civil rights organizations denounced the lack of black, Latino, and Asian charac-
ters in projected programming. None of the thirty-four new series for the fall of 2000 had any Latino performers in lead roles. That summer, however, the cable network Showtime began airing Resurrection Blvd. (2000), a drama series with a Latino cast created by a Latino. The series was a real showcase of Latino talent. While the story line revolves around the main male characters, several Latinas are featured as part of the Santiago family. Prominent among them are Ruth Livier and Marisol Nichols and veteran actress Elizabeth Peña. The children’s cable network Nickelodeon initiated its 2001 season with Taina, whose main character is a Puerto Rican teenager. The show, co-created and produced by Puerto Rican–born María Pérez-Brown, also features other Latino characters. Ada Maris and young Vaneza Leza Pitynski are the female members of the García family in the Nickelodeon series The Brothers García (2000– ) about a Latino household in San Antonio, Texas. Latina Jamie-Lynn Sigler plays Meadow Soprano in the popular HBO series The Sopranos. PBS’s fall 2001 season featured a new drama series, American Family, about a Latino family in East Los Angeles with a mostly Latino cast that included Sonia Braga, Raquel Welch, Constance Marie, Elizabeth Peña, Tamara Mello, and Jacqueline Obradors. Despite such gains, Latinos and Latinas are not highly visible on U.S. network television programs. Researchers Greenberg and Batista Fernández sampled commercial fictional programming during the 1975– 1976, 1976–1977, and 1977–1978 seasons. Of 3,549 characters with speaking roles in 255 episodes coded, there were only 53 reliably identified as Hispanic Americans, or less than 1.5 percent of all television characters. In the Public Advocates audit of sixty-three prime-time shows during the first week of the fall 1983 television season, Latinos/as played 0.5 percent, or 3 out of 496, of the significant speaking roles, and only 1 percent, or ten characters out of 866, of those who spoke one or more lines. A 2005 report prepared for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), states that after ten years of monitoring the situation, minimal coverage is still given to Latinos and Latino issues on network news. Out of 548 hours of network news covered in 2004, only three hours and 25 minutes focused on Latinos. These statistics are glaring, given that Latinos/as make up 12 percent of the total U.S. population. The national Spanish-language networks, Univision and Telemundo, are also key players in this important industry. These networks own the two U.S. Spanishlanguage cable channels, Galavision and Gems. Although a great part of their programming comes from Latin America, both Telemundo and Univision feature Latinas prominently in their U.S. news programs and talk shows. Cristina Saralegui, who has been called the
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Tempe Normal School Oprah Winfrey of Spanish-language television, for example, established herself as a significant player in the entertainment industry. She hosts her own show, Cristina, for Univision and publishes her own magazine. Telemundo’s Primer Impacto current events program is hosted by two women, Candela Ferro and Ana Patricia Candiani, both of whom began their careers in their native countries, Argentina and Mexico, respectively. A similar show on Univision, Ocurrió Así, is also hosted by two Latinas. Women are also present behind the camera. One of the best known of these is producer Nelly Galán. Two court television programs also feature Latina judges, and both are produced in Miami. Most of the news programs on these networks are anchored by women, among them María Elena Salinas and María Antonietta Collins of Univision and María Elena Salazar of Telemundo, who play as important a role as their male counterparts. Telemundo’s Elia Calderón stands out as one of the very few black faces among those presenting the news on these two networks. One of the most prominent journalists today, Denisse Oller, is an anchor newsperson for Univision. Recognized for her balanced, insightful reporting, Oller has garnered four Emmys for her work. The cable news network CNN recognized the importance of the Latino population and initiated
Spanish-language news programming with the inauguration in 1997 of CNN en Español. As on its Englishlanguage counterpart, many women are featured as news broadcasters. Among these are Latinas Glenda Umaña, Patricia Janiot, and Celina Rodríguez. The CNN English-language news team that includes awardwinning reporter María Hinojosa and producer Rose Arce, who has won two Emmys. NBC’s Weekend Today news is anchored by Soledad O’Brian, winner of the Hispanic Achievement Award in Communications. They stand out among the very few Latinas on Englishspeaking national television. In the twenty-first century few would dispute the importance of the Latino population. With an estimated population over 35 million, they form the largest minority community in the United States. But at the close of the twentieth century, in the midst of the socalled Latin boom in entertainment, the face of the Latina was still practically nonexistent on mainstream television. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Media Stereotypes SOURCES: Fregoso, Rosa Linda. 1993. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Reyes, Luis, and Peter Rubie. 1994. Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television. New York: Garland Publishing. Subverbi, Federico, with Joseph Torres and Daniela Montalvo. 2005. “The Portrayal of Latinos and Latino Issues on Network Television News, 2004, with a Retrospect to 1995.” Austin, Texas and Washington, D.C.: National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Irene Sosa
TEMPE NORMAL SCHOOL (1885–1936)
Denisse Oller with the first Emmy Award given for a Spanishlanguage news program, Noticias 41. Courtesy of Denisse Oller.
Between 1885, when the charter to establish the institution was passed, and 1936, Tempe Normal School (TNS) graduated over sixty Mexican American teachers, roughly 2 percent of its student body. Mostly women (about a dozen were men), these Mexican American students earned two-year college diplomas and assumed teaching positions in Arizona’s segregated public schools. Opening its doors in the fall of 1886 as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe and known by several names, including the present-day Arizona State University, TNS enrolled thirty-three students in its first year and awarded 3,522 teaching diplomas by 1936. The two-year curriculum, equivalent to the modern-day associate’s degree, provided a general liberal arts education, combined with pedagogical methods, and qualified students to sit for the state teacher’s examination they were required to pass in order to graduate and teach in Arizona public schools. In 1925 the state of Arizona reclassified TNS as a four-year state teachers college offering a baccalaure-
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Tempe Normal School ate in education; however, the college continued to issue the two-year teaching diploma until 1936. Many of these two-year graduates later returned to the college to complete their baccalaureates. The coeds gained classroom experience by practice teaching in several laboratory schools, including Tempe’s Eighth Street School, operated by the college. The Eighth Street School gained statewide notoriety as a result of a 1925 lawsuit, Romo v. Laird, which challenged an agreement between the Tempe Elementary School District No. 3 and TNS to operate the school as a “Mexican Training School” for “Spanish-American or MexicanAmerican children.” While Mexican American parents won the right to send their children to Tempe’s nearby “American” public school, the TNS and the district also secured the right under “separate but equal” laws to continue operating the segregated training school and its “Americanization” curriculum until its closure in 1945. Rosa Jaime was the first Spanish-surnamed woman to appear on the TNS graduation roster in 1907. Oral histories suggest that Spanish-surnamed women may have attended as early as the 1890s. Teacher Petra Ochoa, who taught in rural Mexican schools and Indian reservation schools, is remembered as an 1897 TNS student. Anna “Ann” Manuela Miller Raut, the daughter of Tempe citizens Winchester Miller Sr. and Maria Sotelo, also graduated in 1897. Enrollment registers confirm that after 1910 Spanish-surnamed women, as well as women of mixed Anglo and Mexican heritage, regularly graduated from TNS, beginning with Eliza Loroña in 1911, Concepción Faras in 1913, and Carmela Martínez in 1915. By 1917 Mexican American women became easily recognizable on campus. From 1917 to 1920, three to four Mexican American women earned diplomas each year, including Rose Mary Faras, who taught at Pirtleville Elementary School in the outskirts of Douglas, Arizona, where her older sister Concepción served as principal. In 1921 Tempe native María Escalante graduated and took a teaching job at a Phoenix-area Mexican school; later she taught Spanish at Scottsdale High School.
Of fifty-one Spanish-surnamed women who enrolled at the Normal School between 1887 and 1936, the majority graduated after 1924. Thirty-five Spanishsurnamed women earned diplomas between 1924 and 1936. Among them was the 1928 valedictorian, María L. Urquides, a bilingual education advocate from Tucson who became a recognized regional leader of the National Education Association, the Democratic Party, and the Southwestern Viva Kennedy campaigns. From 1923 to 1934 TNS usually graduated a Mexican American man each year. Among these was the education civil rights lawyer Rafael Carlos Estrada (1923). Estrada, who taught for several years before entering the University of Arizona Law School, represented Mexican American plaintiffs in the Tolleson, Arizona, landmark school desegregation case Gonzales v. Sheeley (1951). Like the Faras sisters, many of the Mexican American alumni shared common class and family backgrounds. Nearly half of the students shared surnames with at least one other classmate, and many were also siblings, cousins, or distant relatives of the same families. Urquides, for example, attended TNS with her first cousins Evangeline Romo Delesky (1926) and Genevieve Romo Urquides (1927). Other family sets of alumni include the Loroñas, Eliza (1911), Leonor (1920), and Adela (1924), and the Jerezes, Gilbert Joseph (1926), Hilda Virginia (1929), and Hortense Julia (1929). These alliances were further strengthened by marriages between students, such as Estrada and his student bride Ruby López Estrada. Students also hailed from Tempe’s Mexican American community. Among these were Escalante, Estrada, the Loroñas, and alumna Ida Isabelle Celaya (1917), whose father Antonio was a businessman, a fire chief, and president of the Liga Protectora Latina, a statewide mutual-aid society. Other TNS Mexican American alumni include Helen V. Bracamonte (1924), Eugenie Flores (1926), Dionisia G. Estévez (1926), Mary J. Gómez (1927), Florence A. Hernán (1927), Isabel Morales (1927), Marfila S. Arballo (1928), Lydia E. Contreras (1928), Josephine F. Delgado (1928), Caroline L. Contreras (1928), Marion
Students at Tempe Normal School, Tempe, Arizona, circa 1908. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851–1991 (Digital ID: cph 3c24486).
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Ten Years’ War Figueroa (1931), Elene G. Mendoza (1931), Stella R. Pacheco (1931), Naomi Ruth Moran (1931), Otila Uribe Flores (1932), Angelita M. Salazar (1932), Rachel Marie Feliz (1933), Adeline P. Hurtado (1934), Inez Jones Gómez (1935), Lorraine J. Casañega (1936), and Paulita G. Sánchez (1936). See also Education SOURCES: Muñoz, Laura K. 1998. “Mexican Women and Tempe Normal School, 1887–1936.” Paper Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe; Register of Non-Degree Graduates, 1887–1936. Arizona State College, Tempe. Laura K. Muñoz
TEN YEARS’ WAR (1868–1878) The Ten Years’ War in Cuba, known also as el Grito de Yara, and a planned and simultaneous uprising in Puerto Rico, el Grito de Lares, form preludes to the Cuban war with Spain, 1895, and the Cuban-SpanishAmerican War, 1898, that gave the United States colonial control over both islands. Although the Puerto Rican move for independence was squashed by the Spanish military within a month of the rebellion, both uprisings gave rise to the emigrations of hundreds of men and women who ultimately laid the groundwork for sustaining Latino communities, particularly in New York City and in Florida’s Tampa and Key West. For the most part these exile communities continued to support Antillean independence during and after the Ten Years’ War. They raised funds, promoted propaganda, and created effective organizations committed to liberation. The underlying causes of the rebellion were many. By 1824 Spain had lost most of its colonies in the Americas and intensified its administrative and economic hold on Cuba and Puerto Rico. Spain failed to implement promised special laws for equal representation of the islands with Spanish peninsular provinces in legislative bodies. The imposition of taxes and other laws without Criollo (those individuals born in Cuba or Puerto Rico) participation, repression of opposing political views, and prohibitions on trade outraged colonial landowners. Moreover, Cubans in particular had enjoyed a brief period of liberal reorganization under the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that whetted their appetite for free trade and control of their own economic and political destiny. Led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, an attorney, and promoted by a group of patriotic landowners, the Grito de Yara began on October 10, 1868, and signaled a period of warfare that essentially crippled Cuba’s econ-
omy and devastated its agricultural production. The diverse rebel forces included landowners, professionals, merchants, freed slaves, and farmers. While atrocities abounded on both sides of the conflict, incidents such as the massacre of a handful of medical students for allegedly defacing a Spanish tombstone in 1871 and the serial execution of fifty-three individuals in international waters on board the steamship Virginius in 1873 fueled Cuban patriotism. Sanctioned by a constitutional assembly (1869) and led by seasoned war veterans such as Manuel de Quesada, who had fought under Benito Juárez in Mexico, the revolution suffered from a lack of supplies and the capture of many of its leaders. After the arrest of the president of the republic, Tomás Estrada Palma, peace negotiations in Zanjón in 1878 dismantled the Cuban government, and except for skirmishes by rebels who had fought under Antonio Maceo, the war came to an end. But Zanjón was more than just a place where a treaty signaled the official end to warfare; it initiated a cherished and patriotic heritage, fundamental to the creation of Cuban nationhood. Families were torn apart and devastated by the war, which also changed traditional roles and lifestyles. Middle- and upper-class women accustomed to privileged circumstances were forced to work outside the home in department stores, as salesclerks, in factories, in restaurants, and in civil service. It was not unusual for men to bring their families to safety in the United States and return to participate in battle. As a result, émigré households were often headed by women. Women on their own also left Cuba with their children to escape the insurrection, especially when they became widows or lost relatives. This was the plight of Concha Agramonte, whose husband Ignacio Agramonte y Loynáz, principal author of the constitution, died in battle. She and her nine children immigrated to New York City, where she worked as a seamstress. Ana Merchan’s father was an insurgent in the rebellion and fled with his family to Key West during the war. Fifteen charter members of the organization las Obreras de la Independencia, founded in 1892, included Adelaide de Rivero and the wives, widows, and daughters of men who fought in the Ten Years’ War. This women’s club and dozens of others like it contributed to the formation of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano and the war efforts of 1895 through fund-raising, bazaars, dinners, dances, and celebrations. Many organizations honored the deeds of women insurgents, such as the Club Ana Betancourt de Mora, named after a woman who advocated for women’s rights in the 1860s. Overall, the war promoted women’s participation in the public sphere. Émigré communities found a myriad of ways to maintain patriotism and a sense of nation-
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Tenayuca, Emma 1985. Puerto Rico’s Revolt for Independence: El Grito de Lares. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Pérez, Louis A., Jr. 1999. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol
TENAYUCA, EMMA (1916–1999)
Cuban Revolutionary Society, Key West, Florida. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945 (Digital ID: fsa *a09354).
hood. One such way was working with religious organizations. Protestantism, less identified with Spanish rule than Catholicism, had made inroads into Cuba in the late nineteenth century, and émigré women found that they could help the war effort in exile by engaging in missionary work. Isabel Prieto and Bonifacia Dealofeu, for example, worked with the missions in Key West. They sponsored social services, helped integrate recently arrived families into the community, taught Sunday school, and proselytized door-to-door. Perhaps the best-known homage paid to Cuban women in exile appeared in the pages of the newspaper Patria. Penned by the Apostle of the Revolution, José Martí, himself exiled in New York since the end of the Ten Years’ War, the article “El alma cubana” extolled the virtues of Doña Carolina Rodríguez. She served as a courier between the insurgent forces in Cuba in the 1870s. Forced to immigrate to Key West at the age of fifty-three, Doña Carolina made a life for herself working as a stemmer in a cigar factory and promoting Cuban liberation. She collected funds for needy émigré families and to aid renewed liberation efforts. In 1892 she resettled in Tampa. An integral activist in the Cuban émigré community, she helped found women’s organizations, including las Obreras de Independencia. When Martí visited the exile communities in preparation for renewing the war against the Spanish, Doña Carolina accompanied him throughout the city on his mission. “La patriota,” as Martí christened her, exemplified hundreds of Cuban exiled women whose patriotism spanned three decades and two wars. SOURCES: Hewitt, Nancy A. 2001. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Jiménez de Wagenheim, Olga.
Radical labor organizer Emma Tenayuca was born in San Antonio, Texas. On her mother’s side (Zepeda) of the family, she was a descendant of Spanish settlers who came to Texas and settled in Los Adáes, the easternmost establishment in Spanish Texas. However, her father’s pure Indian heritage had a much more significant impact on her development. In an oral interview recorded by the Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, Texas, in February 1987, she discussed her background: “I didn’t have a fashionable Spanish name like García or Sánchez. I carried an Indian name. And I was very, very conscious of that. It was this historical background and my grandparents’ attitude which formed my ideas and actually gave me that courage later to undertake the type of work I did in San Antonio. . . . I think it was the combination of being a Texan, being a Mexican, and being more Indian than Spanish that propelled me to take action.” Growing up in the early years of the twentieth century in San Antonio, Tenayuca saw the economic disparities that prevailed in most of the city’s West Side: low-paying, unskilled jobs, high infant mortality rates, and the dubious distinction of having one of the highest tuberculosis rates in the country. Tenayuca recalled her visits to La Plaza de Zacate (today Milam Plaza) with her Zepeda grandfather, described by her as a “very conscientious, very honest man, a devout Catholic, a good Democrat” who voted for “Ma” Ferguson because she stalwartly opposed the Ku Klux Klan. Her grandfather rallied the entire family to cast their vote for “Ma.” The event was noteworthy to her, even though Tenayuca was only in the third grade at the time. Zepeda was a major influence in shaping his granddaughter’s political and socioeconomic views. He read English, participated in local politics, and was especially interested in labor issues and civil rights. At La Plaza de Zacate, a gathering place where many Mexicans and Tejanos met to discuss the events of the day, Tenayuca heard the radical rhetoric of Carrancistas, Maderistas, and Magonistas as they debated revolutionary developments in Mexico. Here she also learned of the economic plight of laborers expressed by socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies. When she read about the 1932–1933 strikes against the Finck Cigar Company, she joined the labor movement. Tenayuca was
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Tenayuca, Emma sixteen. She walked the picket line and joined strikers in jail. She founded the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union local in San Antonio and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Workers’ Alliance in the 1930s. The Workers’ Alliance endorsed the pecan shellers’ strike in January 1938. The pecan shellers had first walked out in 1934 to protest low wages. The issues— low wages and unfair labor practices—remained unresolved for four years. Laborers endured appalling working conditions: inadequate ventilation, no inside toilets, and wages that added up to perhaps $2 or $3 a week. In comparison, garment workers averaged $3 to $4 a week, while gardeners and domestic servants earned about $2 to $2.50 a week. By 1937 an economic recession resulted in more unemployment and another wage reduction. Government relief jobs were reduced. Across Texas the first to see their relief payments discontinued were Mexican American laborers. Tenayuca’s role in the strike earned her the name “la pasionara.” She urged a walkout, and on Monday, January 31, 1938, between 6,000 and 10,000 workers, the majority of whom were women, walked out in protest. Police used tear gas to dispel the crowds and arrested more than 1,000 strikers on trivial charges such as obstructing the sidewalks. As strike representative for the 12,000 female pecan shellers who worked in 400 work sheds scattered throughout San Antonio’s West Side, Tenayuca was arrested, but the demonstrations continued in downtown parks and in the Plaza de Zacate. City officials, the Catholic Church, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) condemned the strike, although the middle-class Mexican American establishment professed sympathy for the pecan shellers’ appalling working conditions and meager wages. On the night of August 25th, 1939, a near riot took place at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium. The consequences were significant. Mayor Maury Maverick, who gave Tenayuca permission to use the city auditorium for a meeting of the Texas Communist Party, paid a heavy political price. The riot cost him reelection. Tenayuca found herself ostracized, unable to find work because of her Communist leanings, and separated from her husband. The Catholic newspaper La Voz warned: “In the midst of this community exists a woman by the name of Emma Tenayuca who wants to spread disorder and hatred. This woman has all the appearances of a communist. . . . Don’t give your names to her when she comes around to solicit them. Warn people when she comes around. Mrs. Tenayuca de Brooks is not a Mexican; she is a Russofile, [sic] sold out to Russia, communist. If she were a Mexican she would not be doing this type of work.”
Sharyll Soto Teneyuca (the family surname’s original spelling) recalled that her aunt’s exploits were never openly discussed in the family. About the time of the thirtieth anniversary of the Municipal Auditorium riot of 1939, she picked up a newspaper to find a pictorial commemorative of the event. Soto Teneyuca wrote, “I read with awe that ’Emma Tenayuca was the charismatic leader of a movement that shook the city’s labor force,’ a ‘fiery orator’ who married Homer Brooks, a Communist. She had been involved in organizing and fighting for the rights of the city’s poor against some of the city’s most profitable industries. I read of the mass destruction done to the municipal auditorium by the angry mob who stormed it in protest of the Communist party meeting that was to be held there that night and at which she was to speak. I was both proud and impressed to finally learn the family secret about Aunt Emma.” According to historian Zaragoza Vargas, “She had a magnetic personality and possessed extraordinary organizing abilities, honed by years of active struggle on behalf of San Antonio’s Mexican community. Under the banners of the Unemployed Councils and the Workers’ Alliance of America, she helped Mexicans organize hunger marches, protests, and demonstrations to gain relief, obtain jobs on public works projects, and fight against racial injustice and harassment by the U.S. Immigration Service.” Undeterred, Tenayuca continued her organizing efforts. There were laundry workers, cement workers, and onion pickers who needed her help. The Workers’ Alliance desegregated a theater in San Antonio and petitioned for English classes at night. Tenayuca took low-paying jobs while going to school at night. Zaragoza Vargas noted that a Jewish garment manufacturer of army officer uniforms who had sympathized with her community work provided her with a job as a secretary and bookkeeper. One entry in her own journal as told by her niece revealed her predicament. She wrote: “On the other hand, I am going to have to face a barrage of criticisms, etc. from both members of my family as well as the so-called middle class element. It will be sometime before the matter of my divorce will have been forgotten. I am only a very insignificant little individual, who 50 years hence will have been completely forgotten, but my divorce makes a juicy piece of gossip right now.” Eventually, antiunion and anti-Mexican sentiment forced her to leave Texas in the late 1940s for her safety and economic well-being. She moved to San Francisco, where she graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State College. Twenty years later she returned to San Antonio and found that she had acquired heroine status. She enrolled at Our Lady of the Lake University, where she earned a master’s de-
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Tex-Son Strike gree in education and taught in a San Antonio public elementary school until her retirement. She died of Alzheimer’s disease on July 23, 1999, at a San Antonio nursing home. See also San Antonio Pecan Shellers’ Strike SOURCES: Teneyuca, Sharyll Soto. 1999. “Save the Story: The Emma Tenayuca Project.” In San Antonio: La Voz de Esperanza. San Antonio: Esperanza Center; The University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. “If the Principles Are Gone.” TENAYUCA, Emma.” 1987. Oral interview by Gerald E. Poyo, February 21. www.texancultures.utsa.edu/mem ories/htms/tenayuca_trnascript.htm (accessed July 24, 2005); Vargas, Zaragosa. 1997. “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement during the Great Depression.” Pacific Historical Review 66 (November): 553–580. Nora E. Rios McMillan
TEX-SON STRIKE On February 24, 1959, approximately 185 Tejanas and European American women left their posts at the TexSon clothing factory in San Antonio, Texas. This labor dispute was sparked by the company’s decision to subcontract a considerable portion of its production to a factory in Tupelo, Mississippi. It was one of the earliest efforts by union members to fight for their jobs in the face of outsourcing operations to cheaper, nonunion locales, first in the Deep South and decades later across the border into Mexico and across the Pacific to China. In the words of the late historian Irene Ledesma, this was “a do or die battle.” The members of Local 180 of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) at Tex-Son were understandably concerned by the Tupelo factory. They now faced a shortened workweek and thus earned less money. For example, Helen Martínez, a single mother of four children, earned $9.12 per week. The union also protested management’s attempt to restructure the grievance process and to eliminate the health and welfare fund. Harold Franzel, the owner of Tex-Son, refused to negotiate and hired an alleged union-busting attorney. The ILGWU organizer in charge of the strike was Sophie Gonzales, and Tex-Son was the first ILGWU labor action where Mexican American rank and file held actual leadership positions. Indeed, of the fourteen members of the negotiating committee, ten were Mexican American women, and their articulate spokesperson, Gregoria Montalbo, served as president of the Tex-Son local. Within a week of the strike strikers and scabs engaged in a bitter confrontation. The police moved quickly to quell the disturbance. While local newspapers focused on hair pulling and swinging purses, the ILGWU paper Justice published graphic photographs of
Police restrain a striker at the Tex-Son strike. Courtesy of George and Lantane Papers, Texas Labor Archives, University of Texas at Arlington.
law enforcement officers using excessive force against the women strikers. Labor unions across Texas rallied to raise funds for the Tex-Son pickets. Brewery workers, clerical employers, steelworkers, and packinghouse operatives contributed money, and in March 1959, after a union solidarity parade with more than 1,000 marchers, Franzel used the event as an opportunity to red-bait or cast “Communist” aspersions against union activists. Irene Ledesma explains that while Franzel used well-worn cold war accusations against the ILGWU (and his employees), the union itself relied on notions of domesticity and motherhood to garner support for the strike. As in previous labor actions, Mexican American children walked the picket line. Gathering in front of local department stores, they passed out balloons to other children with the message “Don’t Buy Tex-Son.” They distributed bilingual pamphlets, such as one that explained the strike from a child’s perspective: “My Mama sews in a factory making clothes for kids. But now she is on strike because she needs more money for my sisters and my brother and me, and her boss wouldn’t let her have it.” Despite the tenacity of local strikers and their families, management refused to budge. In 1961 the national union withdrew support, and the strike ended several months later. Unemployed Tejanas willing to take jobs as scabs, the antiunion climate of San Antonio and Texas, and then the resulting diffidence of the national union marked the defeat of union militants, women who put their own jobs on the line to try to
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Theater forestall outsourcing of garment production to cheaper, nonunion regions. The Tex-Son strike proved a bellwether for trends in American manufacturing and organized labor. See also International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) SOURCES: Lambert, George. George Lambert Collection. Special Collections, University Library, University of Texas, Arlington; Ledesma, Irene. 1995. “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, 1919–1974.” Western Historical Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Autumn): 309–331. Vicki L. Ruiz
THEATER Unlike the beginnings of the theatrical tradition in England, Spain did not prohibit women from acting, and there was no puritanical strain in Latino culture in the Americas that saw the theater as iniquitous and thus limited the development of the dramatic arts, the construction of theaters, and the enjoyment of entertainment within them. In the Spanish-speaking Americas and in Spain, theaters were called theaters, not “opera houses,” respectable people could frequent them, and women had the opportunity to develop their intelligence and talent and rise to leadership in the dramatic and performing arts. Hispanic theater history is filled with reports of actresses whose beauty and artistry enchanted their audiences. These stars were held in great celebrity and commanded considerable power, not only over their audiences, but also over their managers, impresarios, and theater owners. Their power quite often extended over other men of power and rank in the general society who were smitten by these artists’ charms. During the nineteenth century the rise of melodrama brought with it hosts of interesting roles for leading ladies, roles that allowed them to display the full gamut of emotions on stage. In Spain and Spanish America numerous actresses arose who became so celebrated and sought after that their dramatic companies bore their names. The rise of vaudeville in France and its introduction into Spain and the Americas during the late nineteenth century also had the effect of further empowering women on the stage to the extent that their liberty to display previously prohibited portions of their anatomy and to sexually titillate male audiences made them the center of attention and the greatest box-office draw. By the early twentieth century many leading ladies had become the owners and directors of large dramatic and vaudeville companies, which in a very real sense were large business enterprises. Some of them even owned and operated their own theater houses.
The most famous and exemplary of these women entrepreneurs was Virginia Fábregas, whose company toured throughout Mexico and the Southwest beginning in the late nineteenth century and later went on almost yearly tours from Mexico to the Caribbean, Spain, the United States, the Philippines, and Guam. La Fábregas brought the latest in European realistic drama to the Americas and the best Spanish American playwrights to the stage, but her repertoire always carefully included only plays that presented a forum for her own virtuosity as a leading lady. Her lifelong project was to invest her earnings from her constant touring into the construction and operation of a theater and school of drama in Mexico City, which she accomplished. The Teatro Fábregas and its school are still standing and operating today in the Mexican capital. Fábregas should also be credited for stimulating the development of theater in the southwestern United States in many ways. During the Mexican Revolution Fábregas continued touring the Southwest; however, many of her actors and technicians realized that a prosperous and successful life on stage could be had in the Mexican immigrant and exile communities here. During each tour many of her personnel dropped out of her company to remain in the United States and perform with other companies or even start their own companies. In addition, Fábregas purchased plays by promising playwrights of the Southwest and incorporated them into her repertoire to be performed throughout the Southwest and the Hispanic world. But by far her most important contribution was the quality of her stage productions and of her acting, which served as a model for all the other companies that performed during the more than forty years in which she appeared on stages of the Southwest. Numerous other dramatic and vaudeville companies led by leading ladies followed Fábregas into the United States, such as the companies of Rosa Arriaga, María Caballé, Carmen Cassaude de León, Soledad Castillo, María Conesa, Nelly Fernández, Ligia de Golconda, Elena Landeros, María del Carmen Martínez, Angélica Méndez, Carmen du Molins, María Teresa Montoya, Marita Reid, Marita Ríos, Paquita Santigosa, and various others. Companies such as those of Camila Quiroga and Paulina Singerman were drawn from as far away as Buenos Aires. To what extent these women maintained financial and operational control of their companies is not fully known, but their leadership was never in question to their audiences and the press. All of them, in fact, served as role models and mentors for Latina actresses and performers breaking into theater in the United States. One such actress, who in her early career in drama and vaudeville emulated the vedette (a star performer) Dorita Ceprano, was Beatriz Escalona. Escalona, who
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An aging La Chata Noloesca in a musical review at the Teatro Hispano in New York, circa 1949. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
became the most famous Latina comedienne under the name of La Chata Noloesca, was discovered by a traveling troupe of Cuban-Spanish actor-musicians when she was working as an usherette and box-office clerk in her native San Antonio. After divorcing her husband, the director of the company, Escalona returned to San Antonio and formed her own all-female company and began touring during the depression up to Chicago, east to Florida and Cuba, and north to New York, where ultimately she spent many years on stage performing for Latino audiences into the 1950s. Marita Reid, an actress who debuted as a child on the stages of southern Spain, was one of the theatrical directors and impresarios most responsible for the survival of serious Spanish-language drama in New York during the depression and World War II. At the head of her companies, she not only performed on the professional circuits but also kept theater alive in the mutualaid societies of Spaniards, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. Reid was the first Hispanic actress to cross over into English-language drama on Broadway and into television and during the 1960s served as a mentor for such performers as Tina Ramírez, who was a member of her Spanish-language company. Ramírez went on to become the director of the most important Hispanic dance troupe and school in the United States today, el Ballet Hispánico. Today such leading-lady company directors as Carmen Zapata of Los Angeles’ Bilingual Foundation for the Arts and Miriam Colón of New York’s Puerto Rican Traveling Theater are the inheritors of this tradition. Both came out of Spanish-speaking theater in New York and made the crossover to Hollywood film. Both have established and maintained companies in Latino
urban centers and used them as training grounds and showcases in English and Spanish for theater arts. SOURCES: Arrizón, Alicia. 1999. Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Arrizón, Alicia, and Lillian Manzor, eds. 2000. Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press; Kanel-
Carmen Zapata in the role of Queen Isabella. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
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Theater los, Nicolás. 1990. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Nicolás Kanellos
Padua Hills Theater (1931–1974) The Padua Hills Theater in Claremont, California, featured Mexican-theme folk plays, romantic comedies, and historical dramas performed by young, local Mexican Americans. Begun as an “experiment” to save a dying community theater during the depression, the theater’s troupe, the Mexican Players (or Paduanos, as the performers called themselves), became one of the most celebrated collections of Mexican American artists in southern California from 1931 to 1974. Hosting a repertoire of plays that included traditional and original songs and dialogue in Spanish, Padua Hills surprisingly drew a mostly English-speaking, white audience. After a short stint as a for-profit enterprise, proprietors Herman and Bess Garner successfully converted the theater into a nonprofit “institute” in 1936 with the expressed intent of forging “intercultural understanding” between European Americans and Mexicans. During World War II an emphasis on women’s roles increased after the U.S. military drafted theater director Charles Dickinson and many male Paduanos (male players) for service. Like industries affected by war mobilization, Padua Hills Theater grew more dependent on women workers and provided many Paduanas (female players) greater influence on the performances. For example, Hilda Ramírez-Jara took over directorial duties in Dickinson’s absence. To compensate for the lack of male players, she chose plays that primarily featured women characters, including scripts about Mexican women soldiers during the Mexican Revolution (soldaderas) and Mexican matriarchs (Tehuanas) in southern Mexico. Although Dickinson directed the plays Adelita, Noches poblanas, Juana, la Tehuana, and Marina before his departure for the war in March 1943, these productions took on new importance during the mid-1940s when women dominated the ranks of the Mexican Players. Borne of necessity, the focus and reliance on women also had the unintended consequence of empowering Paduanas, such as Hilda Ramírez-Jara, who not only directed many World War II–era plays, but also worked in the wardrobe department. When the war ended, Charles Dickinson resumed directorial duties, an act by management that reflected post-war attitudes about the temporary role of women in the workforce. Nevertheless, after her career at Padua Hills, Ramírez-Jara’s stint as the theater’s director provided experience that served her later as the director of the popular Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California. An-
other player, Casilda Amador Thoreson, became the lead hostess in the dining room and helped manage the theater until 1947, when she quit temporarily to marry Harold Thoreson. She recalled, “I was head of the dining room and the kitchen at one time until it was too much for me.” After the untimely death of her husband Thoreson returned to the theater in 1951 to become membership chairperson and lead hostess. In 1958 Herman Garner chose her to write the Padua Hills News Notes, a monthly newsletter that went out to patrons and donors, announcing performance schedules and background information regarding the cast. For Ramírez-Jara, Amador Thoreson, and other Paduanas, the changes during World War II led to increased influence at Padua Hills. SOURCE: García, Matt. 2002. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900– 1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Matt García
Playwrights The roots of Latinas in theater can be traced to the middle of the eighteenth century. Women have played important roles in theater ensembles as writers, directors, actresses, and, at times, owners of their own companies. The first cities in the United States to host such entertainment were those in the West Coast, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. Later other cities in the Southwest, such as Tucson, El Paso, Laredo, and San Antonio, became important places for theater. During the 1890s cities like Tampa, Florida, hosted Spanish and Cuban theatrical companies. These were sponsored by owners of big cigar businesses who used this type of entertainment for advertising their products. Women’s participation in theater up to the first half of the twentieth century can be divided into two types: professional theater, where they performed famous works by established Spanish and Latin American writers, and a type of poor people’s itinerant theater better known as teatro de carpa. These different companies traveled throughout the United States—the Southwest, Chicago, New York, and Florida—and Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico. Middle- and workingclass people had their own types of theatrical entertainment. During this time Virginia Fábregas, who owned her own company, exemplified Mexican women in professional theater geared to middle-class Spanish-speaking audiences. Originally born and raised in Mexico, Fábregas decided to relocate to Los Angeles, California. Because of its low economic maintenance and traveling cost, teatro de carpa was the most enduring and famous type of entertainment serving primarily working-class people.
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Virginia Fábregas, distinguished Mexican actor, celebrates a benefit and farewell performance at the Lyceum Hall. Courtesy of Arte Público Press.
A recognized woman of the carpa tradition was Beatriz Escalona, “La Chata Noloesca,” who acted, sang, wrote, directed, and also owned her theater company. Her most famous character was a Mexican social type known as a peladita (a destitute, downtrodden figure), and she traveled throughout the Southwest, New York, and Cuba. There were other women like Escalona, such as Carmen Soto de Vásquez, who also owned her own theater house in Tucson, Arizona, around 1915. Yet another example in Texas is Leonor Zamarripa Mendoza (mother of the famous Tejana singer Lydia Mendoza), who was also in charge of a small traveling show composed of family members for whom she wrote, directed, and created costumes. Her contributions helped the survival of the company for the first few decades of the twentieth century. Teatro de carpa traveled to the areas where great numbers of Mexican workers were employed in the agricultural fields, on the railroad, and in the service industries. These teatristas were another type of mi-
grant laborers similar to the people they entertained. Many carpas followed agricultural workers in particular, set up their tents on the outskirts of town, and tried to incorporate issues pertaining to the workers in that area. Teatro de carpa is considered one of the models on which the most famous Chicano theater ensemble, el Teatro Campesino (ETC), was based. Most contemporary Chicana/Latina theater originates in the theater of the Chicano movement, especially in the works of el Teatro Campesino. During the 1960s and 1970s women such as Socorro Valdez, Diane Rodríguez, and Olivia Chumacero worked with ETC and made great contributions that went unrecognized. Later they went on to write, direct, and produce their own work. In 1971 various Chicano theater ensembles formed, el Teatro Nacional de Aztlán (the National Theater of Aztlán, TENAZ) as their umbrella organization. Another ensemble that belonged to this organization, el Teatro de la Esperanza (Theater of Hope), originally from Santa Barbara, California, attempted to include women’s issues in most of its work. However, given the overall male-dominated environment of the period, the women involved in different teatros across the Southwest decided to create their own group within TENAZ and called themselves Women in Teatro (WIT). This period saw the formation of all-women theater groups in California like Teatro Raíces (Roots Theater) in San Diego and las Cucarachas (the Cockroaches) from San Francisco, led by Dorinda Moreno. This last group performed a play titled Chicana in 1974 in which it traced women’s historical ancestors. Silviana Woods in Arizona led the ensemble called Teatro Chicano, which was one of the first affiliates of TENAZ to produce a play that dealt with issues of homosexuality. Aside from plays, these ensembles also created a type of hybrid work called teatropoesía in which theater, poetry, and music were combined. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano in her study of teatropoesía in the Bay Area states that this art “exploits the beauty and power of words, a dimension often neglected in Chicano Theater, combining the compact directness and lyrical emotion of the poetic text with the physical immediacy of the three-dimensional work of theater.” During the 1980s one written work included concerns pertaining to the struggles of people from El Salvador. Another famous work titled Tongues of Fire was based on the first Chicana/Latina anthology of feminist writings, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as on the poetry of other Chicanas. Chicanas form the largest group of women under the umbrella term “Latina,” and their participation in theater has been well documented. In addition to Chicanas, there are two other major groups recognized
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Theater under this category: Puerto Rican/Nuyorican and Cuban/Cuban American women. Unfortunately, the participation in theater of Latinas who can trace their roots to other Latin American countries has not been fully researched. Some of the central themes of Latina theater include issues of gender and sexuality, class, and race. Certain writers concentrate on the exploration of subject identity (be it sexual or ethnic), family matters, and, among many other themes, the challenge of Latina stereotypes and poverty in the barrios. Works by Latinas in theater can be found in monolingual Spanish, English, or a mixture of both. Since the 1980s there has been a small, but effective, number of theater labs that have catered specifically to the development and professionalization of the industry by Latinas and Latinos. In California José Luis Valenzuela has led the Los Angeles Theater Center’s Latino Theater Lab (LTL) since 1985 and has been responsible for the production of plays like Evelina Fernández’s How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive and Luminarias, both of which deal specifically with issues of sexuality, identity, midlife, and women’s support systems. Both plays were eventually developed into films. Another lab in that same state is the Costa Mesa South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, directed from 1986 to 1997 by José Cruz González. This lab produced the work of several Latinas and published an anthology titled Latino Plays from South Coast Repertory: Hispanic Playwrights Project Anthology (2000). A third theater lab, located in New York, is INTAR (International Arts Relations) Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residency Laboratory Group, directed from 1981 to 1992 by the recognized and established Cuban American playwright and director María Irene Fornés. The author of more than forty plays, she has contributed to the works of many recognized Latina writers in theater, among them Cherríe Moraga and Migdalia Cruz, a Puerto Rican born in the South Bronx, New York. Among recognized Chicana playwrights is Estela Portillo Trambley, who published the first collection of Latina theater works, titled Sor Juana and Other Plays in 1983. Cherríe Moraga was the first to write sympathetically about issues of Chicana/Mexicana lesbian desire, as well as issues of labor exploitation among women and men in the Chicana/o and Mexican immigrant communities. Edith Villarreal, Ruby Nelda Pérez, and Denise Chávez have also written works specifically dealing with women’s issues. Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves and Milcha Sánchez-Scott’s Roosters have also been produced as films. In addition, both writers concentrate on themes of identity, selfimage, immigrant labor exploitation, and life in the barrios.
Like Chicano theater, some Puerto Rican theater work in the United States is based on teatro popular or “leftist proletarian theater.” One of the earliest ensembles was the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater Company, of which Miriam Colón was a founding participant. Migdalia Cruz, who resides mostly in Chicago, Illinois, is the best-recognized writer of Puerto Rican descent. Cruz has written more than thirty plays and musicals with various themes that represent life in urban settings. There has also been a popular theater base in Cuban and Cuban American theater with origins in teatro bufo, but recently most of this theater has shifted to professional settings. Aside from María Irene Fornés, Dolores Prida is another Cuban American writer who has had a successful career in theater. Her best-known plays, Coser y cantar and Beautiful Señoritas, have been widely produced. Prida’s work focuses on issues of Latina stereotypes and national/ethnic identity, among other topics. As with the theatrical activities of teatropoesía of the 1980s, there has recently been a proliferation of theater work by Latinas denominated as performance art that does not necessarily fit into the strict characteristic of plays. In performance art many of the participants often present one-woman shows and incorporate multimedia materials such as slides, recorded and live music, and other types of visual art. Performance artists such as Cuban American Carmelita Tropicana (I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures), Chicana Mónica Palacios (Latin Lesbo Comic: A Performance about Happiness, Challenges, and Tacos and Greetings from a Queer Señorita), and Cuban/Puerto Rican–American Marga Gómez (Marga Gómez Is Pretty, Witty, and Gay and Half Cuban/Half Lesbian) deal specifically with lesbian issues, Latina identity, and comedy. Two additional Chicana performance artists from Los Angeles and San Antonio, respectively, are María Elena Fernández (Confessions of a Cha-Cha Feminist), and Laura Esparza (I DisMember the Alamo). Both focus on Chicana feminism and historical identity. Another important performer is María Elena Gaitán, a Chicana artist and community activist from East Los Angeles. Gaitán produced an important body of work related to the struggles of oppressed peoples. Some of her titles include Chola con Cello: A Home Girl in the Philharmonic, The Adventures of Connie Chancla, and The Teta Show. Her topics include issues of racial discrimination, labor exploitation, women’s history, and breast cancer. Some accomplishments have been made by women in the world of American theater as a whole. However, there continues to be a need to amplify access in all theatrical and other art spaces for the voices of Chicanas/Latinas to continue to be heard.
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Theater SOURCES: Arrizón, Alicia, and Lillian Manzor, eds. 2000. Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press; Feyder, Linda, ed. 1992. Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women. Houston: Arte Público Press; Huerta, Jorge. 2000. Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth. New York: Cambridge University Press; Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. 1989. Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now. Houston: Arte Público Press; Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto, and Nancy Saporta Sternback, eds. 2000. Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. 1985. “Chicanas’ Experience in Collective Theater.” Women and Performance 2 no. 2:45–58. Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz
Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) (1967– ) The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) is a bilingual theatrical and educational organization founded and formally incorporated in 1967. PRTT is the brainchild and labor of love of renowned actress Miriam Colón, founder and creative director of this unique enterprise, whose vision was to bring theater to those communities that could not afford to go to a live theatrical performance. She wanted more than just to provide these communities with entertainment; she
wanted to use the theater as a means of communication and education. PRTT’s mission statement goals are to “foster and ensure a deepening awareness of the magical, instantaneous power that the theater has as a primary force for communication among people.” In particular, Colón aspired to provide a forum within which the works of Latino artists exposed young Latinos of New York to the beauty and artistry inherent in their own cultures, something visibly lacking in standard educational venues. Over time the PRTT has grown to include a number of other complementary programs that underscore and enhance its original purpose. The Annual Summer Touring Unit is the foundation upon which PRTT was built, inspired by Colón’s early theatrical experience as a member of a traveling theater company. The oldest of the theater’s components, it performs plays free of charge for economically disadvantaged audiences in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tristate area. Productions staged by PRTT include works by a wide range of Latino artists from a diverse cultural heritage. Playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and others from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America have been well represented in the offerings of the touring unit.
Founded to bring theater to those communities that could not afford to attend a live performance, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater provides a means of cultural connection and education. Courtesy of the Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Theater Mainstage Productions performs in PRTT’s permanent 194-seat theater, housed at its West Forty-seventh Street location, and is home to an Actors’ Equity Association Off-Broadway company. From its inception it has presented bilingual theatrical productions, enabling Mainstage Productions to reach a wide audience. In addition to presentations by well-known playwrights such as René Márques, Federico García Lorca, and Molière, PRTT has performed works by promising new artists, including many who have come from its very own Playwrights Unit. Moreover, numerous U.S. and world premieres have originated at PRTT’s permanent theater. The Playwrights Unit is a tuition-free writing laboratory through which aspiring playwrights from ethnically and culturally diverse origins are educated and guided in the art of writing for the theater. Its graduates represent a rich source of new dramatic material, much of which has premiered on PRTT’s Mainstage. Carmen Rivera, Oscar Colón, Candido Tirado, and others are among those who have had their works premiered at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, as well as such venues as Repertorio Español, INTAR, Seattle Repertory Theater, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and the Kennedy Center. The Raul Julia Training Unit provides at-risk youth, ages fourteen to twenty-five, with tuition-free lessons in acting in English and in Spanish, singing, body movement, and improvisation. The program aims to improve literacy and encourage good reading habits, as well as train potential professionals through an after-school theater arts program that stresses knowledge and comprehension of contemporary and classical literature. Teamwork, discipline, a sense of responsibility, and sharing are important components of the program that each participant is expected to master. Among the graduates of this unit who have gained national and international recognition in various facets of the entertainment industry are Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, and Bobby Plasencia. In spite of its success as a theatrical venue, the organization has held fast to its founding principle of bringing theater to the people and using it as a means of communication and education. Under the nurturing leadership of Miriam Colón, an extraordinary Latina in her own right, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater has opened avenues of opportunity for countless aspiring actors, actresses, and playwrights. It has woven itself into the fabric of the New York City theater scene and become a vibrant part of its multicultural tapestry. SOURCE: Colón, Miriam, founder and director of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. 2001. Personal interview by Lillian Jiménez, Latino Educational Media Center, New York City, April. Georgina García
Teatro Campesino In order to understand the origin and purpose of el Teatro Campesino (the Farmworkers’ Theater), one must first look at its connection with the United Farm Workers of America union (UFW) in Delano, California. Under the direction of César Chávez, Helen Chávez, and Dolores Huerta, this union was the first of its kind to fight for the farmworkers’ right to organize and to earn living wages. In 1965 César Chávez invited Luis Valdez, who was a former farmworker and had theater experience, to help him create a teatro group in order to spread the word about the union’s causes. Soon the most famous and important Chicana/o theater ensemble was born. Valdez is often credited as the mastermind of the group; however, theater critic Yolanda Broyles-González makes a strong case about the importance of offering a “non-hierarchical and nonpatriarchal” definition of the ensemble in order to credit other members of it and especially the women who played an essential role. El Teatro Campesino grounded its work on the centuries-old oral tradition of the carpa (popular tent show), represented best by the Mexican comedian Cantinflas. The ensemble’s first actors (male and female) and audiences were the farmworkers themselves, and collectively they developed their original actos (skits) through improvisations. These actos’ central themes were the farmworkers’ need to unionize, their labor exploitation, their inhumane living conditions, and their struggles in general. The skits were committed to memory (not written down) and reworked according to the audience’s needs and participation. Along with this oral tradition, another important element was the rasquachi aesthetic (making do with what they had, given their economic limitations). The costumes consisted of an occasional mask and a sign around the neck stating their characters: “esquirol/scab,” “patroncito/little boss.” One of the main ensemble members who imitated and at times surpassed the acting abilities of Cantinflas was Felipe Cantú, who had an amazing ability for comedy. In 1967 the ensemble separated from the UFW and continued presenting actos about issues affecting the Mexican and Chicana/o communities such as the war in Vietnam and poor-quality education. It also embarked on the task of self-empowerment through the learning of indigenous cultures such as Maya and Aztec, from which it attained the idea of “In Lak’ech” (you are my other self). But in privileging the liberation of oppressed peoples the ensemble prioritized men’s struggles. Male characters were more developed than the cardboard female representations. Women’s issues were marginalized, and their involvement and activities within the group were not foregrounded. However,
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Theater it is still essential to recognize the four most influential women in the ensemble: Olivia Chumacero, Socorro Valdez, Diane Rodríguez, and Yolanda Parra. Socorro Valdez, in addition to performing limiting female roles, became famous for her excellent portrayals of some male characters such as a pachuco called Huesos/ Bones. At the height of its fame during the 1970s, the ensemble toured throughout the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, the group dissolved in 1978, and in 1981 Luis Valdez formed a theater company called el Teatro Campesino, Inc. that should not be confused with the original ensemble. Nevertheless, el Teatro Campesino’s legacy continues to be influential on the Mexican and Chicana/o communities interested in representing their struggles through the medium of theater and performance. See also United Farm Workers of America SOURCES: Broyles-González, Yolanda. 1994. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press; Huerta, Jorge A. 1982. Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe; Valdez, Luis M., and el Teatro Campesino. 1990. Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino. Houston: Arte Público Press. Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz
Villalongín Dramatic Company (c. 1849–1924) The Carlos Villalongín Dramatic Company, earlier known as the Compañia Encarnación Hernández, was one of several family-based Spanish-language dramatic companies that, first as touring companies and later as resident companies, provided theatrical entertainment for Hispanic audiences in Texas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This company is notable because for a period of sixteen years, from 1888 to 1904, its director and manager was Antonia Pineda de Hernández. A native of Guadalajara, Antonia Pineda became an actress when she married Encarnación Hernández around 1849. The Hernández-Villalongín company toured towns of northern Mexico and later southern Texas during the period from 1849 to 1924. The company originated in Guadalajara as the Compañia Encarnación Hernández around 1849. Seeking larger and possibly more receptive audiences, Hernández, the founder, moved the company north to the states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. The cast of five to eight actors, composed of some friends but mostly family (his wife, Antonia Pineda, and his children Herlinda, Concepción, and Luis), began touring southwestern Texas and possibly other U.S. border states from about 1881. It may be that earlier performances were staged in the United
States, but the earliest known documentation, a review of a company performance, was printed in a Laredo newspaper in 1881. In 1900 the company was invited to perform at the inauguration of the San Antonio (Texas) Opera House. During these years the group maintained a home base in the town of Montemorelos, Nuevo León, until 1910. In 1888, when Encarnación Hernández died, his widow, Antonia Pineda de Hernández, assumed management of the company. She nurtured the acting talents of her company actors and particularly encouraged her children to perform. Her daughter, Concepción Hernández, became one of the leading female actors in Spanish-language theater in northern Mexico and southern Texas. The traveling companies with their often broad repertories gave audiences an appreciation for Spanish, European, and Mexican dramas and comedies, as well as for Spanish operettas, the zarzuelas. In many instances these companies also encouraged local playwrights in Texas by commissioning original plays. The family-centered companies—which included several generations of husbands and wives and their children, as well as brothers and sisters—appealed to Hispanic families, and their performances became social gathering places where Hispanic cultural values and traditions were reinforced. The Hernández Company became known as the Carlos Villalongín Company after the retirement of Antonia Pineda de Hernández. Carlos Villalongín, born in Chihuahua in 1872 into a theatrical family, joined the Hernández Company when his own father’s company disbanded around 1890. Eventually Carlos Villalongín married Herlinda Hernández, a daughter of Encarnación and Antonia. Carlos became a leading actor with the company and began to assist Antonia in the running of the company. When Antonia retired in 1904, he became manager. It may have been about this time that his two siblings, Mariano and Herminia, joined the company. After 1911 the uncertainties of travel in northern Mexico during the Mexican Revolution caused the company, like many others, to remain in Texas rather than risking the hazards of travel to perform in Mexico. Henceforth the Villalongín company maintained a base of operations in San Antonio, Texas, and presented a repertory of Mexican, Spanish, and foreign plays to San Antonio and southwestern Texas audiences. The company took up temporary residence at the Teatro Aurora in San Antonio, touring only a portion of the year. The role and responsibilities of the manager, Carlos Villalongín, became more complex. The size of the company grew to fifteen employees, and his duties included those of director, business manager, and general supervisor of all activities related to staging the
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Toraño-Pantín, María Elena company’s productions, according to Elizabeth Ramírez. At times the Villalongín acting group merged with other companies to perform certain plays or at certain venues. The Hernández-Villalongín company had a repertory of about 146 plays in its stock, although not all remained active during the lifetime of the company, according to John Brokaw, who studied the archives of the company. The majority of the plays were written in Spain, with a few European examples in translation, and the rest were written by Mexican playwrights. Several original plays were apparently commissioned for the company. The actors kept their roles as long as they were members of the company, and careful preparation and continuous rehearsal gave the company a reputation for excellent acting quality, a quality that Antonia Pineda de Hernández bequeathed to her successor. The company disbanded in 1924 when Carlos Villalongín retired from management. Several actors in the company, including Villalongín, his sister-in-law, Concepción Hernández, and his daughter, Maria Luisa Villalongín, continued to perform in local productions. But the depression and the advent of moving pictures soon replaced live theater. Spanish-language performers moved to community and church halls, where audiences were able to enjoy serious drama and comedies well into the 1950s. Carlos Villalongín died in 1936. The archives of the Carlos Villalongín Dramatic Company are located at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. They include printed plays, promptbooks, photographs, broadsides, and playbills. SOURCES: Brokaw, John. 1983. “Mexican-American Theatre.” In Ethnic Theatre in the United States, ed. Maxine Schwartz Seller, 335–353. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Kanellos, Nicolás. 1990. A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas Press; Ramírez, Elizabeth C. 1990. Footlights across the Border: A History of Spanish-Language Professional Theatre on the Texas Stage. New York: Peter Lang; ———. 2000. Chicanas/Latinas in American Theatre: A History of Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Laura Gutiérrez-Witt
TORAÑO-PANTÍN, MARÍA ELENA (1938– ) María Elena Toraño-Pantín is a successful businesswoman and the first Cuban American to be appointed by a U.S. president to serve in a top-ranking position within the federal government. She was born in Havana, Cuba, into a middle-class family with political connections. During the late nineteenth century her
grandfather Ramón Vidal held the rank of colonel in the Cuban Independence Army. Her father, Julio Díaz, was a government official tied to the Batista government before 1959. By the end of the 1950s many of the women in her mother’s side of the family, along with others of middle-class status, supported and led the Castro revolution against Batista. This support changed direction when Castro assumed control in 1959. On Mother’s Day of that same year rebel soldiers entered the home of María Elena and her husband Arturo Toraño without any provocation. The soldiers seized possession of family cars and other property. Life under the Castro regime quickly became intolerable, and in 1960 María Elena and her husband fled with their son to Florida. María Elena Toraño had lived in the United States before, as a teenager, where she attended school in New Orleans. However, her experience as a Cuban exile in the United States was much different. As she once stated, “Cuban-Americans in Florida have no limits in their need to succeed, to prove to others.” Moving to Florida without any savings, Toraño took on a series of humble jobs such as bagging clothes for a dry cleaner, selling baked goods, and selling panty hose from house to house. In 1961 her husband, along with many other antiCastro Cubans, joined the failed attempt to oust Fidel Castro during the invasion of Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). He was eventually captured and imprisoned in Havana for a year. During that time Toraño became the sole provider for her family while she was pregnant with their second child, who nearly died from birth complications. When her husband was released by the Cuban government, he returned to Florida and began to work as a tobacco broker for the General Cigar Company. The Toraño family moved to different parts of the United States, where María Elena Toraño worked as an insurance clerk, social worker, child-welfare worker, and reservation agent for Eastern Airlines. In 1968 she became an American citizen and joined the Republican Party, influenced by family and fellow Cuban Americans. However, the party’s platform struck her as elitist, and she immediately switched to the Democratic Party. A year later Toraño and her family settled in Miami, where she was promoted to the Division of Corporate Communications and responsible for developing a Spanish-speaking market for Eastern Airlines. After several years she left the airline to become director of Latin American affairs for Jackson Memorial Hospital. She also volunteered in social activities to help expand and create a new image for the Little Havana section of Miami. She soon attracted the attention of the Cuban philanthropist community including the prominent
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Toraño-Pantín, María Elena Cuban American civic leader and insurance executive Leslie Pantín. In 1977 a fellow Florida Democrat recommended Toraño for the position of associate director of the U.S. Community Services Administration in Washington. She became the first Cuban American appointed to a federal position by President Jimmy Carter and served until 1979. After completing her commitment with the government, she created the National Association of Spanish Broadcasters (NASB), the first association established to represent Hispanic broadcasters in the United States and Puerto Rico. As a representative of NASB, she advocated the interests of Hispanic broadcasters to the Federal Communications Commission in the areas of funding, employment, and licensing. In 1980 Toraño decided to open her own public relations firm. Having no money to invest, she took out a loan from the Small Business Administration and used her house as collateral. That same year she married Leslie Pantín, who for many years had been her mentor, best friend, and lover. Pantín allowed her to grow not only as a devoted wife, but also as an independent businesswoman. Toraño became president and CEO of her public relations firm, which she named META. She selected this name because of its English translation, “goal,” and because it was the acronym for Maria Elena Toraño Association. In 1984 META received government certification as a minority business, and in 1986 META’s focus shifted to government contracts, especially those dealing with environmental issues. From 1988 to 1994 META was ranked the nineteenth fastest-growing Hispanic-owned company in the United States by Lear’s magazine and in the top 500 Hispanic businesses according to Hispanic Business Magazine. During these years META’s formulating and executing strategies produced revenues of more than $25 million with 300 employees. In 1988 Ms Toraño was appointed by President George Bush to the U.S. Commission on Minority Business Development. In this position she was responsible for increasing the success ratio of small minority businesses and expanding business practices of existing markets. In 1989 Leslie Pantín fell ill during a business trip and died later that year. Trying to fill the void after her husband’s death, Toraño founded METEC, an asset management company. METEC managed a portfolio of almost $1 billion in nonperforming assets taken over by the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) and later the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. After the closure of RTC in 1994, METEC handled asset disposition work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Marshals, among others. She sold METEC in 1995 and continued running META.
Toraño was appointed to the U.S. Commission for Public Diplomacy in 1993 under the Clinton administration. During this period she also served as cochair of the Development Sub-committee for the Presidential Summit of the Americas, which all elected officials of each state attended. She was instrumental in providing leadership and strong support for the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. While working with the federal government, she served several times (August–September 1994, February 1996) as a presidential advisor in the political crises between Cuba and the United States. She assisted in developing policies for the safe, legal, and orderly migration of political refugees from Cuba to the United States and was advisor on the Helms-Burton legislation. Because of her moderate stand on Cuban issues and her strong political position opposing severe economic sanctions against Cuba, Toraño gained many enemies from radical Cuban political circles within the United States. Among her many achievements, Toraño created the International Health Council of South Florida. She was among the founders and executive committee members of the Hispanic Council on International Relations, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. Latin Chamber of Commerce and was chair emeritus of the National Hispanic Leadership Institute. In addition, she served on many committees, including
María Elena Toraño-Pantín with President William J. Clinton. Courtesy of María Elena Toraño-Pantín.
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Torres, Alva the Council on Foreign Relations, the University of Miami’s Government Affairs and Public Policy Commission, and the Visiting Committee of the University of Miami’s Graduate School of International Studies. Toraño was nominated by the U.S. Department of Transportation as Outstanding Woman of the Year 1989 and received the Governor’s Award from the state of Florida in that same year. See also Entrepreneurs SOURCES: Gómez, Ivonne. 1999. “Maria Elena Toraño. Determinación, intuición y riesgo.” El Nuevo Herald, Domingo Social, October 10; Howard, Jane. 1993. “A Woman for Lear’s: Maria Elena Toraño of Miami, Florida.” Lear’s, September, 100–116; Pérez-Feria, Richard. 1993. “María Elena’s Renaissance.” MM, May, 38–41; Toraño-Pantín, María. 2004. Oral interview by Carlos A. Cruz, April 28. Carlos A. Cruz
TORRES, ALVA (1932–
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Born in 1932, fourth-generation Tucsonan Alva Torres became a vocal community activist and historical preservationist. As urban renewal destroyed the oldest and largest barrio in the city, Torres initiated a battle over space and memory that demanded that older structures be preserved. A firm believer in the power of prayer, she convinced a small group of Mexican American women in 1967, also alarmed by the potential historical erasure of Mexican and Mexican American history, to pray and save sites in danger of destruction. These women moved to collective action and formed a historic preservationist group, the Society for the Preservation of Tucson’s Plaza de la Mesilla, or La
Placita Committee. Led by Torres, the organization rallied to save a Mexican-style plaza and the smallbusiness establishments that surrounded it from the bulldozers. Known for generations as La Placita, the structure was more than 100 years old and represented a long history of Mexican celebrations and worship in Tucson. It was also the city’s cultural heart. La Placita Committee was never a large organization; its membership remained at about twenty. But some of its members, especially Alva Torres, and the organization itself became the city’s most vocal and public critics of urban renewal. They recognized the need for public sites that testified to Mexican American heritage and their involvement in the area’s development. In temperatures above 100 degrees the women stood on downtown streets gathering signatures to save La Placita. Asserting their right to petition the state, they garnered support at street corners, grocery stores, and numerous gatherings during the hot summer months. The committee drew more than 100 people to its meetings and collected more than 8,000 signatures that it submitted to the mayor and council. Its actions forced city officials to leave the kiosk in the original spot where it stood in the old La Placita. Members of La Placita Committee ultimately pushed forth the formation of, and subsequently their appointments to, the Tucson Historic Committee. Torres served on this committee for six years. The roots of the Tucson–Pima County Historical Commission, which currently remains an active and powerful voice in historical preservation matters, can be traced to the efforts of Torres and La Placita Committee. Today the kiosk stands out because it looks old and its authenticity visually marks it as different from the surrounding
Alva Torres, speaking from the kiosk at La Placita, April 2004. Photograph by Marisol Badilla. Courtesy of Lydia R. Otero.
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Torres, Ida Inés structures. It and other sites have Arizona historical markers that mention Mexican American contributions to local history. Torres insisted that all historical markers be in both English and Spanish. Deservingly, Torres was selected Woman of the Year by the Tucson Advertising Club in 1976. She was the first Mexican American woman to receive the award. Torres eventually became a journalist and wrote a popular weekly column in the 1980s for the local newspaper, in which she raised community concerns and issues. She also worked as director of the Legalization Amnesty program for the Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona and served on various charities and community boards. She remains a committed activist to this day. In 2002 Torres received the YMCA’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Women Who Make Tucson Better. SOURCE: Otero, Lydia R. 2003. “Conflicting Visions: Urban Renewal, Historical Preservation and the Politics of Saving the Mexican Past.” Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona. Lydia R. Otero
TORRES, IDA INÉS (1924?–
Torres married young, had two children, and divorced while they were still small. Because of her circumstances she needed to work, but at that time women were supposed to stay home, and her family was set against her working. She went to work, but was made to feel guilty for not being with her children. This experience made her conscious of the special needs of women workers, and throughout her union career the rights of women workers have been a priority. Sister Torres’s first union job was as a telephone operator with Local 231 of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, which merged with Local 65, a militant union that organized small shops. This became her union training ground. She notes that the first lesson she learned was that to be effective in the union, one must have the workers behind one. In 1954 she went to work as an office manager in Local 3 (RWDSU), which represented the Bloomingdale’s Department Store workers. At that time the store workers were mostly women of Irish and Italian descent. It was during a strike in Bloomingdale’s in 1965 that her considerable organizing skills were recognized.
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Labor leader, educator, and union organizer Ida Inés Torres, better known as Sister Torres among her fellow union members, describes herself as a “worker for workers.” She is currently a vice president of the International Retail/Wholesale Department Store Union (RWDSU), president of Local 3, RWDSU, president of the Hispanic Labor Committee, and the treasurer of the New York City Central Labor Council. She grew up in a union family. “In my home,” she says, “union was a special word.” Her father, Francisco Berrocal, was a founding member of the National Maritime Union, and her stepmother, Eulogia, a needleworker, was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. After the death of her mother when Torres was five years of age, she and her brother spent time in foster care. One of the places where they resided was the Little Flower Institute in Wading River, Long Island. There they were forbidden to speak Spanish. “But I was a defiant child,” Torres recalls. Locked up in a closet as a punishment for using Spanish, she spent the whole time singing Spanish songs in a loud voice. Some years later the family was reunited when her father, a merchant seaman, remarried. Torres grew up in East Harlem and went to Wadleigh High School in Central Harlem. After graduating she took a job in the same factory where her stepmother worked as a sewing-machine operator. Here she began to understand the role of the union when she observed the union “chair lady” negotiate with the bosses on behalf of the workers.
Labor leader and educator Ida Inés Torres describes herself as a “worker for workers.” Courtesy of the Felipe N. Torres Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Torres, Lourdes After the fifteen-day strike workers petitioned for Torres to become an organizer. She was appointed to the position of organizer, thus beginning a lifelong commitment of “looking out for the workers.” Her responsibilities included internal organizing, negotiating contracts, and handling grievances. She also assumed a leading role in efforts to unionize nonunion shops. She was subsequently elected vice president, secretarytreasurer, and, in 1998, president of Local 3 (RWDSU) following the retirement of John F. O’Neill. One of Torres’s main concerns has been the education of workers, particularly Latino workers, for leadership positions within the union. She has dedicated her life to educating workers about their rights and training them to assume positions of power. She graduated from Empire State College and Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She is an instructor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She taught at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies. For the past twenty years she has been the workshop coordinator for the University and College Labor Educator Association’s Summer Institute for Union Women. In addition, she played a key role in maintaining the Hispanic Labor Committee’s job-training program for more than twenty-five years. Ida Inés Torres has been instrumental in the founding and development of numerous women’s rights and community organizations, such as the Hispanic Labor Committee, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the National Council of Puerto Rican Women. She has received the prestigious Susan B. Anthony Award from the National Organization for Women and the John Commerford Labor Education Award from the Labor History Association. In May 2000 she received an honorary doctorate from the Queens College Law School of the City University of New York. Sister Torres believes that a labor leader has to be willing to do every job, no matter how menial it may seem. “Nobody washes floors better than I do!” she says with her hearty laugh. How would she sum up her career? “My career?” she objects. “I never use that word. This is my life.” See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Torres, Ida Inés. 2001. Oral history interview by Debra Bernhardt, Ismael Garcia, and Nélida Pérez, January 22; ———. Biographical notes. Local 3, New York, RWDSU. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Nélida Pérez
TORRES, LOURDES (1953–
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Lourdes Torres is a community activist from the South Bronx area of New York City. She has been active in
numerous organizations, including Unión Estudiantil Pedro Albizu Campos (Pedro Albizu Campos Student Union), the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, and the Committee against Fort Apache. Currently she directs the Office of Development and Grants Administration at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. Torres was born on August 2, 1953, the fifth of seven children of Clorinda Valentín and Joaquín Torres Rivera, who migrated to New York from Puerto Rico in the 1930s. Despite limited economic resources, her parents sent her to Catholic schools, believing that this would give her a more solid education. From first to eighth grade Torres attended St. Athanasius (1959– 1964) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1964–1967) in the Bronx. When she started high school in the ninth grade, she received a scholarship to an all-girls school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Manhattan (1967–1971). In her second year she lost the scholarship and had to work in order to pay for tuition. At this point in her adolescent years she formed a club of Latina students and began to more consciously identify herself as Puerto Rican. She also participated in meetings of ASPIRA that motivated her to pursue a college education and to develop personal goals. Torres was also inspired by the Young Lords Organization, and although she was never a member, she learned from it to take pride in her Puerto Rican heritage. In 1971 Torres entered Queens College for an undergraduate degree. It was during her college years that she became involved with the Unión Estudiantil Pedro Albizu Campos, an organization that aimed to unite Puerto Rican students through educational programs and conferences. Torres graduated in the spring of 1976 with a B.A. in education and linguistics. In the summer of 1976 she made a first and memorable trip to Puerto Rico. Upon her return to New York she worked as a public school teacher for six months, but was dismissed because of the fiscal crisis in New York City and the lack of funds for her position. From 1977 to 1980 she taught classes on bilingual education and the Puerto Rican child in the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at Queens College. From 1977 to 1978 she completed a master’s degree in bilingual education at St. John’s University. As a community activist, Lourdes Torres played a leading role in several civil rights organizations. In 1981 she became active in the Committee against Fort Apache, which was created in protest against the film Fort Apache: The Bronx. The film, a negative portrayal of the South Bronx community, is filled with racist overtones. Around this same period Torres joined an organizing committee for the creation of the National
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Torres, Patsy
TORRES, PATSY (PATRICIA DONITA) (1957– )
Lourdes Torres. Courtesy of the Lourdes Torres Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, which became an important civil rights organization. She served as national secretary and as coordinator of the Puerto Rico chapter and the New York council. During the 1980s Torres worked for various institutions. She was a curator for the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1980–1982) and a teacher trainer for the National Origins Desegregation Center (1982–1986) and for the Early Childhood Bilingual Multicultural Resource Center (1982–1986). Since 1987 she has been working at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York and has occupied the following positions: director of the Office of Community and Continuing Education and the Adult Basic Education Program (1987– 1997), special assistant to the president (1987–1992), lecturer in the Department of Health and Human Services (1992–1995), and director of the Office of Development and Grants Administration. Lourdes Torres’s collected papers in the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, about language rights, educational reform, and key civil rights organizations. Torres was part of an important generation of community leaders, and her papers are a good resource for understanding the role of Puerto Rican activists in the 1980s and 1990s. SOURCE: Torres, Lourdes. 1968–2000. Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. Ismael García, Nélida Pérez, and Pedro Juan Hernández
Patsy Torres was born in San Antonio, Texas, to Wiliado (San Antonio, Texas) and Patricia Torres (Grants Pass, Oregon) and was raised there. Unlike most other Tejana artists, Torres’s parents and grandparents were college educated and thus exerted a great influence on her to pursue a college education rather than music. Torres never had singing lessons or even experience singing in a choir. Her strongest music influence was her grandfather, Dr. William Torres, who played various instruments, wrote songs, and loaned Patsy her very first instrument, a trumpet. Attending Thomas Jefferson High School, from which she graduated in 1975, also provided a formal space to pursue music. Patsy and her sister became involved in the school band, with her sister playing the saxophone and Patsy the trumpet. In high school Patsy and her friends became well known for performing and winning many school talent shows. Yet her big break into a more formal music industry arena came while she was in college singing for a local band called Blue Harmony, for which she also began playing trumpet. When Blue Harmony was hired to sing and play at a wedding, Patsy’s singing talent was noticed by a local record promoter, and she was eventually signed by Bob Grever with CBS/Sony in San Antonio. Torres’s first big record contract was with Freddie Records in 1985. Her first Tejano album with Freddie Records resulted in her first number one hit song, “Ya me voy de esta tierra,” which her grandfather William had written back in 1947. Torres recalled, “My grandfather’s song was a traditional mariachi but I did it in ranchera style.” In 1987 Torres was awarded a Tejano Music Award for Best Female Entertainer. She has been nominated since then for numerous other Tejano Music Awards, including Single of the Year, Best Female Performance in a Video, and Album of the Year. She has also produced albums and compact discs for WEA Latina and Joey International. Her most notable contribution to Tejano music was that she was the first Tejana singer to integrate dance performance with song. Unlike earlier woman artists such as Laura Canales, Lisa López, and Elsa García, Torres took advantage of the entire stage by including dance performance and changes in costume along with song. She recalls Laura Canales giving her the nickname Chicana Madonna because of her integration of dance and performance along with music. Her physical energy and creativity on stage won her a huge following among fans of Tejano music. Influenced by female rockers in the early 1980s such as Pat Benatar, Heart, and Chrissie Hynde, she integrated into her act the 1980s styles and aesthetics,
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Tovar, Lupita which included headbands and spandex pants. Since this was a very popular trend of the time, she made an instant connection with the younger generation. Torres recalled, “While other girls were wearing dresses and acting more ladylike I got flack from older people who couldn’t relate to what I was doing.” For Tejana artists who followed, such as Selena and Shelly Lares, the model created by Torres to integrate dance, performance, and singing remains the standard. Torres’s contribution to Tex-Mex was her own unique style of music that, for a woman in Tejano music, was quite original. At the end of the 1990s Torres continued to contribute to Tejano music by recording on Discos Joey International such songs as “Bien cuidada” (1996), “Bien protegida” (1997), and “Trenzas” (1999). Torres’s music has been recognized by various organizations, particularly because of her youth education project Positive Force, a music and education ensemble that tours throughout the country. In 2000 La Prensa awarded her the La Prensa Latina Women in Action Award for her involvement in the arts. That same year she was also inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame. Torres’s strong regional fan base, which began in the early 1980s, remains to this day. She is a local icon in her hometown, where she continues to perform and record and has been recognized as “one of the most influential San Antonians.” SOURCE: Burr, Ramiro. 1999. The Billboard Guide to Tejano and Regional Mexican Music. New York: Billboard Books. Deborah Vargas
TOVAR, LUPITA (1910–
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The oldest of nine children, film star Lupita Tovar was born in Tejuantepec, Mexico, on July 27, 1910. When she was eight years old, the National Railroad of Mexico relocated the family to Mexico City. Educated by nuns, Tovar had a very strict upbringing. In 1928 Fox Studios sent director Robert Flaherty to Mexico to test potential starlets. Flaherty tested Tovar and about sixty other young women. Tovar took first place, and Fox Studios offered her a contract. Her father was very strict and refused until Fox allowed Tovar’s maternal grandmother to act as her chaperone. Tovar signed a seven-year, $150-a-week contract. Tovar first appeared in a Myrna Loy film, The Black Watch (1929), and had small parts in The Veiled Woman (1929) and Joy Street (1929). In the 1920s the studios controlled every aspect of an actor’s life, including his or her appearance, publicity, and roles. Tovar learned how to walk like an actor, dress, and apply makeup. Along with English classes, she took dancing lessons from Rita Hayworth’s father, Eduardo Cansino. With the advent of sound, or “talkies,” many foreign
actors fell by the wayside. “Going from silent to the talkies was very difficult for everybody . . . you had to learn dialogue, which before [you did not have to], because you could say anything you wanted and then they made the titles,” Tovar recalled. She feared that her career was at an end. After learning that her contract would not be renewed, she went to Universal Studios, which had a foreign film department. Here she met her future husband Paul Kohner, the head of the department. Smitten with her, Kohner gave Tovar a job and convinced the head of Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle, to produce Spanish-language films. Laemmle agreed, and Tovar starred in Universal’s first such movie, La voluntad del muerto, the Spanish version of The Cat Creeps (1930). After a successful tour of Mexico with the film, Tovar returned to Hollywood to star in the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931). Like Voluntad del muerto, Dracula was filmed at night on the same sets used in the English versions. Her other Spanish-language films included Carne de cabaret (Ten Cents a Dance, 1931), Alas sobre del Chaco (Storm over the Andes, 1935), and El Capitán Tormenta (Captain Calamity, 1936). With the success of La voluntad del muerto and Dracula, Tovar was asked to star in Mexico’s first talkie film, Santa (1931). Her costar from La voluntad del muerto, Antonio Moreno, a famous silent star, directed the film. The story was a remake of a 1918 film that told the story of a woman who became Mexico’s most famous prostitute. From Germany Kohner called Tovar in Hollywood, asking her to marry him. Tovar agreed and joined Kohner there, where she planned to star in German director Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy (1932). But Kohner forbade her to make the film, and Machaty instead chose a young, unknown actress named Hedy Lamarr. The film made Lamarr an international star. Because of the rise of Nazism, the Kohners returned to Hollywood in 1935. Tovar made a few more films: Blockade (1938), The Fighting Gringo (1939), South of the Border (1939), Green Hell (1940), and The Westerner (1940). At the same time she made films in Mexico: Mariguana (1936), El rosario de Amozo (1938), Resurrección (1943), and El coreo del Zar (1943). Her last film was in 1945, The Crime Doctor’s Courage. Tovar retired to raise her children, Susan and Paul Jr. (Pancho) Kohner. Her daughter Susan starred in the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, winning a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her portrayal of Sarah Jane, the light-skinned daughter of the housekeeper, who attempts to pass for white. Paul Jr. worked as an assistant for John Huston and now is a wellestablished film producer. Tovar never regretted giving up her career for her family. Her husband’s talent agency thrived and kept
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Toypurina her busy. As she said in a recent interview, “I had a very, very, very happy life. I was an actress by fate.” The attention she has received in the last ten years for her work in Dracula and Santa has only made her more grateful for what she accomplished. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Movie Stars SOURCES: Ankerich, Michael G. 1998. The Sound of Silence: Conversations with 16 Film and Stage Personalities Who Bridged the Gap between Silents and Talkies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland; Skal, David J. 1990. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage and Screen. New York: W. W. Norton. Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
TOYPURINA (1761–?) Toypurina was a Native California tribal medicine woman from the Kumi.vit tribe of southern California from the area around San Gabriel. Her tribe became known as the Gabrieleno after Spanish contact in the late eighteenth century. She is best known for her direct involvement in a planned revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Between 1769 and 1823 Spanish Franciscan missionaries established twenty-one missions in California from San Diego to as far north as Sonoma, about twenty miles north of San Francisco. These missions, built in the homelands of various tribal nations, sought to force California Natives to become laborers for the mission, as well as convert them to the Catholic faith. They had little regard for the Native people’s own indigenous religious and spiritual beliefs. The Franciscans attempted to restructure Native societies through policies of both assimilation and acculturation. In an effort to retain their tribal culture, religious practices, and beliefs, some Native people resisted the colonization efforts. Toypurina emerged as one such individual. In October 1785 Native leaders, both traditional and so-called neophytes (the Spanish term for those newly converted to the Catholic faith), made the decision to destroy the San Gabriel Mission. The Franciscan order viewed the Native peoples as “pagan” and “heathen” and thus tried to force conversions. Various tribal leaders concluded that the new Spanish colonists, both religious and secular, were detrimental to the Native population. The leaders viewed the Spanish as paternalistic people who sought Indian land. Furthermore, as previously noted, Indians who were baptized ended up as laborers in the Spanish mission system and were viewed as culturally and socially inferior by the Spanish. Native leaders from six nearby villages organized their planned revolt after Spanish officials told them that they could not practice traditional dances. An-
gered by this authoritarian decision, both traditional and mission Indians, including convert Nicolás José, planned to destroy the San Gabriel Mission, which became the symbol of suppression of local customs. The leaders requested the support of Toypurina because of her extraordinary powers as a medicine person. She was to use her divine influence to eliminate the Catholic priests, while the Native male leaders would eliminate Spanish soldiers. Toypurina appears to have joined the revolt because of her own disheartenment at the invasion of her homeland. She and other leaders wished to defend their way of life. Unfortunately, the Spanish authorities discovered the planned revolt and punished the Native people involved in the incident. After the failed attempt military officials interrogated Toypurina and the revolt leaders to find out the extent of their plans. In 1786 Spanish officials exiled Toypurina from the San Gabriel area and sent her to another Spanish mission, San Carlos, further north. Additionally, according to trial records, she was pressured to accept Catholic baptism before banishment from her native homeland. The authorities sent two male leaders south to San Diego as prisoners. Soldiers publicly flogged the remaining Native participants to demonstrate to other Indians that troublemakers would be punished for opposing Spanish rule. There are two significant aspects of the planned revolt of 1785. First, tribal leaders called upon the support of a Native woman in this incident. This indicates the influence of Native women at the time of early Spanish colonization. Like some men, women could also become influential medicine persons because of their medicinal knowledge, spiritual powers, personality traits, and other factors. This demonstrates one type of leadership role Native California women had both before and after European contact. Second, the planned revolt of 1785 at San Gabriel is an example of Native resistance to the Spanish mission system that existed along coastal California from 1769 to 1821 and was finally abolished by the Mexican government in 1833. To express their extreme dislike of Spanish colonial rule, including the missions, Indians exhibited both passive and active forms of resistance. A passive form was work slowdown while performing manual labor in the missions. Active forms included running away from the missions, destroying church property, and planning revolts to eliminate the Spanish colonists. Native California women, including Toypurina, became participants in the various forms of resistance. See also California Missions SOURCES: Brady, Victoria, Sarah Crome, and Lyn Reese. 1984. “Resist! Survival Tactics of Indian Women.” California History 63 (Spring): 140–145; Fogel, Daniel. 1988. Junípero Serra,
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Trambley, Estela Portillo the Vatican and Enslavement Theology. San Francisco: Ism Press; Milanich, Jerald T. 1999. Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.
Annette L. Reed
TRAMBLEY, ESTELA PORTILLO (1936–1999) Estela Portillo Trambley was a poet, a storyteller, and especially a playwright. The author has been considered a precursor of many Chicana writers because she was among the first Chicana to publish her writings and to produce plays. Portillo Trambley was born in El Paso, Texas, where she spent most of her life. Along with four younger siblings, she was raised in a mixture of cultures by her Italian father and her Mexican mother. Until the age of thirteen she also spent time with her maternal grandparents, owners of a grocery store in El Paso called Amigo de los pobres (Friend of the Poor). The writer expressed a very positive attitude when speaking of the barrio and the community in which she grew up. In an interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa, the Chicana author said, “When I was a child, poverty was a common suffering for everybody around me. A common suffering is a richness in itself.” In 1947 she married Robert Trambley. The marriage produced six children. Portillo Trambley managed to combine the responsibilities of raising a family with a return to college. She received a baccalaureate and a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at El Paso. From 1957 to 1964 she taught at the highschool level and also served as chairperson of the English Department at the El Paso Technical Institute. She guest-edited the historic 1973 issue of El Grito, which included the first contemporary collection of works written by Chicana authors. In 1979 she worked in the Department of Special Services of the El Paso public school system. While working as resident dramatist at El Paso Community College, Portillo Trambley produced and directed several plays. She also hosted a radio talk show, Estela Says, and wrote and hosted a cultural program for television, Cumbres. By that time she realized that she wanted to pursue a full-time writing career. In 1971 she published her first play, The Day of the Swallows, for which she won the Quinto Sol Literary Prize a year later. Her play Blacknight was published in 1973, and in 1985 it won second place in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Hispanic American playwrights’ competition. During the 1970s Portillo Trambley’s Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (1975) was one of the few Chicano books available to that community. The book was
well received by the Chicano audience and especially by Chicana feminists. In 1979 her play Sun Images was published, but she came to national attention only after the publication of Sor Juana and Other Plays in 1983. The collection included Puente Negro, Autumn Gold, Blacknight, and Sor Juana. At the time of Sor Juana’s publication the writer expressed her excitement for theater: “I have tried my hand at most genres of writing: poetry, essay, short story, novel. I have found the writing of plays the most difficult, the most exciting, and the most rewarding.” In 1986 she published Trini, a novel about a Tarahumara woman who crosses the border into the United States. Trini is a novel about struggle and achievement and thus is also a reflection of the author’s own life. Portillo Trambley was a Chicana playwright who fought for recognition and provided the first example of the new Chicana literature. After her death her husband Robert said, “Estela’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and her relentless drive to change the inequitable status of womanhood shows in her books, for she writes of women who have strength in this social world.” See also Literature; Theater SOURCES: Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1980. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interviews. Austin: University of Texas Press; Hernández-Gutiérrez, Manuel de Jesús, and David William Foster, eds. 1997. Literatura Chicana, 1965–1995: An Anthology in Spanish, English, and Caló. New York: Garland Publishing; Telgen, Diane, and James Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit: Gale Research; Trambley, Estela Portillo. 1986. Trini. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press. María E. Villamil
TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO (1848) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was a document that ended the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848). It is the oldest treaty still in force between the two countries and has shaped the international and domestic history of the two countries. The North Americans viewed the forcible incorporation of almost one-half of Mexico’s national territory as an event foreordained by Providence, fulfilling a Manifest Destiny to spread the benefits of American democracy to the lesser peoples of the continent. With arrogance born of superior military, economic, and industrial power, the United States virtually dictated the terms of settlement. The treaty established a pattern of inequality between the two countries, and this lopsided relationship has stalked Mexican-American relations ever since, making the resolution of mutual problems that much more difficult.
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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Since 1848 Indians and Chicanos have struggled to achieve some equality of political status within the United States. In this they have sought to fulfill the promises first made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. However, the treaty ensured that Mexico would remain an underdeveloped third-world country well into the twentieth century. Mexican historians and politicians perceive this treaty as a bitter lesson in American expansionism. The treaty has had implications for international law. Interpretations of the provisions of the treaty have been important in disputes over international boundaries, water and mineral rights, and, most important, civil and property rights for the descendants of the Mexicans in the ceded territories. Among the many provisions of the treaty were two that were very important for Latinos and Latinas. Articles VIII and IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo set forth the terms by which the former Mexican citizens and their property would be incorporated politically into the United States. These provisions affected more than 100,000 Mexicans residing in the newly acquired territories, including a large number of Hispanicized, as well as nomadic, Indians in New Mexico and California. Article VIII provided that a person had one year to “elect” his or her preference for Mexican citizenship. If this were not done, it was stipulated that he or she had elected to become a U.S. citizen and would be granted citizenship by Congress at some future time. Articles VIII and IX also addressed the property rights of the conquered people. Absentee Mexican landholders would have their property “inviolably respected,” and others would “be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property.” In the six decades after the ratification of the treaty the deceptively clear provisions regarding citizenship and property were complicated by legislative and judicial interpretations. In the end the application of the treaty to the realities of life in the Southwest violated its spirit because many Mexicans were denied basic rights as citizens of the United States and had their lands taken from them by lawyers, bankers, speculators, and government officials. The treaty’s provisions in Articles VIII and IX and the Protocol of Querétaro, which replaced Article X when it was deleted by the U.S. Senate, implied protection for private property. But in California and New Mexico this was an empty promise. In California thousands of gold-rush migrants encroached on the Californio land grants and demanded that something be done to “liberate” the land. The result was the passage in Congress of the Land Act of 1851. This law set up a Land Commission whose members would adjudicate the validity of Mexican land grants in California. Eventually this California commis-
sion examined 813 claims and confirmed 604 of them involving approximately 9 million acres. Most Californio landholders, however, lost their lands because of the tremendous expense of litigation and legal fees. To pay for the legal defense of their lands, the Californios were forced to mortgage their ranchos. Falling cattle prices and usurious rates of interest conspired to wipe them out as a landholding class. One of the most important court cases involving the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was that of a Californiana, Señora Dominga Domínguez, owner of Rancho las Virgenes, just east of the San Fernando Mission in California. Señora Domínguez had an ironclad title to her land, a grant from the government of Mexico dated August 28, 1835. Her ancestors had taken all the steps required to legalize this claim. For some reason she and her relatives neglected to bring their papers before the Court Land Commission within the time specified in the 1851 law. For the next thirty years a number of Mexican American and European immigrant families settled on the rancho, assuming that the land was part of the public domain, and that it had been opened for homesteading. Finally, in 1883, Brigido Botiller, a French-born Mexican citizen, headed a group of squatters to oust Señora Domínguez from her land, claiming that by the 1851 law she had no legal title to it. Domínguez then sued Botiller and the other squatters for reclamation of her land and back rents. In the 1880s both the district court and the California State Supreme Court ruled in her favor, but Botiller and the squatters appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in a decision issued on April 1, 1889, the court reversed the California Supreme Court decision and ruled that despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s guarantees, Domínguez did not have legal title. In Botiller et al. v. Domínguez the Supreme Court held that the sovereign laws of the United States took precedence over international treaties. This appeared to contradict the Constitution, which (in Article VI, Section 2, and Article III, Section 2, Clause 1) gave treaties the same status as the Constitution. Botiller et al. v. Domínguez was an important precedent that guided the Court in its future interpretation of conflicts between treaty obligations and domestic laws. In this case the protection of private property ostensibly guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was essentially invalidated. In New Mexico Territory officials were appointed who ruled on the boundaries and legitmacy of Hispano land claims. Ultimately they had to have their decisions approved by Congress, a lengthy and often politicized process. The private and communal land grants in New Mexico covered about 15 million square miles. The surveyor general was given broad powers, but a
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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo decision by the Congress took many years. By 1880, 1,000 claims had been filed by the surveyor general, but only 150 had been acted upon by the federal government. Anglo lawyers and politicians, such as Stephen Benson Elkins and Thomas Benton Catron, formed the nucleus of the Santa Fe Ring, a confederation of opportunists who used the long legal battles to acquire millions of acres of Hispano land through legislative and court manipulation. Finally, on March 3, 1891, President Benjamin Harrison signed into law a bill to establish a Court of Private Land Claims in New Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was specifically invoked as a guiding document. Meeting in Denver, Colorado, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, between 1891 and 1904, the New Mexico court rejected two-thirds of the claims presented before it. Ultimately only eighty-two grants received congressional confirmation. This represented only 6 percent of the total area sought by land claimants. The end result was that the U.S. government enlarged the national domain at the expense of hundreds of Hispano villages, leaving a bitter legacy that would fester through the next century. With regard to the rights of citizenship, some, as provided in Article VIII, chose to remain Mexican citizens, either by announcing their intent before judicial officials or by returning to Mexico. No one knows their exact number, but probably they were few by comparison with the total population of the Southwest. According to the treaty, those who did not choose to remain Mexican citizens would be considered “to have elected” to become U.S. citizens. As early as 1849 the nature of the citizenship rights of these Mexicans became the subject of controversy. In California and New Mexico the delegates to the constitutional conventions wrestled with the problems of race, rights of citizenship, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico had granted citizenship to “civilized” Indians and to blacks, yet the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo clearly stated that former Mexican citizens would be given the opportunity to become citizens of the United States. Following the biases of their age, the framers of these constitutions sought wording that would exclude blacks and Indians while including mestizos and Hispanic Mexicans. During California’s gold rush xenophobia, nativism, and racism resulted in violent confrontations between English-speaking immigrants and other residents, including Californios, who were regarded as foreigners by Anglo miners. Antonio Coronel, a native Californio resident of Los Angeles, vividly described stabbings, extortions, and lynchings as commonplace Yankee reactions to native Californios, whom they regarded as interlopers. Some Spanish-speaking natives even were issued passes, supposed proof of their new status as citizens of the United States, but this had little effect on
the hordes of Yankees who crowded into the mining district. The violations of their rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were finally tested in the U.S. courts. The California Supreme Court case People v. Naglee (1851) confirmed that Californios had the rights of citizens, and another case twenty years later, People v. de la Guerra (1870), reaffirmed that view, stating that the admission of California as a state constituted the positive act that conferred citizenship on former Mexican nationals. The biggest violation of the treaty involved various Indian tribes and groups in California and New Mexico. Under the Mexican Constitution of 1824, Indians were considered full Mexican citizens. Upon the transfer of territory to the U.S. government, however, these Mexican citizens received neither U.S. citizenship nor the protections of the treaty as specified in Article VIII. In violation of the treaty, the California Indian tribes were deprived of state or federal protections and consequently became the victims of murder, slavery, land theft, and starvation. In two decades the Indian population within the state declined by more than 100,000. In New Mexico, where the largest Hispanicized Indian population lived, the Hispanos denied them citizenship. In the territorial constitution the franchise was limited to whites only. Approximately 8,000 Pueblo Indians who had been Mexican citizens in 1848 were disenfranchised thereafter. Despite this early history of disenfranchisement, some of it voluntary on the part of the Indians, the New Mexico territorial courts later decided cases that confirmed the citizenship of the Pueblo Indians. Other provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had international implications. In Article XI of the treaty the United States assumed responsibility for control of Indian raids originating on its national soil. This led to a series of financial claims that were eventually abrogated by the Gadsden Treaty in 1853. Article IV of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined the geographic boundaries between the United States and Mexico. But the land boundary between El Paso and San Diego became a source of controversy almost immediately after the ratification of the treaty, leading to the negotiation of the Gadsden Treaty in 1853. The other portion of the boundary described by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Rio Grande, also became a source of conflict between the two countries, largely because of periodic changes in the river’s course caused by flooding and accretion. The most significant conflict arising from the 1848 treaty boundary involved an area of land known as the Chamizal, a 600-acre tract that eventually became part of downtown El Paso, Texas. El Chamizal had been located south of the Rio Grande and thus part of Mexico in
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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Disturnell’s map of Mexico, published in 1847 and appended to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to help identify the boundary. The cartographic errors in this map were the basis for a prolonged dispute that resulted in the Gadsden Treaty in 1853. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
1848, but by 1896, because of flooding and changes in the river’s course, the tract became located north of the river within the territory of the United States. From 1848 to 1963 the city of El Paso, Texas, and the U.S. government exercised political jurisdiction over this section of land. After some international negotiations President John F. Kennedy in 1963 the disagreement was settled. The region became El Chamizal International Park. For many years the Mexican government cited the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as the authority for claiming a nine-mile territorial sea boundary between the two countries. Finally, on December 26, 1969, after years of discussion between the United States and Mexico over the meaning of Article V with respect to territorial waters, both countries finally agreed to a twelve-mile limit. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in Article XXI, introduced for the first time the idea of permanent arbitration of disputes in American diplomacy. This provision was one that the Mexican negotiators of 1848 had insisted upon. Many disagreements were submitted to international arbitration, and Mexico demonstrated more good faith in abiding by the results than the United States. Since 1848 Mexico and the United States have, in the spirit of Article XXI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, entered into arbitration, conven-
tions, and discussions to resolve mutual problems. On balance, the United States has gained more monetarily even while not fully complying with the spirit of the treaty. The Mexican government has avoided further conflicts with the United States and gained some prestige both at home and abroad by its willingness to arbitrate disputes. The major significance of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has been that it embodied promises that have not been kept. In 1848 the American and Mexican negotiators entered into an agreement with the understanding that the civil and property rights of the Mexican citizens who were being transferred to the United States would be respected. Today the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo remains a document of great historical importance to Mexicans in the United States. See also U.S.-Mexican War SOURCES: Acuña, Rodolfo. 1972. Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation. San Francisco: Canfield Press; Garber, Paul. 1959. The Gadsden Treaty. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith; Griswold del Castillo, Richard. 1990. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Pletcher, David M. 1973. The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press; Rendon, Armando. 1972. Chicano Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
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Richard Griswold del Castillo
Treaty of Paris
TREATY OF PARIS (1898) The Spanish-American War was a relatively brief and lopsided affair that resulted in the total defeat of Spanish military forces in the Caribbean and the Pacific during the late spring and early summer of 1898. With the signing of a truce in August of that year, the Spaniards agreed to negotiate the terms of a formal peace treaty at a gathering of representatives that was held in Paris in the final months of 1898. During the deliberations, which ended in the signing of the document on December 10, 1898, the Spaniards agreed to relinquish all claims of sovereignty to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, also called Ladrones at that time. In return, the United States agreed to fund an exchange of prisoners and to pay the Spaniards $20 million as compensation for the loss of their colonies. The United States also agreed to permit Spanish subjects to remain on the islands and to buy, sell, or retain ownership of their properties or businesses, if they so wished. However, the treaty also stipulated that the “civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants” would “be determined” by the U.S. Congress at some future date. This provision immediately created some difficulties for Puerto Ricans, who, lacking political status, were sometimes harassed or denied entry into the United States until favorable court decisions and the granting of U.S. citizenship in 1917 put a stop to these practices. In the years that followed the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Cuba became an independent country, but remained a de facto economic and political dependency of the United States until the end of the 1950s, when Fidel Castro and his revolutionary government established an alliance with the Soviet Union and other Soviet-bloc countries. The United States also retained the Philippines and Guam, in addition to Puerto Rico, as formal colonies or “unincorporated territories,” despite a vicious war for independence in the Philippines that was led by its patriot leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, between 1899 and 1902. Dissatisfaction with U.S. rule also arose in Puerto Rico, which experienced occasional protests and a violent uprising of Nationalists in the years between 1899 and 1954. Puerto Rican women, such as the Nationalist Lolita Lebrón, a participant in the shootings in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1954, played an active role in these protests. Nevertheless, the eventual outcome of this process, in addition to the establishment of a firm imperialist control over the islands, was increased migration to the United States and Hawaii, which also became a U.S. possession in 1898 and received an influx of Puerto Rican migrants between 1900 and 1901. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and with increased intensity in the decades that followed, waves of
Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and Guamanians came to the U.S. mainland and changed the demographic makeup of the country, a process that continues. See also Cuban-Spanish-American War; Ten Years’ War SOURCES: “Focus/En foco 1898–1998, Part I.” 1998. CENTRO: Journal of Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Hunter College, CUNY) 10:1–2; “Focus/En foco 1898–1998, Part II.” 1999. CENTRO: Journal of Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Hunter College, CUNY) 11:1; Jones, Jacqueline, Peter Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyler May, and Vicki L. Ruiz. 2003. Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States. New York: Longman; Library of Congress. “The Spanish American War.” www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898 (accessed June 25, 2005); Scarano, Francisco A. 1993. Puerto Rico: Cinco Siglos de Historia. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gabriel Haslip-Viera
TREVIÑO-SAUCEDA, MILY (1958–
)
Mily Treviño-Sauceda, founder and executive director of Líderes Campesinas (Organization of Farmworker Women Leaders), was born in Washington State to Francisca Sosa-Barba and Leopoldo Treviño-Guerrera, both migrant farmworkers. She was one of ten children. When Mily was seven, the family moved to Idaho, where her father found steady work on a ranch, enabling Mily and her siblings to attend school. The children also worked in the fields before and after school in order to contribute to the family’s modest income. They returned to Mexico and, when Mily was fifteen, the family moved to California, where they continued laboring in the fields. Treviño began to work with the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1975. Both her father and brother had joined the union, and her father was working as a union staff member. Treviño persuaded him to let her join as well, and at sixteen she became a volunteer organizer. She also worked with Catholic youth groups and was chosen to attend a youth leadership conference. The conference inspired her to continue her work, sharpened her leadership skills, and convinced her to return to school. Treviño was intelligent, charismatic, and well liked, and her talents as a natural organizer came to the attention of California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), which offered her a job as a community organizer in the Coachella Valley. Treviño had married fellow UFW organizer Humberto Luna-Sauceda and continued to organize even after she became pregnant. Her husband encouraged her to leave fieldwork, take the job with CRLA, and continue the community organizing she loved. “He was supportive of my organizing, but he
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Tufiño, Nitza also encouraged me to enhance my skills working outside the fields. He knew I was very smart and he always reminded me I could do more.” During her ten-year association with CRLA she established contacts across the state. Her husband’s untimely death in 1985 changed her life. She became committed to organizing, returning to school, and especially caring for her small son, Humberto. As a CRLA organizer, she worked with Mexican farmworkers in the agricultural towns and labor camps of the Coachella Valley. In 1988 Mara Elena López-Treviño, a graduate student at California State University, Long Beach, enlisted Mily Treviño’s help in conducting a survey among farmworker women. Farmworker women conducted the survey and in the process shared with other women the problems they faced as farmworkers and women: sexual discrimination, harassment, domestic violence, pesticide poisoning, poor housing, and low wages. In response to the women’s desire to organize and change these conditions, Treviño formed Mujeres Mexicanas. In 1991 Treviño returned to school full-time, studying at Mount San Antonio College. In 1992, while still a full-time student, she formed Líderes Campesinas, an organization of, for, and led by Mexican farmworker women. It was the first grassroots organization to develop leadership from among farmworker women and create a structure that they could use to advocate for themselves. She began organizing local Líderes branches across California, driving 1,000 miles each weekend to meet with women. Her son Beto learned about organizing in the fields, but he also learned “about working with women and respecting women,” a feeling reciprocated by his “many aunts” in Líderes, who called him “el hijo de la comunidad” (the community’s son). In ten years the organization has developed twentyfour chapters in California and has worked with similar groups within the United States and internationally. Treviño and a few Líderes staffers have attended the International Women’s Conferences, an experience that strengthened their understanding of their commonalities with rural women around the world. In 2005 Mily Saucedo-Treviño and Lideres Campesinas received an award from the Leadership in a Changing World program, co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation. This program recognizes extraordinarly leaders or leadership teams across the United States who are changing lives and transforming communities—often against great odds. Treviño continued as the full-time Líderes organizer, a full-time student, and the soccer coach for her son’s team. Upon graduating with honors from Mount San Antonio, she attended California State University at Fullerton, studying Chicano studies and women’s
studies. In 1999 she began work on her master’s degree. She plans to step down from the directorship by 2006 so other women can take over the position and manage the organization. Treviño hopes to establish an institute for farmworker women that will encourage them to continue their education and, for those with the desire, work for higher degrees. Treviño plans to turn her thesis on Líderes Campesinas into a book and also plans to write children’s books “so children, specially girls, can learn how to be leaders and the role models they have with women from their community.” See also Líderes Campesinas; United Farm Workers of America (UFW) SOURCES: López, Pablo. 1993. “Campesinas Project Seeded.” Los Angeles Times, March 28, B5; Pulaski, Alex. 1993. “Female Farmworkers Take Care of Business.” Los Angeles Times, February 28, B1; Ruiz, Vicki L. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press; Street, Richard Steven. 1992. Organizing for Our Lives: New Voices from Rural Communities. Portland, OR: Newsage Press and California Rural Legal Assistance. Devra A. Weber
TUFIÑO, NITZA (1949–
)
The daughter of the well-known Puerto Rican artist Rafael Tufiño and a Mexican dancer, Luz María Aguirre, Nitza Tufiño was born in Mexico City and taken to Puerto Rico when she was a year old. During her adolescence her parents divorced, and she spent the next few years commuting between her mother’s house in Manhattan and her father’s in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Surrounded by artists at her father’s home and encouraged by her mother to develop her artistic talents, she spent most of her high-school years taking courses in ceramics, graphics, and painting. When she graduated from high school in Puerto Rico in 1966, her mother sent her to study fine arts at San Carlos Academy at the Universidad Autónoma of Mexico. There she met the great Mexican muralist Alfaro Siqueiros and was exposed to the importance of murals as public art. With a B.F.A. from Mexico, she settled in Manhattan in 1970 and began to work as an artist. In 1973 she created her first ceramic mural for the façade of el Museo del Barrio, a community-based museum that she had helped found. The theme of the mural was from her memories of the vegetation of Loiza Aldea, a coastal village east of San Juan, best known for its surviving African traditions. Some of Tufiño’s earliest works were also inspired by the petroglyph designs of Puerto Rico’s Taino Indians. During the 1970s she also served as a consultant on Puerto Rican and Caribbean art at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the early 1980s she returned to school, obtaining an M.S. in
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Tufiño, Nitza urban affairs (1982) from Hunter College, City University of New York, with the support of a fellowship from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Shortly thereafter she was commissioned to create a mural for the Third Street Music School in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Inspired by the history of the Taíno Indians of Puerto Rico, she called her work Sinfonía Taína (Taino Symphony). Her next ceramic mural, Neo-Boriquén, installed in the subway station at 103rd Street and Lexington Avenue, depicted a tropical landscape, reminiscent of the Caribbean, with Taino spirits overseeing the lush, flowering trees and plants. The mural was commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority as part of an Art Underground project. The same agency commissioned her to train a group of high-school dropouts in mural making as a way to help them obtain their high-school diplomas. The collective ceramic mural, titled Community Life, is a permanent feature of the subway station at Eightysixth Street and Lexington Avenue. Another of her ceramic murals was commissioned by the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation and is part of the Pediatric Ward of the City’s Metropolitan Hospital at Ninety-seventh Street and First Avenue. In more recent years Tufiño has taught dozens of students in New Jersey and Connecticut. One of her most recent student projects is The Wall of Peace, a ceramic mural displayed in the lobby of the Thomas Jefferson School in South Orange, New Jersey. The mural, a collective work she did with fourth-grade students at Jefferson, was funded by the Essex County School District. Her latest and largest ceramic mural is Patience, a work eighty-two feet long by nine feet wide, commissioned by the Hospital for Special Care at New Britain, Connecticut. The mural’s theme is the ever-changing facets of life, depicted by the changing seasons. It was created as part of a two-year training program that in-
cluded eighteen art students from Central Connecticut University at New Britain. Appointed as a visiting artist at Central Connecticut University (1997–1998), Tufiño established a program in public art and taught drawing and design. Tufiño’s commitment to public art led el Taller Boricua, at 111th Street and Madison Avenue, to recognize her in 1970 as its first woman artist. She continues to work with el Taller by teaching art to the community’s children. Tufiño has also served on numerous boards, including the Board of Trustees of el Museo del Barrio, where she coordinated workshops for children for many years on Puerto Rico’s arts and culture. She has collaborated with the Cayman Gallery in Soho and with Loisaida’s Economic Development Program, aimed at improving the lives of young people in the Lower East Side. Tufiño has received recognition and awards for her work, including the Donald G. Sullivan Award, Hunter College, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning (1997), the Mid-Atlantic National Endowment for the Arts Regional Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation (1992), the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship (1984, 1987), the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts (1992), and the New York City Council Excellence in Arts Award, given by the Office of Andrew Stein (1991), among others. Tufiño resides in South Orange, New Jersey, with her husband Shimpei Taniguchi and their son Ken. She also has an older daughter, Rachel Breitman, from an earlier marriage who lives in Manhattan. See also Artists SOURCES: “Exhibition Catalog for Art Underground. 1990. New York: El Museo del Barrio; Tufiño, Nitza. 2001. Oral history interview by Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, June 16.
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Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim
U q ULIBARRÍ SÁNCHEZ, LOUISE (1893– 1983) Louise Ulibarrí Sánchez, recognized as the first Latina school principal in the Albuquerque public school system, was also a woman who refused to follow the social parameters set for women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ulibarrí was born on June 21, 1893, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, to Marillita Dominique and José Ulibarrí. Marillita and José met when he rode shotgun for Wells Fargo stagecoaches. Marillita gave birth to seven surviving children, of whom Louise was the fourth. Louise Ulibarrí was an excellent student. Bright and inquisitive, she graduated from eighth grade and then attended New Mexico Western Normal School, which in those days enabled her to teach. Excited about her career, she became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse at age fourteen in Anton Chico, New Mexico, in 1907. At that time her pupils ranged in age from six to twenty-two years. During the winter one of her jobs
was to start a fire in the wood stove to warm the classroom for the children. In 1912 Ulibarrí married Juan Bautista Sánchez, a cattle rancher, and moved to Duran, New Mexico. She gave birth to five children in her home. The eldest, Frank, went to live with her parents. The youngest, Alfred, died at age two. Despite her domestic obligations, she never stopped teaching and taught in Duran for fifteen years. She divorced Juan Bautista Sánchez in 1927 because she believed that he was having extramarital affairs. Her devoutly Roman Catholic family was not in agreement with her decision. Her parents told her that she was a heretic; her brothers and sister expressed dismay; her uncles and aunts shunned her; and her grandparents told her that no one had ever done such a terrible thing. After her divorce Ulibarrí attended Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, to work on her high-school education during the summer while she was still teaching. There, in 1929, she opened a
Louise Ulibarrí Sánchez, standing in the door on the left, and her first class in Anton Chico, New Mexico, 1907. Courtesy of Evelia Cobos Yusuf.
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United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America restaurant where she met Donaciano Nevarez, a coal miner. After the death of Nevarez’s wife, he frequented Ulibarrí’s restaurant, where he found solace, comfort, and good food, since she was a fabulous cook. They began a relationship, fell in love, and were married in the same year. They lived together blissfully until he died of emphysema in 1939. Her family continued to criticize her personal decisions and told her that she would be excommunicated from the church. Because of her second marriage, she was no longer welcomed in their homes. Shunned by her family and widowed at age fortysix, Ulibarrí came to seek her livelihood in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She arrived in Albuquerque in a wagon with her three children and $10.00 in her pocket. Upon arrival in Albuquerque she went to the Albuquerque Federal Credit Union and convinced the president to give her a loan, which enabled her to establish herself in Albuquerque. Ulibarrí reconciled with her family during the depression. Still teaching, she was the only one employed among her relatives, and she clothed, fed, and gave shelter to nineteen members of her family. Her youngest sister Eleanor said, “They would have died had it not been for Louise.” Realizing that her career depended on furthering her education, she attended Albuquerque High School at night while teaching during the day in the elementary schools. In 1940 she enrolled as a freshman at the University of New Mexico (UNM). At that time her daughter Rita had already obtained her master’s degree from UNM in 1936. Two of her other children were also enrolled in the same university, and she encouraged them to finish their education. Ernesto graduated from business school in 1940, and Patricio graduated first in his class from law school in 1954. Although she educated herself through high school and college, she never stopped teaching, nor did she neglect her duties as a mother. Not satisfied with a bachelor’s degree, in 1944 Ulibarrí drove from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a Model T Ford to Columbia University in New York, which she attended for two summers to pursue a master’s degree. In 1948 she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison and graduated with a master’s degree. Upon receiving her master’s degree she was hired as the principal of Mountain View Elementary School in 1948. In 1950 she was the first principal of a new elementary school and helped organize the curriculum. It was customary at that time to name a school after the founding principal. However, Ulibarrí preferred to name the school La Luz in order to reflect her philosophy of education.
She married Jim Giddings, a distant cousin, in 1950. They were married for only a few years. Jim Giddings became mentally ill, and when he began exhibiting bizarre symptoms, Ulibarrí was forced to institutionalize him. Divorced for the second time, she threw herself into her work, which was to develop the Nambé School Project, a project study on the educational system for underprivileged children that was funded by the Kellogg Corporation. This project, created by Ulibarrí and three other members, was a forerunner to the Federal Title I, a program to help lower-income children designated as educationally deprived. Ulibarrí had an amazing repertory of stories and songs, both in Spanish and in English, with which she entertained children. She was a true Pied Piper as she enchanted and charmed children down the path of enlightenment. Her advice to the new teachers was to “love the little children, be kind to them and give them guidance.” She was a fun-loving and outgoing person. She loved to laugh and sing and believed in gentle persuasion. She disciplined children by talking to them and convincing them to change their ways. Ulibarrí retired from La Luz Elementary School in 1964 after more than fifty-three years of continuous teaching. In 1969 she remarried her first husband, Juan Bautista Sánchez, after having been divorced from him for forty-two years. They remained married until she died in her sleep on February 6, 1983. SOURCES: 2001. Oral history interview by Evelia Cobos Yusef. September 10; Cobos Chénier, Helene. 2001. Oral history interview. September 16; Sánchez, Ernesto. 2001. Oral history interview. September 13; Ulibarrí, Joe R. 2001. Oral history interview by Evelina Cobos. September 10. Evelia Cobos Yusuf and Carlos A. Cruz
UNITED CANNERY, AGRICULTURAL, PACKING, AND ALLIED WORKERS OF AMERICA (UCAPAWA/FTA) (1937–1950) Founded in 1937, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) in its prime became the seventh-largest union affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). UCAPAWA actively recruited workers of color and was the first union to do so on a national basis. Indeed, within its first year UCAPAWA represented African American sharecroppers in the South, Filipino lettuce packers in California, and Mexican pecan shellers in Texas. Several Latinas held leadership positions from the outset, including Monica Tafoya, a Colorado beet worker, Angie González, a Florida cigar roller, and Manuela Sager Solís, a Texas labor organizer. Luisa Moreno, a veteran labor leader, joined UCAPAWA in
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United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America 1938 and three years later served as a national vice president. The union attracted attention quickly. At the second annual meeting in 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt wired the following message: “I hope you continue to improve the conditions and bring a better life to the members of your union.” The San Francisco News noted the union’s popularity among farmworkers in California, especially Mexican migrants. Mobilizing a multiracial rank and file (including Mexicans, African Americans, Filipinos, and Euro-Americans), the union staged several strikes in the state’s San Joaquin Valley. In October 1939 more than 1,000 workers walked off their jobs in the Madera cotton strike. Organized by UCAPAWA, the workers demanded a living wage. As one journalist wrote, “Men, women, and little children with nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat are hunted, shot and beaten because they asked for a wage they could live on.” The next month UCAPAWA negotiated a contract with the Mineral King Farm Association that was perhaps the first farmworker contract in California. However, Mineral King was an atypical grower cooperative because its members, all Dust Bowl migrants, were part of a New Deal experimental farming project. Because of considerable harassment by the Associated Farmers and local law enforcement and because of the financial drain on national union coffers, UCAPAWA left the fields in order to focus on workers more stably employed in canneries and packinghouses; its most notable successes included Campbell’s Soup in New Jersey and the California Sanitary Canning Company in Los Angeles. Led by Luisa Moreno, cannery
workers across southern California considerably improved their wages, working conditions, and benefits. Not afraid to break the CIO’s no-strike pledge during World War II, Moreno organized a successful walkout at Val Vita in Fullerton, the largest cannery in California. In addition to union recognition and improved wages, management agreed to provide on-plant day care for its workers. Women constituted half of UCAPAWA’s national membership, and across the country they exercised considerable leadership. For example, Mexican women in their California locals held 46 percent of the executive board positions and were 43 percent of the shop stewards. On a day-to-day basis women provided the backbone of the union. During a Colorado beetworker strike in 1942, Eleanor Cassados directed the relief committee. “No strikers went hungry,” UCAPAWA News reported, “and we have Eleanor to thank for that.” During an era when few unions addressed the concerns of women, this CIO affiliate paved the way. By 1946, 66 percent of its contracts nationwide contained equal pay for equal work clauses, and 75 percent provided for leaves of absence without loss of seniority. To reflect its growth in organizing tobacco workers and cigar rollers, especially in the South, UCAPAWA became the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America (FTA) in 1944. In addition to local leadership, people of color were well represented at the national level. For example, in 1946, out of the nine executive board positions, six were held by people of color (three African Americans and three Latinos).
UCAPAWA Local No. 3 negotiating committee, including Luisa Moreno (far left in plaid coat) and Carmen Bernal Escobar (third from left with hands around her child Albert), 1943. Courtesy of Carmen Bernal Escobar.
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United Farm Workers of America African American tobacco workers in North Carolina, Italian and Polish women cannery workers in the Midwest, their Mexican and Jewish counterparts in southern California, and Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, and Alaska Native food-processing workers in the Pacific Northwest were all under the union’s big tent. As part of the UCAPAWA pledge, members swore “never to discriminate against a fellow worker because of creed, color, nationality, religious or political belief.” From its earliest days UCAPAWA/FTA came under a cloud of suspicion by conservative politicians and pundits because many of the union’s organizers had current or past affiliation with the Communist Party, including its founding president. During the cold war red-baiting of the union escalated, and it was expelled from the CIO in 1950 on grounds of Communist domination. However, as a grassroots union, UCAPAWA/ FTA’s commitment to rank-and-file leadership and to inclusion, recruiting members across race, nationality, and gender, remains its greatest legacy. See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Vargas, Zaragosa. 2004. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Weber, Devra. 1994. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vicki L. Ruiz
UNITED FARM WORKERS OF AMERICA (UFW) (1962– ) The United Farm Workers of America (UFW) was the most significant and long-lasting effort to unionize agricultural labor in the United States during the twentieth century. Ideologically linked to the civil rights movement, it began as a grassroots struggle in Delano, California, in 1962 and was originally called the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). The founders included the charismatic César Chávez, his supportive wife, Helen Fabela Chávez, their passionate colleague, Dolores Huerta, and various like-minded sympathizers. The group fought to ameliorate the appalling conditions endured by agricultural laborers: poverty-level wages, substandard housing, dismal working conditions, lack of benefits, poor job security, exploitation by unscrupulous labor contractors, and racism on the part of employers and their allies. Farm laborers suffered from high rates of disease, elevated infant mortality rates, short life expectancy, and low educational attainment. In the words of one
campesino (farmworker), the union was “the best thing that ever happened to the farm workers.” The founders had gained valuable skills and experience as a result of their association with the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Mexican American self-help group that had emerged out of the heightened civic and civil rights consciousness that arose in southwestern barrios in the aftermath of World War II. When the more urban-oriented CSO declined to take up the farmworker issue, Chávez and Huerta left the group to concentrate on the problems of agricultural laborers. The spark that ignited the unionization effort proved to be a strike sponsored by a group of Filipino workers that the NFWA voted to join in 1965. Unsuccessful in its initial attempts to gain union recognition from unyielding and well-financed agribusiness, the fledgling organization turned to a consumer boycott. Striking farmworker families packed up their meager belongings and headed to boycott offices that were springing up all over the country, often traveling in family groups. The experience transformed field workers, many of whom participated in the civic and political life of the nation for the first time. “The union has to win,” declared one farmworker woman. “We’re making this sacrifice so they [growers] will pay so we can educate our children.” The public speaking and picketing of farmworker families struck a nerve with middle-class consumers. The boycott attracted widespread support from coalitions of students, organized labor, religious organizations of all denominations, women’s groups, environmentalists, and ethnic activists. At the same time La Causa, as the union’s struggle was sometimes called, exerted a galvanizing impact on the Mexican American community, an important symbol of La Raza. The intersection of so many reformist constituencies placed extraordinary pressure on agribusiness and led to the historic grape contracts in 1970. The union had little time to savor this momentous victory before it confronted an organizing campaign in the lettuce fields of northern California. This conflict turned violent with the entry of the Teamsters into the fray and the negotiating of “sweetheart” contracts with the industry. These less exacting work arrangements encouraged other companies to oppose vehemently the UFW and to balk at negotiating contracts up for renewal. The turmoil in the fields and renewed boycotts of the period prompted the California state government to broker a settlement between growers and the United Farm Workers. Under the auspices of Governor Jerry Brown, the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed in 1975. The union turned its energies to conducting field elections. Although the UFW was successful in winning the majority of contests, growers, through appeals in the courts, held up the certification
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United Farm Workers of America on the boycott in Detroit, Michigan. Far from disappearing, the union rededicated itself to organizing workers and concluded contracts with strawberry growers in California. Despite such gains, the union faces numerous obstacles, including the continued immigration of desperate and powerless workers from Mexico and Central America willing to work for low pay under horrendous conditions. Although the UFW has not maintained the membership levels of the 1970s, it continues to be the largest and most visible agricultural union in California. In addition, it has spun off smaller-scale organizations in a number of other states, including Arizona, Texas, Florida, Washington, Ohio, and Michigan. With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United Farm Workers has built low-income senior housing complexes with the aim of providing decent, affordable housing for elderly farmworkers. For example, Desert Garden Apartments in Indio, California, is a full-service assisted-living facility with hot meals, transportation, and health care. The UFW bettered the conditions of a marginalized and impoverished group of workers, politicized a generation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and became an important symbol of cultural pride. Appropriating the phrase “Sí, se puede” (it can be done), the UFW instilled courage and confidence. César Chávez remains the most recognizable Latino leader. The best-known facet of the Chicano movement of the 1960s, the union and its legacy lives on.
United Farm Workers, “Boycott Lettuce & Grapes,” circa 1978. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (Digital ID: cph 3g02420).
of the union as the collective bargaining agent for their employees. Frustrated by the legal process and undergoing internal dissension about the direction of the union, many long-term staff and supporters left. The fortunes of the UFW declined further with the election in 1982 of Republican governor George Deukmejian, a strong supporter of agribusiness. The antiunion posture of the Reagan presidency also contributed to the union’s difficulties. Despite the setbacks, the union had succeeded in raising the standard of living of union members, negotiated better wages, improved working conditions, created health and pension programs, raised awareness of sexual harassment, and increased concern over pesticides. The greatest challenge for the UFW came with the unexpected death of César Chávez in 1993. His funeral brought an outpouring of grief and support from individuals from all walks of life who had been touched by La Causa, but also raised questions about the continued existence of the union without its powerful leader. Dolores Huerta and other colleagues vowed to carry on his work. Chávez was succeeded by his son-in-law, Arturo Rodríguez, a college-educated Chicano who had met and married Linda “Lu” Chávez while working
See also Labor Unions SOURCES: Alvarez, Fred. 2002. “After a Life in the Fields, Farm Workers Looking for a Place to Call Their Own.” Los Angeles Times, July 8, A1, A16; Ferriss, Susan, and Ricardo Sandoval. 1997. The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers Movement. New York: Harcourt Brace; Majka, Linda C., and Theo J. Majka. 1982. Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rose, Margaret. 1990. “From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975.” Labor History 31, no. 3 (Summer): 271–293; ———. 2002. “César Chávez and Dolores Huerta: Partners in ‘La Causa.’ ” In César Chávez, ed. Richard Etulain. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. Margaret Eleanor Rose
Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW) (1962– ) “We want union contracts and I’m willing to stay here until they’re signed,” vowed thirty-two-year-old Enedina Hernández, a UFW picketer. Her sentiments represent the sense of empowerment she and other women experienced as a result of their association with the union. Perhaps misled by the popular and scholarly treatments of the farmworker movement that focused largely on the charismatic César Chávez, historians
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United Farm Workers of America have missed the important role women have played in the vanguard and behind the scenes. Since the development of large-scale agriculture in the late nineteenth century in the Southwest, Chicanas and Mexicanas have worked in the “factories in the fields” and contributed to the family income as daughters and wives. Like their husbands and sons, they endured low pay, poor working conditions, substandard housing, nonexistent benefits, lack of job security, exploitation by contractors, and prejudice on the part of employers; they also faced sexual harassment. Furthermore, lacking adequate resources for child care, women were often forced to take their children with them to the fields. The double day took its toll because women rose early in the morning to prepare breakfasts and lunches for their husbands and children and then, upon returning home after a long day in the fields, cooked the evening meal and tended to household chores. They had strong motivations to support any efforts to improve their difficult lives. Perhaps the two most significant women in the early stage of the union’s history are Helen Chávez, spouse of César Chávez, and Dolores Huerta. Their examples influenced other women in the United Farm Workers. Helen Chávez played a largely behind-thescenes but critical role. She shared a firm conviction with her husband regarding the urgent need to help farmworkers. “After all,” she recalled, “we were both farm workers, and my parents and his parents and our whole families. I thought a lot of people felt the way we did.” Not only did she avidly support the goal of organizing, but her work in the fields allowed Chávez to devote his time to the union. “While César was organizing, I was picking grapes or doing whatever field work was available. When the grape harvest was pretty heavy,” as she remembered the early difficult years before the 1965 grape strike, “sometimes I’d work ten hours a day, five days a week for eighty-five cents an hour.” At times she would take the older children with her to work during the summers and weekends. After work she had to cook, clean, and care for their eight children. When the union became more established, she was persuaded, over her initial reluctance, to work in the union’s credit union, first as a bookkeeper and later as manager. Work and domestic responsibilities did not prevent her from joining picket lines and even facing arrest. However, she was only comfortable participating with her family. She actively shunned an independent role and refused to speak before groups. Because of her quiet legacy, her lifelong commitment to the union has gone unrecognized. Dolores Huerta, the first vice president of the union, exerted a more visible presence in its history. She was a teacher in Stockton, California, in the 1950s, but her life took another direction when she joined the Com-
munity Service Organization (CSO), a Mexican American civic group that emerged after World War II. It was through the CSO that she met and began to work with César Chávez, who soon became the national director while she served as its lobbyist. Although they both gained valuable skills and experience, they became disenchanted when the urban-oriented CSO declined to organize farmworkers. Chávez resigned, soon followed by Huerta, to focus on creating the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Both recognized the financial and emotional sacrifices they would confront. In her thirties with seven children and an estranged second husband, whom she later divorced, Huerta shouldered considerable economic and familial burdens. Struggling to make ends meet, she survived on irregular payments from her ex-husbands, odd jobs, assistance from family members, and occasional anonymous donations of food and clothing. These hardships did not deter her ambition to achieve meaningful changes for farmworkers. From her base in Stockton she spent hours publicizing the new organization, setting up meetings, calling on workers at their homes, and visiting migrant camps to get workers to join the union. Collecting dues proved difficult, and after deducting expenses, Chávez and Huerta shared the slim proceeds for living expenses. “César was very fair about that,” she asserted. “He would always divide it down the middle.” After repeated requests from Chávez, Huerta relocated her family to Delano to concentrate on the NFWA’s efforts in the central San Joaquin Valley. Not long after her move the fledgling organization faced its first real test when the union voted unanimously to honor a strike called by Filipino grape workers in 1965. Huerta became an inspirational leader on the picket lines, as well as a strategist behind the scenes. In a relatively short time the union won a few contracts with the more vulnerable wine grape producers as the result of negotiations led by the tenacious Huerta. Against the more intransigent table grape growers, the union devised a consumer boycott strategy to bring the industry to terms. Huerta added “boycott director” to her list of responsibilities. A fiery speaker, she became very effective in publicizing La Causa and in raising significant sums to support the union. She also provided an important model for other campesinas to join the union’s nationwide boycott. Striking farmworker families heeded the call to help staff the boycott offices that sprang up across the country. Historians have been slow to recognize what Huerta realized: “Families are the most important part of the UFW because a family can stick it out in a strange place, on $5 a week per person, the wage [in the early 1970s] everyone in the union is paid (plus ex-
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United Farm Workers of America penses).” María Luisa and Hijinio Rangel transplanted their family to Detroit, Michigan; Juanita and Merced Váldez moved their family to Cincinnati, Ohio; Herminia and Conrado Rodríguez packed up their family and personal belongings to work on the boycott in Washington, D.C. These are just a few examples of the women who disrupted their lives to bring justice to the fields. Work on the boycott was often a life-changing experience for families who had lived and worked in rural areas. Becoming active participants in the boycott propelled Mexicanas and Chicanas into the national spotlight. Many learned or improved their English, mastered office skills, broadened their perspectives, and gained confidence. Through experience on urban picket lines they asserted themselves in new public ways. Boycott experience also transformed the personal lives of participants by altering the dynamic between husbands and wives. Women and men worked together and developed more open relations and equal partnerships. Mexicanas and Chicanas recognized new opportunities for personal growth and raised their expectations for themselves and their children. The presence of farmworker women also gave the boycott an additional dynamic in appealing to middleclass consumers, particularly female shoppers, who became aware of the exploitation in the fields through the vivid firsthand accounts of women and children. “I grew up in the fields,” revealed one farmworker woman. “In Fresno, some workers still live in tents, with no toilets and kerosene stoves to cook on, the same as when I was a child.” Often moved by such testimony, middle-class housewives volunteered their time to the local union operations. Boycott directors were quick to seize upon an aroused female constituency. “Volunteers needed for the LADIES DELEGATION,” proclaimed a boycott newsletter. “Bring the kids and the babysitter. They should be involved in changing history too.” Chicanas and Mexicanas participated not only as family members, but also as autonomous women. Encouraged by the example of Dolores Huerta, they emerged as boycott directors. Important examples of this more independent activism included Jessica Govea in Montreal, Canada, María Saludado in Indianapolis, and Hope López in Philadelphia. These activists were distinct from women who participated as part of a family unit. They were second-generation Mexican Americans with more education, having graduated from high school and, in some cases, having attending college. Often these women were single, lived in nonmarital relationships, and were divorced or widowed. Because of their education and relative mobility, they were in great demand by union officials confronted with
chronic personnel shortages. Directing a boycott center was a challenging task: contacts had to be made, picket lines organized, newsletters produced, speeches given, endorsements collected, funds solicited, and volunteers recruited. “It has been difficult to come from the ‘farm’ to the big city,” remarked Jessica Govea, a director in her early twenties from Bakersfield, California, “but we are making tremendous headway in the boycott in Montreal now.” It was through the sacrifices of striking farmworker women and boycott leaders like Jessica Govea that the union could pressure growers to sign the historic grape contracts in Delano in 1970. Before the ink was dry on the agreements, a strike erupted in the lettuce fields of northern California. Huerta, Govea, and other women became involved in organizing campaigns in the Salinas Valley. Faced with little progress, union staff and workers called for the boycott of lettuce, and later Gallo wines and table grapes, as agribusiness launched an all-out offensive to defeat the United Farm Workers. Alarmed by the violence in the fields, eventually the California state legislature, working with Governor Jerry Brown, passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in 1975 to check the acrimonious relations between growers and the union. After passage of the ALRA the union turned its resources to organizing field elections throughout California. While it won a substantial number of contests, it soon became apparent that agribusiness would pursue a tactic of obstruction and delay by appealing unfavorable outcomes through the legal system. At the companies where the union was successful, it was necessary to train workers to negotiate and administer contracts. Although this area of union work was considered men’s work, Chicanas and Mexicanas exercised influence as they served on negotiating and ranch committees (equivalent to a union local). These bodies participated in the negotiation process with their employers, and once the contract was accepted, they supervised the administration of the agreement at their individual companies, handling issues such as seniority, dismissals, layoff procedures, and local grievances. Even with the strong model of Dolores Huerta to encourage them, women faced opposition to their presence around the bargaining table. “There were no women on the first ranch committee,” recalled Jessie de la Cruz, who eventually served on the committee at her company. De la Cruz and others like her, such as Mary Magaña, a rose worker, Carolina Guerrero, a grape laborer, Cleo Gómez, a walnut and fruit picker, and Juana Arroyo, a celery and tomato employee, faced resistance and skepticism from husbands, fathers, sons, colleagues, and employers. Initially lacking self-confidence, women seemed reluctant
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U.S.-Mexican War to speak forcefully. Gradually hostility toward women eased as their enforcement of the contracts gave laborers more control over the workplace, improved wages and benefits, and secured better working conditions. Moreover, the UFW expanded female autonomy and eroded barriers between male- and female-defined endeavors. Although service on ranch committees was a more nontraditional area of participation for women, managing campesino or service centers became a more acceptable pursuit for Chicanas and Mexicanas. Scholars and journalists have overlooked the administrative and social welfare apparatus of the union because it lacked the allure of the boycott or the drama of the picket line or ranch committee. From its earliest days the union provided social services for its members. The campesino center directors and staff contributed a direct and vital link between the union and farmworkers. Women such as Helen Chávez followed a more conventional pattern of activism, combining family, work, and unionism. Unlike Chicanas and Mexicanas who served on ranch committees, they encountered little or no opposition from their families and husbands. Campesino centers seek to improve the quality of life for farmworkers and their families through education, action, and service programs, methods women have traditionally employed to achieve social change. Directors such as Minnie Ybarra in San Ysidro, Monica Alfaro in Santa Maria, and Sandra Rodríguez in Hollister inform farmworkers of their basic rights to various economic, social, and health benefits, available from both the UFW and government agencies. Center staff members also advise workers on union medical and pension programs and devote substantial time to discussing eligibility for such programs as unemployment insurance, state disability insurance, workers’ compensation, food stamps, and Medi-Cal Center directors and personnel further assist union members with immigration questions, translation assistance, housing, and aid during natural disasters. Traditional gender ideologies that viewed women as the heart of their homes eased their entry into campesino centers to direct the provision of shelter, clothing, food, and education for striking workers and union members. Because this type of activity does not draw headlines, the contributions of these women have remained unacknowledged. Women have always been involved in the farmworker movement. During the 1970s the UFW began to encourage the participation of Chicanas and Mexicanas. Stories on women with headlines like “A Woman’s Place Is . . . on the Picket Line” (which appeared in the union’s newsletter, El Malcriado) symbolized the change in attitude. Union officials also recog-
nized the appeal of farmworker women to middleclass Americans, especially the female consumer. Later in the decade another woman, Jessica Govea, served on the nine-member UFW executive board. Women, however, remain clustered in the traditionally female areas of administration and behind-the-scenes support. Women gave their loyalty to the farmworker movement, but they also gained validation. “On the one hand, it was tough,” remembered Jessica Govea, “on the other, it was an incredibly liberating and wonderful experience.” This quest brought about change for impoverished workers and raised hopes. “If we win this fight,” noted Josephine Hernández, “then we can give our children what they need.” SOURCES: Baer, Barbara L., and Glenna Matthews. 1974. “ ‘You Find A Way’: The Women of the Boycott.” Nation (February 23): 232–238; Majka, Linda C., and Theo J. Majka. 1982. Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rose, Margaret. 1990. “From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975.” Labor History 31, no. 3 (Summer): 271–293; ———. 1995. “ ‘Woman Power Will Stop Those Grapes’: Chicana Organizers and Middle-Class Female Supporters in the Farm Workers’ Grape Boycott in Philadelphia, 1969–1970.” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 4 (Winter): 6–36; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Margaret Eleanor Rose
U.S.-MEXICAN WAR (1846–1848) On February 2, 1848, beside Mexico’s most sacred site, la Basilica de la Virgen de Guadalupe, representatives of the newly constituted Mexican government met with U.S. representatives to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending what Mexicans remember as the “war of northern aggression.” As a result, almost 530,000 square miles of the land Mexico had inherited from Spain, including the coveted bays of San Diego and San Francisco, became what is now known as the western United States. The treaty crushed any hopes that Mexico had harbored of regaining approximately 350,000 square miles of territory claimed by the Republic of Texas, which the United States had annexed in 1845. With the signing of this treaty, the United States became a transcontinental nation, and more than 96,000 Mexican citizens from New Mexico to California became American citizens. In the 1830s and early 1840s conflict between the two nations for these lands was inevitable, but war was not. Examined from three vantage points, however, the internal struggles of both countries and the weakness of the borderlands did create a complicated
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U.S.-Mexican War scenario in which to negotiate. First, when Mexico became a republic in 1824, the country faced crippling problems. Its finances and infrastructure were fractured after an eleven-year fight for independence and a brief, unsuccessful attempt at becoming an empire. Leaders struggled to create the Constitution of 1824 and put into operation a government that reflected a unified vision of how their country would be structured, what the states’ relationship to the national government would be, and how the country would survive financially. Several power groups confounded these attempts, particularly the military generals, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and international creditors. Second, while political forces struggled in the capital, citizens in the northern territories, from the Gulf coast to the Pacific coast, looked elsewhere for support. They took advantage of the end of Spain’s mercantile system and the opening of seaports and overland commerce to develop relationships with British, American, French, and South American merchants. In the 1830s and early 1840s, when women from important Mexican families, like María de las Angustias de la Guerra, married foreigners, commercial bonds with these merchants became even stronger, while the families’ political bonds with Mexico City weakened as centralists exerted their power. In an attempt to weaken the states’ power, the central government ordered a reduction in the state militias and expanded the national army. Citizens in California and New Mexico battled against the new centralist-appointed governors—and with each other—over this issue. Tejanos not only revolted over it, in 1836 they declared themselves a republic. Third, the United States faced its own internal discord, financial stress, and international threats, especially from Britain. Memories of the Battle of New Orleans and the British attack on Washington were still vivid. U.S. leaders continued to feel threatened by the economic and military power of Great Britain. Although the United States had achieved independence from Britain, sections of the border with Canada remained undefined. American leaders knew that they were competing with the British not only for control of the Northwest Territories, where hundreds of Americans were beginning to settle, but also for two harbors important to international trade in the Pacific. Both claimed Puget Sound, and both coveted Mexico’s San Francisco Bay. As 1844 drew to a close, while Mexico prepared to welcome a leader who offered internal reconciliation, voters in the United States elected a leader ready to risk war with both Britain and Mexico. In the fall James K. Polk campaigned for president with a focus on three geographic targets. He wanted to win the Oregon Ter-
ritories from Britain. He wanted to see Texas join the Union, knowing that Mexico had still not given up hope of regaining its former state. He also wanted to acquire California. In Mexico the fall of 1844 offered new hope for the federalists. They were able to force out the centralists and their leader, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, and elect a wiser leader and political moderate, General José Joaquín Herrera, whose primary goal was to return the Republic to its original Constitution of 1824. Herrera took office in January 1845, two months before Polk. On March 1, 1845, three days before Polk became president, Congress voted to offer statehood to Texas. Soon after Polk’s inauguration, in protest over the congressional vote, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, Mexico’s minister to Washington, broke off diplomatic relations and returned home. On July 4 a majority of Texans voted for statehood, despite attempts by Britain and Mexico to persuade them to reject it. One of Polk’s three campaign goals, the annexation of Texas, was accomplished. Expecting a military response from Mexico, Polk ordered the navy to move into the Gulf of Mexico and General Zachary Taylor to move his troops from Louisiana to Texas, where they camped at Corpus Christi, on the mouth of the Nueces River. Mexico viewed the Nueces as the southern boundary of Texas. The United States claimed that the southern boundary was the Rio Grande. Whoever entered this disputed territory invited trouble. Then Polk sent his emissary John Slidell to Mexico City with an offer to buy California, New Mexico, and land on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande line. President Herrera knew the implications of Polk’s actions. He ordered a study of the military’s preparedness to do battle, which found it wanting. A realist, he would rather lose part of Mexico’s territory than engage in a disastrous war and so agreed to meet with Polk’s emissary in November. Herrera’s political enemies, however, accused him of treason, so he and Slidell never met. The call of treason was loudest from an ambitious general, Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, who threatened to use military force against him, so Herrera resigned rather than have the Constitution of 1824 overthrown. Paredes won a dubious election, assumed the presidency in January 1846, and led the country toward war. Polk continued to pursue his strategy of graduated pressure, also willing to risk a war. In January he ordered General Zachary Taylor to march his troops across the disputed territory to the Rio Grande. On April 25, soon after Major General Mariano Arista arrived in Matamoros to take command, Mexican troops fought a U.S. scouting party. Eleven American soldiers
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U.S.-Mexican War were killed. As far as the generals were concerned, war had begun. On May 8 and 9 the armies fought two major battles, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, near Matamoros. The fighting ended with the retreat of the Mexican army. Instead of receiving reinforcements, however, they learned that antagonism against Paredes for disregarding the Constitution of 1824 was so deep that the city of Guadalajara had revolted. Rather than send much-needed troops to help fight against the U.S. Army, Paredes ordered them to lay siege to Guadalajara. Even though Polk had not received news of the battles on May 8 and 9, he had begun to develop his case for war on the basis of the failure of Slidell’s mission and news of the skirmish on April 25. On May 11 Polk presented his message to Congress asking for a declaration of war. On May 13 the U.S. Congress complied with Polk’s wishes and authorized $10 million and 50,000 twelve-month volunteers. While Polk and his cabinet began implementing their war plans, they received welcome news that they no longer had to worry about a war with Britain. U.S. and British negotiators had agreed on the terms of a treaty to settle the Oregon boundaries. Polk had achieved the second of his campaign goals. In June 1846 Polk ordered Colonel Stephen W. Kearny to lead the Army of the West from Fort Leavenworth to New Mexico. This army included a battalion of Mormons, who joined as a way to migrate west with their families. Although there was a threat of battle in New Mexico, Kearny’s troops entered Santa Fe peacefully and claimed it for the United States. Women’s experiences in the war varied greatly. Susan Magoffin, wife of a successful merchant involved in commerce on the Santa Fe Trail, wrote in her diary about her entry into Santa Fe and how she and Mexican women of the privileged class met and cautiously became acquainted. In Santa Fe, as well as other sites where soldiers were stationed, women took advantage of business opportunities the war created. Historian Deena González described how one Santa Fe woman, María Gertrudis Barceló, ran a popular gambling saloon that catered to U.S. soldiers. Near Matamoros and then in Saltillo, Sarah Bowman, known as the Great Western, operated an inn and restaurant for soldiers. Samuel Chamberlain was one patron who described her forceful character in his book My Confession. Most Mexican women in occupied cities and towns tried to continue daily life and stay out of danger. Once the army settled in Santa Fe, Kearny sent Colonel Alexander Doniphan south to Chihuahua with his First Missouri Mounted Volunteers while he proceeded to San Diego, California. Outside San Diego Californios routed Kearny and his troops at San Pas-
cual, but they joined with the U.S. Navy and Marines to win the battles of San Gabriel and La Mesa and force the Californios to surrender in January 1847. Polk had achieved the third of his campaign goals but would need a treaty with Mexico to make it official. The rest of the war was fought to get that treaty. In northeastern Mexico, after the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, General Zachary Taylor moved his Army of the North toward its target, the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León. On September 20–24 the Mexican and U.S. armies fought in the streets and on hillsides surrounding the city. Monterrey residents— men and women—aided the Mexican soldiers, but all were forced to surrender. Later one woman’s heroism was commemorated in the song “The Maid of Monterrey.” Taylor’s troops then marched to Saltillo, where in November 1846 leaders allowed them to occupy the city rather than have it become a battleground. U.S. soldiers began to write in letters and journals about their admiration of the beautiful Mexican women they met. Meanwhile, the former Mexican president, Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had surrendered Texas in 1836, had been allowed to pass through the U.S. naval blockade and return to Mexico from his exile in Cuba on the promise of helping Polk buy California. Instead, Santa Anna became provisional president and rallied an army that he then led north to Saltillo. Many of the 20,000 troops were conscripts, rural people pressed into service who traveled with their wives rather than leave them unprotected at home. These women cooked for and nursed the soldiers. All suffered from shortages of food and water and the bitterly cold weather. On February 22–23 Santa Anna engaged Taylor’s army on the plains of Buena Vista. Taylor feared, and some historians believe, that if Santa Anna had not withdrawn during the night of February 23, the Mexican army might have won this strategic battle. One theory is that Santa Anna withdrew because he had news of an insurrection in Mexico City and raced back to settle it. Supporters and opponents of his controversial vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, had started a poorly timed battle in the streets of Mexico City, known as the “polka revolt” (named for a favorite dance of the period), sapping much-needed resources from the defense of the country and particularly the port city of Veracruz. General Winfield Scott’s Army of the Center had already begun to land in Veracruz. On March 17 Scott insisted on the surrender of the city, but when that did not happen, he bombarded the port for eight days until its leaders did submit. The news reached Santa Anna, who was back in control of the government. He re-
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Urquides, María Luisa Legarra organized his army in time to confront Scott’s troops on the road to Jalapa. At Cerro Gordo, on April 19–20, Santa Anna met defeat and barely escaped capture. From April until August Winfield Scott and Nicholas Trist, the U.S. treaty negotiator, attempted to arrange a truce with Mexican leaders, but when that failed, Scott led his troops into the Valley of Mexico. On August 19– 20, south of Mexico City, a rolling battle from Padierna to Churubusco ended with a stalemate. Scott and Santa Anna agreed to an armistice to give Nicholas Trist and Mexican negotiators a chance to end the war. When it became clear that they could not agree, Scott ordered his troops forward. The battle of Molino del Rey on September 8 was followed by the battle of Chapultepec on September 12, which spilled over to the gates of the city and by the next day into the city itself. Santa Anna withdrew his troops in the early morning of September 14. Later that morning city leaders surrendered, and the occupation of the capital began. From September to December 1847 Mexican leaders in the temporary capital of Querétaro reconstituted the government, held elections, and named a team of negotiators. In January, as formal negotiations began in Mexico, the U.S. Congress was dealing with the repercussions of winning the war. Some even called for conquering “all of Mexico.” The issues between slave and nonslave states became heated, exacerbated by the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. While the lands won by the United States as a result of the war would enable the country to become a transnational power, one of the costs was that they would fuel tensions that led to the Civil War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in Mexico on February 2, ratified by the U.S. Congress on March 10, and returned to Mexico to be ratified by the newly elected Mexican Congress on May 25. Terms included that Mexico would receive $15 million and cede its northern borderlands to the United States. Polk had finally achieved his goals, the biggest of which was California, where news of the January discovery of large deposits of gold did what the Mexican government had tried to do: it attracted thousands of settlers. See also Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo SOURCES: Bauer, K. Jack. 1992. The Mexican War, 1846– 1848. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Cashion, Peggy M. 1990. “Women and the Mexican War, 1846–1848.” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington; Francaviglia, Richard V., and Douglas W. Richmond, eds. 2000. Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848. Arlington: Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, University of Texas at Arlington; Padilla, Genaro M. 1993. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Pletcher, David M. 1973. The Diplo-
macy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press; Weber, David J. 1982. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Andrea Boardman
URQUIDES, MARÍA LUISA LEGARRA (1908–1994) Often called “the mother of bilingual education,” María L. Urquides dedicated her life to improving education for Mexican American children. Urquides was born in 1908 in Tucson, Arizona, to two prominent families. Her father, Hilario Urquides, was a businessman and civic leader. In 1894 he helped found the Alianza Hispano-Americana, the largest Mexican American mutual-aid society. Her mother, Mariana Legarra, belonged to a longtime Tucson family. María Urquides spent much of her life working with organizations that addressed social issues. Involved with the Catholic Church throughout her life, she once said that she was a member of three minorities: she was a woman, a Mexican, and a Catholic. In high school Urquides’s teachers encouraged her to become an elementary-school teacher, and she attended Tempe State Teachers College, earning a twoyear teaching certificate in 1928. Since it was unusual for a Mexican American woman to leave home for college during the 1920s, she defied her family’s expectations. She remembered, “My older brother pitched a fit and my mother cried. But I went.” She was the first person in her family to go to college. Her father had no formal schooling, and her mother went to school only through third grade. At the Tempe State Teachers College she financed her education by cleaning the bathrooms in her dormitory and singing Mexican songs at a local restaurant. During the summers Urquides continued her education at the University of Arizona, eventually earning a B.A. in 1946 and an M.A. in 1956. Urquides began her forty-six-year teaching career at Davis Elementary School, then the largest school in Tucson, with a student body of 750 students, mostly Mexican American. At Davis Elementary she witnessed the learning difficulties and loss of self-esteem experienced by Spanish-speaking children who were forcibly immersed in English. She then began to formulate her ideas about teaching Mexican American children, ideas that would coalesce into bilingual education. Beginning her career at a time when children were not allowed to speak Spanish at school, she recalled teaching some of her students some songs in Spanish, only to have her supervisor insist that she translate them into English. Later in life she often remembered the educational policies, stating, “If I ever
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Urrea, Teresa go to hell, it will be because of the kids I punished for speaking Spanish.” In 1948, after twenty years working with workingclass Mexican American children, Urquides was transferred to Sam Hughes Elementary School, a predominantly Anglo school in an affluent area of Tucson. Noting the different resources available to the two groups of children, she wondered, “Why couldn’t these children be brought together as part of the whole system?” In the mid-1950s Urquides joined the faculty at the newly built Pueblo High School, and it was there that she and her colleagues began to develop what would become one of the first bilingual education programs, creating Spanish classes for the Spanishspeaking students. In 1966 Urquides and fellow educators Hank Oyama and Adalberto Guerrero coauthored The Silent Minority, a report that documented their survey of thirty-five school districts in five southwestern states. The report eventually went to Congress and initiated debates over the education of Mexican American children. The same year Texas senator Ralph W. Yarborough attended a bilingual education conference in Tucson that Urquides organized. Yarborough left the conference committed to supporting bilingual education. In 1967 he introduced the bill that would fund bilingual education under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and a year later the U.S. Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act. During her long career Urquides received more than sixty honors and was named to influential state and national commissions. In 1950 President Harry Truman appointed her to the White House Conference on Children and Youth. She was reappointed to the commission by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and by President Richard Nixon in 1970. In the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Arizona State Advisory Committee to the Civil Rights Commission, and in 1967 President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed her to the National Advisory Committee to the Commissioners of Education on Mexican American Education. Urquides continued to work in the school system until her retirement in 1974. In 1983 the University of Arizona awarded her an honorary doctor of law degree. Although Urquides said that she had no regrets over her years in the classroom, she did express disappointment over bilingual education. “Bilingual education is not what I hoped it would be—because we didn’t teach the monolingual child, the Anglo child, to speak Spanish.” She died at the age of eighty-six in 1994. See also Bilingual Education SOURCES: González, Elizabeth Quiroz. 1986. “The Education and Public Career of María Urquides: A Case Study of a
Mexican American Community Leader.” Ed.D. thesis, University of Arizona; Sheridan, Thomas E. 1992. Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Yolanda Chávez Leyva
URREA, TERESA (1872–1906) Teresa Urrea was a local curandera, international healer, border exile, and fledgling labor activist. Her fame as a curandera, or Mexican folk healer, straddled two nations. Illuminated by her followers as a folk saint, la Santa de Cabora, she drew the ire of the Catholic Church. Her insistent criticism of President Porfirio Díaz’s land policies cast her as a revolutionary. Consequently, the Mexican government carefully scrutinized her. Exiled in 1892, she became a media sensation in the United States. During the closing years of her life she allied with Mexican labor activists in Los Angeles before returning to Clifton, Arizona. Born in Ocoroni, Sinaloa, on October 15, 1872, Teresa Urrea was reared by her mother, Cayetana Chávez, a Tehuecan domestic servant. Her father, Tomás Urrea, was a moderately successful dairy farmer. The casa chica (the home provided for a mistress and her children) relationship between elite men, like Urrea, and poor women, including indigenous women, like Chávez, appeared common during the nineteenth century. Teresa Urrea was reared in the modest surroundings of the servants’ quarters, but her life changed drastically in 1888. She arrived at her father’s Cabora estate as she approached her sixteenth birthday. In the months immediately following she developed important relationships with her stepmother, Gabriela Cantúa, and the local curandera, Huila. Huila treated patients with herbals and massages, and Urrea became her apprentice through the fall of 1889. On October 28, 1889, Urrea lapsed into the first of a series of trancelike comas that lasted two weeks. After regaining consciousness, she displayed bizarre behavior; she frequently experienced seizures and catatonic states and began exuding a heavy perfumed odor. Moreover, in exchange for renewed health, Urrea promised the Virgin Mary that she would be devoted to “healing humanity.” By December 1889 she had amassed a considerable local, regional, and national following. Her adherents dubbed her la Santa de Cabora, an unrecognized folk saint, which provoked skepticism from the Catholic Church. She frequently proselytized about equality and love, but her denunciation of Catholic sacraments and her renegade style of sacramental dispensation drew the most criticism.
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Urrea, Teresa
Legendary healer Teresa Urrea. Courtesy of the William Curry Holden Papers, the Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University.
Mexico underwent monumental changes at the end of the nineteenth century. With a shift to modernization, large-scale foreign investments marked the Mexican landscape, while Porfirian policies eroded ejido communal landholding, resulting in the displacement of millions of indigenous and mestizo ejido farmers. In the wake of these changes Teresa Urrea emerged as a beacon of hope for the disenfranchised. Recognizing her ubiquitous following, and possibly challenged by it, the central government moved to undercut her support. After surviving three years of watchful government surveillance, Teresa Urrea was exiled to the United States. Even after she left Mexico, controversy surrounded her. Relocating initially to Nogales, Arizona, the Urrea family was counseled to move inland away from volatile borderland strife. Shortly thereafter she moved to Solomonville, Arizona. Throughout the 1890s political conflict followed her. An anti-Díaz tract was published from Solomonville, and the Mexican government speculated about Urrea’s involvement in an opposition faction. She responded
by moving to El Paso to continue healing. However, a series of border rebellions flung her back into the limelight. Mexican rebels, attempting to take over the Nogales customhouse in August 1896, evoked her name as la Santa de Cabora. Sensing turmoil, Urrea retreated to the insulated mining community in Clifton, Arizona. During the closing years of her life she began to exert her own autonomy. She briefly married miner Lupe Rodríquez in June 1900, but a medical healing tour in 1900 represented her personal independence. In August, at the behest of local Clifton businessmen, she traveled to San Jose, California, to cure an ill boy. This marked the beginning of a three-year healing tour with stops at several major metropolitan areas. Unlike Urrea’s earlier days, she earned a considerable income from touring, but by all accounts she felt uneasy and terribly isolated. In early 1901 she wrote to a Clifton friend, Juana Van Order, imploring her to send her bilingual son John to serve as an interpreter. By spring their working relationship blossomed into an intimate relationship, and Urrea bore a daughter, Laura Van Order, in February 1902. While living in East Los Angeles, she drew comfort from the growing Sonoran community. Drawn to Los Angeles by Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway, Sonorans labored under poor living conditions and racially stratified wages. From her Brooklyn Avenue cottage Urrea continued healing, but she also began protesting dire labor conditions. Her reputation quickly spread both as a healer and as a labor activist who frequently encouraged railroad laborers to join the fledgling Mexican mutualista whose members had gone out on strike. Mirroring past years, the laborers glorified her as the symbolic la Santa de Cabora. Yet after several months battling with Pacific Electric, Urrea retreated to Clifton. Never losing her devotion to the poor, oppressed, and infirm, Teresa Urrea continued her healing activities. In June 1904 she bore a second daughter, Magdalena Van Order. By late 1905 her health had deteriorated markedly. She died of tuberculosis on January 12, 1906. See also Folk Healing Traditions; Religion SOURCES: Domecq, Brianda. 1994. “Teresa Urrea: La Santa de Cabora.” In Tomóchic: La revolución adelantada, ed. Jesús Vargas Valdez, 2:13–30. Ciudad Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez; Perales, Marian. 2005. “Teresa Urrea: Curandera and Folk Saint.” Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; Vanderwood, Paul. 1998. The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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V q VALDEZ, PATSSI (1950?–
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Patssi Valdez was born in Los Angeles. She was educated through the experiences of the Los Angeles blowouts of 1968, the Chicano moratorium of 1970, the performance art collective Asco (1974–1987), and the Otis Parsons School of Art and Design (1981– 1985). Her artistic career began at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, where she met Harry Gamboa and Willie Herron. Through their collaborations at school and in the community they eventually developed Asco (Spanish for nausea), a performance art group whose aesthetic choices and directions emerged from urban realities of police brutality, poverty, gang warfare, Hollywood glamour, barrio
counterculture, a sense of humor, and increasing distance from Chicano nationalism and movimiento art. The artists of Asco did not intend to establish themselves as authentic Chicano or folk artists. Instead, they worked to displace and rupture the image of the so-called real Chicano. Through Asco Valdez worked in performance and installation art, photo-collage and photography, “nomovies,” and costume design. In 1981 she enrolled at Otis Parsons in Los Angeles and New York City, which provided her with a vocabulary and larger historical context for her work. “Even though going to school was not considered the thing to do by the artistic community at the time, I wanted to educate myself . . . learn the vocabulary and more technical
Chicana artist Patssi Valdez. Photograph by Vern Evans. Courtesy of Patricia Correia Gallery.
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Vallejo, Epifania de Guadalupe aspects of my chosen profession.” In 1985 she received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts and full-page coverage in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. In 1988 she began to seriously pursue painting as a medium, and her first solo exhibition at the Pico House in Los Angeles was a success: she sold all but one of her paintings. As a mixed-media artist, she continues to develop a style that is both familiar and disturbing. Beyond her work as a visual artist, Valdez established a career in theater and films as an art director and set designer. Valdez has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts U.S./Mexico Artist-in-Residence (1994), the Durfee Foundation Artist Fellowship (1999), and the Brody Arts Fellowship in Visual Arts (1988). Her work has gathered wide recognition in France, Germany, and the United States and is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Valdez is widely recognized for her domestic spaces—both installations and paintings— and her images of women, including self-portraits and portraits by Harry Gamboa and representations of celestial and earthly women. The inspiration for strong women came from her mother and sister, and her images of virgins, madonnas, queens, and goddesses articulate a social commentary on gender stereotypes and a reorientation of spiritual and female icons. Unconventional motifs all point to her rejection of assimilation rhetoric and Chicano cultural nationalism, both of which confine women to domestic and service labor, demand obedience to patriarchial rule, or silence challenges to gender politics. Although her reconfiguration of glamour and sexuality can produce ambivalence in the spectator, Valdez’s art of the female body and spirit is a visual demonstration of dignity and power through grace and self-representation. Her works speak to a Chicana public about spiritual authority, intolerance for abuse, healing, and women-centered power. See also Artists SOURCES: Lewis, Louise. 1998. “Interview with Patssi Valdez.” Patssi Valdez: Private Landscapes, 1988–1998 (exhibition brochure). Northridge Art Gallery, California State University, Northridge; Pasqual Erkanat, Judy. 1995. “Burning Colors: Dynamic Interpretations Dominate LA Artist’s Exhibit.” El Observador, August 1, 16–22; Romo, Tere. 1999. “Patssi Valdez: A Precarious Comfort.” In Patssi Valdez: A Precarious Comfort (exhibition catalog), ed. Elizabeth Ptak, 9–31. San Francisco: Mexican Museum; Wiggins, Susan. 1992. “Patssi Valdez.” Artweek, March 26, 15. Karen Mary Dávalos
VALLEJO, EPIFANIA DE GUADALUPE (1835–1905) Pioneer photographer Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo, also known as Epifania Gertrudis “Fanny” Vallejo, was the daughter of early Californios Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and Francisca Benicia Carrillo of Sonoma, California. Born on August 4, 1835, Epifania was the third of sixteen children born to Mariano and Francisca in the period before the American occupation and conquest of Alta California that began in 1846 and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848. Though her life was full of grand achievements and interactions with some of the most notable people of her time, Epifania’s role as a pioneer photographer in 1840s Mexican-era California stands as a pivotal moment in the history of art and science in North America. As the daughter of the founders of Sonoma, Epifania Vallejo was heir to a rich Californio cultural tradition replete with the many social trappings and cultural graces of that day. She was tutored and mentored in the classical arts from a young age and was surrounded by the academic and scholarly atmosphere that her father and mother built into their rancho headquarters and home at Lachryma Montis (Mountain Tear), named for the artesian spring located at that site on the edge of the town of Sonoma. Situated as it was on one of the largest Mexican ranchos of early California, with holdings of some 175,000 acres, Lachryma Montis was groomed into the premier cultural center of the region. With more than 12,000 volumes in Mariano’s personal library, the Vallejos were well educated and highly cultured. Accordingly, young Epifania played the piano and spent a good deal of her time as an amateur artist and painter. In addition, she had access to a personal music teacher and to the very best in tutors and classical works. The benefits of her family’s access to early Californio traditions ultimately translated into what soon became the basis for some of Epifania’s many cultural and artistic pursuits, not the least of which was her early experimentation with the daguerreotype process and her assembly of the earliest known photographic images ever produced in early California and the West. The daguerreotype process, initially documented in California and the West through images produced by Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo, was first made commercially available through the introduction of the Giroux daguerreotype camera in 1839. The Giroux daguerreotype camera, invented by early French photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, required twenty- to thirty-minute exposure times for individual stills and the photochemical processing of copper plates, and was thus a relatively new, cumbersome,
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Vallejo de Leese, María Paula Rosalía complex, and experimental process that was only beginning to become popular in the period after the 1840s. At this time Vallejo obtained access to a daguerreotype camera and began producing images while still only between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Despite her youth, Vallejo family photographic collections and early documents provide clear indications that Vallejo had in fact mastered the art of photography and the daguerreotype process in the period before 1849, and years before the formal American occupation and settlement of Alta California. One of her images found its way into the mounting of a finger ring with photo locket worn by General Mariano Vallejo himself. That ring ultimately came into the possession of Vallejo family descendant Martha McGettigan, whose quest for Vallejo’s story inspired the research underlying this narrative. The image in question portrays Vallejo’s mother, Francisca Benicia Carrillo Vallejo. Thus the earliest known photographic image on record for the period before the American occupation is that of a Californio woman of the Mexican or ranchero era of early California history. On April 3, 1851, Epifania Vallejo married Captain John Blackman Frisbie, who was stationed at the town of Sonoma under Mariano Vallejo. At that time she was only fifteen years of age to his twenty-six years of age, but that was the beginning of a long and prosperous relationship with the American entrepreneur. Soon after their marriage the couple moved to San Francisco, where they boarded with California businessman and politician Thomas Larkin in 1854. Subsequently they relocated to the town of Vallejo. In March 1861 Vallejo attended President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural ball. According to Linda Lorda, a descendant of the Carrillo and Vallejo families who now lives in Sebastopol, California, Vallejo and her husband moved to Mexico in 1877–1878. Their residence was located at Calle Luis Moya or Hacienda Careaga, and it is likely that the move to Mexico was necessitated by John Frisbie’s mismanagement of Vallejo family holdings. In Mexico Vallejo and her husband prospered, and some measure of their prosperity is made evident by the fact that the president and first lady of Mexico ultimately became godparents to Vallejo’s family of twelve children. On February 14, 1905, Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo succumbed to pneumonia and died in Cuautla, Mexico. She is buried in the French Cemetery in Mexico City. Her husband, John Frisbie, died in the family home on Calle Ancha in Mexico City on May 15, 1909. Vallejo’s cherished piano was subsequently purchased and returned to the Vallejo home at Lachryma Montis, where it now stands in the museum along with other Vallejo family treasures. Epifania Vallejo’s work stands as a historical benchmark for the introduction of photography to California
and the American West and heralds the acknowledgment of Latina roles in the earliest contributions to that body of art, science, and technology made manifest north of the Rio Grande before the advent of the Americans. Clearly, Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo’s contributions to the art and science of early photography and phototechnical processes in California and the West will necessitate a fundamental reappraisal of the history of art, science, and technology in the Americas. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Empáran, Madie Brown. 1968. The Vallejos of California. San Francisco: Gleeson Library Associates, University of San Francisco; McGettigan, Martha A. 2000. “Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo: California’s 1st Woman Daguerreotypist.” The Seventeenth Conference of the California Mission Studies Association. Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, San Gabriel, CA, February 19; Mendoza, Rubén G. 2000. “Villains Honored and Heroes Unsung: California State University Historian on the Vallejos of California.” Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education 10, no. 23 (August 11): 35–37; Rosenus, Alan. 1995. General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rubén G. Mendoza
VALLEJO DE LEESE, MARÍA PAULA ROSALÍA (1811–1889) Born on January 25, 1811, in Monterey, California, Rosalía Vallejo was the tenth of thirteen children born to Ignacio Vicente Vallejo and his wife María Antoñia Lugo. Vicente Vallejo arrived in California in 1774 as a member of the Fernando Moncada expedition, and the Lugos were original settlers of San Luis Obispo, where María Antoñia was born in 1776. In time both families rose to prominence in northern and southern California. As a member of one of the richest, most politically influential, and largest landholding families in northern California, Rosalía Vallejo grew up in relative prosperity and comfort, exemplifying the life experiences of the female ranchero elite, or the gente de razón class, of early-nineteenth-century California. Both her father and her brothers, especially Mariano and Salvador, were influential politicians and community leaders who extended the family’s social honor and prestige throughout California. The Vallejos, both male and female, were known for their wealth and influence, personal intelligence, talents, and strong personalities. In the 1840s William Heath Davis described Rosalía Vallejo as “a tall, handsome, beautifully formed woman, full of vivacity and remarkably intelligent,” but prone to sarcasm and “quite expert” with firearms. Of the eight Vallejo sisters, none was more independent and high spirited than Rosalía, traits she demonstrated throughout her adult life, particularly in when and
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Vanguardia Puertorriqueña whom she chose to marry. Her brother, Mariano Guadalupe, as head of the household, favored the courtship of Timothy Murphy, an Irish trader involved in the Lima trade, whom he placed as administrator to the Mission San Rafael. Refusing to obey her brother’s wishes, the twenty-six-year-old Vallejo took advantage of Mariano’s absence and secretly married Jacob Primer Leese, an American trader born in Ohio, on April 13, 1837, in the Mission San Francisco. Mariano never fully forgave Rosalía for her actions, and it remained a sore point throughout their lives. Little is known of Murphy, but Leese’s business correspondence indicates that he was a literate, but hardly an educated, man. For any other woman this action would have been highly irregular; however, Vallejo was by all accounts a determined, strong-minded person. Luckily for her, she and her husband were not estranged from the Vallejo clan, and the couple eventually purchased land and raised a family. During the Mexican-American War Vallejo again showed her personal courage and stubbornness. When four Americans attempted to rob her family’s storehouse, she physically blocked the entrance, and only after the men threatened her at gunpoint did she reluctantly step aside. In another incident, after American forces had captured Sonoma and set up camp near the Vallejos’ rancho, Captain John C. Frémont requested that Rosalía Vallejo personally bring a seventeen-yearold Indian servant girl to the officers’ barracks, obviously to be used for sexual pleasure. Vallejo defiantly wrote back that she would not do so, regardless of the consequences, and since Frémont was unwilling to press the point, she won the round. To Vallejo, this incident provided evidence of the depraved and opportunistic motivations of the American conquerors. Later Frémont exacted revenge when he forced her to write a letter to Captain Padilla beseeching him to return to San Jose and not attack Sonoma. Vallejo regretted writing the letter, but, as she explained, she was pregnant at the time, and when Frémont threatened to burn down the buildings with the women inside, she was forced to comply in order to protect her unborn child and her fellow countrywomen. In 1876 Vallejo was interviewed and asked to comment on the Mexican-American War and to give her opinion of the American conquest. Her response was short and to the point: “Those hated men inspired me with such a large dose of hate against their race that though twenty-eight years have elapsed since that time, I have not forgotten the insults heaped upon me and not being desirous of coming in contact with them I have abstained from learning their language.” One of the reasons why she refused to have continued contact with Americans was Jacob Leese’s abandonment of his family in 1865. In 1864 Leese was given a massive land
grant in Baja California as part of a colonization enterprise. The enterprise was a tremendous failure and financially bankrupted Leese, who chose to leave California without his family. By 1876 Vallejo and her children were being supported by her brother Mariano on his Lachryma Montis estate. Rosalía Vallejo died on July 31, 1889, and was buried at Mission San Carlos de Monterey, the same place where she was baptized in 1811, but the transformations during her lifetime spoke volumes about tremendous changes for the gente de razón class, women included. Born a Californio elite, Rosalía Vallejo died a reluctant American, a true testament to her resisting Californio identity. See also Spanish Borderlands SOURCES: Davis, William Heath. 1929. Seventy-five Years in California, 1831–1906. San Francisco: John Howell; Rosenus, Alan. 1995. General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Vallejo de Leese, Rosalía. “History of the Bear Flag Party.” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. María Raquel Casas
VANGUARDIA PUERTORRIQUEÑA (1935–1950S) The Vanguardia Puertorriqueña (including its Women’s Auxiliary) established in 1935, functioned as Lodge No. 4797 of the International Workers’ Order (IWO). The Vanguardia was one of ten IWO lodges in the New York area and formed part of the Sociedad Fraternal Cervantes, the national umbrella organization for the Spanish-speaking lodges of the IWO. In 1938 there were nearly 1,400 Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking members in the IWO. Another Puerto Rican lodge in New York was the Mutualista Puertorriqueña, IWO Lodge No. 4792. Founded in 1930, and originally chartered in New York State, the International Workers’ Order was a progressive multinational fraternal benefits organization that provided its members life insurance and sickness, disability, and death benefits. Open to men and women regardless of nationality, race, color, creed, or political affiliation, the IWO also sponsored educational, recreational, cultural, and social programs and activities for its members and their families. These programs included choral groups, drama clubs, music bands, sports teams, and summer youth camps. In addition, the IWO encouraged its members to establish trade union organizations, promote adequate social and security legislation, discharge the duties of a citizen of the United States of America, and support progressive political causes. These included the fight against fascism, support for the Republicans during the Spanish
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Varela, Beatriz
Vanguardia Puertorriqueña, Mother’s Day celebration. Courtesy of the Jesús Colón Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
civil war, and the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. Among others, the IWO had Jewish, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Italian, and Polish lodges and in 1938 claimed more than 135,000 members. The Vanguardia Puertorriqueña, numbering some 200 members and centered in the Puerto Rican workingclass community in the Brooklyn Navy Yard district of that borough in New York City, participated in all IWO programs and activities. In addition, on a local level, it sponsored English-language classes, conferences, lecture series, dances, beauty pageants, recreational excursions, and special celebrations for Mother’s Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Its most outstanding leaders were Puerto Rican community activist and writer Jesús Colón, his wife, Concha, and brother, Joaquín Colón. See also Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York SOURCES: Acosta-Belén, Edna, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. 1993. Jesús Colón: The Way It Was and Other Writings. Houston: Arte Público Press; Colón, Jesús. Jesús Colón Archival Collection, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Library and Archives, Hunter College, CUNY; Iglesias, César Andréu, ed. 1984. Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York. New York: Monthly Review Press. Carlos Sanabria
VARELA, BEATRIZ (1927–
)
Retired Spanish professor Beatriz Varela is considered an authority on Spanish linguistics, especially the language as it is spoken in Cuba and other parts of the
Americas. She has published four books: Mejora tu español (coauthored with Marta de la Portilla, 1979), a textbook for students of the Spanish language; Lo chino en el habla cubana (1980), an examination of Chinese influences in Cuban Spanish; El español cubanoamericano (1992), a noted examination of Spanish as it is spoken not only in Cuba but also by Cubans in exile; and José Varela Zequeira (1854–1939): Su obra científicoliteraria (1997), a biography of her grandfather, famed Cuban poet and doctor José Varela Zequeira, a work that was based on her University of Havana thesis. Graduating from the University of Havana and the Universidad Católica de Santo Tomás de Villanueva in 1950, this daughter of María Antonia Dumás y Alcocer and Dr. Roberto Varela Zequeira taught grammar and linguistics at her alma mater, Ruston Academy in Havana. Her brief marriage to Dr. Jorge Cuéllar produced one son, Jorge. Suffering the pain of exile in 1960, Beatriz Varela settled in New Orleans, where she taught at Cabrini High School while completing graduate studies at Tulane University. She obtained a master’s degree in 1964 and her doctorate in 1965. From 1964 until her retirement Varela was a professor of Spanish at the University of New Orleans. She has published numerous articles on the folklore and linguistics of Cuba and has been actively involved in various organizations. She was elected to the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española in 1993. Upon her retirement from the University of New Orleans, Beatriz Varela moved to Miami. She has since presented at conferences in Costa Rica, New York, and the Czech Republic. Her current area of research is Spanish as it is spoken in Central America, with partic-
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Varela, Mariá ular emphasis on Costa Rica. With her keen inquisitiveness and scholarly distinction, Beatriz Varela continues to contribute to the understanding of the unique shades, as well as the common roots, of Spanish as it is spoken in the Americas and the influences of other languages and cultures on the language. See also Education SOURCES: Varela, Beatriz. 1980. Lo chino en el habla cubana. Miami: Ediciones Universal; ———. 1992. El español cubano-americano. New York: Senda Nueva de Ediciones; ———. 1997. José Varela Zequeira (1854–1939): Su obra científico-literaria. Miami: Ediciones Universal. María R. Estorino
VARELA, MARÍA (1940–
)
María Varela has been organizing in rural communities of color since 1962. Born of a Mexican immigrant father and an Irish American mother, she graduated from Alverno College in Milwaukee in 1961 with a degree in secondary education. Long active in the Young Christian Students (YCS), a progressive Catholic social justice organization, Varela joined the national staff after graduation. In 1962 she was recruited by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and moved to Selma, Alabama, to work for voting rights. She became the first Latina photographer to document the organization’s work in the Deep South. In addition, Varela was jailed twice and learned firsthand the risks associated with organizing. These experiences, however, only served to solidify her commitment to social change. “The movement raised a lot of questions about democracy and left them unanswered. I needed to find those answers.” In 1967 land-grant leader Reies López Tijerina invited Varela to work with la Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance) in Albuquerque. Although Varela had also been recruited to organize farmworkers in California, her experience in the South reaffirmed her belief in the importance of land. “I learned from Black farmers, who were aggressive in defending farm and community, that landlessness was worse than political disenfranchisement. Owning land is key to taking control of community, economy, and culture. For land-based cultures to lose their land was to ensure [their] extinction.” Varela left La Alianza in 1968 to work with heirs of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant and helped establish La Cooperativa Agricola. La Cooperativa was a community-based organization that promoted selfhelp projects in agriculture, legal affairs, and health. Varela served as the director of the primary health clinic, La Clinica, from 1975 to 1979, helping to develop northern New Mexico’s first rural birthing center.
She resigned in 1980 to have a daughter, Sabina, with Lorenzo Zúñiga, a local plumber she had married in 1977. During this time Varela won a National Rural Fellowship, which funded her M.A. from the University of Massachusetts in community and regional planning (1982). Her master’s work included researching ways of preserving agriculture in the traditional villages of northern New Mexico. Although many local Hispanos still owned ancestral land, much of the area had been appropriated by the federal government in 1905 for the creation of the Carson and Santa Fe national forests. The loss of land, low livestock prices, an inability to compete for grazing allotments, government neglect, and out-migration, particularly of young people, led to a century of poverty. Varela and her neighbors Gumercindo Salazar and Antonio Manzanares began to search for alternatives. They sought to show how rural communities could modernize their economies in ways that would not destroy the environment or pastoral lifestyle. Their first step was to gain higher prices for their lamb by participating in an existing lamb cooperative’s teleauction. The group then reinstated traditional pastoral practices, including cooperative grazing and breeding to revitalize the nearly extinct Churro breed. Incorporating as Ganados del Valle, a nonprofit corporation, in 1984, Varela and her neighbors then created several businesses, which marketed weavings, wool products, organic lamb, crafts, and products from recycled tires. Considered to be a national and international model of sustainable rural economic development, Ganados and related enterprises together constitute the largest private employment source in northern Rio Arriba County. Varela’s work with Ganados and other nonprofits was recognized in 1990 when she received a
Chicano movement leader and community visionary María Varela. Photograph by Lorenzo Zúñiga Jr. Courtesy of María Varela.
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Vásquez, Anna MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, also known as a “genius award.” One of the first Latinas to win a MacArthur, Varela was especially pleased that the award recognized community organizing. “I was stunned that they chose a community organizer, because community work is not often recognized.” Varela left Ganados in 1997 to teach, write, and expand her business, the Rural Resources Group, which assists traditional rural cultures. She, Manzanares, and Salazar serve as advisors for life on the Ganados board of directors. Varela taught at the University of New Mexico for nearly a decade and in 1997–1998 was appointed to an endowed chair at the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies at Colorado College, where she currently teaches. An acclaimed organizer and photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, she has coauthored Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities and has contributed to Across the Great Divide: Explorations in Collaborative Conservation in the American West. See also Ganados del Valle SOURCES: Chu, Dan, and Leslie Linthicum. 1991. “MacArthur Grant Winner Maria Varela Shepherds a Rural New Mexico Community towards Economic Rebirth.” People, January 14, 115–117; Hazelhurst, John. 2000. “Chronicling the Dream: Photos Depict Dignity in Civil Rights Struggle.” Colorado Springs Independent, February 27, 2–8; Jackson, Donald Dale. 1991. “Around Los Ojos, Sheep and Land Are Fighting Words.” Smithsonian 22:37–47; Pulido, Laura. 1996. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
ties he had not encountered in southern Texas and during the war. “We came out of the service, and they used to seat us in a separate colored section in the theaters,” he said. “Here we were out of the war with a bunch of medals, and we had to sit on the side. So we got involved in politics and changed a lot of things.” Roberto Vásquez met his wife, Anna Torres, in East Chicago, Indiana, where they live today. They had three sons, David, Arturo, and Richard. The Vásquezes began their activist involvement in 1948 when they joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the largest and oldest Hispanic organizations in the United States. For Roberto and Anna Vásquez, LULAC embodied a philosophy that they believed in, one in which the will of a people can overcome inequalities of discrimination and injustice and people can enjoy their rights as U.S. citizens. Roberto and Anna Vásquez organized a men’s and ladies’ council in East Chicago. Roberto Vásquez was a pioneer president of LULAC, first in East Chicago; later he became second national vice president. Anna Vásquez was first state president in the Midwest. Together they attended thirty-nine consecutive LULAC national conventions all over the United States. Awards and plaques cover the walls of their home as symbols of all their hard work. Through war, discrimination, and sickness, the Vásquezes have remained partners and set a legacy for themselves and others in East Chicago and beyond. Anna Vásquez is unable to speak and is mostly confined to her bed be-
Laura Pulido
VÁSQUEZ, ANNA (1918–
)
Anna Torres was born in Mexico but was raised in Indiana. She was the only Hispanic female from her neighborhood to join the World War II effort. She served as a Wac during the war, working as a trainer with the Third Air Force, which was based in Florida. She was sent to Florida to train Allied pilots in the 201st Squadron Mexicano to fight in the South Pacific. “They held her here (Florida) because they were training all those Allied pilots,” her husband, Roberto Vásquez recalled. “They didn’t want to let her go.” Roberto Vásquez was born in Laredo, Texas, on August 1, 1923. From the beginning Vásquez was made to feel at ease with his culture. Located on the TexasMexico border about 160 miles south of San Antonio, Laredo was unique. In the 1930s the sheriff and most of the local police department, as well as the mayor and a number of teachers, were all Hispanic. Vásquez said that after the war he experienced racial inequali-
Roberto and Anna Vásquez at a 1960 LULAC dance in East Chicago, Indiana. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
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Vásquez, Enriqueta Longeaux y cause of a series of strokes in recent years. “She can’t speak very well,” Roberto Vásquez remarks, “but she can think better than I can.” See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); Military Service SOURCES: Jenschke, Callie. 2003. “Post-war Racism Inspired Pair to Fight Discrimination.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin), 4, no. 1 (Spring): 69. Vásquez, Anna and Roberto Vásquez. Interviewed by Bill Luna, East Chicago, IN. Callie Jenschke
VÁSQUEZ, ENRIQUETA LONGEAUX Y (1930– ) Born in the agricultural town of Cheraw, Colorado, Enriqueta Vásquez became a well-known Chicano movement columnist whose writings captured her lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice in the face of racial, class, and gender inequality. Appearing from 1968 to 1972 in New Mexico’s El Grito del Norte, a leading Chicano movement publication, the column “Despierten Hermanos!” (Awaken, Brothers and Sisters!) aimed to inspire the Mexican American population to political action. A powerful critic of U.S. foreign policy, the institutional Catholic Church, and consumer society, Vásquez was also an unrelenting advocate of women’s equality, the dignity of the poor, and the richness of Mexican American culture. The column reflected her politicization and radicalization as a working-class single parent and mestiza living in the United States. Vásquez’s early years were spent working in the fields and local canning factories with her Mexican immigrant parents and her twelve siblings, five of whom died in childhood. After high-school graduation she moved to Denver with the hope of improving her standard of living but instead encountered blatant job discrimination and personal upheaval. Despite her excellent secretarial skills, Vásquez was initially denied front-desk jobs because she was dark skinned. In 1950 Vásquez married a man who proved to be physically abusive. Their divorce left her nearly destitute with two children to raise. In 1965 Vásquez joined the local chapter of the American GI Forum, a civil rights organization founded by Mexican American World War II veterans. Through the American GI Forum Vásquez became one of the local directors of a War on Poverty employment agency, Proyecto SER (Service, Employment, and Redevelopment Project; “ser” means “to be” in Spanish). She also met Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, a fellow
Forum member and emerging Chicano movement leader. In 1966 Gonzales founded the Crusade for Justice, a Chicano organization that vigorously criticized police brutality and educational inequality. Vásquez became a dedicated Crusade member. In 1967 she married Bill Longeaux, an artist, political activist, and friend of Gonzales. The following year the LongeauxVásquez family moved from Denver to northern New Mexico to become caretakers of a ranch that served as an educational and cultural center for Crusade youth. In New Mexico Vásquez also joined a circle of activists who were organized around the fiery activism of la Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance) whose members sought the return of lands granted to their ancestors by the Spanish and Mexican governments. Vásquez became part of a cooperative effort that launched El Grito del Norte, a publication that covered the local land-grant movement, as well as national and international events. Embracing a similarly broad sweep, Vásquez’s columns ranged from celebrating Mexican folk culture as a source of personal and community regeneration to praising socialist Cuba, which she visited in 1969, as a model of revolutionary liberation and freedom. She was also among the first Chicanas to attempt to reconcile feminism and cultural nationalism. Although some men—and women—within the Chicano movement labeled feminism divisive and culturally inauthentic, Vásquez argued in 1969 in one of her most celebrated pieces, “The Women of La Raza,” that “total liberation” for Mexican Americans meant liberation for both sexes and the entire family. Yet because “the family must come up together,” she asserted, “there is little room for a woman’s liberation movement alone.” In another well-known column, 1971’s “Soy Chicana primero,” Vásquez again stated that her first loyalty lay with the Chicano movement versus the “white women’s liberation movement.” Still, she had little patience with any implied subordination. A staunch critic of the conflict in Vietnam, Vásquez instead proposed that Chicanas emulate the women fighters in Vietnam who, she claimed with slight exaggeration, carried “a gun in one hand” and a suckling child in the other. Vásquez frequently suggested that the urban struggles of Mexican American women made them prime candidates for politicization and collective action. In her estimation women and women’s issues were central to the Chicano movement. During the 1970s Vásquez developed her interest in Native American culture and spirituality by participating in sweat lodges, sacred dances, and other ceremonies as an elder. She continues to live and write in northern New Mexico, where she has recently completed a sweeping history of Raza women.
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Velázquez, Loreta Janeta See also Chicano Movement; Feminism SOURCE: Espinoza, Dionne, Elaine. 1996. “Pedagogies of Nationalism and Gender: Cultural Resistance in Selected Representational Practices of Chicana/o Movement Activists, 1967–1972.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University.
Lorena Oropeza and Dionne Espinoza
VELÁZQUEZ, LORETA JANETA (1842–?) Madame Loreta Janeta Velázquez has been described as a patriot, a cross-dresser, a heroine, or a hoax, but her true story continues to elude historians. Nonetheless, it is known that in 1876 Loreta Janeta Velázquez published an astonishing and controversial Civil War memoir titled The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velázquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army. This was no ordinary war story, for Velázquez claimed to have so passionately supported the Confederate cause that she disguised herself as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford and fought at the battles of First Bull Run, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. Velázquez’s book depicts her dangerous work as a spy, a transporter of dispatches, a secretservice agent, and a blockade runner. Also described are her adventures in Washington, D.C., her career as a bounty hunter and substitute broker in New York, travels to Europe and South America, mining escapades in the American West, residence among the Mormons, love affairs, courtships, and four marriages. Velázquez was born on June 26, 1842, in Havana, Cuba, the daughter of a hacendado, formerly a native of Cartagena, Spain. An educated man, he had acquired great wealth in the sugar, tobacco, and coffee trades. Velázquez confessed that her girlhood was spent “haunted with the idea of being a man.” She maintained that she wished for the privileges and status granted to men and denied to women and often compared herself to Spanish conquistadores, Joan of Arc, and Deborah of the Hebrews. She further admitted to an “impulsive and imaginative disposition,” often prone to idealize every episode of her life. “I could not even write a social letter to my father to inform him of the state of my health, or my educational progress, without putting in it some romantic project which I had on hand. This propensity of mine evidently annoyed him greatly, for he frequently reprimanded me with much severity.” Velázquez was sent to New Orleans at a young age to live with her mother’s sister and complete her education. Cuban families of means often sent their sons and daughters abroad for education. While sons, like Velázquez’s brother Josea, studied in Spain or France, daughters often went to Catholic girls’ schools in the United States to learn English and domestic arts. How-
ever, Velázquez was far from the typical antebellum adolescent. In addition to dressing up as a man—“It was frequently my habit, after all in the house had retired to bed at night, to dress myself in my cousin’s clothes and to promenade before the mirror, practicing the gait of a man, and admiring the figure I made in masculine raiment”—she was unusually independent. At age fourteen she ran away from her school in New Orleans to marry a young American Army officer named William, breaking an engagement to a Spaniard that had been previously arranged by her family. By the time Velázquez was eighteen, she and William had had—and lost—three children, two of them to fever. It was also around that time that William’s state (Arkansas) seceded from the Union and he resigned his commission to join the Confederate army. Velázquez states that her grief over the loss of her children “probably had a great influence in reviving my old notions about military glory, and of exciting anew my desires to win fame on the battle-field.” In this regard Velázquez was not alone. Women attempted to sign up for battle in both the Union and Confederate armies. Some 200 women are said to have fought in the Civil War, and they could join the army because physical examinations were superficial. The general assumption was that anyone dressed in pants as a man must be a man. Unable to persuade William to let her fight for the Confederacy, Velázquez simply waited for him to leave, adopted the name Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, was measured for several uniforms, and proceeded to Arkansas to raise a battalion for the Southern cause. Thus began her military adventures, which are described in The Woman in Battle. The end of the story finds Velázquez traveling through the American West, where she stopped long enough to have a baby in Salt Lake City and to meet Brigham Young. In Nevada she claimed to have married for the fourth time; the gentleman is unnamed. Then she was off again “with my little baby boy in my arms, starting a long journey through Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, hoping perhaps but scarcely expecting to find the opportunities which I failed to find.” Velázquez’s story ends at that point. Her final plea was that the public would buy her book so that she could support her child. It should be noted that the historical validity of The Woman in Battle has never been determined. Historians, as well as Velázquez’s contemporaries, point out that The Woman in Battle is not entirely verifiable based on information that can be confirmed. Other than citing the right generals in the right battles, Velázquez wrote in vague generalities. Many of the people cited in her book have only a first or a last name, including three of her four husbands. Velázquez also stretches her credibility by claiming to have done too much. The
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Velázquez, Nydia M. panic Caribbean countries who were drawn to the American Civil War because of ideological interests, and the only Latina to have written a memoir about her experiences. See also Military Service SOURCES: Docker, Amy. 2005. “The Adventures of Loreta Janeta Velázquez: Civil War Spy and Story Teller.” In Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. New York: Oxford University Press; Velázquez, Loreta Janeta. 1876. The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velasquez, Otherwise Known as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army. Ed. C. J. Worthington. Richmond, VA: Dustin, Gilman and Co. Electronic edition of the Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. Pamela J. Marshall
VELÁZQUEZ, NYDIA M. (1953–
Civil War soldier and writer Loreta Janeta Velázquez. Courtesy of Documenting the American South Collection. Wilson Annex, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.
author herself mentions that “the loss of my notes has compelled me to rely entirely upon my memory, and my memory is apt to be very treacherous.” She goes on to say that she “has been compelled to write hurriedly, as the necessities I have been under of earning my daily bread being such as could not be disregarded, even for the purpose of winning the laurels of authorship.” Nonetheless, the arguments cited by Velázquez’s main critic, a former Confederate general, Jubal Early, are based on equally flimsy evidence. He claimed that Velázquez was not of Spanish origin because she did not have an accent, and that she was probably a Yankee. Above all, he criticized her lifestyle, unladylike deportment, and aggressive nature. Yet there are enough references to validate Velázquez’s claims. An 1863 record of the Confederate secretary of war has a request for an officer’s commission from an H. T. Buford; wartime pay stubs from the U.S. government list an Alice Williams, one of Velázquez’s aliases; and a newspaper article in New Orleans reports that Velázquez served as an agent for a company attempting to establish a colony of ex-Confederate patriots in Venezuela. While the definitive truth of Velázquez’s claims may never be known, she remains one of the hundreds of Latinos and Latinas residing in Southern states or His-
)
Nydia M. Velázquez is the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She won her seat to the 103rd Congress on November 3, 1992, representing the Twelfth Congressional District of New York. A heavily Democratic, largely Latino district consisting of poor, working-class neighborhoods, it spans three of New York City’s boroughs. These communities include Corona in the Bronx, East Chinatown in Manhattan, and Williamsburg, Bushwick, Sunset Park, and Cypress Hills/East New York in Brooklyn. Velázquez was born on March 28, 1953, in the sugarcane town of Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. According to her official congressional biography, “I grew up in a rural area surrounded by mountains. I was always asking myself what was on the other side of those mountains.” She started school early, skipped a few grades, and was the first member of her family to earn a college degree. In 1974 she graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras with a degree in political science. She then earned her master’s at New York University in 1976. In 1981 she joined the faculty at Hunter College as an adjunct professor of Puerto Rican studies. She and her twin sister were among nine children raised by Doña Carmen Luisa Velázquez and Don Benito Velázquez. Benito Velázquez was a butcher, a sugarcane cutter, and a local politician in their hometown. In 1983 Nydia Velázquez entered New York City politics as the special assistant to U.S. representative Edolphus Towns, a Brooklyn Democrat. One year later she became the first Latina appointed to serve on the New York City Council. In 1986 she served as the director of the Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs in the United States, where she initiated a very successful empowerment program titled Atrevete
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Velázquez, Nydia M. (Dare to Go for It!). It consisted of a massive voter registration drive that ultimately registered more than 200,000 new voters. Her bid for Congress coincided with a surge in the national efforts to increase the voice and participation of minorities in America’s political agenda. The Twelfth Congressional District was formed by redistricting after the 1990 census. Although Velázquez garnered a fraction of the $3.2-million war chest raised by her opponent, Stephen Solarz, she gained a key endorsement from former New York City mayor David Dinkins. In 1992, after running a hard, grassroots campaign and shored up by her family, friends, and community network, Nydia Velázquez became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She describes herself as “progressive, concentrating on the problems that would affect the lives of the working class and the poor.” Congresswoman Velázquez sits on the House Banking and Financial Services Committee and on the Small Business Committee. Her assignments include the Housing and Community Opportunities and General Oversight and Investigations subcommittees. She is the ranking member on the Small Business Committee, which includes the Regulation and Paperwork Reduction Subcommittee. At the vanguard of hate crimes legislation, she also sponsored the Family Violence Prevention Act, which provides violence prevention services to underserved populations regardless of race, culture, or language. Velázquez cosponsored the English Plus Act with Congressman José Serrano (D-NY) and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), which encourages the teaching of foreign languages in addition to English. She assisted in the coordination of a historic summit between national Latina health care professionals and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to discuss health care issues in the Latino community. Outspoken against NAFTA, the elimination of bilingual education, the denial of federal benefits for legal immigrants, amending laws against lending discrimination, reduction of funds for fair housing, and welfare reform that fails to provide jobs and job training with adequate health care benefits and child-care options, she always focuses her concerns on the disenfranchised. In the 109th Congress, 1st Session, Velázquez continues to serve on the Small Business Committee where she is the ranking member. She serves on the House Financial Services Committee, and she is a member of the Capital Markets, Financial Institutions, and Consumer Credit Subcommittee. She also serves on the Subcommittee for Consumer Credit, Housing, and Community Opportunity. At the district level Velázquez sponsored a service of free tax-filing assistance for her local residents. She
Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez. Courtesy of Kate Davis and the Office of Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez.
brought together Housing and Urban Development personnel, real-estate consultants, and local lenders for forums to discuss increased home ownership in her district. She has worked for increased policing in the areas of her district where there were high crime statistics. Working with HUD, Velázquez pointed out the need for federal dollars for fair housing and economic development in her district. She is an uncompromising fighter for equal rights for the underrepresented and a staunch proponent of economic opportunity for the working-class poor. In 2001 the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce honored Congresswoman Velázquez and California lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante for their tireless efforts on behalf of Latino small business. Bustamante received the Chairman’s Award, and Velázquez was honored with the President’s Award. Velázquez has held federal departments accountable for their record of accomplishment regarding minority federal procurements and has been quoted as saying, “We need to take responsibility in life and try to be somebody that everybody can be proud of.” See also Latinas in the U.S. Congress; Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Newman, María. 1992. “From Puerto Rico to Congress, a Determined Path; A Cane Cutter’s Daughter, Nydia M. Velázquez Is Now a Force in New York Politics.” New York Times, September 37, 33; Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds. 1996. Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. New York: Gale Research; U.S. House of Representatives. “Con-
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Vélez de Vando, Emelí gresswoman Nydia Velázquez.” www.house.gov/velazquez/ (accessed July 12, 2005).
Linda C. Delgado
VÉLEZ, LUPE (1908–1944) Born María Guadalupe de Villalobos in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1908, film star Lupe Vélez was one of four children. Her father, Jacob Villalobos, served as a military officer. Her mother, Josefina Vélez, was a former opera singer. Vélez studied for a time at a girls’ Catholic school in San Antonio, Texas, but the Mexican Revolution forced her to return and help support her family. She first worked in a department store before finding the opportunity to dance and sing on the Mexican stage. An American talent agent persuaded her to travel to Hollywood, where there was a part waiting for her. But when she arrived, the director thought that she was too young for the part, and instead Vélez found work as an extra. In 1928 Vélez got a break when Douglas Fairbanks Sr. chose her to co-star with him in The Gaucho. RKO then offered her a five-year contract. Her aggressive personality and sexuality meshed with her ethnicity, and producers gave her exotic and half-caste parts in such films as Wolf Song (1929), East Is West (1930), Cuban Love Song (1931), and Broken Wing (1932). From the beginning Hollywood studios and film magazines portrayed Vélez as a “sex kitten,” “hot tamale,” and “Mexican spitfire.” Proclaiming, “I am not wild. I am just Lupe,” Vélez developed a public reputation as the “Hot Baby” of Hollywood, an image that was promoted both on and off the screen. While filming Wolf Song, Vélez met Gary Cooper, and they began a two-year relationship. With the debut of Cuban Love Song (1931), Vélez’s relationship with Cooper ended, but while promoting the film in New York, she met Johnny Weissmuller, who had just finished his own film Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). MGM viewed Weissmuller as its newest star and encouraged the romance between him and Vélez. The couple began their tumultuous marriage on October 8, 1933, separated several times, and then finally divorced in 1939. In 1939, under contract to RKO Studios, Vélez introduced the Mexican Spitfire series with Girl from Mexico (1939). Vélez played Carmelita, a singer hired by an American ad executive, Dennis Woods, played by actor Donald Woods. Dennis falls for her, much to the dismay of his aunt. In the second film of the series, Mexican Spitfire (1939), Carmelita marries Dennis, reversing the Hollywood stereotype of the Latin woman who loses the Anglo man to an Anglo woman. Yet through
all eight films other stereotypes abound, including Carmelita’s lack of breeding and social unacceptability, her refusal to put her show-business career aside, her lack of desire to have children, and her failure to promote Dennis’s career. Throughout the series, including Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940), Mexican Spitfire’s Baby (1941), Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942), Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942), Mexican Spitfire’s Elephant (1942), and Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943), misunderstandings abounded. With the end of the Spitfire series, Vélez returned to Mexico in 1944 and made the film Nana. While she waited for a Hollywood release of the film, Vélez made plans to star in a new play in New York. Instead, Vélez, single and pregnant, committed suicide in December 1944 at her Beverly Hills home. Vélez’s stardom manifested images that focused upon her sexuality and aggressive personality, an image that appeared consciously negotiated. From the moment Vélez was introduced to Hollywood audiences, her sexuality was attributed to her ethnicity. Her image and behavior transgressed accepted Anglo boundaries. Yet Hollywood, the studios, and movie magazines, such as Photoplay, promoted this image. Some critics have argued that Vélez internalized her image as a “Mexican spitfire,” but others believe that there is ample evidence to support the theory that Vélez knew and understood the difference between real life and acting. See also Media Stereotypes; Movie Stars SOURCES: López, Ana M. 1991. “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism.” In Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press; Pinto, Alfonso. 1977. “Lupe Velez, 1909–1944.” In Films in Review 28 (November): 513–524; Ramírez, Gabriel. 1986. Lupe Vélez: La mexicana que escupía fuego. Mexico: Cinéteca Nacional; Rodríquez-Estrada, Alicia I. 1997. “Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez: Images on and off the Screen, 1925–1944.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada
VÉLEZ DE VANDO, EMELÍ (1917–1999) Emelí Vélez de Vando was one of the pioneers of the colonia puertorriqueña in New York. Not long after her arrival in the early 1930s from Puerto Rico, she immersed herself in the cultural and political activities of the Puerto Rican community and supported early efforts to build organizations. Vélez took part in theatrical productions and acted in some of the first Puerto Rican plays to be presented in New York. However, she is mostly recognized for her extraordinary dedication
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Vélez de Vando, Emelí to the cause of Puerto Rican independence, her organizational skills, and her talent for public speaking. Upon her return to Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, she joined the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño and in 1960 was the party’s candidate for mayor of San Juan. Vélez remained active in the independence movement until the end of her life, tireless in her efforts to transform Puerto Rico into a republic. Emelí Vélez Soto was born in the Canas barrio of Ponce on January 2, 1917, and was one of the nine children of José Dolores Vélez and Beatriz Soto Medina. She moved frequently, which made it hard for her to get a formal education. Her early schooling took place in her hometown school. She then lived with her sister Genoveva in Santurce, where she completed the eighth grade. Later Vélez moved to the home of her older sister Otilia in Arecibo and was briefly employed by the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration. At the age of seventeen, faced with economic hardships, Emelí Vélez decided to leave Puerto Rico in search of better opportunities. In 1934 she traveled on the SS San Jacinto to New York, where she intended to live with her brother José. In New York she moved in with her sister Adela in Brooklyn instead. Vélez’s first job in the city was at the Pilsen Brothers Curtain Factory, located on Twenty-third Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, where she earned ten dollars per week. On March 21, 1937, unarmed members of the Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico were fired upon by the insular police as they attempted to carry out a peaceful march. Twenty people were killed and more than 100 were wounded in what came to be known as the Ponce massacre. When the news reached New York, Emelí Vélez was deeply saddened and worried about her younger brother Fernando, who was a member of the Nationalist Party and believed to be among the marchers. As it turned out, he was unharmed, but she was suddenly made conscious of Puerto Rico’s political reality and shortly thereafter joined la Junta Nacionalista de Nueva York, an organization linked to the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. From then on she became committed to the struggle for Puerto Rican independence and devoted a good deal of her time to the activities organized by the Nationalists. As she ventured out, she gained a reputation as a good public speaker and declamadora and was called upon to be the master of ceremony for events, often opening for the main speakers. The young Vélez honed her skills amid a group of freedom fighters and leaders from Puerto Rico and Latin America who worked together in New York. Emelí Vélez’s enthusiasm for her newfound cause created tensions within her family in Manhattan, and they presented her with an ultimatum. In order to stay
with them, she would have to give up her political work. She chose her political activities and the adventure of being on her own. With just small change in her pocket, Vélez decided to go out on her own. Although she was still quite young, she became part of a circle of women experienced in political organizing who formed a women’s group called el Comité Femenino del Partido Nacionalista (Women’s Committee of the Nationalist Party). Some of the women who became Vélez’s friends and mentors were closely connected to the Nationalist Party leadership. Among them was Lolín Quintana, a goddaughter of Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos, who took Vélez in; Rosa Collazo, the wife of nationalist militant Oscar Collazo; Consuelo Lee, the wife of renowned poet and revolutionary leader Juan Antonio Corretjer; Juanita Arocho, a community activist and organizer; Laura Meneses, the wife of Pedro Albizu Campos; and Julia de Burgos, considered one of the greatest poets of Puerto Rico and Latin America. Apart from these extraordinary women, some of the men she met who influenced her political thinking were the Cuban journalist and scholar Juan Marinello, the fiery Puerto Rican Nationalist leaders Pedro Albizu Campos and Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, who was to become a founder and president of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño. It was through the activities of the Junta Nacionalista that she met her husband, Erasmo Vando. He was an activist, an actor, and a playwright who became captivated with her beauty and invited her to join his acting troupe. Vando was in fact the first to present Puerto Rican theater in New York. The productions, which included some of his own plays and those of writers like Gonzalo O’Neill, were usually fund-raisers for political events. Emelí Vélez became one of Vando’s favorite actresses and soon his wife. They were married on June 11, 1942, and from then on pursued their numerous political and artistic interests together. For example, they helped create la Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas (Association of Writers and Journalists) and the Asociación pro Independencia de Puerto Rico en la Ciudad de Nueva York (the Proindependence Association for Puerto Rico in New York City). Together they also participated in the political campaigns of Vito Marcantonio in East Harlem. In 1944 Vélez de Vando left New York with her two young children, Bertha Borinquen and Gabriel, to visit her ailing parents in Puerto Rico. In 1945 Erasmo Vando joined her there. She returned briefly to New York for medical reasons, but was back in Puerto Rico by 1948. In 1949 she had her third child, Emelí Luz. Vélez was briefly employed as a host for a radio program on station WPRP in Ponce, but she resumed her
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Emelí Vélez de Vando during a political campaign. Courtesy of the Emelí Vélez de Vando Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
political work and, with her husband, participated in the founding of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP). Distinguishing herself as a leader of the PIP for more than twelve years, she became the party’s candidate for mayor of San Juan in 1960. Years later, disenchanted with the PIP, Vélez helped found the Movimiento pro Independencia (MPI), where she served as the secretary of Acción Femenina, the organization’s women’s division. She also coordinated public events for the MPI and organized major activities such as the celebration of Pedro Albizu Campos’s seventy-fifth birthday and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The MPI became the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño in 1971, and Emelí and Erasmo Vando remained active members. Their home in Santurce, Puerto Rico, served as a central meeting place for many of the party’s members, including its leader, Juan Mari Brás. Additionally, Emelí Vélez de Vando represented her political organizations and the case for Puerto Rico’s independence in international forums such as the United Nations Decolonization Committee. In the 1970s she organized tours to the Soviet Union and Cuba. She died in Puerto Rico on November 10, 1999. SOURCE: Vélez de Vando, Emelí. 1919–1999. Papers. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Library and Archives, Hunter College, CUNY. Ismael García, Nélida Pérez, and Pedro Juan Hernández
VÉLEZ-MITCHELL, ANITA (1916–
)
Poet, writer, and performer Ana (Anita) Vilia Vélez was born in Vieques, Puerto Rico, on February 21, 1916, and named after her maternal aunt, Ana Rieckehoff de
Benitez. Her mother, Lucila Rieckehoff Medina de Vélez (1880–1967), became a widow shortly before Anita was born. Her husband, Francisco “Paco” Vélez, took his life after the hurricane of 1915 wiped out his coffee crop in Añasco. When Anita was four years old, her mother married Rafael Malpica Hoard. They sent Anita to live with Lucila’s sister and brother-in-law, Isaura and August Bonnet, in Vieques. Anita remained in Vieques until her mother and stepfather, who had migrated to New York City, sent for her in 1929, at the height of the depression. Vélez went from a privileged, idyllic existence in Vieques to tenement living in New York’s El Barrio— though her mother insisted: “We are not poor; we just don’t have any money.” But poverty had its charms: Vélez felt free for the first time in her life, because she was allowed to play in Central Park, sleep on the fire escape, and attend school with other children. In Vieques she had been tutored at home, where she became an avid reader of the classics in her family’s library, memorizing and performing the poems of famous Latin American writers by the time she was ten. She was also fluent in Spanish, French, and English, skills that kept her from being held back two years, as was the custom for Spanish-speaking children entering the city’s public schools. As the oldest child living at home, however, Vélez was called on to contribute to the family income. At fifteen she got a job after school as an usherette in a movie theater, where she learned dance routines, acting, and songs by watching Hollywood musicals. At seventeen Vélez married the thirty-five-year-old Puerto Rican writer and political activist Erasmo Vando (1898–1988). They had a daughter, Gloria, but the mar-
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Vélez-Mitchell, Anita riage did not last. A few years later Vélez was chosen by a talent scout to appear in Mexican Hayride. From there she toured for a season as an aerialist with Ringling Brothers Circus, where she could draw a salary large enough to support the family. Her beauty and talent enabled her to land roles in Broadway shows and television commercials: she portrayed the “Dole Pineapple Girl,” danced the mambo for Coca-Cola, squeezed Charmin with Mr. Whipple, sashayed with Cantinflas for the Hilton hotels, and sang with the Xavier Cugat orchestra. In 1950, with the help of legendary producer George Abbott, Vélez formed the Anita Vélez Dancers. Herbert Ross choreographed the dances, and Tito Puente wrote “Mambo Macoco” for her. They opened the famed Caribe Hilton in San Juan, played the Hilton hotels throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada, and in 1951 reopened the Palace Theatre in New York City. The company received raves everywhere. One reviewer in Montreal wrote, “Ms. Velez has more curves than the Laurentian Mountains.” Vélez performed on The Ed Sullivan Show and in Carnegie Hall and appeared in nightclubs as a solo act and with various dance partners. In the mid-1950s she was signed by Columbia Concerts to tour as a classical Spanish dancer with Marina Svetlova, prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera, and to perform “A Night of García Lorca” with Antonio Valero. In 1955 Vélez married Pearse Mitchell (1916–1983), an advertising executive. They had a child, Jane, and remained married until his death. Her dance career culminated in 1963 when she starred as Anita in West Side Story, returning
in 1972 to coach the dancers in its Lincoln Center revival. Throughout her life Vélez wrote stories, poems, essays, and plays. In 1981 the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture named her Poet of the Year. In 1986 she won Puerto Rico’s coveted Julia de Burgos Poetry Prize for her bilingual, autobiographical book-length poem Primavida: Calendario de amor (1986). The book’s title, Primavida, a word she coined, describes the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Primavida also won the Association of Puerto Rican Writers and Poets Award and the University Press Award. Other awards followed: the Prince of Asturias Award for Belles Lettres, the Partners in Education Award, Center of Ibero-American Poets and Writers awards in four separate genres (short story, poetry, essay, and drama), the Isaac Perez Award (1994), and others. In 1999 she received a grant from the Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation to complete a PBS documentary on the poetry of Julia de Burgos, “Child of the Waters,” which was broadcast the following year. She was named Poet of the Year by the Institute of Puerto Rico in New York and Woman of the Year, 2000 by the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women in the USA. Her bilingual poetry, short stories, essays, and translations (from and to Spanish, French, and English) have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Vélez’s plays have been presented throughout New York City, including La Casa de la Herencia, the Spanish Repertory Theatre, and La MaMa Theatre, from which she received an INKY Award for playwriting. She
The Anita Vélez Dancers, circa 1954. Anita Vélez stands in the center. Photograph by James Kreigsmann, New York. Courtesy of Anita Vélez-Mitchell.
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Vicioso Sánchez, Sherezada “Chiqui” directed Salsa of the Hispanic Woman for Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival and received the 1996 Director’s Award from the Latino Newspapers Association for Butterflies Are Free. She remains active in the theater as a playwright, director, and actor. Anita Vélez: Dancing through Life, a documentary that follows her early career in theater, won four awards at the New York and Los Angeles Film Festivals in 2000. The film was produced and directed by her daughter, Jane Vélez-Mitchell. In 2002 Vélez costarred in the film Voice of an Angel, which won Best U.S.A. Short Film Award from the Silver Image and Los Angeles film festivals. Vélez has also composed and translated many songs for theater and films. In 1999 she performed her songs at Lincoln Center in a tribute given to her by the Panamerican Symphony Orchestra. For many years Vélez has worked as a journalist with various Spanish newspapers. Among the luminaries she has interviewed are Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pablo Neruda, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1970 and 1971, respectively), and two of her acting teachers, Marcel Marceau and José Ferrer. She also worked with inner-city schoolchildren, conducting poetry residencies for the Board of Education and Poets in the Schools Program and teaching drama to children at the Museum of Natural History. In 1989, representing the Hispanic community, she accompanied Mayor Ed Koch in the mayoral exchange between New York City and its sister city, Madrid, Spain. In 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 she addressed the United Nations General Assembly as part of the Special Committee on Decolonization, urging the United States to halt military maneuvers on Vieques and, subsequently, to decontaminate the island. “Wherever one goes one represents one’s culture and one’s humanity, no matter what one’s race or age.” See also Literature; Theater SOURCES: Fernández, Roberta, ed. 1994. In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States. Houston: Arte Público Press; Helicon Nine Reader. 1990. Kansas City, MO: Helicon Nine Editions; Stanton, Daniel E., and Edward F. Stanton, eds. 2003. Contemporary Hispanic Quotations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Vélez-Mitchell, Anita. 1986. Primavida: Calendario de amor. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Mairena Press; Vélez-Mitchell, Jane, director and producer. 2000. Anita Vélez: Dancing through Life. Documentary. San Francisco, CA: Eastwind Enterprises. Gloria Vando
VICIOSO SÁNCHEZ, SHEREZADA “CHIQUI” (1948– ) Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso Sánchez is a poet, playwright, essayist, and cultural activist. She was born in Santo Domingo, the daughter of Juan Antonio Vicioso
Contín and María Luisa Sánchez. After the death of her father, Chiqui Vicioso moved with her mother and three siblings to New York City, where she completed her studies. She holds a B.A. in sociology and history from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and an M.Ed. from Teachers College, Columbia University. She also studied administration of cultural projects at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1980 Chiqui Vicioso returned home to the Dominican Republic after having lived in New York City for eighteen years. In her homeland Vicioso found the encouragement and support needed to publish her first collection of poetry, Viaje desde el agua (1981). This first book is a collection of poems written mostly while living in the United States and during her many travels abroad. To Vicioso in her early collection and in much of what she has written since, the world is indeed small—so small, in fact, that everyday survival in New York City goes hand in hand with the struggles of the African people or of a Dominican youth drifting, seeking to find direction. In the Dominican Republic Vicioso assumed a number of important positions, including director of education for Pro-Familia (1981–1985) and consultant on women and children’s programs for the United Nations, in particular UNICEF. She writes a weekly column in the Listín Diario, a daily newspaper comparable to the New York Times, and has been a contributor to La Noticia (another daily) and the editor of the literary page “Cantidad Hechizada” for El Nuevo Diario (another daily). At the beginning of the 1980s Vicioso founded the Circle of Dominican Women Poets. In 1988 the Dominican Writers Association awarded Vicioso the Golden Caonabo prize, and in 1992 the National Women’s Bureau awarded her a gold medal as the most accomplished woman of the year. She has published four collections of poetry, Viaje desde el agua (1981), Un extraño ulular traía el viento (1983), Internamiento (1991), and Wish-ky Sour (1996), a poetic biography of Julia de Burgos, and a collection of feminist essays. She has edited a collection of Salomé Ureña’s poems and has become one of the leading scholars on the subject. She travels often to the United States to share her experiences as a transnational Dominican, educated in the United States. Vicioso is also the author of a script for Desvelo, for ballet and theater. Since 1996 she has published and staged several plays, including the award-winning Wish-ky Sour (National Theater Award, 1996) and Salomé U: Cartas a una ausencia (Cassandra Award, 2000). In 2000 Perrerías was staged in Spain and Cuba. Her poems and essays have been translated into several languages and have been included in numerous anthologies published at the national and in-
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Vidal, Irma ternational levels in the Dominican Republic and abroad. See also Literature SOURCES: Cocco De Filippis, Daisy. 2000. Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History. New York: Alcance; Gutiérrez, Franklyn. 2004. Diccionario de la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editorial Búho. Daisy Cocco De Filippis
VIDAL, IRMA (1921–1997) Dr. Irma Vidal was a Latina pioneer in medicine who specialized in hematology and oncology. She was born in Cuba in 1921, the youngest of eight children in a comfortable, middle-class family involved in the tobacco industry. Her family had ties to the latenineteenth-century independence movement among cigar workers in Tampa, Florida, and other cities in the United States. At the beginning of the Cuban-SpanishAmerican war (1895–1898) her father, Ramón Vidal, joined the army on the side of the insurgency and earned the rank of colonel. After the establishment of the independent republic in 1902, Colonel Vidal was appointed a senator of the new Cuban government. Dedicated to both the family business in Pinar del Río and political activities, Senator Ramón Vidal spent most of his time away from home in Havana, leaving his wife, María Julia Vidal, to raise the family on her own. A strong woman devoted to her children, María Julia encouraged all of them to further their education. As a result, her son and seven daughters all became professionals. Inspired by her mother’s convictions, young Irma Vidal defied traditional standards for the women of her times and enrolled in the School of Medicine at the University of Havana in 1938. During that period there were very few women attending medical school in Cuba. Vidal had to be strong enough to survive gender discrimination from her male colleagues and professors who believed that medicine was a field for men. While attending school, Vidal worked as a volunteer in the Hematology Department of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes Hospital. In 1944 she proved herself by graduating from the School of Medicine with honors. That same year Vidal applied for a position in the Hematology Department at the Municipal de la Infancia Hospital. Despite her education and experience, she was not considered a possible candidate because she was a woman. The discrimination Vidal faced in her country did not discourage her. Her desire for improvements overcame rejections and served to motivate her to apply for an internship and residency training program in the
United States. A year later she was accepted by a hospital in Boston and moved to Massachusetts. Far from her family, Vidal not only had to adapt to the drastic changes in weather and a new language, but faced yet another type of discrimination, that of being a single white woman. The Boston hospital served a predominantly black community of a Boston suburb. Vidal was told by hospital officials that the color of her skin was creating tension among black patients and with her colleagues. After completing the internship, Vidal was forced to look for another place to continue her training. Determined in her pursuit of a medical career, Vidal applied for training positions at several hospitals in New York City. In 1946, at the age of twenty-five, she was accepted at Lenox Hill Hospital and was finally given the opportunity to complete her training. But accomplishing academic and career goals had an unanticipated consequence: Vidal fell in love with New York City and decided to stay. For the next ten years she dedicated herself to providing health care in her newfound home. Unfortunately, her mother’s fragile health forced her to return to Cuba. In Cuba Vidal was offered the opportunity to head the Department of Hematology
Dr. Irma Vidal, standing in front, during the visit of her sisters from Cuba, Caridad Vidal (sitting) and Yolanda Vidal (third from left), New York, circa 1948. Courtesy of Jorge Sastre Vidal.
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Vidaurri, Rita at the Municipal de la Infancia Hospital, ironically, the same hospital that had denied her a position in the past. In addition to her responsibilities at the hospital, Vidal established a private practice specializing in hematology. In the late 1950s she met a New York–born former colleague from the School of Medicine in Havana and shortly thereafter married him. The couple had three sons. They established their home close to the Vidal family estates, where Vidal performed professional and familial duties. In 1959, when Fidel Castro took power, the couple supported his ideas of social equality. However, the majority of her family and most middle-class families turned against the government and fled the country. Vidal and her husband continued to support the revolution. They were among the few physicians who decided to stay in Cuba. Despite her American education, Vidal renounced her private practice and devoted herself to improving health care for the Cuban people while also caring for her mother and raising her family. From 1960 until her retirement in 1991, la doctora Vidal, as people called her, headed hematology departments at many hospitals in Havana, including the Calixto García Hospital, where she was on the staff during the last fifteen years of her life. Throughout this period she also served as chairperson and professor of the Hematology Department of the School of Medicine in Havana. Vidal became a well-respected figure in her field, recognized as a scientist and educator who taught a whole new generation of Cuba’s doctors. In the early 1990s she lost one son, and the other two moved to the United States. Vidal remained in Cuba with her husband, granddaughter, and two older sisters. When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1996, her last dream was to be reunited with her sons at their family home in Havana. However, because of Cuban government restrictions, the family was not granted a humanitarian visa. In 1997 Vidal died in Havana, Cuba. See also Medicine; Scientists SOURCES: Sastre Sisto, Luis, husband of Dr. Irma Vidal. 2004. Oral interview by Jorge Sastre. New York, August 3; Sastre Vidal, Jorge, son of Dr. Irma Vidal. 2004. Oral interview by Carlos A. Cruz. New York, June 20; Vidal, Irma. 2004. Papers. Family collection. New York. Jorge Sastre Vidal and Carlos A. Cruz
VIDAURRI, RITA (1924–
)
Rita Vidaurri was born to María de Jesus Castillo and Juan Vidaurri in San Antonio, Texas, where she was raised. Rita began singing at the age of eleven, even
though she was strongly discouraged by her father from becoming a singer. However, her mother, whom she lost at the age of seventeen, did support her interest in singing, which was very significant for Rita since it was very rare at that time for Mexicanas or Mexican American women to be public performers. In 1938, at the age of fourteen, she recorded her first 78 rpm single, “Alma Angelina,” for Bluebird Records at Tomás Acuña Studios with her sister Queta. Since Rita’s father owned and operated various cantinas in San Antonio, he was somewhat familiar with the business of hiring persons to sing and in fact often hosted singers from Mexico to perform in his establishment. Some of these same singers from Mexico, as well as local radio personalities, persuaded Rita’s father to take her to Monterrey, Mexico, in 1944 to try and establish her talents in music. Although she was only nineteen years old, she found assistance from the legendary comedian Mario Moreno, “Cantinflas,” who taught her how to obtain permits for jobs. Among the first places Vidaurri performed was one of the finest nightclubs in Monterrey, El Parthenon, where Lalo “Piporro” González was then master of ceremonies. There she decided to sing “El heredero,” “Por un amor,” and “Guadalajara.” Vidaurri left quite an impression on her audience, and her career was effectively launched, taking her to perform around Mexico and throughout Latin America. Although most of her fame was in cities throughout Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and Cuba, she did record and perform frequently throughout Texas. She was a regular on José Davila’s radio program La Hora Anahuac, the most popular radio show of the time, and she performed regularly at the Teatro Nacional in downtown San Antonio. Vidaurri referred to herself as “an international Tejana” because she was one of the few Tejanas to sing for the famous Mexico City radio station XEW, the station she listened to as a child in order to memorize the popular Mexican rancheras and boleros of the time. In Mexico City it was common for her to share the stage with notables such as Tito and Pepe Guízar y sus Corporales, Lucho Gatica, Gloria Martínez, and comedian Tin Tan. Famous venues where Vidaurri performed included the Follies, Club Ritz, El Maxim, El Waikiki, and Rio Rosa. She eventually toured with Pedro Vargas and even had the opportunity to be flown to Havana, Cuba, where she performed in the same lineup with Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot for three shows during one year. During her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s Vidaurri also recorded more than forty singles for José Morante’s Norteño International Records, along with several other recordings for local Tejano record labels. She has earned several nicknames along the way, in-
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Villarreal, Andrea and Teresa cluding la Belleza Morena de Tejas and Rita la Ranchera. She even became an entrepreneur in the early 1960s, opening several music nightspots, including Lo Dudo Nightclub and Rita’s Club: El Rincón de los Artistas, where artists such as Freddy Fender (Baldemar Huerta) occasionally stopped in to perform. By the mid-1960s Vidaurri decided to spend more time raising her two sons and her daughter. Yet she has remained active over the decades singing and performing throughout San Antonio at private gatherings and community events. In 1995 she was honored along with Lydia Mendoza, Chelo Silva, and other early Tejana pioneers with a photo exhibit in the Texas Capitol rotunda in Austin, Texas. Her oral history is included in the Texas Music Museum. In 1999 Vidaurri produced and recorded a self-initiated compact disc, Canciones del recuerdo, which was sold through independent record stores and local cafés in San Antonio. Along with Eva Garza, Chelo Silva, and other early Tejana singing pioneers, Rita Vidaurri’s greatest contribution to Texas-Mexican music remains her musical ambassadorship to Mexico and Latin America. SOURCES: Esperanza Peace and Justice Center (San Antonio, TX). 2004. La Calandria. www.esperanzacenter.org/ yearly2004/Folder/rita.htm (accessed July 19, 2005); “Rita Vidaurri.” 2004. Texas Public Radio KSTX 89.1 San Antonio. Texas Matters. Program archive: SHOW #233, December 3; Vargas, Deborah Rose Ramos. 2003. “Las tracaleras: TexasMexican Women, Music, and Place.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. Deborah Vargas
VILLARREAL, ANDREA AND TERESA (18??–19??) In the early twentieth century, sisters Andrea and Teresa Villareal were known as social activists who advocated women’s and workers’ rights. Andrea Villareal joined efforts with Mother Jones. The two made public speeches demanding the release of Mexican revolutionaries imprisoned in San Antonio. Teresa Villareal was also involved in social justice causes. She established a socialist newspaper titled El Obrero (The Worker). In 1910 Andrea and Teresa founded La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman). La Mujer Moderna was based in San Antonio and held the emancipation of women as its central focus. Alongside their journalistic endeavors, Andrea and Teresa were also active in Regeneración, a San Antonio women’s group. The group, under the leadership of Teresa Villareal, felt that women’s liberation should be a critical goal and outcome of the Mexican Revolution. The Villareal sisters participated in a variety of functions in organizing
Mexican women. They assisted in fund-raising and organizing activities of the feminist organizations Leona Vicario and the Liberal Union of Mexican Women. Their interest in women’s role and influence in the Mexican Revolution led to their involvement in, and support of, the Partido Liberal de Mexico (PLM). Since the male leadership of the PLM was continuously politically threatened, the Villareal sisters and other feminists played key roles in maintaining revolutionary causes and messages. One observer recalled how women like Andrea and Teresa Villareal took on responsibilities that men feared because of the heightened threats of the revolution: “Women in Texas were particularly active . . . had to continue the work men were now too intimidated to do.” See also Journalism and Print Media SOURCES: Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. 2003. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press; Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. 1973. Sembradores: Ricardo Flores Magón y el Partido Liberal Mexicano, Los Angeles: Aztlan Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
VIRAMONTES, HELENA MARÍA (1954– ) Novelist Helena María Viramontes was born in California. Her parents raised nine children in East Los Angeles, a community that offered refuge to Mexicans who had crossed the border into California. Her childhood experiences as a daughter of migrant workers who labored in the fields form the base of her creative process. Viramontes attended Immaculate Heart College and received a baccalaureate degree in 1975. She began to write in college while majoring in English literature and won prizes for her short stories “Requiem for the Poor,” “The Broken Web,” and “Birthday.” In 1981 she was able to assure a writing career when she entered a master of fine arts in creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine. During her years as a graduate student Viramontes was also a wife, a fulltime mother of two children, and an active intellectual in a community with a large number of Latinos. Major influences in Viramontes’s literature include the work of César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, as well as her childhood in East Los Angeles. Literary influences include authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo. Like many Chicano writers, Viramontes writes about the personal life of individuals and their families. In her literary representations she deals with issues re-
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Virgen de Guadalupe lated to the struggles of Chicana women in their households and beyond. Viramontes’s childhood experiences with friends and family have also influenced her writing. Her parents met while picking cotton in the fields and suffered as underpaid migrant workers. Viramontes has admitted that both parents influenced her in different ways: “If my mother showed all that is good in being female, my father showed all that is bad in being male.” Nonetheless, Viramontes dedicated her novel Under the Feet of Jesus to both parents and to César Chávez. Two of Viramontes’s best-known short stories are “The Moths” and “The Jumping Bean,” both of which show different aspects of Latino life. “The Moths” (1985) is a story of family relationships, caregiving, and dying. A Latina narrator tells about providing care to her dying grandmother at the age of fourteen. Manuel de Jesús Hernández-Gutiérrez has pointed out the author’s representation of feminist concerns in this story. María Herrera-Sobek describes “The Jumping Bean” as an excellent portrayal of a hardworking Latino father struggling to survive. The writer’s first book, The Moths and Other Stories, was published in 1985. This collection also includes the short story “Growing,” in which the writer again presents a feminist perspective and an interest in sexual discrimination against young women. In 1989 Viramontes won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to collaborate in a workshop with Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute. She also wrote a screenplay based on her second book of short stories, Paris Rats in E.L.A., which was produced by the American Film Institute. In addition, she adapted the short story “Candystripers” for the screen. She received her masters of fine arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1994. Since 1993, Viramontes has taught creative writing at Cornell University, where she is associate professor of English. In 1995 she was the first Latina to receive the John Dos Passos Prize; previous recipients of the prize have included Graham Greene and Tom Wolfe. Martha E. Cook, professor of English at Longwood College and chair of the Dos Passos Prize committee, stated that Viramontes “brings a new perspective to understanding our American culture and heritage by giving a voice to those whom many readers have not heard.” A dedicated, approachable writer who truly mentors students, she is married with children. Her husband, Eloy Rodríquez, holds an endowed chair in environmental studies at Cornell. In the words of Eric Rosario, a Cornell student affairs officer, “Helena is a successful Chicana who is passionately and profoundly proud of her heritage,” and he notes with appreciation, “her message that our heritage is not a liability but an
asset we should nurture.” In 2005 she was recognized for her literary works with an honorary doctorate from St. Mary’s College of Notre Dame. See also Literature SOURCES: Cornell (University) Chronicle (online edition). Geddes, Darryl. 1996. “Author Counsels Chicano students at CU Summer College, August 8. www.news.cornell.edu/ Chronicle/96/8.8.96/Viramontes-counsel.html (accessed July 24, 2005); Davidson, Cathy N., Linda Wagner-Masrtin, and Elizabeth Ammons, eds. 1993. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press; Hernández-Gutiérrez, Manuel de Jesús, and David William Foster, eds. 1997. Literatura Chicana, 1965–1995: An Anthology in Spanish, English, and Caló. New York: Garland Publishing; Telgen, Diane, and James Kamp, eds. 1993. Notable Hispanic American Women. Detroit: Gale Research; Viramontes, Helena. 2005. “Curriculum Vitae.” www.arts.cornell.edu/english/cv/ viramontes.short.html (accessed July 24, 2005). María E. Villamil
VIRGEN DE GUADALUPE Mythology, oral tradition, and literary texts date the Guadalupe event to 1531 when the Virgen de Guadalupe appeared in central Mexico to a Christianized Mexica man, Juan Diego or Cuauhtlatóhuac (He Who Speaks like an Eagle). Surrounded by cosmic symbols and dressed in the colors of Mexica deities, she appeared four times and told Juan Diego to advise the Catholic bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, to build a temple on the site of her appearance, the ancient worshiping grounds of the Nahua mother goddess, Tonantzin. In order to prove her existence, she miraculously imprinted her image on the tilma (a course cloak of maguey fiber) of Cuauhtlatóhuac. She also gifted him with many roses, rare and seasonal flowers, to further prove the sacredness of her presence in New Spain. Flowers and the soothing sound of her voice signified flor y canto, the Nahua tradition of communicating with the deities through flower, song, and poetry. Her message of unconditional maternal love and protection to all that honored her gave the conquered indigenous peoples renewed hope for their survival amid the violence and genocide of the Spanish conquest. The divine woman appeared a fifth time, to the uncle of Juan Diego, whom she cured of smallpox. The bishop commissioned a small chapel at Tepeyac dedicated to Guadalupe, and by 1556 Mexicas and Spaniards could be found worshiping her there and experiencing miraculous healings. The first written text of the apparitions appeared in 1648, authored in Spanish by Father Miguel Sánchez. One year later Father Luis Laso de la Vega translated the tale into Nahuatl. This later text, titled Huei tlamahuicoltica, agrees closely with Sánchez’s version, but has a more flowing
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Virgen de Guadalupe dialogue between the characters. The account of the apparitions appears in a section titled Nican mopohua (Here Is Recounted), which states that the uncle of Juan Diego identified the woman as Tlecuauhtlacupeuh (She Who Comes Flying from the Light like an Eagle of Fire). The Spaniards christened her Nuestra Señora Santa María de Guadalupe, after the image of the Virgin Mary from Guadalupe, Extremadura, the hometown of Hernán Cortés. In 1746 Guadalupe became the patroness and national symbol of Mexico, and in 1754 the papacy designated December 12 as her holy day. In the war for independence from Spain (1810–1821) Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla chose her image to rally criollos, mestizos, and indigenous peoples. After the MexicanAmerican War (1846–1848), the treaty that ceded Mexico’s northern territories to the United States received her name, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) the banner of Guadalupe rode alongside the peasant fighters under Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and Mexicano immigrants seeking refuge and work in the United States sought her assistance and mercy. Under the leadership of César Chávez beginning in the 1960s, she appeared as a labor rights advocate for farmworkers, and more recently as an immigrant rights proponent and defender of land rights for indigenous peoples in southern Mexico. Guadalupe continues to represent struggles for justice and has won countless devotees across many cultures. Pope John Paul II named her patroness of the Americas in the early 1990s and commissioned a replica of her image
to tour parts of the United States in 1999. Many Latino/a Catholic theologians understand her to be the feminine face of God and Mother of the mestizo people. Her original image remains enshrined at her basilica in Mexico City, defying all attempts to prove its historical origins. Scholars admit that little about the Guadalupe event can be proved or disproved. As a multivalent symbol, Guadalupe stands not only for divine protection and revolutionary struggle, but also for female chastity, passivity, and self-sacrifice. In response, Chicana artists began (re)imaging Guadalupe in the mid-1970s to reflect their emerging feminist politics. In 1976 Ester Hernández offered the first revisionist work. Her portrayal of Guadalupe as a karate master defending the rights of Chicanos inspired other artists to reassess the cultural myths and archetypes that shaped what it meant to be a woman. Yolanda López’s Guadalupe Triptych in 1978 portrays her as a runner, a seamstress, and an elder who challenges viewers to see all women as sacred. Alma López’s Our Lady (2001) suggests the sacredness and power of female sexuality. In creating new role models, Chicana artists imbue Guadalupe with traits and qualities reflecting their own lives. These artists and their feminist revisionist images of the primary female icon of Mexican Catholic culture have not been well received by conservative Latino/a Catholics. Creative writers have also reworked the Guadalupe event to reflect their contemporary multidimensional lives. Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros are among the many Chicana/o writers who have challenged readers to ponder the multiple ways
Mexican Americans celebrating the patron saint la Virgen de Guadalupe, New York, 1958. Courtesy of the Justo A. Martí Photograph Collection. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
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Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in which the indigenous mother goddess through Guadalupe remains active in our troubled world. Images of the divine mother continue to take on new meanings for the descendants of mestizo peoples in the Americas. See also Religion SOURCES: Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute; Castillo, Ana, ed. 1996. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgen of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books; Elizondo, Virgilio. 1997. Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press; Rodríguez, Jeanette. 1994. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among MexicanAmerican Women. Austin: University of Texas Press; Sousa, Lisa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, eds. 1998. The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuicoltica of 1649. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lara Medina
VIRGEN DE LA CARIDAD DEL COBRE The representation of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre is the patroness of the Cuban people. Her basilica is located in copper mines sixteen kilometers west of the city of Santiago, on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Her origins date back to the early seventeenth century, possibly between 1604 and 1606. In 1687 a notarized account of the virgin’s appearance became the first written testimonial of her growing importance. Variations of this story were elaborated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as religious and political reinterpretations of this Marian tradition. In the 1687 version three men first sighted the image in the middle of the Bay of Nipe on their way to a small cay in the bay named Cayo Francés. Two were assumed to be Indians and brothers, Juan and Rodrigo de Hoyos. The third was a young slave boy named Juan Moreno, who gave the 1687 account. They collected salt in the bay for a flourishing cattle ranch on the mainland, named Hato de Bajaragua. On one of their trips they sighted “something white” on the water. On coming closer they discovered that it was an icon of the Virgin with a small baby Jesus in her arms. The image was riding on a small piece of wood with a sign saying, “I am the Virgin of Charity.” Her clothes were dry, which the men interpreted as being a miraculous fact. The administrator of the ranch built a small sanctuary for the image. According to popular folklore, she mysteriously disappeared several times from this location, which was interpreted as a message to be relocated to another site. That final place was the town of El Cobre, a copper-mining community mostly formed
Virgen de la Caridad. Illustrated by and courtesy of Carlos A. Cruz.
by slaves owned by the king. By the end of the seventeenth century there was a small church dedicated to this virgin and a well-rooted worship by the slave community. In time this image became the patroness protector of the slaves and freedmen working the mines and attracted many pilgrims of all races on account of her miracles. The patronage of rich and poor led to the construction of a large sanctuary cared for by several chaplains, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was the most important shrine in Cuba. The first available history of the virgin and its worship was published in 1829. Throughout the nineteenth century her popularity increased, and she became the object of devotion of all Cubans. The rebels in the Cuban-American war against Spain (1895–1898), known as mambises, held her as their special protector. On August 12, 1898, a mass of thanks for the end of the war was celebrated in her sanctuary. The veterans of this war requested that the Vatican declare the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre the national patron. Benedict XV issued a papal decree on May 10, 1916, elevating her to that position. In 1977 Pope Paul VI consecrated the sanctuary as a basilica, and during his visit to Cuba in 1998, John Paul II crowned the image as the “queen” of Cuba. As a result of the Cuban Revolution, the image is
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Voting Rights Act also worshiped in Miami by Cuban exiles—largely pre1980 immigrants—for whom the Virgin has become a national symbol for the community. A shrine to the virgin in Biscayne was dedicated in 1973. It was consecrated in 1994 by the archbishop of Miami. In AfroCuban folklore religion this image is associated with Oshun, the queen of rivers and springs, goddess of fertility and love, and one that must be consulted by all those becoming priests in that type of worship. This parallel syncretic worship was probably introduced in the nineteenth century by newly arrived slaves who practiced Yoruba religions of West Africa. See also Religion SOURCES: Arrom, Juan J. 1971. “La Virgen del Cobre: Historia, leyenda y símbolo sincrético.” In Certidumbre de América: Estudios de letras, folklore y cultura, 184–214. Madrid: Editorial Gredos; Corbea Calzado, Julio. 1996. “La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Construcción simbólica y cultura popular.” Del Caribe 21:4–11; Díaz, María Elena. 2000. The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Paz y Ascanio, Alejandro. 1829. Historia de la aparición milagrosa de Nuestra señora de la Caridad del Cobre. Santiago de Cuba: Imprenta de la Viuda e Hijos de Espinal; Portuondo Zúñiga, Olga. 1995. La Virgen de la Caridad: Símbolo de cubanía. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente; Tweed, Thomas A. 1997. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New York: Oxford University Press. Asunción Lavrin
VOTING RIGHTS ACT The Voting Rights Act (VRA) has served as a tool to empower people of color who have been historically blocked from voting. For instance, before the VRA African Americans and Mexican Americans had to pay poll taxes or pass literacy or English tests in order to vote. Furthermore, they were physically intimidated, threatened, and harmed when they sought to register to vote, to cast their ballots, or otherwise to participate in the political process. In 1965 Congress enacted two primary sections of the VRA. Section 2 prohibited all voting and election practices that discriminated on the basis of race or color. This included abuses of the redistricting process. The U.S. Constitution requires that a census be con-
ducted every ten years, and state and local governments use these data to redraw local districts to reflect shifts in population. Historically, incumbent elected officials have often gerrymandered political districts to favor European American candidates. The VRA did not guarantee that people of color would control districts, but it was intended to ensure that white block voting or political gerrymandering would not defeat their choices. If patterns of gerrymandering emerged, complaints could be brought to the Justice Department to halt these practices. In many states, however, Section 2 was not enough. New discriminatory practices began almost as soon as old discriminatory practices were struck down. Congress enacted Section 5 to require the U.S. Justice Department to review, or “preclear,” the election practices of certain states before implementation to prevent discriminatory practices. In 1975 the VRA was amended to protect Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Alaskan Natives and Aleuts who do not speak English. In communities where large numbers of the population are not proficient in English, if more than 5 percent of these people are of voting age, then ballots and other voting materials must be made available in the appropriate languages. In 1982 the VRA was again amended to prohibit voting and election practices that had a discriminatory effect, as well as a discriminatory intent. For instance, the courts could now examine historic practices and patterns of discrimination, including the extent of polarized voting, district size, and the candidate slating process. More important, the courts could consider discrimination in education, unemployment, and even health in determining the extent of VRA violations. The Voting Rights Act has been an important piece of civil rights legislation that seeks to level the political playing field. SOURCES: De la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Louis DeSipio. 1999. “Save the Baby, Change the Bathwater, and Scrub the Tub: Latino Electoral Participation after Seventeen Years of Voting Rights Act Coverage.” Texas Law Review 71, no. 7 (June): 1479–1539; DeSipio, Louis. 1999. Counting on the Latino Vote: Latinos as a New Electorate. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
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Lisa Magaña
W q WATSONVILLE STRIKE In September 1985, 1,600 workers, mostly Mexican and Mexican American women, went on strike at the Richard Shaw Frozen Food Company and the Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company in Watsonville, California. In response to drastic cuts in wages and benefits, the women took on one of the largest frozen food manufacturers in the nation. Watsonville and the fertile Salinas Valley were commonly known as the frozen food capital of the world. The Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company alone produced half the country’s supply of frozen vegetables and employed 5,000 workers. Of the entire Watsonville frozen food workforce, nine out of ten workers were Latino, and the majority of activists were Latina women. Once thriving, successful companies, the Shaw and Watsonville companies responded to foreign competition by lowering workers’ wages dramatically, by 40 percent, terminating benefits, and increasing the pace of work. Work in the canneries required a great deal of stamina and strength. Because of increased demand on production, many women were forced to stand extra long hours and face deteriorating working conditions. Fedelia Carrisoza was reprimanded several times for challenging cannery management. On one occasion she defended her need to use the restroom. During breaks the three to four stalls were not enough for the eighty-four women working a line. Carrisoza, pregnant at the time, responded to management’s complaints of her frequent use of the restroom by demanding, “Show me a law that says I cannot go to the bathroom!” Increased injuries and poor working conditions were among the many hardships workers faced from the canneries’ attempts to produce more profits. In response to these conditions, workers attempted to call upon the assistance of local Teamsters Union Local 912. This particular union had organized workers in the region during World War II and was led mostly by white men who shared the interests of the corporate owners. The union did little to improve the
workers’ contract or to understand their demands for an improved contract. In addition to the dramatic cuts in wages and the termination of benefits, workers also went on strike to protest lack of leadership and support required of the Teamsters Union. Teamsters Union leaders often collaborated with company leaders and encouraged workers to settle. Strikers organized committees to lead and organize the strike. One committee, the Teamsters for Democratic Union, focused on operating within the existing union (the Teamsters) while demanding improved working wages, as well as decent and equal representation within the union. The other committee, the Strikers’ Committee, strategized and instituted more militant tactics. Gloria Betancourt and Chavela Moreno were among the leaders of the Strikers’ Committee who continuously fought for the workers as part of the negotiating committees. Latina workers were instrumental in the organizing of the Watsonville strike. As one source explained, the important lesson learned from the Watsonville Strikes was that there is no separation between the private and public worlds. The women who went on strike used mostly female networks to encourage support for the strike. Women worked the picket line and distributed food to striking workers. Women also used family networks and friends to provide food and resources to striking families. For the Latinas involved in the strike, there was no distinction between home and work life. They struck for their dignity, family, and rights. The strike lasted eighteen months and garnered support from all over the state. Picket lines, rallies, and marches served as instruments to inform and motivate the community. In some instances peaceful gatherings of strikers turned violent. The Watsonville court denied the strikers the right to assemble and deployed the Watsonville police to break up group gatherings at the picket lines. Students from the University of California at Santa Cruz often supported strikers and “volunteered” to be the ones arrested. Support for the strike came from prominent individuals such as César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Jesse Jackson. One form
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Welch, Raquel of protest that gained considerable attention was the procession of hunger strikers who marched on their knees to Watsonville’s St. Patrick’s Church. Anita Contreras helped lead the procession and stated, “As long as God is in Heaven, I will never give up.” The Strike Committee also organized a boycott of Wells Fargo Bank, the financial lender to the canneries. The strike ended with a reinstatement of benefits but no increase in salary. Many strikers saw this as a compromise but not as a victory. Women agreed to the terms of the new contract in order to go back to work and provide for their families. The strike held valuable lessons about political activism when it is organized among women. In recognizing their potential, some women chose not to return to the canneries, others sought opportunities elsewhere, and others, like Gloria Betancourt, pursued leadership roles in the fight for Latina workers’ rights. SOURCES: Castillo, Ana. 1995. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume; Flores, William V., and Rina Benmayor, eds. 1997. Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Boston: Beacon; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Silver, Jon, director and writer, and Migrant Media Productions, producer. 1989. Watsonville on Strike: A Documentary. [Videocassette]; Zavella, Patricia. 1987. Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Margie Brown-Coronel
WELCH, RAQUEL (1940–
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Born in Chicago on September 5, 1940, Jo Raquel Tejada burst into stardom in 1966 with two science fiction classics, Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C. In 1969 Time magazine featured her clad in a prehistoric deerskin garb on the year’s November issue and lauded her as “Today’s Sex Symbol.” Downplaying her Latina background until she was well established in her career, Jo Raquel Tejada became known to the world as Raquel Welch. Years later she recalled that her rise as an internationally known sex symbol and comedic movie starlet developed under nearly complete ethnic invisibility, a choice mostly encouraged by movie studios and marketing managers who purposefully deemphasized Welch’s ethnicity. As a condition to popularity and access to multiple roles, her Hispanic background was deliberately ignored. Welch commented during an interview that pressures to forget her Latina roots started at home. Her father, Armand C. Tejada, a Bolivian-born aerospace engineer, relocated his family to California, where he raised Raquel under an assimilationist ethos, stressed the speaking of En-
glish in the home, and chose to live in non-Latino neighborhoods in order to Americanize his family. As a little girl, Welch frequented the movies to avoid her parents’ fights and became an avid cinema fan, later identifying the ballet classic The Red Shoes as both escape and inspiration. As a teenager, she took dance classes and participated in and won several California beauty pageants, including Miss Contour, Miss La Jolla, Miss Photogenic Teen, and Miss San Diego. At the age of eighteen she enrolled in San Diego State University. She married a year later and gave birth to her daughter Tahnee in 1960. “You just couldn’t be too different,” she remarked about her journey into movie stardom, arguing that early on in her career she agreed to temporarily dye her hair blonde and to change her last name from Tejada to Welch, but insisted on remaining Raquel. Raquel Welch reached the heights of popularity during the mid-1960s and early 1970s. A thriving 1963 publicity tour in Europe with her second husband Patrick Curtis propelled her career into a major international phenomenon. However, the year 1964 found Welch struggling as a divorced single mother of two children. Still, the striving actress persevered and landed the role of “billboard girl” on the television variety show Hollywood Palace, where Welch’s stunning appeal gained her notoriety that led to various television appearances in shows such as The Virginian and Bewitched. Beginning as a sex symbol and later performing multiple roles as a comedienne, Welch debuted in movies with a small role as a college student in the 1964 Roustabout, starring Elvis Presley. She played a bordello girl in A House Is Not a Home (1964), which starred Shelley Winters. Other films to her credit include A Swinging Summer (1965), 100 Rifles (1969), The Last of Sheila (1973), The Three Musketeers (1973), Stunt Woman (1981), and Naked Gun 33: The Final Insult (1994). She also appeared in noteworthy television productions, including A Right to Die (1987), in which she played a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Trouble in Paradise and Scandal in a Small Town, both in 1988, and Tainted Blood in 1993. Welch costarred opposite numerous leading men, including Richard Burton, Burt Reynolds, Dudley Moore, James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Vittorio De Sica, Jean Paul Belmondo, and Bill Cosby, and became a favorite star of film and television directors such as Richard Lester, Herbert Ross, Peter Yates, and James Ivory. A contract darling of Twentieth Century Fox, the scene-stealer Raquel Welch was carefully crafted for stardom roles in films that capitalized on her sex appeal and magnetic screen presence. Reflecting upon her career choices at the age of sixty-one, Welch argued: “You can be a legitimate sex symbol up
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West Side Story until the age of thirty-five and then after that you just can’t take that too seriously. As I was coming up to forty, I was looking for breadcrumbs along the road of sex-symbolism. I couldn’t find any that were very positive.” Grateful for the many opportunities that accrued from her fame as a sex symbol, Welch also confessed feeling limited by the narrow acting opportunities granted to her by her sexualized identity on screen. Yet, Welch has to her credit more than sixty-two films. In 1981, she surprised critics with her successful Broadway debut as the headliner in the hit musical Woman of the Year. Reawakening to her Latina identity during the 1980s, Raquel Welch has made important contributions to promoting a Latino presence in television. With a busy acting career into the twenty-first century, she had a leading role in An American Family, the first PBS dramatic series with a Latino theme. In a New York Times interview published on October 7, 1987, she remarked that the time had arrived in her career to “let go of everything I had ever used before in a part. . . . It was a big relief, and there was a great freedom in knowing for myself what a range of things I could look forward to personally, as well as for myself as an actress.” Raquel Welch continues to reinvent herself. She is the author of a best-selling fitness book stressing the virtues of yoga and nutrition and has created her own line of wigs and beauty products. See also Movie Stars SOURCES: Hadley-Garcia, George. 1990. Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures. New York: Carol Publishing Group; Keller, Gary D. 1997. A Biographical Handbook of Hispanics in United States Film. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press; Reyes, Luis, and Peter Rubie. 2000. Hispanics in Hollywood: A Celebration of 100 Years in Film and Television. Hollywood, CA: Lone Eagle Publishing Company; Rodríguez, Clara. 2004. Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Soledad Vidal
WEST SIDE STORY West Side Story opened on Broadway in 1957. Because the stage version was such a smashing success, a film version was made in 1961. Chita Rivera played the role of Anita in the play, and Rita Moreno played this role in the film version. There were few other Latinos in the film or the play. Because of its huge success as a movie, more than any other drama, it has influenced the images of Latinas and Latinos. The question is how. On the one hand, there are those who view West Side Story as reflecting the ageless Romeo and Juliet love story. On the other hand, there are those who contend that this cold-war era film conveyed a more subtle message that ethnic differences were a threat to the
Anita Vélez as Anita in West Side Story, 1963. Courtesy of the Erasmo Vando Papers. Centro Archives, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
national, territorial, racial, and linguistic identity of the United States. In addition, they maintain that Latina women were stereotypically portrayed as either madonnas or harlots. Regardless of one’s perspective, it cannot be denied that, as the first major film and play about Latinos in the Northeast, it has had a major impact on how Latinas/os, and more specifically Puerto Ricans, have been viewed. In many ways it paralleled the impact that Giant, a film of the same era and magnitude, had on the perception of Chicanos or Mexican Americans. There are few films that have equaled the impact of both these epics. Puerto Ricans in New York were clearly the focus of this drama. However, when Arthur Laurents originally wrote the play in 1949, it was about a Jewish girl and an Italian Catholic boy. When the scriptwriters turned their attention to the play’s production, the original Jewish-Catholic conflict was seen as dated. At the time stories of juvenile delinquency and gang activity filled the news; in particular, Leonard Bernstein was inspired by the idea of Chicano gangs fighting so-called ethnic Americans. The possibility of making the play about Chicanos was contemplated, but it was decided that it would be easier to set it in New York. Puerto Ricans, perhaps because they were concentrated in New York and had arrived in large numbers during the 1950s, ended up “fitting the bill.” Not only was West Side Story the first major film about Latinos in the Northeast, it was also a megafilm in its own right. It not only was the top-grossing film of 1961, but also received ten Academy Awards, including best picture, best supporting actress, director, cine-
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Wilcox, Mary Rose Garrido matography, art direction/set decoration, sound, score, editing, costumes, and supporting actor and an honorary award for choreography, given to Jerome Robbins. It was also for this film that an Oscar was awarded for the first time to a Latina, Rita Moreno for best supporting actress. In addition to these awards, the film received other prestigious awards, which included Golden Globe awards for Best Film (in Musical/Comedy) and Best Supporting Actor and Actress and the Directors Guild of America award for Best Director. Indeed, no other film had ever garnered this many awards, and only one has matched this record since (Titanic). West Side Story was an extremely popular film during its time, and the musical has had, and continues to have, immense appeal as a drama production for repertory companies, schools, and colleges. Indeed, many consider West Side Story to be an American classic. Moreover, many of the songs, written by Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim, have joined the pantheon of American all-time classics—for example, “Maria,” “I Feel Pretty,” “Tonight,” “Something’s Coming,” and “Somewhere.” Other songs, such as “One Hand, One Heart,” “America,” “Gee, Officer Krupke!” “The Rumble,” “Dance at the Gym,” “A Boy like That/I Have a Love,” and “Cool,” have become some of the best-known American songs today, recognizable even when played without their lyrics. However, despite the film’s popularity, Latino writers have raised a number of criticisms of it. Alberto Sandoval Sánchez maintains that it reflected a view of Latinos, in this case Puerto Ricans, as coming from another world and invading the United States. He contends that although on one level it is simply a love story, on a deeper level it is the beginning of an explicit discourse of discrimination and prejudice toward immigrant Latinos. This discourse projects a series of binary oppositions about class, race, and ethnicity. For example, the very title implies the contrast between the “then” working-class West Side and the upscale East Side of New York. The names of the gangs reflect a negative binary in which the Puerto Ricans/Latinos are threateningly named the Sharks, while the earlier white, Anglo-heritage residents of the area are referred to as the Jets to connote modernism and technological prowess. In addition, the film focuses on “stories,” as the title indicates, and ignores “histories.” Thus the troublesome political and economic history between the United States and Puerto Rico is ignored, particularly its relationship to the migration of Puerto Ricans to New York. Similarly overlooked is the long history of Puerto Ricans on the West Side and in New York, which dates to the nineteenth century. Last, the long and rich immigrant history of the West Side is not part of the film. Essentially, Sandoval Sánchez views the
film as providing an early and important medium within which the confrontation of Anglos/whites with foreign or immigrant Latino “others” is depicted and continues to subsequently be understood. Others argue that the film established definitively the image of Puerto Ricans, and more generally Latinos, as urban ghetto dwellers and juvenile delinquents who were social misfits or personally inadequate victims. Moreover, it perpetuates the stereotype of Puerto Rican males as knife-carrying gang members who could only solve their problems through violence. These same images find their counterparts in the “social problem” films, which featured Chicanos on the West Coast. With regard to Latinas, West Side Story personified and established in the public mind a dualist image of Puerto Rican women as either the innocent, passive, virginal Madonna, as played by Natalie Wood as María, or as the hot-blooded, fiery, sexy spitfire or whore, as played by Rita Moreno as Anita. See also Cinema Images, Contemporary; Media Stereotypes SOURCES: Pérez, Richie. 1997. “From Assimilation to Annihilation: Puerto Rican Images in U.S. Films.” In Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, ed. C. Rodríguez, 142–163. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Sandoval Sánchez, Alberto. 1997. “West Side Story: A Puerto Rican Reading of America.” In Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media, ed. C. Rodríguez, 164–179. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; ———. 1999. José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Clara E. Rodríguez
WILCOX, MARY ROSE GARRIDO (1949– ) Mary Rose Garrido Wilcox, a fourth-generation member of a pioneer Mexican American family, was born in Superior, Arizona. She was the first Latina to be elected to the Phoenix City Council and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. She is one of the most recognized Latina leaders in the state. Raised in a union family in an Arizona mining community, Mary Rose Wilcox saw firsthand the ability of common folk to achieve power through organizing. She applied these lessons to her own endeavors throughout her life. As a nineteen-year-old student at Arizona State University in the 1960s, she became part of the core group that organized the Mexican American Student Organization (MASO). Within a short time MASO effectively pressured the university’s administration for accountability regarding the educational needs of Mexican Americans in the Valley of the Sun (Maricopa County). Like that of many other students, Wilcox’s concern for social justice evolved from uni-
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Wolf, Esther Valladolid versity reform to helping the larger community gain civil rights and economic empowerment. In a 1972 attempt to recall an Arizona governor considered insensitive to the needs of Chicanos, Wilcox gained valuable political insights. Although the removal efforts were unsuccessful, the experience helped her and other Mexican Americans gain a foothold in the arena of Arizona politics. Her political training continued as she worked to elect Valley Chicanos to school boards, the state legislature, and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and in Raúl Castro’s successful campaign to become the first Mexican American governor of Arizona in 1974. By 1978 Senator Dennis DeConcini hired Wilcox as a community liaison, a position that provided Mexican Americans access to the senator’s office in Washington, D.C. Confident that she could serve the people directly, in the 1980s Wilcox concentrated on her own political ambitions. With the help of her husband, Earl Wilcox, a former state legislator and justice of the peace, she was elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1983 and served until 1993, when she won a seat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. In 2000 and 2004 she was reelected for third and fourth four-year terms. As a city council member and county supervisor, Mary Rose was instrumental in revitalizing downtown Phoenix. The building of America West Arena and Bank One Ballpark, projects that put Phoenix at the forefront as a national sports center, were goals to which she committed much of her energy. Such projects as the “fight back movement,” which combats neighborhood crime by involving local residents, and the City of Phoenix Kool Kids program, a summer swimming program for inner-city children, exist largely through her efforts. Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox spawned numerous community projects as volunteers, especially those focusing on youth in the Phoenix inner city, where Earl grew up. With the help of other community activists, the couple runs Late Night Basketball, a signature program that provides recreation and positive activity for Phoenix’s young people. In addition, Mary Rose has served on numerous boards and commissions, such as the Phoenix Economic Growth Corporation, the Phoenix Symphony, the Genesis Program, Friendly House, and the Downtown Phoenix Partnership. In 1983 she was a founding member of the Arizona Hispanic Women’s Corporation and served as executive director in 1988–1989. Besides involvement in local activities, her participation with the national Hispanic community is extensive. She has served in such organizations as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).
Mary Rose Wilcox has received numerous honors for her community and political work. She and her husband reside in downtown Phoenix, own New El Sol, a weekly newspaper serving the Hispanic community, and operate the restaurant El Portal Mexicano. Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox have a daughter and five grandsons. See also Politics, Electoral SOURCES: Luckingham, Bradford. 1994. Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Luey, Beth, and Noel J. Stowe, eds. 1987. Arizona at Seventy-five: The Next Twenty-five Years. Tempe: Arizona State University Public History Program and the Arizona Historical Society; Navarro, Armando. 2000. La Raza Unida Party: A Chicano Challenge to the U.S. Two-Party Dictatorship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Rosales, F. Arturo. 1996. Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston: Arte Público Press. F. Arturo Rosales
WOLF, ESTHER VALLADOLID (1940–
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Born in El Paso, Texas, Esther Valladolid Wolf attended Catholic schools along with her three sisters. Her father, Rosendo Alfero Valladolid, immigrated to the United States from Mexico, where he had been a leader in an underground movement that helped secure the passage of Catholic priests and nuns from Mexico to the United States when they were escaping persecution during the Mexican Revolution. Her mother, Guadalupe Pérez Valladolid, volunteered for many local church-related and social organizations. Her family believed in the value of education, and Esther began her career in community service in grade school, where she volunteered as an interpreter, translating for the nuns in her school and recent immigrants from Mexico. After completing high school, she attended the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City and the University of Texas at El Paso. She graduated from the University of Kansas with undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work, as well as a postgraduate certificate in gerontology. She was awarded a Kellogg Fellowship to the John F. Kennedy School of Government Executive Program at Harvard University. In 1964 she married James Wolf and has two children, Paul and Judith. Following the spirit of the feminist movement of the 1960s, Esther Wolf learned firsthand that the personal is political. After her mother was diagnosed with cancer and needed help with Medicare forms and bills, Wolf found her cause. Since then her primary mission has been helping older Americans, especially Latinos, who need assistance with health care, insurance, and
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World War II hospital information. Her energy and enthusiasm for life are obvious in her long list of achievements. In the early 1980s she was the director of social services for el Centro de Services para Hispanos in Kansas City, Kansas. She has been the executive director of the Richard Cabot Clinic in Kansas City, Missouri, a primary-care clinic that provides medical services for Kansas City residents. She took a run-down, one-story, poorly equipped health center with a leaky roof and turned it into a modern, cheerful facility with the latest equipment for low-income Latino families. “Before I knew it, I was considered a Hispanic leader . . . because of the passion I felt for working in the community,” she observed when she recounted the early years of her career. From 1987 to 1991 she served as secretary of aging for the state of Kansas. In addition, she has been a clinical instructor and project director at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in the Institute of Human Development and the Graduate School of Social Work. She continues as a consultant for Wolf and Associates, specializing in issues concerning gerontology and cultural diversity. One of her more recent projects has been working with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at Kansas City, Missouri, to promote art education for senior citizens who want to increase their creativity. “I act as if what I do makes a difference,” Wolf remarked with typical passion about her life’s work, and she has indeed made a difference. In 1987 she was featured in Newsweek as an American hero. She received the Public Service Achievement Award the following year, one of seven given nationally by Common Cause. She has received the National Mexican-American Women’s Community Service Award, the Women of Color Service Award, the YMCA Hearts of Gold Health Award, the Greater Kansas City Hispanics Chamber of Commerce Humanitarian Award, and the Missouri Commission on the Status of Women Service Award, among many others. She serves on the board of directors for the National Hispanic Leadership Institute, the National Association of Hispanic Elderly, the American Red Cross, the Kansas Humanities Board, the Heart of America United Way Executive Association, and the Posada del Sol Senior Housing Center. She has also been involved in several international projects, working with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and as a consultant to the Mexican government. In addition to her work with senior citizens, Esther Wolf serves as a mentor to young Latinas. She is actively involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization, and conducts workshops in the Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, public schools
to promote leadership qualities in middle- and highschool students. Her warmth and compassion make her a frequent recipient of evening telephone calls from young women who have attended her workshops and who seek her advice. Esther Wolf continues to give back to U.S. society, even though she was forced to sit in the back of the bus when she was young, just because she was Latino. She has often observed, “You can’t stay angry forever.” In fact, it is her love of life that makes her vitality infectious. She breathes energy into every project she touches. She has reached out to thousands of Latinos with her passionate belief that one person has the power to change the way that ordinary people live their lives. See also League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) SOURCE: Newsweek. 1987. “A Celebration of Heroes.” July 6, 78.
Mary Ann Wynkoop
WORLD WAR II (1941–1945) World War II was a pivotal point for the United States and was no less so for U.S. Latinas, who contributed to the war effort as both civilians and military enlistees. On the home front Latinas participated in rationing efforts, recycling drives, and letter-writing campaigns and took jobs in defense-related industries. Untold thousands married young soldiers right before they left for overseas tours of duty. Still others found themselves performing work from which they had been restricted before the war because of their gender or their race/ethnicity or both. For American women in general, and especially for married women, who had often been discouraged from working outside the home after marriage, the war created unprecedented employment opportunities. In 1940 most of the 11.5 million working American women were single, but by 1944 nearly a third of female defense workers had been housewives previously. A typical week’s salary in war-industry work was $35 to $40. For many Latinas, however, participation in the workforce had come out of necessity during the Great Depression of the 1930s; World War II represented an opportunity to earn higher wages. The United States began war readiness before the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when it began to produce equipment and armament for its allies even before the passage of the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941. A by-product of that acceleration in production, in conjunction with the beginning of a draft program, was a substantial lowering of the un-
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World War II employment rate—to 14.6 percent at the end of 1940, the lowest unemployment rate in a decade. During the war years the country enjoyed full employment, and Latinas received higher wages working in many industries. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire country became fully mobilized for war. The workforce participation of women was essential, because young men served in the military. Some 16 million American men, including an estimated 500,000 Mexican Americans and some 65,000 Puerto Ricans, were pressed into duty. There were also Cuban Americans and Spanish Americans, including those from Ybor City, in what is now Tampa, Florida. As those men left for battlefields and other war-related work, women were called upon to fill the men’s jobs in industry and in other workplaces. From 1940 to 1944 the number of women working rose dramatically, from 12 million to 18.2 million. By the end of the war with the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, the United States had built nearly 300,000 airplanes, 5,777 merchant ships, 635,000 jeeps, 2.4 million trucks, and 1,556 naval vessels. The nation’s factories had also built 6.5 million rifles and made 40 billion bullets. Latinas were among those involved in that production. For Latina women, those high-salaried jobs represented unprecedented independence and prosperity. To understand Latinas of the World War II generation, it is essential to understand the forces that shaped them. Key among those forces was the prevailing discrimination in the United States against Spanish speakers in many parts of the country before and during the war. Another important factor was the Great Depression, which rendered between 11 million and 13 million Americans unemployed. Some estimates place the rates of unemployed and underemployed (involuntary part-time) Americans as high as 50 percent. Latinas of the World War II generation repeatedly assert that families “made do” by cultivating vegetable gardens and, in some cases, accepting government relief. Some Latino families refused any government help out of pride. It was common for entire families to hire out, in pecan shelling in San Antonio, Texas, for instance, or by working as migrant laborers in the cotton fields of Texas or the sugar-beet industry in the Midwest. The depression also stemmed migration from Puerto Rico because jobs dried up on the mainland. One authority puts the return migration (back to Puerto Rico from the mainland) of the 1930s at 10,000 people, or about 20 percent of the Puerto Rican population in the United States. In Puerto Rico, however, circum-
stances were just as bleak, because sugar and tobacco cultivation took a nosedive, which led to high unemployment and food shortages. One writer characterizes the period as “the Desperate ’30s.” Women often did “piecework,” the edging or embroidery on handkerchiefs, or sewing collars. It was a system that paid the work-at-home women a pittance—they might earn thirteen cents for a dozen handkerchiefs—but that was better than no income whatsoever. In addition, the women could also do the work while keeping up with their children and housework. The poverty suffered as a consequence of the depression was only one challenge. In many areas Latinos, most notably Mexican Americans, also grappled with discrimination that relegated them to segregated schools and other social institutions. In some communities in the Southwest there were no provisions for Mexican American children beyond fourth grade. Latinos in the Midwest also suffered; those who worked as migrant workers lived in substandard housing and were generally treated harshly by the dominant society. For Mexican Americans, the Great Depression also led to the deportation or repatriation of 400,000 to 500,000 Mexicans. About 200,000 Mexican immigrants, as well as Mexican Americans, went to Mexico voluntarily between 1929 and 1931. Government institutions and a few companies also began repatriating Mexicans in 1931 and 1932. In some instances men, women, and children were loaded onto trains. In other cases church groups, the Red Cross, and Mexican American societies began programs to take people back across the border. Latinas interviewed as part of the U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II Oral History Project also recall the generosity of their own parents during the Great Depression. Theresa Herrera Casarez (1926– ), a young girl in the hardest years of the depression, said that her mother often gave food to people who came knocking on their Austin door. “My mother never, never sent anyone away without giving them the little bit that we had,” said Casarez. “She was always sewing things and mending . . . [in case] anyone came by the house that needed clothing.” It was common for Latinas to quit school to help their families. One such woman, Henrietta López Rivas (1924– ), left school in the eighth grade when she and her family traveled to the Midwest to work in the betabel, or sugar-beet fields—an arrangement favored by the sugar-beet producers, who were able to maximize the labor of the entire family. When she returned to San Antonio, she worked cleaning houses and barns for $1.50 a week. At the outbreak of war López took a job with the civil service, translating for non-English-
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World War II
Rita Rodríguez, a real-life “Rosie the Riveter.” Photograph by Howard R. Hollem, October 1942. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945. (Digital ID: fsac la34937).
speaking residents instructions on the security measures in place. In that job she began making $90 a month. Thus her ability to speak Spanish, seen as a liability to be discouraged in school, became a job skill that earned her more than she had dreamed possible. Other Latinas worked in defense plants, bringing home a salary they could never have hoped for before the war. The high-paying jobs gave some women an entrée into the working world, as well as a measure of independence they had never known before. For one thing, many young Latinas began frequenting USO clubs or other similar clubs for Latino servicemen. The young Latinas sported the style of the day, curled hair, dresses with fitted bodices, and dark lipstick. The music they listened to was of two worlds, that of the dominant culture—Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, to name a few of the most celebrated— but also Spanish-language music, which varied from region to region and ethnic group to ethnic group. For the first time it seemed that the Hispanic system of chaperonage took a back seat to patriotism. As Sherna Berger Gluck observed in Rosie the Riveter Revisited, servicemen were “respected and trusted and social activities with them were permissible. The resulting social climate often led to increased independence for young women.” In some cases young women were swept away by the romance of the war years and married young servicemen they had only recently met, or boyfriends who were on the verge of leaving for battle. Elizabeth Ruiz García (1924– ), of Austin, was introduced by a friend to a young soldier from western Texas named Willie García. After three months of dating, García proposed
to her just before leaving for the battlefield in North Africa and Sicily. Although she preferred to wait until he returned, she finally agreed to the proposal. The two were married hurriedly, but properly: she wore a new white wedding dress, the ceremony was at her parish church, and her mother put together a large family party, with live music and food. The young groom departed the following morning. The two remained married for the rest of their lives. One Latina who worked in the defense industry was Josephine Ledesma (1917– ), the mother of a young boy when the war broke out. Ledesma worked as an airplane mechanic during the war years, traveling to Randolph Air Force Base, near San Antonio, about seventy miles south of San Antonio. She learned to be a mechanic by doing. “In Bergstrom Field (Austin, Texas) our duty was ’to keep them flying.’ We were taking care of all transit aircraft that came that needed repairs,” she said. She was stationed in Bergstrom Air Field and then Big Spring, both in Texas. Besides Ledesma two other women, both Anglos, served in Bergstrom Air Field, and several more in Big Spring, all working in the sheet-metal department. At Big Spring Ledesma was the only woman working in the hangar. Other Latina women worked in other areas. Puerto Rican women in New York, for instance, worked as censors for the U.S. Postal Service, using their Spanishlanguage skills to check civilian mail between the mainland and Spanish-speaking countries, as well as Puerto Rico. In the Midwest Mexican American women worked in defense-related industries, performing the myriad tasks required in order to build airplanes and other equipment and munitions. A few worked at the steel mills and in the railroad industry. If it is true that an army travels on its stomach, then it follows that the nation’s food producers had to struggle mightily to feed the 16 million Americans in military service in World War II. Labor unions enjoyed a measure of leverage as canneries and packing houses won federal contracts to feed servicemen abroad and at home, as well as to help feed U.S. allies. Historian Vicki L. Ruiz notes that the cannery industry in southern California found itself appeasing the labor unions, and their employees in general, with better working conditions and higher wages as the defense-related industries became viable employment alternatives. Women, comprised three-quarters of the canning employees in California, included hundreds of Latinas in the 1940s, and some Latinas served in leadership roles within their locals. On a national level, the demands of the federal government during World War II on food producers enabled the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO) to secure substantial wage increases and
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World War II
A highly decorated army nurse, Carmen Contreras Bozak, in New York City, 1945. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
other benefits, so by the end of the war, nationally nearly 90 percent of the cannery contracts included a minimum-wage stipulation of 65 cents an hour, and two-thirds of those contracts required equal pay for equal work. Within the context of labor organizing, the cannery workers’ union, like hundreds of other U.S. organizations, participated in blood drives, war bond sales, and baking for area USO clubs. Some Latinas served in the military, usually as nurses, and were usually stationed at installations back home. A few, including Rafaela Muñiz Esquivel (1920– ), of San Antonio, Texas, were sent overseas. Muñiz was one of five Mexican Americans to graduate from Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in May 1942; the remaining four of them joined the military. Muñiz joined the Army Nurse Corps on October 1, 1942 (the Army Nurse Corps became a part of the Regular Army of the United States by an act of Congress in April 1947) and become a second lieutenant in the Reserve. After working at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Second Lieutenant Rafaela Muñiz was shipped out in late 1944, assigned to the 242nd General Hospital at Sissonne, France. She was later assigned to the 101st Evacuation Hospital in Luxembourg. “[We were] always on the go,” Muñiz recalled in 2001. “Most of the time we were dressed. We didn’t have time. There was no way that we could really get undressed [to sleep].” From Luxembourg Rafaela Muñiz was later sent to a makeshift hospital in a German town near Coblenz, about five miles away from George Patton’s Third Army. In 2001 she recalled hearing bombs exploding in the distance, and flashes of light could be seen at night. Here the nurses were dressed in combat clothing at all
times. In recognition of her exemplary service, Nurse Muñiz was promoted to first lieutenant in France in May 1945. After the war Rafaela Muñiz returned to home and civilian life and married Efrain (Frank) Esquivel, who served as a radio operator in the air force in the South Pacific during the war. Esquivel later retired from professional nursing and has been a caregiver to various family members since then. The World War II generation of Latinas has repeatedly followed the pattern of working as reliable and compassionate caregivers for their families. Throughout the country the war effort also encompassed the many small tasks that made life a bit more bearable for the overseas serviceman. One example, an organized letter-writing campaign by women for lonesome overseas soldiers, was the effort of the Spanish-American Mothers and Wives Association. This organization, 300 strong, began in 1944. Women worked baking cookies, selling war bonds, raising money through raffles, and writing a four-page newsletter, Chatter, which carried tidbits about Mexican American servicemen and women and local milestones, such as births, deaths, and weddings. Relatives bought Chatter for a nickel to send to their loved ones on assignment overseas. The dues in this organization were fifty cents a month. A recurring theme for the Latina mothers who took jobs outside their homes during World War II was the lack of day care or after-school programs for their children. The federal government sought to alleviate the problem by establishing day-care centers for women in defense jobs, but care was available for only around 135,000 of the 4.5 million children under the age of fourteen. Josephine Ledesma, working as a mechanic at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, left her young boy with her mother and mother-in-law in Austin and saw her child when she could on weekends. In one survey, taken in 1944, half the women workers said that they wanted to keep working after the war. But many were given pink slips to make employment available for returning GIs. For example, only 14 percent of the women who had worked in the aircraft industry in Los Angeles during the war years retained their jobs in June 1946. Ledesma was one who reluctantly returned to her routine after the war. “Oh, I loved it. I thought I was just doing a real big thing,” she said. “After the war there was not anything like that. You had to put your mind to work at something else.” World War II ushered in momentous changes for U.S. Latinas by providing jobs, independence, and outlets for civic participation. Latinas rose to the occasion and in many instances embraced the newfound opportunities, carefully negotiating the new independence with respect to the old ways of deferring to the hus-
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World War II band, father, or brother. As the men returned stateside, it is a matter of debate how much lasting change had taken place for Latinas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in some cases there was no turning back: some Latinas were less tolerant of bad marriages, and divorce became an attractive option. Most Latinas resumed their prewar domestic roles, and many deferred to the male head of household. However, it is certainly true that this generation of Latinas enjoyed an unprecedented measure of freedom and self-reliance and perhaps filled their own daughters’ imaginations with dreams of exciting new possibilities. See also Military Service SOURCES: Acosta-Belén, Edna. 1986. “Puerto Rican Women in Culture, History, and Society.” In The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and Society, ed. Edna Acosta-Belén. New York: Praeger; Campbell, Julie A. 1990. “Madres y esposas: Tucson’s Spanish-Speaking Mothers and
Wives Association.” Arizona History 31, no. 2 (Summer): 161– 182; Colman, Penny. 1998. “On Writing Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II.” Social Science Record 35, no. 1 (Spring): 15–19; García, Juan. 1996. Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–1932. Tucson: University of Arizona Press; Gluck, Sherna Berger. 1987. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. New York: Twayne; Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Arnoldo De Leon. 1997. North to Aztlán: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States. New York: Twayne; Kennedy, David M. 1999. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930– 1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez
Y q YBARRA, EVA (1945–
)
Eva Ybarra was born on March 2, 1945, and was raised in San Antonio, Texas. Ybarra has been playing the accordion for more than thirty-five years around southern Texas and the Southwest. She is the undisputed “queen of the accordion” in conjunto music, “la reina de la acordeón.” Along with Chabela Ortiz and Brown Express of San Jose, California, and the lesser-known Lupita Rodela of San Antonio, Ybarra is among only a few women in the history of traditional conjunto music to lead her own conjunto band. Moreover, Ybarra writes most of her songs, thereby creating some of the few conjunto tunes written by a woman. Ybarra was given her first accordion by her father Pedro at the age of four, and by the time she was six, she was playing in local restaurants, cantinas, and dance halls. Ybarra was raised in a family of musicians, including her mother, who was a singer and songwriter. She often practiced with her older brother Pedro Jr., also an accordionist, who along with their father encouraged Ybarra to pursue the instrument, despite the fact that there existed no woman accordionists as role models within the conventional male stronghold in conjunto music. Ybarra considers the radio her greatest teacher, because she listened for hours at a time to accordionists such as Narciso Martínez and Tony de la Rosa. Ybarra comments that she has known from the beginning that adopting the accordion as her own instrument would require more determination and effort than that required of men in this field of music. “What I dislike the most is when people try to compliment me by saying ‘you play really good for a woman’ [ . . . ] that’s like saying I don’t play as good as the men because we all know that I’m the only woman playing.” Ybarra’s playing style is unique, often described as “making the accordion cry with emotion,” and she has established inroads for other woman accordionists in contemporary conjunto music. As a master accordionist, Ybarra has been commissioned to teach accordion classes for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Xicano Music education
program in San Antonio, Texas, for several years. She has also served in a music apprentice project sponsored by Texas Folklife Resources in Austin, Texas, teaching young women the instrument. Ybarra has released two CDs, A mi San Antonio (1994) and Romance inolvidable (1996), both on Rounder Records. In January 1999 Ybarra joined las Madrugadores, Tish Hinojosa, Rosie Pérez, Shelly Lares, and Clemencia Zapata, to form las Super Tejanas, the first all-star Tejana music performance ensemble in the history of Texas music. Las Super Tejanas performed to a sellout crowd in Austin, Texas. Ybarra also participated in the Latino Music Oral History project of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. She was one of the first five Tejano music artists selected to be part of this historic project to capture the life histories of significant Latina/o music artists in the United States. Ybarra continues to make her home in San Antonio, where, among other sites, she can be found performing live at the annual Tejano Conjunto Music Festival. SOURCES: RootsWorld (world music website). “La reina de acordeón”. Silja J. A. Talvi talks with accordion queen Eva Ybarra. www.rootsworld.com/rw/feature/ybarra.html (accessed July 24, 2005); Vargas, Deborah Rose Ramos. 2003. “Las tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. Deborah Vargas
YOUNG LORDS (1968–1972) With the cry “All Power to the People,” the Young Lords advocated independence for Puerto Rico, a socialist society, and grassroots community services controlled by, and meeting the needs of, the people. In 1968 Puerto Rican youth in Chicago, many of them former gang members, started the Young Lords Organization. A year later Puerto Rican students in New York City affiliated and formed a second chapter. When these two chapters split, the New York group became the Young Lords Party. Chapters emerged in Newark, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
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Young Lords Bridgeport, Connecticut, and briefly in Hayward, California. Puerto Rican women were active in the New York Young Lords from the beginning, fomenting a “revolution within a revolution” and demanding that the Young Lords confront “male chauvinism” within the party and society. The Young Lords’ four major offensives addressed the challenges that Puerto Ricans faced in New York, and often women’s needs. During the 1969 Garbage Offensive, the Lords cleaned up the streets for several consecutive Sundays. They piled the trash in the streets, forcing the city to remove it. When a church refused space for the Lords to provide children with a free hot breakfast before school, they started the Peoples Church Offensive. They took over and occupied the church for eleven days, running their breakfast program, free clothing drives, “a liberation school,” a day-care center, and health programs, as well as providing entertainment via poetry readings, music, or movies. For their third offensive, the Young Lords and the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, a group of hospital workers, took over Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. They ran lead poisoning and tuberculosis detection programs and operated a day-care center. Earlier health initiatives had included door-todoor testing of children for lead poisoning and “liberating” the city’s tuberculosis X-ray truck, which was underused. The fourth offensive’s central issues were prison conditions and reported “suicides” among Puerto Rican and African American inmates. When Young Lord Julio Roldán was found hung in his cell, the Lords occupied the church at the end of his funeral procession. The Lords also addressed police brutality, drug addiction, education, the war in Vietnam, and independence for Puerto Rico, organizing a march of 10,000 people to the United Nations in 1970 to demand the liberation of Puerto Rico. Writing in 1971, Young Lord Denise Oliver linked these initiatives with the need for women’s participation. Noting that “when the Party got started, there were very few sisters,” she explained, “We saw that we really weren’t gonna be able to do any kind of constructive organizing in the community without sisters actively involved in the Party, because most of the people that we’re organizing are women with children, through the free-breakfast program and through the free-clothing drive and health care programs.” Women questioned their roles in the party. “We didn’t have a chance to contribute politically. . . . We were relegated to doing office work, typing, taking care of whatever kids were around, being sex objects.” They formed a women’s caucus to foster their own political development and then pushed for a men’s caucus. Richie Pérez explained, “We have been having a weekly male cau-
cus to discuss the oppression of our sisters not only in the Party, but in our community in general, because we recognize machismo as one of the biggest problems in making our revolution.” The Lords identified women’s oppression as stemming from “capitalism that affects all people of the Third World” and “capitalism that affects women in terms of jobs,” as well as “the oppression that we receive from our own men.” They revised their Thirteen Point Program from calling for “revolutionary machismo” to asserting, “We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism.” In 1969 Denise Oliver became the first woman on the Central Committee, and a year later, she was joined by Gloria Fontáñez. Young Lords challenged the gender constructions they had grown up with. Iris Morales described her family as “a very strict, patriarchal type of family” and explained that her father maintained “his role as an authority figure,” and her mother was “just one step above the children—she doesn’t question anything that the father does.” Morales saw a change: “There used to be only four choices for the Puerto Rican woman— housewife, prostitute, or drug addict, and then, when the society needed more labor for its sweatshops, she would become a worker. Now there’s a new choice open to her that threatens the existence of the family and the state itself: The Revolution.” Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán added, “See, there is a biological division in sex, right—however, this society has created a false division based on a thing called gender. Gender is a false idea, because gender is merely traits that have been attributed through the years to a man or a woman.” The gay liberation movement offered an alternative. “We’re saying that to be totally real, it would be healthy for a man, if he wanted to cry, to go ahead and cry. It would also be healthy for a woman to pick up the gun, to use the gun. . . . That’s how you round people out. The Gay Liberation struggle has shown us how to complete ourselves, so we’ve been able to accept this and understand this.” Challenges remained. “We found out it’s a lot quicker for people to accept the fact that sisters should be in the front of the struggle, than saying that we’re gonna have gay people in the Party.” Although short lived, the Young Lords mounted a critique of Puerto Rico’s status, of the conditions confronting Puerto Ricans in the United States, and of gender constructions. When the Young Lords opened a chapter in Puerto Rico in 1971 to promote independence, divisions emerged within the group over whether to focus on independence or on issues in the United States. Repression from outside the group increased as well. By 1972 the remaining Young Lords became the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization.
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Young Lords SOURCES: Laó, Agustín. 1994–1995. “Resources of Hope: Imagining the Young Lords and the Politics of Memory.” Centro Bulletin 7 (Winter/Spring): 34–49; Morales, Iris, director. 1996. Palante, Siempre Palante! The Young Lords. Latino Education Network Service Inc. New York: Third World Newsreel; Torres, Andrés, and José E. Velázquez, eds. 1998. The
Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Young Lords Party and Michael Abramson. 1971. Palante: Young Lords Party. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Carmen Teresa Whalen
Z q ZAMORA, BERNICE B. ORTIZ (1938–
)
Bernice Ortiz Zamora is one of the preeminent poets to emerge from the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She has affirmed the importance of Chicano oral tradition and communal heritage to her writing, which reveals the keen eye of both social critic and mystic. She has wielded her pen to address the politics of language and race, sexual double standards, and the complex legacies of colonization and community. As a poet whose writing operates on multiple levels, she delights in the various dimensions of meaning possible in mixing Spanish and English. Many of Zamora’s poems reflect her family’s deep roots in southern Colorado: six generations of farmers on her father’s side and countless generations of Tewa and Acoma descent on her mother’s side. Like her parents, she was born in Aguilar, a village at the foot of the East Spanish Peak. In 1945 her family moved to Pueblo. Her father worked as a coal miner and then a car painter; when he became disabled, her mother took a job in an optical shop. Zamora, the oldest of five children and a precocious reader from the age of three, attended Catholic schools through the eighth grade. In high school she began to develop her artistic talent and to explore philosophy. After graduating she worked in a bank. It was in college that she developed her passion for writing. She entered Southern Colorado University in 1968 and majored in English and French. Inspired by Emily Dickinson and Japanese poetry, she began to write poems in English, Spanish, and Caló, experimenting with a range of techniques and styles. By this time she had married and become the mother of two daughters, Rhonda and Katarina. In 1972 she completed an M.A. degree at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, writing a thesis on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Francis Ponge. In the same year her award-winning first short story, “Flexion,” was published in Caracol. Involvement in the Chicano movement was a heady defining period in her life. In 1974 her marriage ended, and she moved to California with her daughters to pur-
sue a Ph.D. at Stanford University. While juggling family duties, literary studies, and teaching jobs, she became active in the movement, which she credited with accomplishing “a great deal in diminishing the degree of isolation we felt before we became visible to each other. . . . It was . . . the catalyst to cultural cohesiveness.” Zamora became part of a lively community, joining Trabajadores Culturales of San Jose and other groups. She and literati such as Alurista, Ron Arias, and Cecilia and José Antonio Burciaga gathered monthly to share their work. Because a vibrant part of this movement focused on community empowerment, Zamora and other poets served as “cultural workers,” doing readings at bookstores, churches, parks, and college campuses from coast to coast. Through their poetry they countered racial stereotypes, proudly reclaimed ethnic heritage, and challenged social injustice and inequity. Zamora boldly critiqued sexism not only in the larger society but also in the ethnic community and the movement. Her poems often addressed the experiences and concerns of women, as in “Notes from a Chicana ‘Coed’ ” who wakes up “alone each morning and ask[s], / ‘Can I feed my children today?’ ” Like many Chicana activists, Zamora called attention to survival issues rarely broached by European American feminists of the era. Zamora was one of the first Chicana poets to publish a volume of verse: Restless Serpents, a back-toback book featuring her work and that of José Antonio Burciaga, appeared in 1976. In this landmark work, deftly mixing Spanish and English, her scope encompassed identity, religion, gender relations, language, politics, and love. As literary scholar Juan Bruce-Novoa said, “Restless Serpents is a must for any serious student of Chicano literature.” Of her title poem, Zamora has remarked, “For me [it] was a metaphor of that act . . . the writing of poetry.” In 1994 Restless Serpents reappeared in a stand-alone edition, retitled Releasing Serpents and augmented by thirty new poems. Concerned by the need of Chicano youth for texts reflecting their experiences and culture, Zamora helped nurture the growth of ethnic literature. In 1979 she moved to New Mexico to work on the journal De
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Bernice Zamora painting with watercolors. Photograph by and courtesy of Valerie J. Matsumoto.
Colores. She coedited early anthologies of Chicano literature from the Flor y Canto Festivals in Albuquerque and Tempe, Arizona. She continued to work as an editor while finishing her Ph.D. dissertation on cultural archetypes in Chicano poetry, filed in 1986. Through subsequent literary scholarship she has illuminated the roles of Chicanos and Native Americans in the corrido and the position of Chicanas in American literature. Zamora is a distinguished, innovative teacher, as well as a poet and scholar. During her nine years as an assistant professor at Santa Clara University in California, her classes on Chicano and Native American literature routinely overflowed with eager students. In 1997 she returned to Colorado and has continued to teach creative writing, composition, literature, and thirdworld feminisms at Colorado State University in Pueblo (formerly the University of Southern Colorado). Though she has not focused on publication, Zamora has continued to write steadily and is a member of las Compañeras, a bilingual Chicana poetry group in Pueblo. Her work includes a vast stockpile of poems and two completed manuscripts, one on the poetic effect of modernism on Native American women and Chicana writers, the other a novel/memoir that weaves her parents’ history together with the politics of land and memory in Colorado. Her writing both traces patterns of meaning in the past and offers a vision for the future. As one stanza of her 2001 poem “Sublime Strength Reclamations” suggests: Do no harm for you can dance, Make music, sing away slavery, and Piece impatience to bead arrangements. In your heart’s barometer, create atoms.
She invokes the power of words, averring that “lyrics alone can soothe the restless serpents,” and she reminds readers of their own power: “You can charm the snakes.”
See also Feminism; Literature SOURCES: Binder, Wolfgang, ed. 1985. “Bernice Zamora.” In Partial Autobiographies: Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets, 221–229. Erlangen: Palm and Enke; Desai, Parul. 1985. “Interview with Bernice Zamora, a Chicana Poet.” Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal 2, no. 1 (Summer): 26–39; Zamora, Bernice. 1994. Releasing Serpents. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe; ———. 2001. “Sublime Strength Reclamations.” Manuscript; Zamora, Bernice, and José Armas, eds. 1980. Chicano Literary Criticism, Chicano Short Stories, Barrio Oral History, Chicano Poetry Anthology. Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications; Zamora, Bernice, José Armas, and Michael Reed, eds. 1980. Flor y Canto IV and V: An Anthology of Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications. Valerie Matsumoto
ZÁRATE, ROSA MARTA (1942–
)
Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1942, Rosa Marta Zárate immigrated to the United States in 1966 as a member of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Her family’s involvement in church activities and charitable works influenced her decision to become a women religious or sister at the age of eighteen. “I wanted to be doing what the seminarians were doing, studying theology and organizing activities for students. I didn’t want to have a boyfriend. . . . I wanted to serve, that is why I entered the convent.” Zárate and her religious community journeyed to the United States to establish a convent and school in San Ysidro, California. They quickly experienced exploitation and discrimination. “We were teaching the children for less pay than the Irish sisters before us and the priest was always ridiculing us.” Meeting with an organization of Chicana sisters, Las Hermanas, in 1971 exposed Zárate to the challenges of social change. Initially she believed, “Las Hermanas was too radical. Little by little I began to see they had something to say . . . then I saw
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Rosa Marta Zárate singing protest songs at the UCLA student hunger strike in 1992. Photograph by and courtesy of Lara Medina.
them as very free, mujeres muy libres.” Involvement with Las Hermanas led Zárate to become the first Mexicana in Latino ministry for the Diocese of San Diego in 1973 at a time when the U.S. Roman Catholic Church had only begun to acknowledge the distinct culture of Mexican American Catholics. Her own religious community disapproved of her position and prohibited her from sharing her work with the other sisters. Zárate’s exposure to Latin American liberation theology influenced her organization of youth choirs, ministries for the laity, and comunidades eclesiales de base (grassroots or small church communities). Her reputation as a community organizer took her to the San Bernardino Diocese in 1978, where she took the position of coordinator of the Department of Evangelization and Catechesis for Hispanics (DECH). She worked closely with Father Patricio Guillen, who supported her ideology. Her teachings on liberation theology eventually proved too radical for her superiors and some of her peers. Bishop Phillip Straling of San Bernardino branded her a Communist and ultimately forced her to leave her position as coordinator. Father Guillen was reassigned, and DECH was placed under new leadership. Receiving no support from her religious community, Zárate filed a $1.5-million lawsuit against the diocese alleging sexual discrimination, fraud, and breach of contract. Losing her suit in 1994 has not discouraged Zárate from working with impoverished Chicano/Mexicano communities. She continues to organize small base communities through calpulli, a network of cooperatives in San Bernardino County emphasizing economic self-empowerment and cultural knowledge. Zárate and Guillen work closely with a team of laity in successfully applying the tenets of liberation theology in southern California. The inspiration for their efforts comes not only from liberation theology but also from
knowledge about the economic systems of their Mesoamerican ancestors. The cooperative system, or calpulli, stresses that social and economic change is possible through collective action. In addition to her strong leadership abilities, Zárate is an internationally recognized composer and singer of la nueva canción music echoing themes of justice and self-determination of oppressed peoples. Zárate travels frequently to Chiapas, Mexico, to assist textile cooperatives operated by indigenous women and to participate in the Zapatista struggle as a civil rights observer. Her revolutionary vision of the role of the church in society has not faded. See also Las Hermanas; Nuns, Contemporary SOURCES: Cadena, Gilbert R., and Lara Medina. 1998. “Liberation Theology and Social Change: Chicanas and Chicanos in the Catholic Church.” In Chicanas and Chicanos in Contemporary Society, ed. Roberto M. DeAnda. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon; Medina, Lara. 2004. Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Lara Medina
ZÚÑIGA, ALEJANDRA ROJAS (1923–
)
Born in Gonzalez, Texas, on May 17, 1923, Alejandra Rojas Zúñiga was one of eleven children who helped her father, Boreteo Rojas, and mother, Zarita Ruiz, work in the fields of cotton and sugarcane. The fields were a major part of the Rojases’ family life because their produce yielded money for the family to survive. Strong family ties and a work ethic made the difficulties of the depression and World War II a learning experience, according to Alejandra Rojas Zúñiga. “It was rough for us attending school in Texas because dis-
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Zúñiga, Alejandra Rojas crimination was bad there. I remember trying to get along with all the kids in the classroom, but they looked at us like we didn’t belong there.” Gradually Rojas Zúñiga’s older brothers left Gonzalez to work in San Antonio. The family eventually followed, and Rojas Zúñiga attended Burbank High School. The family traveled between San Antonio and Michigan, always looking for opportunities to work. They traveled to Michigan every year and eventually settled there in 1942. “At the time when World War II started in 1941, our family got word that there was an attack on Pearl Harbor,” Rojas Zúñiga recalled. Not long after that her brothers were drafted. She believes that the reason all of her brothers served in the U.S. Army is that the government was targeting Hispanics to go into the military. After her brothers were drafted, Rojas Zúñiga looked for work in Greenville, Michigan, to support the family. Working in a plant, she saved enough money to attend the School of Cosmetology in Saginaw, where she eventually opened her own beauty shop after finishing beauty school in 1948. Rojas Zúñiga married Tom Zúñiga and started a family in 1947. They settled in Saginaw, where the couple raised five children and managed to run the beauty shop while the children went to school. Through the support of her family, especially her brothers, Rojas Zúñiga became a member of the American GI Forum, the nation’s largest group to support Ameri-
can military veterans of Hispanic descent. The organization continues to advocate for Hispanics and is actively involved in issues concerning the Hispanic community. The American GI Forum of the United States was founded on March 26, 1948, in Corpus Christi, Texas, by Dr. Héctor Pérez-García, a veteran of the Army Medical Corps during World War II. His goal was to provide good health care for veterans who needed it and were refused because they were of Mexican ancestry. The organization links Hispanic veterans together for the same cause in 500 chapters throughout thirty states. Rojas Zúñiga became involved with the women’s chapter in such issues as employment, housing, civil rights, women’s programs, and youth activities. “I learned a lot from my own people joining this organization, because it is a national organization. Going to conventions, I learned and got acquainted with other people that make it into the higher world.” “In Texas, there was so much discrimination,” she said. “The returning veterans, like my brothers, were finding it hard to get help. The founder made it possible by organizing the American GI Forum nationwide. So with that, the organization started having chapters in different states.” “One year I attended (a national convention), and I came back here to Saginaw and told the women’s chapter that I was so tired of listening to the comments and people telling us we have problems with dropout rates. We started our program, Adopt-ASchool, for the American GI Forum in 1974. I was also serving on the Women in Community Service National Board, which recruits boys and girls for the job corps centers in regions,” Rojas Zúñiga remembered. “We’ve come a long way, and all of that is due to the knowledge that I have learned with my husband and brothers being in the military and Dr. García’s efforts to educate children for the benefit of our Hispanics.” She is thankful that her parents gave their children the understanding and knowledge a big family needs, and she is proud of her children, who have decent jobs and did not have to struggle as her family did. “My mom passed down a tradition where she wanted all of us to work together and produce for one another,” Rojas Zúñiga said. “It’s a learning experience, and I feel good I am trying to do something.” See also World War II
Alejandra Zúñiga. Courtesy of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, University of Texas, Austin.
SOURCES: Babb, Stephanie. 2003. “Veterans Group Has Been Educational Experience.” Narratives: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II, (U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project, University of Texas at Austin) 4, no. 1 (Spring): 86; Zúñiga, Alejandra Rojas. 2002. Interviewed by Raul García Jr., Saginaw, MI, October 19. Stephanie Babb
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List of Biographical Entries
q Art Alvarez, Cecilia Concepción Baca, Judith Francesca Barraza, Santa Contreras Hernández, Ester Lomas Garza, Carmen López, Yolanda López Córdova, Gloria Martínez, Agueda Salazar Mendieta, Ana Mesa-Bains, Amalia Montemayor, Alice Dickerson Romero Cash, Marie Tufiño, Nitza Valdez, Patssi
DiMartino, Rita Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán Hernández, Victoria Herrera, Carolina Lozano, Mónica Cecilia McBride, Teresa N. Muñoz, María del Carmen Olivarez, Graciela Otero-Smart, Ingrid Reid, Victoria Comicrabit Rodríguez, Hermelinda Morales Rodríguez, Sofía Sada, María G. “Chata” Saralegui, Cristina Toraño-Pantín, María Elena
Education Athletics Casals, Rosemary Fernández, Beatrice “Gigi” Fernández, Mary Joe Gallegos, Carmen Cornejo Lobo, Rebecca Rose López, Nancy Marie
Aviation and Aerospace De Acosta, Aida Ochoa, Ellen Pauwels Pfeiffer, Linda Lorena Rodríguez McLean, Verneda
Business Avila, María Elena Barceló, María Gertrudis (“La Tules”) Barnard, Juana Josefina Cavasos Briones, María Juana Burciaga, Mirna Ramos Calvillo, Ana María del Carmen Ceja, Amelia Moran De León, Patricia de la Garza
Agostini del Río, Amelia Babín, María Teresa Bencomo, Julieta Saucedo Bernal, Martha Caballero, Diana Crawford, Mercedes Margarita Martínez De Avila, Dolores C. Del Castillo, Adelaida Rebecca Esquivel, Yolanda Almaraz Figueroa Mercado, Loida Gómez-Potter, Socorro González, Laura González, Matiana Henríquez Ureña, Camila Herrera, María Cristina Maldonado, Amelia Margarita Meléndez, Sara Mora, Magdalena Navarro, M. Susana Nieto, Sonia Ontiveros, Manuela Ortega, Carlota Ayala Otero-Warren, Adelina Pantoja, Antonia Peñaranda, Ana Marcial
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List of Biographical Entries Quesada, Alicia Otilia Quesada, Dora Ocampo Ramírez, Emilia Schunior Sánchez, María E. Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza Ulibarrí Sánchez, Louise Urquides, María Luisa Legarra Varela, Beatriz
Film and Theater Braga, Sonia Colón, Miriam Del Río, Dolores Escalona, Beatríz (“La Chata Noloesca”) Fornés, María Irene Hayworth, Rita Jurado, Katy Miranda, Carmen Montez, María (María Africa Gracia Vidal) Moreno, Rita (Rosa Dolores Alverio) Prida, Dolores Reid, Marita Rivera, Chita San Juan, Olga Tovar, Lupita Vélez, Lupe Vélez-Mitchell, Anita Welch, Raquel
Grassroots Community Activism and Civil Rights Acosta Vice, Celia M. Alatorre, Soledad “Chole” Alvarez, Delia Antonetty, Evelina López Apodaca, Felicitas Arocho, Juanita Bernasconi, Socorro Hernández Betanzos, Amalia V. Blake, María DeCastro Burciaga, Mirna Ramos Caballero, Diana Calderón, Rose Marie Canales, Nohelia de los Angeles Canino, María Josefa Cardona, Alice Castillo, Guadalupe Castro, Rosie Castro, Victoria M. “Vickie” Cepeda-Leonardo, Margarita Colón, Rufa Concepción Fernández “Concha” Cotera, Martha De Avila, Dolores C.
Del Castillo, Adelaida Rebecca Espinosa-Mora, Deborah Esquivel, Yolanda Almaraz Fierro, Josefina Flores, Francisca Fontañez, Jovita Gallegos, Carmen Cornejo Garcíaz, María Gómez Carbonell, María Gómez-Potter, Socorro Hernández, María Latigo Hernández, Olivia Herrada, Elena Huerta, Cecilia Olivarez Jiménez, María de los Angeles López, María I. López, Rosie Lozano, Emma Martínez, Demetria Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland “Betita” Martínez, Frances Aldama Martínez Santaella, Inocencia Medina, Esther Mercado, Victoria “Vicky” Montes-Donnelly, Elba Iris Mora, Magdalena Morales, Iris Nieto Gómez, Anna Palacio-Grottola, Sonia Pantoja, Antonia Payán, Ilka Tanya Reyes, Guadalupe Robles Díaz, Inés Rodríguez, Patricia Sánchez, María Clemencia Santiago, Petra Saucedo, María del Jesús Talamante, Olga Torres, Alva Torres, Lourdes Treviño-Sauceda, Mily Varela, María Vásquez, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vélez de Vando, Emelí Zárate, Rosa Marta
Journalism Alvarez, Aida Alvarez, Linda Arías, Anna María Armiño, Franca de Betances Jaeger, Clotilde Carbonell, Anna Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia
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List of Biographical Entries Idar Juárez, Jovita Lozano, Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo Lozano, Mónica Cecilia Martínez, Demetria Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland “Betita” Olivera, Mercedes Quintero, Luisa Saralegui, Cristina Silva de Cintrón, Josefina “Pepiña” Villarreal, Andrea and Teresa
Labor Activism Betanzos, Amalia V. Capetillo, Luisa Chávez, Helen Chávez-Thompson, Linda De la Cruz, Jessie López Durazo, María Elena Escobar, Carmen Bernal Govea, Jessica Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda Huerta, Dolores Lucas, María Elena Marshall, Guadalupe Mercado, Victoria “Vicky” Moreno, Luisa Parsons, Lucia González Patiño Río, Dolores Ramírez, Sara Estela Rodríguez, Patricia Schechter, Esperanza Acosta Mendoza “Hope” Tenayuca, Emma Torres, Ida Inés Treviño-Sauceda, Mily
Law Callejo, Adelfa Botello Echaveste, María Hernández, Antonia López, María I. Madrid, Patricia A. Martínez, Vilma S. Morales-Horowitz, Nilda M. Perales, Nina Rodríguez, “Isabel” Hernández Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz
League of United Latin American Citizens Acosta, Lucy García, Eva Carrillo de Gonzáles, Elvira Rodríguez de Machuca, Ester Méndez, Consuelo Herrera
Montemayor, Alice Dickerson Ontiveros, Manuela Orozco, Aurora Estrada Sloss-Vento, Adela Vásquez, Anna Wolf, Esther Valladolid
Libraries Belpré, Pura López, Lillian Miller, Esther Núñez, Ana Rosa Ruiz, Irene Hernández
Literature Alfau Galván de Solalinde, Jesusa Allende, Isabel Alvarez, Julia Anzaldúa, Gloria Babín, María Teresa Belpré, Pura Betanzos, Amalia V. Borrero Pierra, Juana Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cabrera, Lydia Castillo, Ana Cervantes, Lorna Dee Chávez, Denise Cisneros, Sandra De Acosta, Mercedes De Aragón, Uva De Burgos, Julia De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés De la Garza, Beatríz Del Prado, Pura Escajeda, Josefina Espaillat, Rhina P. Esteves, Sandra María García, Cristina García-Aguilera, Carolina González Mireles, Jovita Guerra, Fermina Henríquez Ureña, Camila Jaramillo, Cleofas Martínez Martí de Cid, Dolores Martínez, Demetria Meléndez, Concha Mistral, Gabriela (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) Mohr, Nicholasa Mora, Patricia “Pat” Moraga, Cherríe Norte, Marisela Núñez, Ana Rosa
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List of Biographical Entries Obejas, Achy Ortiz Cofer, Judith O’Shea, María Elena Peña de Bordas, (Ana) Virginia de Ramírez, Sara Estela Ramírez de Arellano, Diana Rivera, Roxana Rodríguez Cabral, María Cristina Rodríguez de Tió, Lola Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Sánchez Garfunkel, Aura Luz Sepúlveda, Emma Trambley, Estela Portillo Vicioso Sánchez, Sherezada “Chiqui” Viramontes, Helena María Zamora, Bernice B. Ortiz
Medicine and Science Aragón, Jesusita Novello, Antonia Coello Ochoa, Ellen Rodríguez-Trias, Helen Vidal, Irma
Military Service Bozak, Carmen Contreras Novello, Antonia Coello Phillips, Carmen Romero Quesada, Dora Ocampo Rodríguez McLean, Verneda Vásquez, Anna Velázquez, Loreta Janeta
Music and Dance Alonzo, Ventura Arroyo, Martina Baez, Joan Chandos Boyar, Monica Canales, Laura Carr, Vikki “Charo” (María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza) Cruz, Celia De Arteaga, Genoveva Dueto Carmen y Laura Estefan, Gloria Fernández, Rosita García, Providencia “Provi” Guerrero, Rosa Hamlin, Rosalie Méndez Hernández, Victoria Hinojosa, Tish “La Lupe” (Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond)
Lares, Michelle Yvette “Shelly” León, Tania Mendoza, Lydia Miranda, Carmen Moreno, Rita (Rosa Dolores Alverio) Morillo, Irma Olivarez, Graciela Pérez, Graciela Quintanilla Pérez, Selena Ramírez, Tina Rico, Angelina Moreno Rivera, Chita Rivera, Graciela Silva, Chelo Torres, Patsy (Patricia Donita) Vélez-Mitchell, Anita Vidaurri, Rita Ybarra, Eva
Philanthropy Avila, María Elena Callejo, Adelfa Botello Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán Lobo, Rebecca Rose Lozano, Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo Meléndez, Sara Munguía, Carolina Malpica de Olivarez, Graciela Quesada, Alicia Otilia Quesada, Dora Ocampo
Politics Alvarez, Aida Arroyo, Carmen E. Baca Barragán, Polly Cabrera, Angelina “Angie” Casal, Lourdes Chacón, Soledad Chávez Chávez, Linda Collazo, Rosa Cortéz Cotera, Martha Davis, Grace Montañez DiMartino, Rita Echaveste, María Figueroa Mercado, Loida Flores, Diana Grau, María Leopoldina “Pola” Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán Hernández, María Latigo Kimbell, Sylvia Rodríguez Lebrón, Dolores “Lolita” Lee Tapia, Consuelo Madrid, Patricia A.
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List of Biographical Entries Martínez, Anita N. Mederos y Cabañas de González, Elena Inés Méndez, Olga A. Mendoza, María Estella Altamirano Mojica-Hammer, Ruth Molina, Gloria Morales-Horowitz, Nilda M. O’Donnell, Sylvia Colorado Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, María Concepción “Concha” Otero-Warren, Adelina Pedroso, Paulina Rangel, Irma Rincón de Gautier, Felisa Rivera, Aurelia “Yeya” Rodríguez de Tió, Lola Rodríguez Remeneski, Shirley Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana Roybal-Allard, Lucille Sánchez, Loretta Solis, Hilda L. Souchet, Clementina Toraño-Pantín, María Elena Velázquez, Nydia M. Wilcox, Mary Rose Garrido
Urrea, Teresa Virgen de Guadalupe Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre Zárate, Rosa Marta
Spanish Borderlands and Colonies, 1521–1900
Public Health and Social Work Abarca, Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz Del Valle, Carmen Delgado, Jane L. Olivares, Olga Ballesteros Rodríguez-Trias, Helen San Antonio, Ana Gloria Sánchez Cruz, Rebecca Smith, Plácida Elvira García Wolf, Esther Valladolid
Religion Arguello, María de la Concepción (Sister María Dominica) De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés Ferré Aguayo, Sor Isolina Figueroa, Belén Florez, Encarnación Villarreal Escobedo García Cortese, Aimee Guzmán, Madre María Dominga León, Ruth Esther Soto (“La Hermana León”) Lorenzana, Apolinaria Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia Pérez, Eulalia Rivera Martínez, Domitila Rosado Rousseau, Leoncia (“Mamá Léo”) “Sister Carmelita” (Carmela Zapata Bonilla Marrero) Soto Feliciano, Carmen Lillian “Lily” Tarango, Yolanda
Arballo, María Feliciana Arguello, María de la Concepción (Sister María Dominica) Avila, Modesta Barceló, María Gertrudis (“La Tules”) Barnard, Juana Josefina Cavasos Borrero Pierra, Juana Briones, María Juana Callis de Fages, Eulalia Francesca y Josepha Calvillo, Ana María del Carmen Carrillo de Fitch, Josefa Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia Cossio y Cisneros, Evangelina Cuero, Delfina De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés De León, Patricia de la Garza Jaramillo, Cleofas Martínez La Llorona La Malinche (Malinalli Tenepal) Lorenzana, Apolinaria Martínez Santaella, Inocencia Mugarrieta, Elvira Virginia (Babe Bean; Jack Bee Garland) Nuestra Señora de la Divina Providencia Parsons, Lucia González Pérez, Eulalia Pinedo, Encarnación Reid, Victoria Comicrabit Rodríguez, Josefa “Chepita” Rodríguez de Tió, Lola Ruiz, Bernarda Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Swilling, Trinidad Escalante Toypurina Urrea, Teresa Vallejo, Epifania de Guadalupe Vallejo de Leese, María Paula Rosalía Velázquez, Loreta Janeta Virgen de Guadalupe Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre
World War II Abarca, Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz Albelo, Carmen Barrera, Plácida Peña Bozak, Carmen Contreras Chabram, Angie González Córdova, Lina
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List of Biographical Entries Dimas, Beatrice Escadero Esquivel, Gregoria Guerrero, Victoria Partida Kissinger, Beatrice Amado Ledesma, Josephine Moraga, Gloria Flores Nerio, Trinidad
Ontiveros, Manuela Phillips, Carmen Romero Quesada, Dora Ocampo Rodríguez McLean, Verneda Sena, Elvira Vásquez, Anna Zúñiga, Alejandra Rojas
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List of Organizations
q Antonio Maceo Brigade Aprenda y Superese Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA) ASPIRA Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) Cántico de la Mujer Latina Casita Maria, New York Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA) Centro Hispano Católico Centro Mater Chicana Caucus/National Women’s Political Caucus Chicana Rights Project Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC) Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN) Communist Party Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) Community Service Organization (CSO) Congreso del Pueblo Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party Cuban Women’s Club Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR) El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) El Rescate Friendly House, Phoenix Fuerza Unida Ganados del Valle Head Start Hijas de Cuauhtémoc Hispanic Mother-Daugher Program (HMDP) Houchen Settlement, El Paso Hull-House, Chicago International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) La Mujer Obrera
La Raza Unida Party Labor Unions Las Hermanas League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Líderes Campesinas Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA) Mexican Mothers’ Club, University of Chicago Settlement House Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA) Mujeres por la Raza National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW) National Chicana Conference National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW) National Council of La Raza (NCLR) National Hispanic Feminist Conference National Puerto Rican Forum New Economics for Women (NEW) New York City Mission Society (NYCMS) Pilsen Neighbors Community Council Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA) Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) Substitute Auxiliary Teachers (SATs) Tabaqueros’ Unions Tempe Normal School United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA) United Farm Workers of America (UFW) Vanguardia Puertorriqueña Young Lords
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Selected Readings in Latina History
q Acosta, Teresa Paloma, and Ruthe Winegarten. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Acosta-Belén, Edna, Margarita Benítez, José E. Cruz, Yvonne González-Rodríguez, Clara E. Rodríguez, Carlos E. Santiago, Azara Santiago-Rivera, and Barbara Sjostrom. “Adíos Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History and Contributions. Albany, NY: Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies, SUNY, 2000. Alvarez, Julia. Something to Declare. New York: Plume, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Interviews = Entrevistas. Ed. Ana Louise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2000. Aparicio, Frances. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. Aquino, María Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez, eds. A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Blocker, Jane. Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Bouvier, Virginia M. Women and the Conquest of California, 1542–1840: Codes of Silence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Cantú, Norma, and Olga Najéra-Ramírez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Casas, María Raquel. “Married to a Daughter of the Land”: Interethnic Marriages in California, 1820–1880. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006. Castañeda, Antonia I. “The Political Economy of NineteenthCentury Stereotypes of Californianas.” In Between Borders: Essays on Mexican/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida Del Castillo, 213–238. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press, 1990. Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume, 1995. Chávez, Marisela R. “ ‘We Lived and Breathed and Worked the Movement’: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo-Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA– HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 83–105. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000. Chávez-García, Miroslava. “Guadalupe Trujillo: Race, Culture, and Justice in Mexican Los Angeles.” In The Human Tradi-
tion in California, ed. Clark Davis and David Igler, 31–46. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002. ———. Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Cocco De Filippis, Daisy, ed. Documents of Dissidence: Selected Writings by Dominican Women. New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 2000. Cotera, María Eugenia. “Engendering a ‘Dialectics of Our America’: Jovita González’s Pluralist Dialogue as Feminist Testimonio.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 237–256. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000. Dávila, Arlene. Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. de la Torre, Adela, and Beatríz Pesquera, eds. Building With Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Doran, Terry, Janet Satterfield, and Chris Stade, eds. A Road Well Traveled: Three Generations of Cuban American Women. Fort Wayne, IN: Latin American Educational Center, 1988. Flores, María Eva. “St. Joseph’s Parish, Ft. Stockton, Texas, 1875–1945: The Forging of Identity and Community.” U.S. Catholic Historian 21 (Winter 2003): 13–31. Flores, William, and Rina Benmayor, eds. Latino Cultural Citizenship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. García, María Cristina. “Adapting to Exile: Cuban Women in the United States, 1959–1973.” Latino Studies Journal 2, no. 2 (May 1991): 17–33. ———. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. García, Matt. A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gil-Montero, Martha. Brazilian Bombshell: The Biography of Carmen Miranda. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989. Goldman, Anne E. “ ‘I Think Our Romance Is Spoiled,’ or, Crossing Genres: California History in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don.” In Over the Edge: Remapping the American
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Selected Readings in Latina History West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, 65–84. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. González, Deena J. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. González, Jovita. “Jovita González: Early Life and Education.” In Dew on the Thorn, ed. José E. Limón. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997. Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Gutiérrez, Ramón. “Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History.” American Quarterly 45 (1993): 44–72. ———. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hart, Dianne. Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant’s Story. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997. Henkes, Robert. Latin American Women Artists of the United States: The Works of 33 Twentieth-Century Women. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999. Hewitt, Nancy A. Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ———, ed. Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Jensen, Joan M. “Disenfranchisement Is a Disgrace: Women and Politics in New Mexico, 1900–1940.” New Mexico Historical Review 56 (January 1981): 5–36. Katz, Robert. Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. Latina Feminist Group. Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Leonard, Elizabeth D. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Leyva, Yolanda Chávez. “Breaking the Silence: Putting Latina Lesbian History at the Center.” In New Lesbian Studies, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni McNaron, 145–152. New York: Feminist Press, 1996. Lucas, María Elena. Forged under the Sun/Forjado bajo el sol: The Life of María Elena Lucas. Ed. Fran Leeper Buss. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Martin, Patricia Preciado, ed. Beloved Land: An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. ———, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Matos Rodríguez, Felix V., and Linda C. Delgado, eds. Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Medina, Lara. Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.
Menjívar, Cecilia. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Mirabel, Nancy Raquel. “Ser de aquí: Beyond the Cuban Exile Model.” Latino Studies 1, no. 3 (November 2003): 366–382. Montoya, María. Lost in Translation: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Mora, Pat. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Moreno, Luisa. “Caravans of Sorrow: Noncitizen Americans of the Southwest.” In Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigration in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez, 119–123. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996. Muñiz, Vicki. Resisting Gentrification and Displacement: Voices of Puerto Rican Women of the Barrio. New York: Garland, 1998. Ochoa, María. Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Orozco, Cynthia E. “Alice Dickerson Montemayor: Feminism and Mexican American Politics in the 1930s.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, 435–456. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Ortiz Cofer, Judith. Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pantoja, Antonia. Memoir of a Visionary. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002. Pedraza, Silvia. “Beyond Black and White: Latinos and Social Science Research on Immigration, Race and Ethnicity in America.” Social Science History 24 (Winter 2000): 697–826. ———. Political and Economic Migrants to America: Cubans and Mexicans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pérez, Gina. The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pessar, Patricia. “Sweatshop Workers and Domestic Ideologies: Dominican Women in the New York Apparel Industry.” International Journal of Urban Regional Research 18, no. 1 (March 1994): 127–142. Pitti, Gina Marie. “The Sociedades Guadalupanas in the San Francisco Archdiocese, 1942–1962.” U.S. Catholic Historian 21 (Winter 2003): 83–98. Ponce, Mary Helen. Hoyt Street: An Autobiography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Prieto, Yolanda. “Cuban Women in New Jersey: Gender Relations and Change.” In Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna R. Gabaccia, 185–210. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana S. Rivero, eds. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. Rodríguez, Clara. Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Lati-
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Selected Readings in Latina History nos in Hollywood. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004. ———, ed. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Rodríquez-Estrada, Alicia. “Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez: Images on and off the Screen, 1925–1944.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, 475–492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Rose, Margaret. “César Chávez and Dolores Huerta: Partners in ‘La Causa.’ ” In César Chávez, ed. Richard Etulain. Boston: Bedford Press, 2002. ———. “From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975.” Labor History 31, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 271–293. Ruiz, Vicki L. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. ———. From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———, ed. Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000. Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ruiz, Vicki L., and Susan Tiano, eds. Women on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Responses to Change. Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1987; rpt. Westview Press, 1991. Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo. [C. Loyal, pseud]. The Squatter and the Don: A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California. San Francisco: Samuel Carson and Co., 1885. Rpt. with an introduction and notes by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992; 2nd ed., 1997. ———. Who Would Have Thought It? Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872. Rpt. with an introduction and notes by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995. Salas, Elizabeth. “Ethnicity, Gender, and Divorce: Issues in the 1922 Campaign by Adelina Otero Warren for the U.S. House of Representatives.” New Mexico Historical Review 70 (October 1995): 367–382. Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Sánchez, Rosaura. Telling Identities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Sánchez González, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Sánchez Korrol, Virginia. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. ———. Teaching U.S. Puerto Rican History. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1999. Sánchez Walsh, Arlene. Latino Pentecostal Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Torres, Lourdes, and Immaculada Pertusa, eds. Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel, and Mario T. García. Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Valle, Isabel. Fields of Toil: A Migrant Family’s Journey. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994. Veciana-Suarez, Ana. Birthday Parties in Heaven: Thoughts on Love, Life, Grief, and Other Matters of the Heart. New York: Plume, 2000. Velázquez, Loreta Janeta. The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velázquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier. With an introduction by Jesse Alemán. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Villarreal, Mary Ann. “The Synapses of Struggle: Martha Cotera and Tejana Activism.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 273–295. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000. Weber, Devra. “Historical Perspectives on Mexican Transnationalism.” Social Justice 26, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 39–58. ———. “Raiz Fuerte: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers.” Oral History Review 17, no. 2 (1989): 47–62. Whaley, Charlotte. Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe. Albuquerque: University of New Press, 1994. Whelan, Carmen Teresa. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Yohn, Susan. A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Zamora, Emilio, Cynthia Orozco, and Rodolfo Rocha, eds. Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001. Zavella, Patricia. Women’s Work and Chicano Families. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.
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Notes on Contributors
q Edna Acosta-Belén is Distinguished Service Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women’s Studies at the State University of New York at Albany and director of the Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies (CELAC). Her publications include “Adíos Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History and Contributions (with Margarita Benítez, José E. Cruz, Yvonne González-Rodríguez, Clara E. Rodríguez, Carlos E. Santiago, Azara Santiago-Rivera, and Barbara Sjostrom, 2000) and Women in the Latin American Development Process (with Christine E. Bose, 1995).
Organization, and the 1960s counterculture movement. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative cultures from the University of California, Irvine.
José M. Alamillo is an assistant professor of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University. He researches the intersections of labor, leisure, sport, and politics among Mexican Americans in twentieth-century California. Recent publications include “Mexican American Baseball: Masculinity, Racial Struggle, and Labor Politics in Southern California, 1930–1950,” in Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture, ed. John Bloom and Michael Willard (2002). He is the author of Bitter Lemons, Sweet Lemonade: Mexican Labor and Leisure in a California Town (forthcoming).
Gabriela F. Arredondo is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote “Navigating Ethno-racial Currents: Mexicans in Chicago 1919–1939, Journal of Urban History (2004) and co-edited Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (with Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella, 2003). She is the author of Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1919– 1939 (forthcoming).
Jonathan Alexander was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Benny Andrés Jr. teaches history at Imperial Valley College. His essay “La Plaza Vieja (Old Town Albuquerque): The Transformation of a Hispano Village, 1880s–1950s” is in The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico (2000). His dissertation, “Power and Control in Imperial Valley, California: Nature, Agribusiness, Labor and Race Relations, 1900–1940,” was completed in 2003. Frances R. Aparicio is a professor and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. Among her many publications are Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (1998) and Latino Voices (1994). Linda Apodaca studies Chicana historiography and feminism, the history of the Los Angeles Community Service
Bettina Aptheker is a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of several books, including The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1976, 1999), Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982), and Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Existence (1989).
Bruce Ashcroft is an air force historian, Headquarters Air Education and Training Command (AETC) History Office, Randolph AFB, Texas. He has been active in air force education and training heritage and developed a World Wide Web site and a CD-ROM describing AETC and air force history. He authored The Territorial History of Socorro, New Mexico (1988), and In Remembrance: The Centennial History of Trinity Presbyterian Church (1991). Carole Autori is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Irvine. As an undergraduate at UC Irvine, she was a Chancellor’s scholar and the 2003 Shirley Hine scholar in history. She is a former television and documentary film producer. Stephanie Babb was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Bettie Baca is a consultant with the firm Alex Rodríquez and Associates. She was a senior member of the Clinton
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Notes on Contributors administration from 1994 to 2001, serving first as assistant director of the Minority Business Development Agency and later as executive secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce under the late secretary Ronald H. Brown. David Badillo is a historian who conducts research on Latinos/as in the United States, published a monograph on Latinos in Michigan (2003), and has recently completed a book on Latinos and urban Catholicism. He has taught at Lehman College, CUNY, the University of Notre Dame, Brooklyn College, CUNY, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Wayne State University. Francisco Balderrama is a professor of Chicano Studies and history at California State University, Los Angeles. He coauthored Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (1995), and published In Defense of La Raza, The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate, and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936 (1982). Victor Becerra holds an M.A. and C.Phil. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. He directs the Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) at the School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, and engages in applied research initiatives, service learning, and outreach activities to foster community development. Julia Bencomo Lobaco is an award-winning Mexican American journalist and was editor of VISTA magazine. During her tenure at VISTA she was named one of the 100 most influential Spanish-language journalists in the United States (2001) by the Hispanic Media 100. She is also an independent consultant and writer/editor. Maylei Blackwell is an assistant professor in the César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include globalization, oral history, and transnational cultures in the Americas. She is writing a book on early Chicana feminism. Carlos Kevin Blanton is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. In addition to articles on Mexican American education in the Pacific Historical Review and Social Science Quarterly, his monograph The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 was published in 2004. Andrea Boardman is executive director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. She was the writer and producer of “U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848” for PBS and KERA-TV and designed the exhibition Destination Mexico: A Foreign Land a Step Away—U.S. Tourism to Mexico, 1880s–1950s at the DeGoyler Library, Southern Methodist University.
Ramón Bosque-Pérez is a researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, CUNY. With José Javier Colón-Morera he coauthored Las carpetas: Persecución política y derechos civiles en Puerto Rico (1997). He is the co-editor of Puerto Rico under Colonial Rule: Political Persecution and the Quest for Human Rights (with ColónMorera, 2005). Margie Brown-Coronel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. Becoming a Latina historian has been her dream since her undergraduate days at the University of California, Berkeley. She is most interested in late-nineteenth-century Californianas and earlytwentieth-century Mexican immigration. Enrique M. Buelna is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include labor, working-class social movements, race and ethnic relations, and environmental justice. He has a tenure-track position in history at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, California. Emily Burgess was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Melanie E. L. Bush teaches at Brooklyn College and is the associate editor of the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities newsletter, REMarks. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the City University of New York and researches racism and intergroup relations. She is the author of Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness (2004). Susanne Cabañas, a poet and writer, completed For a Whole World, a compilation of four poemarios, America Poems, In Mourning, The Rose and the Ghetto, and Love Poems, published in a limited edition. She has a tenuretrack position in history at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, California. She is working on Songs of My Childhood, a collection of autobiographical free prose. Dagmaris Cabezas, a writer and journalist, has worked for Columbia University’s Health Sciences Division and the City University of New York (CUNY) and was the first Hispanic vice president at a CUNY senior college. She participated in the Antonio Maceo Brigade, the first group of Cubans to be invited to visit Cuba after the 1959 revolution. José Z. Calderón is the holder of the Michi and Walter Weglyn Endowed Chair for Multicultural Studies, Cal Poly, Pomona. He has published numerous articles based on his experiences and observations, including “Lessons from an Activist Intellectual: Participatory Research, Teaching, and
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Notes on Contributors Learning for Social Change” in Latin American Perspectives and “Organizing Immigrant Workers: Action Research and Strategies in the Pomona Day Labor Center.” Roberto R. Calderón is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. His research interests include social and labor history. He published Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880–1930 (2000), and is completing a book, Mexican Politics in Texas: Laredo, 1845–1911. Yolanda Calderón-Wallace teaches the history of Mexicans in the United States at Los Medanos Community College in northern California. She holds an M.A.T. in history from the University of California, Davis, and is co-owner of Human Behavior Associates, Inc. Albert M. Camarillo is the Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service at Stanford University. Among his many publications are Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios (1979) and Chicanos in California: A History of Mexican Americans (1984). His most recent book is Not White, Not Black: Mexicans and Racial/Ethnic Borderlands in American Cities (forthcoming). Elaine Carey is an assistant professor of Latin American and gender history at St. John’s University in New York. She researches student movements, human rights movements, and gender and sexuality in Latin America. From 1997 to 2002 she taught at the University of Detroit and directed the James Guadalupe Carney Latin American Solidarity Archive (CLASA). Eve Carr is a prospect research analyst with the Zoological Society of San Diego. She was formerly a staff historian at the Cape Fear Museum in North Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Arizona State University. Hector Carrasquillo is the Murray Koppelman Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Syracuse University and a degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary, New York. He teaches courses on Puerto Rican and Latino culture and education. María Raquel Casas is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Chicano/a history and general American history. Her scholarly interests include colonialism, gender history, and the Spanish borderlands. She is the author of Married to a Daughter of the Land: Interethnic Marriages in California, 1820–1880 (2006).
Carolina Castillo Crimm is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. Among her publications are Cabin Fever (2001), Turn-of-the-Century Photographs from San Diego, Texas (2003), and De León: A Tejano Family History (2004). Philip C. Castruita teaches Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and is a doctoral student in history and cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian is a professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests and numerous publications are in the emergent area of Chicana/o cultural studies, transnationalism, critical literacy, and multiculturalism. Dorian Chandler studies at Brooklyn College and volunteers at WBAI 99.5 Pacifica Radio, where she and other volunteers have a weekly talk radio program, Student Voices for Peace, on issues affecting young people. Alicia Chávez is a doctoral candidate in history at Stanford University. She resides in southern California, where she is completing a dissertation about Mexican American union laborers in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. She recently published “Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers,” in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community (2005). Marisela R. Chávez is an assistant professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She wrote “ We Live and Breathed and Worked the Movement: The Contradictions and Rewards of Chicana/Mexicana Activism in el Centro de Acción Social Autónomo-Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA–HGT), Los Angeles, 1975–1978.” In Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz, 83– 105. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000. Miroslava Chávez-García is an assistant professor in Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her publications focus on Mexican and Native women, patriarchy, and nineteenth-century law in California. She is the author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (2004). Evelia Cobos Yusuf is a retired educator who lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. She holds a B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. In 1981 she established Milpitas Piano Instruction in California. Daisy Cocco De Filippis is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, CUNY. Among her many publications are Docu-
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Notes on Contributors ments of Dissidence: Selected Writings by Dominican Women (2000) and From Desolation to Compromise: The Poetry of Aida Cartagena Portalatín (1988). Julie Cohen teaches at Santa Monica City College and is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. Her areas of interest include twentieth-century California, the western United States, and gender studies. Marcelle Maese Cohen is a doctoral student in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include critical race theory, postcolonial and ethnic studies, and labor history. Elizabeth Conde-Frazier is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the Claremont School of Theology and received the Hispanic Theological Initiative’s Dissertation Series Award for her work on Hispanic Bible institutes. Ordained with the American Baptist Churches, she formerly directed Hispanic and Latin American Ministries at the Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts. Alicia M. Cortez is a counselor in the Office for International Student Programs at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. She received recognition for the Chicana/ Latina History Project. María Eugenia Cotera is an assistant professor in American culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include “Engendering a ‘Dialectics of Our America’: Jovita González Pluralist Dialogue as Feminist Testimonio” in Las obreras: The Politics of Work and Family (2000). Natasha Mercedes Crawford is a nonprofit housing attorney in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned a B.A. in government from the University of Texas, Austin, and a J.D. from Boalt Hall, the University of California, Berkeley. She was admitted to the Arizona bar in 1997. Mercedes Cros Sandoval is a professor emerita of anthropology at Miami-Dade College and an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of the University of Miami. She is the author of various publications, including Mariel and Cuban National Identity (1986). Bárbara C. Cruz is a professor of Social Science Education at the University of South Florida. She conducts research on the representation of Hispanics in school curricula and textbooks, diversity issues in education, and the teaching of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her publications include young adult biographies of Frida Kahlo and Rubén Blades and Multiethnic Teens and Cultural Identity (2001).
Carlos A. Cruz is managing editor of Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. He holds a master’s in graphic and computer arts, was an art editor and critic for the Spanish-language press, and curated several exhibitions on Latin American artists. He wrote Herencia Clásica (1990) and “Ana Mendieta” in Latina Legacies (2005). María D. Cuevas, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Washington State University, is an adjunct faculty member at Washington State-Tri-Cities. In 2006 she will be affiliated with Yakima Community College. She is interested in documenting Chicana activism in Washington. Karen Mary Dávalos is an assistant professor of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her publications include Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán Scholarship, 1970–2000 (2001). Adela de la Torre is a professor and director of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her research and publications focus on health care and finance issues affecting the Latino community. She is the co-author of Mexican Americans and Health: Sana¡ Sana¡ (with Antonio L. Estrada, 2001) and co-edited Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies (with Beatríz Pesquera, 1993). Maritza de la Trinidad is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Arizona and authored “The Segregation of Mexican Americans in Tucson Public Schools: Chicanos in Arizona, Southwest Have Long History of Fighting Discrimination” in Arizona Report (Spring 2000) and, with Adela de la Torre, “The Chicano Movement: Intersection of a Social Movement and Institutional Reform” in Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States: An Encyclopedia, edited by Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (2003). Arnoldo De León is C. J. “Red” Davidson Professor of history at Angelo State University, Texas. His significant publications include The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (1982, 1997), They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (1983), and Ethnicity in the Sunbelt: Mexican Americans in Houston (2001). His most recent work is Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848–1890 (2002). Linda C. Delgado conducts research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. immigration history, race, class, and ethnicity in Latino and gender studies. Her publications include Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives with Félix Matos Rodríguez (1998) and five biographies in Making It in America: A Sourcebook on Eminent Ethnic Americans, edited by Elliott Barkan (2001).
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Notes on Contributors Christa Desimone was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. José A. Díaz is head reference and humanities bibliographer at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY). His most recent accomplishments include cotranslating into Spanish the new CUNY Information Competency Tutorial and cowriting a book chapter, “Language and Literary Research in a Bilingual Environment.” Eileen Diaz McConnell is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her recent project, “Variation and Transition in the Hispanic Experience in the United States,” documented demographic changes in the Latino population between 1990 and 2000 and evaluated the quality of Hispanic data in U.S. Census Bureau data sources. Ana María Díaz-Stevens is a professor of Church and Society at Union Theological Seminary, New York. Her publications include An Enduring Flame: Studies on Latino Popular Religiosity (1994), coedited with Anthony M. StevensArroyo, and Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion: The Emmaus Paradigm, coauthored also with Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo (1998). Edward J. Escobar is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and history at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity (1999). He teaches about race and the American criminal justice system and Mexican American history and coedited Forging a Community: The Latino Experience in Northwest Indiana, 1919–1975 with James B. Lane (1987). Elizabeth Escobedo is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Her dissertation focuses on Mexican Americans in Los Angeles during World War II. She consulted on “Zoot Suit Riots” (2001), a PBS documentary in which she offered commentary on the roles of Mexican American women in the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1942.
cuses on youth culture, feminisms of color, and literary theory. She is completing a manuscript titled Revolutionary Sisters: Chicana Activism and the Cultural Politics of Chicano Power. Martha Espinoza authored entries in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, and a feature piece for Hispanic Magazine, “A Passion for History: A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya” (1999), and contributed to 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martínez. María R. Estorino is the project director and archivist of the Cuban Heritage Digital Collection, a digital preservation and access project of the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection. She holds graduate degrees in history and library science from Northeastern University and Simmons College, respectively. Elisa Linda Facio is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications include Understanding Older Chicanas: Sociological and Policy Perspectives (1996). She has also published several articles on Chicana feminism. She researches globalization, gender violence, and aging. Lilia Fernández holds a postdoctoral fellowship in Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Receiving a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, she focuses on the history of migration and community formation among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Beginning July 2006, she will be an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University. Nancy Page Fernández is a professor and director of the Interdisciplinary General Education Program at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She researches home dressmaking and the industrialization of women’s clothing fashion and has published articles on paper pattern technology, household dressmaking, and the sewing machine.
Virginia Espino is a doctoral candidate in history at Arizona State University. She is a recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson grant for women’s studies and the author of “Women Sterilized As They Give Birth: Forced Sterilization and Chicana Resistance,” in Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family (2000).
Margarite Fernández-Olmos is a professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and writes extensively on contemporary Caribbean and Latin American literatures. Among her recent publications are U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers (2000), coedited with Harold Augenbraum, and Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and Its Diaspora (2001), coedited with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.
Dionne Espinoza is an assistant professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Holding a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, her work fo-
Yvette G. Flores-Ortiz is a professor of Chicano Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her current studies examine intimate partner violence among Mexicans on both
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Notes on Contributors sides of the border. Her publications bridge clinical psychology and Chicano/Latino studies, where she focuses on gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. She is also a licensed research psychologist. Estelle B. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of history at Stanford University. Among her many publications are Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (1981), Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (1996), and No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (2002). Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Rosa Linda Fregoso is a professor and chair of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her publications include MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (2003), Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films (2001), Miradas de mujer (with Norma Iglesias, 1998), and The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (1993). Lori Gallegos-Hupka received a J.D. from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. A family law attorney, she lives in Huntington Beach, California. Alma M. García is a professor of sociology and Women’s Studies at Santa Clara University. She has published The Mexican Americans (2002), Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (1997), and several articles in Gender and Society, Latin American Research Review, and Journal of American Ethnic History. Georgina García pursues graduate studies at Hunter College, CUNY. An honors graduate of Brooklyn College, CUNY, she is interested in combining her experiences in the performing arts with advanced studies in the social sciences on Latin Americans and Latinos in the United States. Ismael García engages in archival research at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library and Archives, Hunter College, CUNY. María Cristina García is an associate professor of history at Cornell University and director of the Latino Studies Program. She conducts research on comparative immigration and ethnic history and authored Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (1996). Matt García is an associate professor of American civilization at Brown University, author of A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (2001), and coeditor with Angharad Valdivia
and Marie Leger of Geographies of Latinidad: Mapping the Future of Latina Studies for the 21st Century (forthcoming). Lisa García Bedolla is an assistant professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and political science at the University of California, Irvine. Her area of specialty is Latino political incorporation and representation in the United States. She is the author of Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (2005). Antonia García-Orozco was a dissertation fellow in the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She teaches courses in the field at California State University, Northridge. In 2005 she completed her doctorate in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Anelisa Garfunkel holds a degree in journalism from Boston University School of Communication and a certificate in filmmaking from Rockport College. A videographer in the Federated States of Micronesia, she produced a number of educational videos for the region of Micronesia and is completing a documentary on surviving a spinal cord injury. Raquel C. Garza was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Dorcas R. Gilmore teaches English and computer skills for the Presidential Anti-poverty Plan in Neyba, Bahoruco, Dominican Republic. She graduated magna cum laude from the Honors Degree Program at Rollins College with a major in psychology and double minors in Women’s Studies and African/African-American Studies. Marylou Gómez holds degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Chicago. She studies American ethnic groups, Spanish literature, and U.S. history and plans to complete a doctoral degree. Deena J. González is a professor and chair of the Department of Chicana/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. She has published extensively on nineteenth-century New Mexico and authored Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (1999). She is coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (2005). Gabriela González is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Her dissertation, titled “Two Flags Entwined: Transborder Activists and the Politics of Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in South Texas, 1900–1950,” focuses on gendered transborder or fronterizo politics and the struggle for civil rights in Texas.
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Notes on Contributors María de Jesús González is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Central Florida. She has published articles on modern Mexican art and collecting practices in Mexico. She currently researches Mexican photography and contemporary Puerto Rican women artists. Monica González was an undergraduate at St. Mary’s College. Luis G. Gordillo was a student in a research class dedicated to the Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia project at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Linda Gordon is a professor of history at New York University. Her book The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction won the Bancroft Prize for best U.S. history book and the Beveridge Prize for best book on the history of the Americas. The author of several award-winning books in U.S. women’s history, she is working on a book about photographer Dorothea Lange and the New Deal. Rachel Greene was a student in a research class dedicated to the Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia project at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Richard Griswold del Castillo is a professor of Mexican American Studies at San Diego State University. Among his significant publications are North to Aztlán: Mexican Americans in United States History (with Arnoldo De Leon, 1992), César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (with Richard García, 1995), and The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (1990). Guadalupe Gutiérrez holds a degree in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her clinical work focuses on adult and juvenile justice, with special training in forensics and competency. She researches ethnopsychology, specifically cross-cultural assessment, and the role of race and gender in the juvenile justice system. Ramón A. Gutiérrez is a professor of history and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and author of When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (1991). The winner of eleven major academic book awards, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, he is completing Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism: A Cultural History of the Chicano Movement, 1965–1990 and Crucifixion, Slavery, and Death: Genizaro Politics and Identity in New Mexico, 1700–1990. Laura Gutiérrez-Witt was director of the internationally prestigious Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
at the University of Texas, Austin. She currently serves as executive secretary of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) and is a freelance writer and researcher. Michelle Habell-Pallán is an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. She coedited Latino/a Popular Culture: Cultural Politics into the 21st Century (with Mary Romero, 2002). Linda B. Hall is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Among her many publications are Oil, Banks, and Politics: The United States and Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1917–1924 (1995), Tangled Destinies: Latin America and the United States (1999), and Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas (2004). Gabriel Haslip-Viera is an associate professor and director of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at City College, CUNY. He authored Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692–1810 (1999) and edited Taino Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics (2001). Pedro Juan Hernández is senior archivist at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY. He was head archivist and director of the Archives of the Puerto Rican Migration to the United States, 1898–1948, and coauthored Pioneros: Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1892–1948. Nancy A. Hewitt is a professor of history and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has authored two books, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (1984) and Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s– 1920s (2001), and edited A Companion to American Women’s History (2002). She is also coeditor of Visible Women: New Essays on Women’s Activism (with Suzanne Lebsock, 1993). Karen V. Holliday conducts research on Latina health issues at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she held a postdoctoral fellowship. She explores the role of Latinas in the healing process and the impact of gender distinction on Latina/o health outcomes. She was a Peace Corps Health Sector volunteer in the Dominican Republic and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Rachel Howell was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Albert L. Hurtado holds the Travis Chair in Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. Among his publications are Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Cul-
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Notes on Contributors ture in Old California (1999), Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1988, 1989, 1998), “Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century: The Politics of History in a Contested Region,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Winter 2001): 417–435, and “When Strangers Met: Sex and Gender on Three Frontiers,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 17, no. 3 (1996): 52–75. Jorge Iber is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University. His publications include Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999 (2000), “El diablo nos esta llevando: Utah Hispanics and the Great Depression,” Utah Historical Quarterly (1998), and articles in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West, Perspectives in Mexican American Studies, and West Texas Historical Association Yearbook. Ada María Isasi-Díaz is a professor, founder, and codirector of the Hispanic Institute of Theology at Drew University. Among her many publications are Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church, with Yolanda Tarango (1988), Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens, coeditor and contributor (1988), Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century (1996), and Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, coeditor and contributor (1996). Margaret D. Jacobs is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her publications include Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879–1934 (1999). She is currently writing “White Mother to a Dark Race: White Women and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the United States and Australia, 1880–1940.” Callie Jenschke was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim directs the Hispanic Research and Information Center (HRIC) at Newark Public Library. Among her many publications are Puerto Rico: An Interpretive History from Pre-Columbian Times to 1900 (1998), Puerto Rico’s Revolt for Independence: El Grito de Lares (1984), and The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History (1973), with Kal Wagenheim. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University.
Asunción Lavrin is a professor of history at Arizona State University. Among her many significant publications are Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (1978), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (1989), and Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (1995). She is completing book projects on nuns and on masculinity and the religious orders in colonial Mexico. Luis Daniel León is a visiting assistant professor in Ethnic Studies and Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He authored La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (2004) and researches transnationalism, ethnicity, race, culture, and queer theory. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas, El Paso. She is completing a scholarly monograph on children’s immigration experiences and has authored several articles on border lives and identities. Amy Lind teaches in the Studies of Women and Gender Program at the University of Virginia. She authored Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (2005). Iris López is an associate professor of sociology at the City College of New York and directs the program in Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies. Her publications and research interests focus on Puerto Rican and Latina sterilization. She is currently working on a manuscript on the development of the Hawaiian Puerto Rican community. Tomás López-Pumarejo is an assistant professor of economics at Brooklyn College. He teaches multicultural marketing and business and conducts research on the Latin American television industry and marketing of historic, revitalized urban sites. Alessandra Lorini is a professor of history at the University of Florence, Italy. Her publications include Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (1999) and Ai confini della libertà: Saggi di storia americana (2001).
Nicolás Kanellos is the Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of Houston and founding publisher of the literary journal the Americas Review and the publishing house Arte Público Press. He is the director of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, a national research program.
Olga Loya is a professional storyteller who grew up in East Los Angeles, California, and specializes in dramatic thematic theatrical performance. A nationally recognized Latina performer, she uses a mix of Spanish and English stories in a one-woman show for adults and children.
Katie Kennon was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin.
Lisa Magaña is an associate professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Arizona State University. She researches and writes about immigration and Latino public policy.
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Notes on Contributors Her publications include Straddling the Border: Immigration Policy and the INS (2003). Pamela J. Marshall holds an M.S. in management from the University of Maryland. She studied history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and served in the U.S. Army Reserve and the Maryland Army National Guard. She trains examiners for the National Association of Securities Dealers. Elena Martínez is a folklorist at City Lore: The New York Center for Urban Folk Culture. The primary fieldworker for the South Bronx Latin Music Project, she interviews musicians, arranges photo and archival research, and produces public programs. She coproduced the exhibition A Float for All Seasons: New York City’s Ethnic Parades at the Museum of the City of New York. Virginia Martínez directs the International Center for Health Leadership Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An attorney, she has spent most of her career working in nonprofit organizations. An advocate for women and children, she was executive director of Mujeres Latinas en Acción from 1992 until 1997. Irene Mata is a doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include women and labor, Chicana/o literature, and U.S. ethnic literature. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez is an associate professor of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center and directs the Center of Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. His publications include Women in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820– 1868 (2001), Boricuas in Gotham (2004), and Puerto Rican Women’s History (1998). Valerie Matsumoto is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She conducts research on Asian American, women’s, and oral history. Her publications include Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (coedited with Blake Allmendinger, 1999), and Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (1993). Wendy McBurney-Coombs is a professor of Spanish at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia. She taught school in her native Trinidad and Tobago, completed advanced education in the United States, and currently researches AfroHispanic literature and cultural studies from a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Lara Medina is an associate professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her recent publications include Las Hermanas: Chicana/Latina Religious-
Political Activism in the U.S. Catholic Church (2004) and “Día de los muertos: Public Ritual, Community Renewal, and Popular Religion in Los Angeles” (with Gilbert Cadena) in Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (2002). Lisa Meléndez is an associate professor of Library Services at Suffolk County Community College. She coordinates the library instruction program, teaches library research methods, and advises the Ammerman Campus’s Latino student club. She has also served on a local advisory board to the New York State Documentary Heritage Program on Latinos in New York State. Rubén G. Mendoza is a professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Center, California State University, Monterey Bay, and directs the Institute for Archaeological Science, Technology, and Visualization. He has published extensively on Mesoamerican archaeology and in reference books, including Herencia Mexicana: The Mexican Americans of Kern County, 1870–1955 (1986). Sylvia Mendoza was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Cecilia Menjívar is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University. Her research interests include immigration, family dynamics, and religious communities among Central Americans in the United States. She is the author of Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (2000). Edward Mercado is the director of the Division of Diversity Planning and Management (DPM) in the New York State Department of Civil Service and former commissioner of the New York State Division of Human Rights. He writes about ethnic and social issues. Ronald L. Mize is an assistant professor of Latino Studies and sociology at Cornell University. He conducts research on the historical origins of racial and class oppression in the lives of U.S. Mexicans and published “Crossing the Border for Health Care: Access and Primary Care Characteristics for Young Children of Latino Farm Workers along the U.S.-Mexico border” in Ambulatory Pediatrics (2003). Allison Mokry was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Douglas Monroy is a professor of history at the Colorado College and author of Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (1990), winner of the James Rawley Prize of the Organization of American
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Notes on Contributors Historians, and Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (1999). Anthony Mora is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University and currently studies the historical construction of race, gender, and sexuality. His next project explores the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in the early-twentieth-century Midwest. Milga Morales is Dean of Student Life at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her academic interests center on English-language acquisition among Hispanics, multicultural education, and the education of Puerto Ricans in the United States. She has developed curricula for educating elementary and non-English-speaking students. Jackie Morfesis is an instructor in the Department of Fine Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She researches art history and women’s studies and is a recipient of a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship to Greece and an Andrew W. Mellon Program grant in art history. Vicky Muñiz is an associate professor of social geography in the School of General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, cofounder of Mujeres in Action in Brooklyn, and the author of Resisting Gentrification and Displacement: Voices of Puerto Rican Women of the Barrio (1998). She examines gender issues, immigrant groups, and return migration in Puerto Rico. Laura K. Muñoz, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Arizona State University, held a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and is an AERA/Spencer Predissertation fellow. She is completing a dissertation on Mexican American education in Arizona during the era of segregation and published a lesson plan based on her research in OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (Winter 2001). Lorena Muñoz, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of Southern California, is writing a dissertation, “Informal Landscapes: Gender, Place, and Culture: A Study of Latino Street Vending Practices in Los Angeles.” Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. An award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar, she includes among her publications Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Nationalisim and Colonialism, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture, and None of the Above: Puerto Rican Culture and Politics. Carrie Nelson was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin.
Victoria Núñez is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on cultural texts generated during the post–World War II migration of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to the northeastern United States. Tey Marianna Nunn received a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and is curator of contemporary Hispano and Latino collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has curated acclaimed exhibitions, including Sin nombre: Hispana and Hispano Artists of the New Deal Era, Cyber arte: Tradition meets Technology, and Flor y canto: Reflections from Nuevo México. Holly Ocasio Rizzo teaches journalism at California State University, Fullerton, and has been recognized for her writing by the Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Managing Editors, and other journalism organizations. Her work has appeared in the Miami Herald, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, Hispanic, and Hispanic Business. María Ochoa is a lecturer in Women’s Studies at San Jose State University and focuses on women of color in the United States, Chicana/o visual culture, and feminist oral history methodologies. She authored Creative Collectives: Chicana Painters Working in Community (2003) and is writing about Rita Hayworth for an anthology, From Bananas to Buttocks: Latina Bodies in Popular Culture. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Annette Oliveira was the first director of fund-raising and public relations for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City. For two years she was the media and publications director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She wrote Diez anos, a ten-year history of MALDEF and of its roots in Mexican American history. Lorena Oropeza is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She focuses on Chicano/ Chicana history and American foreign relations. Her publication include Raza Sí! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (2005). Cynthia E. Orozco teaches history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University in Ruidoso and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (forthcoming) and coedited Mexican Americans in Texas History (with Emilio Zamora and Rodolfo Rocha, 2000). She wrote eighty entries for the New Handbook of Texas.
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Notes on Contributors Victoria Ortiz is Assistant Dean for Student Services at Boalt Hall, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. She holds a J.D. from the City University of New York and is currently finishing a book on the court cases brought by Sojourner Truth. Lydia R. Otero is an assistant professor in the Mexican American Studies and Research Center at the University of Arizona. A public historian, she conducts research on the politics of saving Mexican American historical sites and wrote “Refusing to Be Undocumented: Mexican Americans in Tucson during the Depression Years” in Visions in the Dust: Arizona through New Deal Photography (2004). Jeff Paul is the Multicultural Center librarian at San Jose State University. He has served as the director of SJSU’s Chicano Library Resource Center since its inception in 1979 and is an adjunct professor in the School of Library and Information Science at SJSU. Marian Perales is a doctoral candidate in history at the Claremont Graduate University. She is completing a dissertation on the life and times of Teresa Urrea. She recently published “Teresa Urrea: Curandera and Folk Saint” in Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community (2005). Monica Perales is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Houston. The winner of the Galarza Prize at Stanford University, she conducts research in Chicana/o labor and social history, race and migration in the twentieth century, and the history of the U.S./Mexico border region. Nélida Pérez holds an M.L.S. from the School of Library Service at Columbia University and an M.A. in history and archives management from New York University. She is director and archivist at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Library and Archives at Hunter College, CUNY. María Pérez y González is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She authored Puerto Ricans in the United States (2000) and conducts research on the role of women in the Pentecostal Church. Andrés Pérez y Mena is an adjunct associate professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Among his publications are Speaking with the Dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States (1991) and Enigmatic Powers: Syncretism with African and Indigenous Peoples’ Religions among Latinos (with A. Stevens-Arroyo, 1995). Marifeli Pérez-Stable is currently vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue in
Washington, D.C. Among her most significant publications is The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. (1998). She is a professor of sociology and anthropology at Florida International University. Susan L. Pickman taught history for more than twenty years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. She received a Ph.D. in History from SUNY, Stony Brook, and holds a CFE from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. She is a sworn law enforcement officer. Kinchen C. Pier III is the manager of Trust Oil and Gas Legal and Compliance at the Bank of America in Dallas, Texas. He holds a J.D. from South Texas College of Law and is a master’s candidate in history at the University of North Texas. Beatrice Pita teaches in the Spanish Section of the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego. With Rosaura Sánchez, she has edited and written the introduction to María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s two novels, The Squatter and the Don (1992) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1995), and also Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (2001). Merrihelen Ponce, also known as Mary Helen Ponce, has written Taking Control (1987), The Wedding (1980), and Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993). Her forthcoming works include a play based on her book The Wedding, the novel Raising Albuquerque, and an essay collection. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Yolanda Prieto is a professor of sociology at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She researches Cuban migration to the United States, with particular attention to the role of women. She is writing a book-length manuscript on the origins, development, and transformation of the Cuban community in Union City, New Jersey. Laura Pulido is an associate professor of geography and the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (1996) and Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, 1968–78 (2006). Naomi H. Quiñonez is a poet, scholar, and educator whose publications include Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de colibri and The Smoking Mirror. She coedited Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Claremont Graduate School.
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Notes on Contributors Jorivette Quintana majored in business and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and has worked in many of Manhattan’s most prestigious spas. She is a freelance writer, has mentored high-school students and foster children, and plans to join the Peace Corps in Latin America. Mario Ramírez is a project archivist at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, CUNY. He holds an M.A. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in Library and Information Science, and a Certificate in Archives and Records Management from the Palmer School of Library Information Science at Long Island University. Annette L. Reed is an associate professor and director of the Native American Studies program at California State University, Sacramento. Her research interests and publications focus on comparative ethnic studies and Tolowa (Deeni/Huss) tribal history, precontact to 1934. Bárbara O. Reyes, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow, is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She teaches Chicano history, gender, race and ethnicity, and borderlands and immigration histories and is completing a manuscript, “Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the 19th Century California Missions.”
manuscripts, a documentary film with educational materials, and a general-interest book, Mexican Americans and World War II (2005). Monica Rivera was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Sally Robles is an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Clara E. Rodríguez is a professor of sociology at Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. She is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood (2004), Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (2000), and Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media (1997). Alicia I. Rodríquez-Estrada is a tenured instructor of history and chair of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Department at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. She researches popular culture and media and is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of “Dolores del Río and Lupe Vélez: Images on and off the Screen, 1925–1944” in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (1997).
Jeannette Reyes was assistant to the managing editor of Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. A Ford Colloquium Honors graduate from Brooklyn College, CUNY, she plans to pursue advanced studies on Latino/Latin American history.
Maythee Rojas is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at California State University, Long Beach. A literary critic and historian, she focuses on gender and sexuality in the work of Chicana/o and Latina/o writers.
Jean Reynolds is public history coordinator for the city of Chandler, Arizona. She works on projects that document the stories of local minority and working-class communities. Her publications include The History of the Grant Park Neighborhood, 1880–1950 (1999), African American Historic Property Survey (2004), and Victory Acres/Escalante Neighborhoods: Historias de la comunidad (2004).
F. Arturo Rosales is a professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of ¡Chicano! A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (1996), “¡Pobre Raza!”: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (1999), and Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights (2000).
Nora E. Rios McMillan is a professor of history at San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas. Her most recent publications include “ ’Siendo mi derecho . . . ’: The Hispanic Woman’s Legal Identity in the Spanish Southwest,” South Texas Studies (1999), published also in the Journal of South Texas (2000), and “The Repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression,” Journal of South Texas (1998).
Steven Rosales is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. He is completing a dissertation, “Soldados Razos: Chicano Politics, Identity, and Masculinity in the U.S. Military, 1940–1975.”
Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Austin. A founding member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, she founded and directs the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, a multifaceted effort that includes a conference, an edited volume of academic
Ana E. Rosas is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Southern California. The recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, she is completing a dissertation titled “ ‘Familias Flexibles (Flexible Families): Bracero Families’ Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries, 1942–1964.” Margaret Eleanor Rose directs the California History–Social Science Project at the Interdisciplinary Humanities
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Notes on Contributors Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent publications are “César Chávez and Dolores Huerta: Partners in ‘La Causa’ ” in César Chávez: A Brief Biography with Documents, edited by Richard Etulain (2002), and “ ‘My Own Life’s Worth’: Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers’ Union” in The Human Tradition in American Labor History, edited by Eric Arnesen (2004). She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith holds degrees in law and philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She teaches in the Mexican American Studies and Research Center at the University of Arizona, where she specializes in research on Mexican American women’s history, human rights, and immigration issues. Daniel Ruiz is an M.F.A. student in Critical Studies at the California Institute for the Arts. He graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a major in English in 2005. Vicki L. Ruiz is a professor of history and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Among her most significant publications are Cannery Women, Cannery Lives (1987), From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998), and Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community with Virginia Sánchez Korrol, 2005. Elizabeth Salas is an associate professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (1990) and has published articles on New Mexico Hispana and Washington State Chicana politicians. Carlos Sanabria teaches courses in Latin American, Hispanic Caribbean, and Puerto Rican history at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. His published articles include “Patriotism and Class Conflict in the Puerto Rican Community in New York during the 1920s,” Latino Studies Journal (1991). He holds a Ph.D. in History from the City University of New York. Reinaldo Sánchez is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University and directs its Spanish graduate program. Rosaura Sánchez is a professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Chicano Discourse (1994) and Telling Identities (1995) and coeditor with Beatrice Pita of Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (2001). She coedited the republication of Ruiz de Burton’s novels The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It? He Walked In and Sat Down, a bilingual collection of her short stories, appeared in 2000.
Virginia Sánchez Korrol is a professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Among her most significant publications are From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York (1994) and Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community with Vicki L. Ruiz, 2005. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Arlene Sánchez Walsh is an associate professor of religion at the Haggard School of Theology, Azusa Pacific University. She is the author of Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (2003) and several articles on Latino Pentecostal history. Diane Sandoval is a biomedical information specialist in New York who has many interests, including family history. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. Gabriela Sandoval is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She conducts research on the effects of racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities on political practices. Janine Santiago is an assistant professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Brockport. She teaches courses in bilingual and multicultural studies. She wrote the manual Tolerance, Community Action, and Cultural Understanding: A Guide to Assist Latina Victims of Violence. Jorge Sastre Vidal is an attending physician and course instructor in the Department of Family Practice at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an M.D. degree from the University of Havana School of Medicine, Havana, Cuba. Katherine Sayre was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Bettina E. Schmidt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Philipps-University Marburg (Germany) and a visiting professor at Oxford University, England. Her recent publications include Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (with Ingo W. Schröder 2001) and “Mambos, Mothers and Madrinas in New York City: Religion as a Means of Empowerment for Women from the Caribbean,” Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diaspora (2002). Antoinette López Sedillo is Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law. Among her many publications is the six-volume anthology Latinos in the United States. Her poetry and creative writings appear in numerous journals, and she is the current president of the Clinical Legal Education Association.
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Notes on Contributors Christine Marie Sierra is an associate professor in Political Science at the University of New Mexico. She coedited Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender (1993) and Chicana Critical Issues (1993). Lori Slaughenhoupt was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Celest Smith is a transplanted New Yorker who lives in California. Lauren Smith was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Irene Sosa is an independent film and video maker and an assistant professor in the Department of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She holds degrees from Universidad Central de Venezuela and New York University. She produced Sexual Exiles (2002) and Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero (1993). Kathleen Staudt is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso. Among her many publications are Fronteras no mas: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Irasema Coronado, 2002) and Policy, Politics and Gender: Women Gaining Ground (1998). Darcie Stevens was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. K. Lynn Stoner is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. She is the author of From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (1991) and has produced two major bibliographic works on Latin American women: Latinas of the Americas: A Source Book (1989) and Cuban and Cuban-American Women: An Annotated Bibliography (2000). Margaret Strobel is a professor of history and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her publications include European Women and the Second British Empire (1991), Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (1989), and Muslim Women in Monbasa, 1890– 1975 (1979). Ben Tatar, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and the American Theatre Wing School of Drama in New York City, appeared in the films The Battle of the Bulge, The Wind and the Lion, The Long Duel, and The Christmas Kid. His
memoir, The Dream Never Dies, relates his experiences as personal assistant to Jackie Gleason and “confidential secretary” to actress Ava Gardner. Sam Thompson is an attorney and spokeswoman for Patricia Madrid, attorney general of the state of New Mexico. Maura I. Toro-Morn is an associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University and the author of numerous articles focusing on the gender and class dimensions of Puerto Rican migration to the United States. She coedited Migration and Immigration: A Global View (with Marixsa Alicea, 2004). Benjamin Torres is an associate professor of Spanish at Western Michigan University. He was born in Havana, Cuba, and was raised in Puerto Rico. Rebecca Torres-Wilkner is a literary agent and publicist for Latina/o writers. She is located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Amanda Traphagan was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Nicole Trujillo-Pagán teaches courses in the social sciences in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She researches the intersection of politics and health policies in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and among Latinos in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz is an assistant professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her research interests include Mexican and Chicana/o literature, theater, music, language, and film in the twentieth century. Omar Valerio-Jiménez is an assistant professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. He teaches U.S. urban history, borderlands, Chicana/o studies, and immigration. He is the author of River of Hope: Identity and Nation along the Rio Grande Valley, 1749–1890 (forthcoming). Gloria Vando edited The Helicon Nine Reader and coedited Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems to Benefit Hunger Relief (with Robert Stewart, 1999). Her work was adapted for productions at the Women’s Work Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New Federal Theatre, and the Latino Playwrights Theatre in New York. She published Shadows and Supposes (2002).
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Notes on Contributors Deborah Vargas is an assistant professor of Chicano/ Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is completing a manuscript, Las Tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place. María Vega has worked at El Diario–La Prensa in New York City for more than a decade. She has written about housing policy, nonprofit institutions, and local politics, among other subjects. She currently writes for the “Folklore, Arts, and Culture” section of the newspaper. Soledad Vidal is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. A Eugene Cota-Robles fellow, she is interested in immigrant histories, community studies, and oral history projects. Joseph M. Viera is an associate professor of American literature at Nazareth College. He is writing Understanding Oscar Hijuelos, a book-length study of the Pulitzer Prize– winning Cuban American novelist. María E. Villamil is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She conducts research on Chicano testimonials and the Mexican and Colombian narrative in the second half of the twentieth century and has published numerous articles on these subjects. Mary Ann Villarreal is an assistant professor of history and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of “Synapses of Struggle: Martha Cotera and Tejana Activism” in Las obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family. She is completing a manuscript, Con ganas y amor: Tejanas and Family Owned Businesses, 1935–1955.
Angela Walker was a student in a class dedicated to the U.S. Latinos and Latinas in World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas, Austin. Devra A. Weber is a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farmworkers, Cotton, and the New Deal (1994) and coedited Manuel Gamio, el inmigrante Mexicano: La historia de su vida; Entrevistas completas, 1926–1927 (2002). Carmen Teresa Whalen is an associate professor of history at Williams College. She researches labor history and women in the garment industry and is the author of From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (2001). Norma Williams was a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington. She was the author of The Mexican American Family: Tradition and Change (1990) and editor of a special issue of Journal of Family Issues (1995) on cultural diversity. She was the first Mexican American to be elected president of the Southwestern Sociological Association. After a valiant battle against cancer, she died in the fall of 2004. Mary Ann Wynkoop is the director of the American Studies Program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Julia Young is a journalist. She was managing editor for the bimonthly Latina Style magazine and is the author of “Our Hidden History” in Latina Style (2003).
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Index
q Page numbers in bold indicate the main listing for each entry. Page numbers in italics refer to photographs. Abarca, Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz, 29–30, 29 Abella, Rosa, 529 Abortion rights: and Graciela Olivarez, 537; and Helen Rodríguez-Trias, 642 Acción Cívica Hispana: and Inés and Emilio Robles, 632 Acevedo, María: and Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP), 696 Acosta, María Ofelia, 209, 210 Acosta Bañuelos, Romana, 374 Acosta, Guadalupe: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 416 Acosta, Lucy, 30–31 Acosta Vice, Celia M., 31–32, 32, 47 Actors’ Studio: and Miriam Colón, 165 Acuña y Rosetti, Elisa: and Mexican Revolution, 463, 608; Vesper and La Guillotina newspapers founder of, 463, 465 Adam Díaz Early Childhood Development Center: and Friendly House, 272 Addams, Jane: founded Hull-House, 333, 334, 335; Children’s Book Award, 481; High School, 666 Adelante con Nuestra Vision: First National Latina Lesbian Leadership and Self-Empowerment Conference, 338 Administrative Conference of the United States: and Linda Chávez, 148 Adopt-A School: American GI Forum program, 821 (AFL-CIO) American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): Socorro Hernández Bernasconi worked for the, 87; Linda Chávez-Thompson first Latina executive vice president of, 150; and María Elena Durazo, 220; Jessica Govea New Jersey state director for the, 295; and Dolores Huerta, 332; and Labor Unions, 371; Alicia Sandoval public relations director of, 371; and Dora Ocampo Quesada, 598 African Caribbean Poetry Theater: Sandra María Esteves executive artistic director of the, 244 Aging, 33–34; and Family, 245–49; Esther Valladolid Wolf served for the state of Kansas as secretary of, 810 Agosín, Marjorie, 680 Agostini del Río, Amelia, 7, 35; and Education, 222 Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) and the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 333, 772; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 775 Agripino, Antolina, 184 Agüero Sisters, 279 Aguila, Lourdes, 183
Aguilar, Laura, 64, 65 Aguilera, Victoria, 678 Aguirre, Mirta, 316 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 21: and Aprenda y Superese, 54 Al Frente de Lucha: Rose Marie Calderón developed, 107 Alaníz, Yolanda, 26 Alarcón, Norma, 395 Alarm: Lucia González and Albert Parsons coedited the newspaper, 559 Alatorre, Soledad “Chole,” 35–36; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 137; and Labor Unions, 370; and Emma Lozano, 411; and Sterilization, 723 Alavez, Francisca, 473, 718 Alba, Jessica, 501 Albelo, Carmen, 36–37, 37 Albita: and Celia Cruz, 181; and Salsa, 654, 655 Albizu Campos, Pedro: and Juanita Arocho, 60; and Lolita Lebrón, 380; and Consuelo Lee Tapia, 383; and Helen Rodríguez-Trias, 641; and Sister Carmelita, 683; and Lourdes Torres, 758; and Emilí Vélez de Vando, 794, 795; and Laura Meneses, 794; and Movimiento pro Independencia (MPI), 795 Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 264, 767 Alfaro, Olympia, 670 Alfau Galván de Solalinde, Jesusa, 37–38 Alfonso Schomburg, Arturo: and Puerto Rican section of Cuban Revolutionary Party, 181 Ali, Tatyana (Marisol), 501 Alianza Hispano-Americana, 450; and the Americanization project, 271; and Luisa M. González, 719 Alianza Nacional Femenista: and María Gómez Carbonell, 288; and Elena Inés Mederos y Cabañas de González, 434 Alinsky, Saul, 169 Allende Gossens, Salvador, 26, 38 Allende, Isabel, 38; and Literature, 395 Alma Latina journal: and Clotilde Betances Jaeger, 87; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano, 610 Alomar, Edith, 645 Alonso, María Conchita, 160 Alonzo, Ventura, 38–39; and Teodoro Estrada mural of, 39 Altar for Dolores del Río, 453 Altars, 40–41, 40; and Marie Romero Cash, 644 Alvarado, Linda, 6
851 q
Index Alvarez, Aida, 41–42 Alvarez, Cecilia Concepción, 28, 42–43 Alvarez, Delia, 43–44 Alvarez, Ina, 506 Alvarez, Julia, 13, 279, 44; and Camila Henríquez Ureña, 316; and Literature, 395 Alvarez, Linda, 44–45 Alvarez, Lissette: and Operation Pedro Pan, 541 Alvarez Muñoz, Celia, 66 Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District, 45–46 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: and Tania León, 386 Amador, Alicia: and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA) , 506 Amador, María Ignacia: and San Gabriel Mission, 705 Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), 249: and Jessica Govea, 295; and International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 350 América Latina: and Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, 353 American Bar Association: and Adelfa Botello Callejo, 111, 112; and Legal Issues, 384; and Vilma S. Martínez, 432 American Book Award from Before Columbus Foundation: and Ana Castillo, 128; and Lorna Dee Cervantes, 141; and Denise Chávez, 144; and Sandra Cisneros, 162; and Nicholasa Mohr, 481; and Cherríe Moraga, 489 American Civil Rights Union: and Linda Chávez, 147 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG): and Sterilization, 723 American Committee for Devastated France: and Aida de Acosta, 189 American Federation of Labor (AFL): and Bracero Program, 98; and El Paso Laundry Strike, 228–29; and the antiimmigrant policy, 228; and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 410; and Luisa Moreno, 493. See also AFLCIO American Federation of Teachers (AFT): and Linda Chávez, 147; and Yolanda Almaraz Esquivel, 242; and Dora Ocampo Quesada, 598 American Friends Service Committee: and María de los Angeles Jiménez, 352; and Olga Talamante, 734 American GI Forum: and Chicano Movement, 152; and Mendoza v. Tucson School District No. 1, 450; and Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez, 789; and Alejandra Rojas Zúñiga, 821 American Legion Ladies Auxiliary: and Ester Machuca, 415 American Library Association (ALA): and Lillian López, 401 American Red Cross: and Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz Abarca, 29; and Grace Montañez Davis, 188; and Anita N. Martínez, 427; and Pachucas, 554; and Carmen Romero Phillips, 574, 575; and Esther Valladolid Wolf, 810 Americanization Programs, 46–48, 47, 48; and Bilingual Education, 89; and Chicano Movement, 152, 153, 154; and Education, 222; and Friendly House, Phoenix, 271, 272; and Houchen Settlement, 329; and Journalism and Print Media, 355; and Literature, 393; and The Mexican Mother’s Club, 460; and Mexican Schools, 467; and Mining Communities, 478; and Placida Elvira García Smith, 689 Amnesty International, 22: and Joan Chandos Baez, 77 Ana Gabriel: and Vikki Carr, 121; and Intermarriage, Contemporary, 342 Ana María Díaz-Stevens, 617 Anderson, Karen, 574 Andrade v. Los Angeles County: and Sterilization, 724
Anti-defamation League of B’nai B’rith: and Harvey Schechter, 675; Gloria Estefan, 243 Antiwar Protests, 153, 227, 373, 510, 738, 752, 795: and Delia Alvarez, 43; and Joan Chandos Baez, 77; and Movimiento Estudantil de Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) , 289; and Elizabeth Sutherland “Betita” Martinez, 429; Magdalena Mora participated in movements, 487; and Patricia Rodríguez, 636; and Young Lord’s, 816 Anti-Violence Project of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbians Center, 116 Antonetty, Evelina López, 48–49, 49, 401; and Alice Cardona, 121; and Lillian López, 401 Antonio Maceo Brigade (BAM), 49–50; and Lourdes Casal, 124 Anza, Juan Bautista de, 700, 706: and María Feliciana Arballo, 55 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 6, 51–52, 802; and Cántico de la Mujer Latina, 118; and Feminism, 254; and La Malinche, 366; and Lesbians, 387; and Literature, 394, 395; and Cherríe Moraga, 489; and Religion, 621; and Sexuality, 681; and Playwrights, 748 Apodaca, Felicitas Córdova, 52–53, 53 Apodaca, Jerry, 537 Apolinaris, Reverend Yamina: and American Baptist Churches of Puerto Rico, 620 Aprenda y Superese, 21, 54 Aquilino, Casimira, 184 Aquino, Pilar María, 621 Aragón, Jesusita, 54–55 Araiza García, Alma, 142 Arancibia, Josefina, 169, 465 Arballo, María Feliciana, 1, 55–56; and Intermarriage, Historical, 346 Arce, Rose, 740 Archuleta Sierra, Victoria, 26 Archuleta-Sagel, Teresa, 426 Arciniega, Lupe, 373 Arco Iris/RainbowHouse: and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), 506 Arcos, Pilar, 613 Areíto magazine: and Lourdes Casal, 124; and Latinas in the editorial roles of the, 23; and Antonio Maceo Brigade, 50 Arguello María de la Concepción (Sister María Dominica), 56–57, 57 Arías, Anna María, 57–58, 58 Ariel Awards: and Dolores Del Río, 201; and Katy Jurado, 358 Arizona Hispanic Community Forum: and Rosie López, 404 Arizona Orphan Abduction, 58–59 Arizona Republic, 328, 670, 689, 730 Arizona State University (ASU): and Julieta Saucedo Bencomo, 85; and Martha Bernal, 86; and Socorro Hernández Bernasconi received the Martin Luther King Jr. Servant Leadership Award from, 87; and Mexican American Student Organization (MASO), 155; and Hispanic-MotherDaughter Program (HMDP), 328; and Phelps Dodge Strike, 574; and The Ocampo Family, 597; and Tempe Normal School (TNS), 740 Arizona’s Border Ecology Project, New Mexico, 235 Armed Commandos of Liberation (CAL), 590 Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), 590
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Index Armed Independentist Revolutionary Movement (MIRA), 590 Armiño, Franca de, 59–60; and Journalism and Print Media, 355 Army Air Corps Nurses: and Colonel Nilda Carrulas Cedero Fuentes, 474; and Lieutenant María García Roach, 474; and Clelia Perdomo Sánchez, 474; and Dora Ocampo Quesada, 597; and Rafaela Muñiz Esquivel, 813 Arnaz, Desi, 94, 738 Arno, Max, 309 Arnold, Cindy: and El Puente Community Development Corporation (CDC), 366 Arocho, Juanita, 60–61, 61; and Emilí Vélez de Vando, 794 Arriaga, Rosa, 746 Arroyo, Carmen E., 61–62 Arroyo, Felicia, 632 Arroyo, Martina, 62–63 Artists, 63–66; and Cecilia Concepción Alvarez, 42–43; and Judith Francesca Baca, 74–75; and Santa Contreras Barraza, 80–81; and Ester Hernández, 318–319; and Carmen Lomas Garza, 397; and Yolanda López, 404–405; and Gloria López Córdova, 406; and Agueda Salazar Martínez, 426; and Ana Mendieta, 447–448; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452–53; and Marie Romero Cash, 643–644; and Nitza Tufiño, 767–768; and Patssi Valdez, 782–783 Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas Pentecostal: and New York City Mission Society (NYCMS), 522 Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas, 566–567 Asencio, Carmen, 11 Asociación de Trabajadoras Domésticas, 299 Asociación de Trabajadores Fronterizos (ATF): and La Mujer Obrera (LMO), 366 Asociación de Vendedores Ambulantes (AVA), 726 Asociación Ministerial de Mujeres Cristianas: and Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, 645 Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 67–68; and Communist Party, 168–169; and Francisca Flores, 264 Asociación Protectora de Madres, 319 Asociación Puertorriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas: and Josefina “Pepiña” Silva de Cintrón, 682 ASPIRA, 10, 68; and Yolanda Sánchez, 11; Antonia Pantoja founded, 11, 557–558; and ASPIRA v. New York Board of Education, 69; and Bilingual Education, 89; and María DeCastro Blake, 93; and Angelina (Angie) Cabrera, 105; and María Josefa Canino, 116; and Alice Cardona, 121; and Education, 224; and María Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258; and Luisa Quintero, 356, 601; and Sara Meléndez, 443; and National Puerto Rican Forum, 516; and Lourdes Torres, 758 ASPIRA Consent Decree, 68, 69, 89, 224 ASPIRA v. New York Board of Education, 69; and ASPIRA, 68 Asociación para la Educación Teológica Hispana (AETH), 390 Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor (AICP). See Community Service Society Association of Hispanic Arts (AHA): and Anna Carbonell, 120, and Ilka Tanya Payán, 562; and Dolores Prida, 582 Association of Minority Entrepreneurs (WAME): and Luz Bazán Gutiérrez, 305–306 Ateneo Puertorriqueño: and María Teresa Babín, 74; and Julia de Burgos, 194; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano, 610; and Lola Rodríguez de Tió, 638
Aurora, 354, 465, 608 Austin Commission for Women: and Eva Carrillo de García, 280; and Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas Pentecostal, 522 Austin Latina/o Lesbian Gay Organization (ALLGO), 388 AVANCE and LEAP: and National Puerto Rican Forum, 517 Avila, Chelo, 368 Avila, María Elena, 69–70, 70, 231 Avila, Modesta, 70–71, 71 Ayala, Isabel: and Méndez v. Westminster, 446 Azlor, María Ignacia, 530 Aztlán, 71–73, 72; and Chicano Movement, 151–154; and El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 227–228 Azusa Street: and Pentecostal Church, 565–556, 617 Babe Bean, Jack Bee Garland. See Mugarrieta, Elvira Virginia Babín, María Teresa, 74 Baca, Judith Francesca, 6, 74–75; and Artists, 64; Pachucas, 555 Baca Barragán, Polly, 75–76; and Cecilia Olivarez Huerta, 331 Baca Zinn, Maxine, 245 Baca, José, 143 Backiel, Linda: and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 590 Badillo, Herman: and Carmen E. Arroyo, 61; and Luisa Quintero column “Marginalia,” 602; and Aurelia “Yeya” Rivera, 626; and Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski, 641; and Rebecca Sánchez Cruz, 667 Baez, Joan Chandos, 76–78, 77; and Tish Hinojosa, 327 Baldorioty de Castro, Román, 638 Balenciaga, Cristobal, 325 Balmaseda, Liz, 23: and Journalism and Print Media, 356 Baptist Society: and Eva Torres Frey, 617 Barajas, Teresa, 621 Baraldini, Silvia, 590 Barbosa de Rosario, Pilar, 7, 222 Barbosa, Irma Lerma, 64 Barcelata, Lorenzo, 280 Barceló, María Gertrudis (“La Tules”), 3, 78–79, 78; and Women in New Mexico, 712, 713; and Women’s Wills, 720; and U.S.-Mexican War, 778 Barker, Walter: and Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros, 176, 177 Barnard, Juana Josefina Cavasos, 79–80; and Intermarriage, Historical, 347 Baró, Juanita: and Santería, 670 Barragan, Guadalupe, 321 Barraza, Santa Contreras, 80–81; and Religion, 621; and Artists, 66 Barrera, Plácida Peña, 81–83, 82 Barroso, Ari, 280 Basic Occupational Language Training (BOLT): and National Puerto Rican Forum, 516 Basso, Theresa, 373 Batista, Fulgencio, 242, 296, 435, 754 Bay of Pigs invasion, 296, 542, 580 Beame, Abraham: and Amalia V. Betanzos, 88; and Luisa Quintero, 602; and Patricia Rodríguez, 636 Beauchamp Ciparick, Judge Carmen, 11 Becerra Seguín, Josefa, 717 Belén Figueroa Foundation, 261
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Index Belén Jesuit High School: and Centro Hispano Católico, 139 Bello, Andrés, 441 Bello, José: and Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR), 218 Belpré, Pura, 83–84, 84 Beltrán, Alma, 738 Beltrán, Haydee: and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 590 Beltrán, Lola, 175 Benavides, Estela: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417 Bencomo, Julieta Saucedo, 84–85, 85 Beneficencia Mexicana: and Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo Lozano and Ignacio Lozano, 162, 163, 411 Benítez Rodríguez-Aviles, Julia, 474 Benito Júarez High School: and Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, 576, 622; and María del Jesús Saucedo, 673 Benito Juárez Society: and Hull-House, 334 Berio, Aida, 513 Bernal, Martha, 85–86 Bernasconi, Socorro Hernández, 86–87 Bernstein, Leonard: and Martina Arroyo, 62; Tania León studied with, 386; and West Side Story, 807, 808 Berríos, Luz M., 590 Berry, Richard, 308 Betances Jaeger, Clotilde, 87–88 Betancourt de Mora, Ana, 742 Betancourt, Emma, 181 Betancourt, Gloria: and Watsonville Strike, 805, 806 Betanzos, Amalia V., 88 Between Borders, 200 Bilingual Education, 32, 301, 636, 88–89, 89, 90; and Ana Marcial Peñaranda, 9, 564; and Evelina López Antonetty, 49; and ASPIRA Consent Decree, 68; and Julieta Saucedo Bencom, 85; and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167; and Jessie López de la Cruz, 195; and the Hispanic Professional Women’s League, 203; and the Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols, 242; and Socorro Gómez-Potter, 290; and Matiana González, 292; and Olivia Hernández, 320; and Cecilia Olivarez Huerta, 331; and Lillian López, 401; and Rosie López, 404; and Amelia Margarita Maldonado, 419, 420; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452; and Sonia Nieto, 523; María Concepción “Concha” Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, early promoter of the, 547; and Adelina Otero Warren, 550; and Antonia Pantoja, 558; and Tempe Elementary School District No. 3 (TESD), 598; and Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski, 641; and María Clemencia Sánchez, 664; and María E. Sánchez helped create, 665; and Hilda L. Solis, 691; and Student Movements, 727–728; and Substitute Auxiliary Teachers (SATs), 729; and María Luisa Legarra Urquides, 779, 780 Bilingual Education Act, 89 Billboard magazine, 144, 243 Billy Graham Evangelistic Team in Latin America: and Aimee García Cortese, 282 Birdwell, Yolanda, 367 Black and Latino Coalition against Police Brutality: and Diana Caballero, 104 Black Legend, 90–91; and Encomienda, 708–709 Black Panthers Party: and Sandra María Esteves, 243; and Fred Hampton leader of the Chicago’s, 491
Blair House: and Oscar Collazo, 163; and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 588 Blake, María DeCastro, 11, 91–93, 92 Blanca, Canales, 588 Blessed Trinity Mother Missionary Cenacle in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: and “Sister Carmelita” (Carmela Zapata Bonilla Marrero), 684 Bolton, Herbert E., 699 Bonilla, Pura, 730 Border Environment Cooperation Commission, 235 Border Industrialization Program (BIP), 420, 233 Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, 52, 395 Borgnine, Ernest, 358 Boricua College: and Celia M. Acosta Vice, 32; and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258; and Antonia Pantoja, 558 Borrero Pierra, Juana, 93–94, 93 Boston University Law School, 402 Botiller et al. v. Domínguez: and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 764 Botiller, Brigido, 763 Bouvier, Virginia Marie, 704 Boyar, Monica, 94–95, 94 Bozak, Carmen Contreras, 95–96, 96, 473, 813 Bracero Program, 26, 96–99, 420; and Environment and the Border, 233; and United Farm Workers (UFW), 333; and Migration and Labor, 469, 470; and Adela Sloss-Vento, 687 Braga, Sonia, 99; and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 160; and Movie Stars, 501; and Television, 738, 739 Brando, Marlon, 165 Brandon, George, 267, 269 Brás, Juan Mari, 795 Bright, John, 259 Briones, Brigida: and María de la Concepción Arguello, 57 Briones, María Juana, 2, 3, 99–100 Bronx Community College: and Student Movement, 727 Brooklyn College, 11, 31, 49, 668, 797; and Miriam Colón received Presidential Medal from, 165; and Loida Figueroa Mercado, 262; and Tania León, 386; and Sara Meléndez, 442; and Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, 503; and Sonia Nieto, 524; and María E. Sánchez headed the Department of Puerto Rican Studies at, 665; and Student Movements, 727–728; Margarita Mir de Cid established a bilingual and bicultural program at, 665 Brooks, Homer, 659, 168: and Emma Tenayuca, 744 Brown v. Board of Education, 446, 468, 573: and Education, 222; and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 379; and Méndez v. Westminster, 445, 446 Brown, Jerry: and the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 772; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 775 Broyles-González, Yolanda, 752 Bruce, Babbitt, 85: and Phelps Dodge strike, 574 Buenas Amigas, 388 Buenaventura, Fabiana, 184 Buford, Lieutenant Harry T. See Loreta Janeta Velázquez Buñuel, Luis, 358 Burciaga, Mirna Ramos, 6, 100–102, 101 Burton, Richard, 806 Burton, Henry Stanton, 3, 650
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Index Bush, George H.: and Catalina Vásquez Villalpando, 375; Antonia Coello Novello was nominated surgeon general by, 527; and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, 645; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 755 Bush, George W., 148, 577, 580, 611: and Latina U.S. Treasurers, 375; and Aurora Estrada Orozco, 544 Buzz magazine, 525 Caballé, María, 746 Caballero, Diana, 103–104, 103 Caballero, Laura: and Líderes Campesinas, 391 Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola, 104–105; and Literature, 393 Cabrera, Angelina (Angie), 105–106, 106 Cabrera, Lydia, 106–107, 107, 670 Cabrera, Marta, 620 Calderón, Rose Marie, 107–108, 108 California Institute of Technology: and France Anne Córdova, 677 California Labor School: and Francisca Flores, 67 California Missions, 108–110, 109 California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA): and Mily TreviñoSauceda, 390, 766 California Sanitary Canning Company Strike, 4, 110–111, 111, 238, 299, 771; and Carmen Bernal Escobar, 237–238 California State University, Los Angeles: and Linda Alvarez graduated from, 45; and Felicitas Apodaca, 53; Judith Francesca Baca was faculty at, 75; and Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 327; and Lucille Roybal-Allard, 376; and the first Chicano studies program, 727 California State Assembly: and Grace Flores Napolitano, 377; Hilda L. Solis served in the, 378; and Lucille Roybal-Allard, 646 California State Legislature: and Gloria Molina, 483 California State Senate: and Hilda L. Solis, 378, 578, 961 California State University, Long Beach (CSULB): Hijas de Cuauhtémoc published at, 326, 727; and Anna Nieto Gómez, 524, 525; and Roxana Rivera graduated from, 629; and Mily Treviño-Sauceda, 767 California State University, Monterey Bay, 453 California State University, Northridge (CSUN): and Judith Francesca Baca, 75; and Anna Nieto Gómez, 525; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 675 California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), 241, 289 California State University, San Jose, 141 Calixto García Hospital in Havana: and Irma Vidal, 799 Callava, Leticia, 183 Callejo, Adelfa Botello, 111–112 Callis de Fages, Eulalia Francesca y Josepha, 112–113 Calvillo, Ana María del Carmen, 3, 113–114 Camacho Souza, Blasé: and Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, 592, 592, 593 Camarillo, Lydia: and the Democratic National Convention Committee, 696 Canales, Alma, 506: and La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 367, 368 Canales, Laura, 114–115; and Selena Quintanilla Pérez, 600; and Patsy Torres, 759 Canales, Nohelia de los Angeles, 115–116 Cancel Miranda, Rafael, 381, 588 Candelario, Fermina, 184 Canino, María Josefa, 11, 116–117
Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), 4, 117–118; and El Monte Berry strike, 226–227; and Carmen Bernal Escobar, 237, 238; and Labor Unions, 368; and San Joaquin Valley Cotton strike, 660, 661 Canonization: and Madre María Dominga, 307 Cántico de la Mujer Latina, 118 Cantú Pérez-Guillermety, Lieutenant Colonel Lupita, 474 Cantú, Norma V.: and Chicana Rights Project, 151 Cantú, Norma, 395 Capetillo, Luisa, 8, 119, 585; and Cigar Workers, 158; and Feminism, 253, 254; and Journalism and Print Media, 354; and Literature, 394; and Luisa Moreno, 493; and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 587; and Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT), 732, 733 Carbajal de Valenzuela, Romanita, 565 Carbonell, Anna, 119–120 Carcaño, Reverend Minerva: and United Methodist Church, 620 Cardona, Alice, 120–121; and Antonia Pantoja, 10, 11; and the Hispanic Young Adult Association (HYAA), 584 Carmona, Dolores, 422 Carnegie Hall: and Martina Arroyo, 62, 63, and Celia Cruz performed at the, 181; and Genoveva de Arteaga celebrated fifty years as a music artist at the, 192; and “La Lupe” (Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond), 363; and Irma Morillo, 496; and Anita Vélez-Mitchell, 796 Carr, Eve, 330 Carr, Vikki, 121–122 Carranza, Venustiano, 337, 354, 461, 462, 463 Carrasco, Barbara, 64 Carrera, María Teresa: and Operation Pedro Pan, 542 Carrillo de Fitch, Josefa, 122–123 Carrión, Lizette, 501 Carrisoza, Fedelia: and Watsonville Strike, 805 Carta Editorial: and Francisca Flores, 264 Carter, Jimmy: and Antonio Maceo Brigade, 50; and the Nationalist Party, 164; and Cuban Political prisoner, 296; and María Leopoldina “Pola” Grau, 296; and Hilda L. Solis, 378, 692; and Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón, 381; and Elena Inés Mederos y Cabañas de González, 435; and Ruth MojicaHammer, 482; Gloria Molina deputy for presidential personnel of, 483; Graciela Olivarez the highest-ranking Hispanic female during the administration of, 537; and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 588; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 755 Casa Aztlán, 673 Casa Borinquen, 60 Casa de Recogidas, 176 Casa Esperanza, 270 Casa Loma: and New Economics for Women (NEW), 521 Casa Puerto Rico: and Patricia Rodríguez and Antonia Denis, 636 Casa Ramona Community Center in San Bernardino: and War on Poverty program, 289 Casa Victoria: and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167 Casal, Lourdes, 123–124; and Antonio Maceo Brigade, 50 Casals Istomin, Marta, 12, 225 Casals, Rosemary, 124–125 Casañas Masón, Rosa, 112
855 q
Index Casano, Gertrudis, 181 Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia, 8, 125–126, 126; and the struggles for the Cuban independence, 182, 184; and Journalism and Print Media, 353 Casarez Vásquez, Enedina, 41 Casas, María Raquel, 577, 700 Cash, Rosanne, 327 Casiano-Colón, Aida: and Scientists, 677–678 Casilda Amador Thoreson, 748 Casita María, New York, 126–128, 127; and Gloria Estefan, 243; and Sister Carmelita, 683 Cassados, Eleanor: and United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), 771 Cassaude de León, Carmen, 746 Castañeda, Antonia, 700, 709 Castañeda, Emilia, 209, 210, 211 Castañeda, Irene, 26 Castañeda, Sister Margarita, 619 Castellanos, Isabel, 670 Castillo de González, Aurelia, 7 Castillo, Ana, 65, 128–129, 800, 802; and Chicano Movement, 154; and Literature, 395 Castillo, Guadalupe, 129–130, 130 Castillo, Soledad, 746 Castro, Fidel, 22, 200, 279, 646, 754, 799; and Antonio Maceo Brigade, 50; and María Leopoldina “Pola” Grau, 296; and Elena Inés Mederos y Cabañas de González, 435, 436 Castro, Juanita, 541 Castro, Rosie, 130, 368; and Feminism, 254 Castro, Sadie: and El Monte Berry Strike, 227 Castro, Sergeant Mary, 474 Castro, Victoria M. “Vickie,” 131–132, 132; and Education, 225 Catalina, Vásquez Villalpando: and Latina U.S. Treasurers, 374 Catholic Daughters of America, 415 Catholic Service Bureau: and Operation Pedro Pan, 542 Catholic University in Ponce, 258, 628 Catholic University in Washington, D.C., 326 Cedero Fuentes, Nilda Carrulas, 474 Cedillos, María, 137 Ceja, Amelia Moran, 6, 7, 132–134, 134 Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL): and Latino Pastoral Action Center (LPAC), 523; and Religion, 620 Center for Law and Justice: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417, 418; Center for Policy Studies, 235 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 218 Central American refugees: and Guadalupe Castillo, 129 Central American Immigrant Women, 134–137; and Immigration of Latinas to the United States, 337–341; and Migration and Labor, 468–473 Central Michigan University, 545 Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 137–138; and Soledad “Chole” Alatorre, 36, 411; and Adelaida Rebecca del Castillo, 199, 200; and María Elena Durazo, 219; and Feminism, 254; and Emma Lozano, 411; and Magdalena Mora, 487; and “Isabel” Hernández Rodríguez member of, 633, 634; and Sterilization, 724 Centro de Derechos Humanos del Movimiento Demócrata Cristiano, 22
Centro Hispano Católico, 139 Centro Mater, 139 Centro sin Fronteras: and Emma Lozano founded, 411, 412 Cepeda-Leonardo, Margarita, 140; and Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR), 218 Ceprano, Dorita, 746 Cerda, Maria, 18 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 140–142; and Literature, 394 Cervantes, Maggie, 521 Cervántez, Yreina, 64 Chabram, Angie González, 142–143, 142 Chacón, Soledad Chávez, 143–144, 144 Chambers, Claude: and Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District, 46 Chapa, Evey, 368: and Chicana Caucus, 150; and Mujeres por la Raza, 506 “Charo” (María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza), 144; and Movie Stars, 501 Chávez Marta, 64 Chávez, Elsa: and Farah Strike, 249, 250 Chávez, César, 5, 149, 802; and Helen Chávez, 146; and Chicano Movement, 153; and Community Service Organization (CSO), 172; and Corridos, 175; and Jessie López de la Cruz, 195; and El Diario, 239; and Yolanda Almaraz Esquivel, 242; and Farah Strike, 249; and Farmworkers, 252; and Jessica Govea, 294; and Rosalinda Guillen Herrera, 304; and Dolores Huerta, 332; and Labor Unions, 370; and Rosie López, 404; and María Elena Lucas worked with, 414; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452; and María del Jesús Saucedo, 673; and Teatro Campesino, 752; and United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 772, 773; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 774; and Helena María Viramontes influenced by, 800, 801 Chávez, Denise, 144–145, 145; and Literature, 395; and Playwrights, 750 Chávez, Ernesto, 138, 507, 633 Chávez, Helen, 146–147, 370; and Labor Unions, 370; and Teatro Campesino, 752; and United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 772, 774, 776 Chávez, Linda, 147–148 Chávez, Marisela, 138, 411, 412 Chávez, Ravine, Los Angeles, California, 148–149 Chávez-García, Miroslava, 2, 703 Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 149–150; and Labor Unions, 371 Chicago Tribune, 533 Chicago Working Women’s Union: and Lucia González Parsons, 559 Chicana Caucus/National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 150–151 Chicana Rights Project, 151: and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), 458 Chicana Service Action Center (CSAC): and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167; and Francisca Flores, 265 Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education (CCHE), 73, 153 Chicano Movement, 6, 128, 151–154, 452; and Delia Alvarez, 43; and Guadalupe Castillo, 129; and Victoria M. “Vickie”Castro, 131; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 138, 139, 487; and Lorna Dee Cer-
856 q
Index vantes, 141; and Chicana Caucus/National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 150; and Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC), 156; and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167–168; and Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 170; and Adelaida Rebecca Del Castillo joined the, 199; and María Elena Durazo, 219; and El Movimiento Estudantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 227; and Feminism, 253; and María Garcíaz, 284; and Chicano moratorium, 289, 782; and Ester Hernández, 318; and Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 326; and Intermarriage, Contemporary, 344; and Las Hermanas, 373; and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 379; and Lesbians, 387; and Cherríe Moraga, 388, 489; and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 416–419; and Gloria Molina, 483; and Magdalena Mora, 487; and National Chicana Conference, 512; and National Council of La Raza (NCLR) founded during, 514; and Anna Nieto Gómez, 525; and “Isabel” Hernández Rodríguez, 633, 664; and María del Jesús Saucedo, 673; and And Adela Sloss-Vento, 687; and Soldaderas, 691; and Playwrights, 749; and Patssi Valdez, 782; and Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez, 789; and Bernice Ortiz Zamora, 818 Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC), 155–156 Chirino, Willy: and Operation Pedro Pan, 541, 542 Chorens, Olguita, 496 Chumacero, Olivia: and Teatro Campesino, 749, 753 Church of God: and María Rivera Atkinson, 567, 568 Cigar Makers’ International Union (CMIU), 158, 732, 733 Cigar Workers, 8, 20, 156–159, 157; and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party, 181; and Luisa Moreno, 493; and Tabaqueros’ Unions, 732 Cinema Images, Contemporary, 159–161; and Media Stereotypes, 436–438; and Movie Stars, 497–502 Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica, 161; and Carolina Malpica de Munguía, 508 Cisneros, Sandra, 6, 161–162, 629, 800, 802; and Literature, 395; and Demetria Martínez, 428 City College of the City University of New York: and Diana Caballero, 103, 104; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano taught at the, 610; and Helen Rodríguez-Trias, 642; and Iris Morales cofounded Puerto Ricans in Student Activities (PRISA) at the, 727 City of Providence Minority Business and Women Development Enterprise: and Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo, 140 City University of New York (CUNY) , 212, 442, 562: and María Josefa Canino, 116; and Lourdes Casal, 123; and Iris Morales, 491; and Graciela Rivera, 628 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 69, 89; and Vilma S. Martínez, 432 Claramunt, Teresa, 733 Clemson University, 255 Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana, 162–163; and Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica, 161; and Great Depression, 297; and Alicia Guadalupe Elizondo Lozano, 411 Clínica Monseñor Romero: and El Rescate, 229 Clinton, Bill: and Aida Alvarez, 41, 42; and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 169; and María Echaveste, 221, 222; and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 259; and Ellen Ochoa, 534; and Puerto Rican Political Prisioners, 590; and Vieques, 642; and Loretta Sánchez, 663; and Diana García-Prichard, 678; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 755
Clinton, Hillary Rodham: and health care issues, 792 Club Hermanas de Ríus Rivera: Inocencia Martínez Santaella founded the, 433; and Lola Rodríguez de Tió, 433, 638; and Aurora Fonts, 433 Club Mercedes de Varona, 433 Club Obrero Español, 163 Clubes femeninos. See Cuban Independence Women’s Clubs CNN: and Anna María Arías, 57, 58; and Television, 740 Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA), 217 Coalition of Hispanic American Women (CHAW), 24 Coalition of Labor Union Women, 758 Coalition on Violence against Women and Families on the Border, 421 Cocco De Filippis, Daisy, 38, 316 Colegio Nacional de Bibliotecarios en el Exilio, 21 Collazo, Candita, 587 Collazo, Esmeralda: and el Movimiento del Dios Vivo founder, 618 Collazo, Oscar, 163, 164, 587–588, 794 Collazo, Rosa Cortéz, 163–164, 164, 589; and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 588, 589; and Emelí Vélez de Vando, 794 Collins, María Antonietta, 740 Colmenares, Margarita: and Scientists, 678 Colombian civil war, 357 Colón, Carmelita, 25 Colón, Jesús: and Evelina López Antonetty, 49; and Rufa Concepción Fernández “Concha” Colón, 166; and Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York, 586; and the Vanguardia Puertorriqueña, 785 Colón, Marcus, 165 Colón, Miriam, 164–166, 165; and Lone Star, 398; and Theater, 747, 750; and Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT), 751, 752 Colón, Rufa Concepción Fernández “Concha,” 166–167, 166 Colón, Shirley, 593 Colón, Willie, 652, 654 Colonial Law, 700–703. See also Spanish Borderlands Colorado House of Representatives and Senate: and Polly Baca Barragán, 76 Colorado State University in Fort Collins, 818 Colorado State University in Pueblo, 240, 819 Colorado State University, 75, 818 Columbia University, 35, 37, 728, 770; and María Teresa Babín, 74; and María DeCastro Blake, 92; and Diana Caballero, 103; and María Josefa Canino, 116; and Pilar Barbosa de Rosario, 222; and Loida Figueroa Mercado, 262; and Lillian López, 401; and Vilma S. Martínez, 432; and Concha Meléndez, 441; and Olga A. Méndez, 444; and Antonia Pantoja, 558; and Nina Perales, 569; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano, 610; and Helen Rodríguez-Trias, 642; and Student Movement, 727; and Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso Sánchez, 797 Comadrazgo, 1, 703. See also Spanish Borderlands Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167–168; and Grace Montañez Davis, 188; and Feminism, 254; and Francisca Flores, 264; and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417, 418, 419; and Gloria Molina, 417, 483; and New Economics for Women (NEW), 521
857 q
Index Commission for Environmental Cooperation, 235 Committee against Fort Apache: and Diana Caballero formed the, 103, 104, and Lourdes Torres, 758 Committee for a Fair Education, 444 Committee for Abortion Rights and against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), 642 Committee to Denounce Cruelties to Cuban Political Prisoners, 22 Committee to Free Los Tres (CTFLT): and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 137; and “Isabel” Hernández Rodríguez, 633 Communist Party, U.S.A., 168–169; and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), 117; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 138; and El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española, 226; and Dorothy Healy, 238; and Josefina Fierro, 259, 260; and Consuelo Lee Tapia, 383; and Guadalupe Marshall, 425; and Luisa Moreno, 493; and Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York, 585–586; and United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), 772; and Emma Tenayuca, 744 Community Anti-drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), 642 Community Committee for Alternatives in Education (CCAE), 241, 289 Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 169–170 Community Service Organization (CSO), 5, 170–172; and Felicitas Córdova Apodaca, 53; and Grace Montañez Davis, 187; and Jessica Govea was an officer of, 294; and Dolores Huerta, 332; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 369, 674; and Labor Unions, 370; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 774 Compañeras: Latina Lesbians, an Anthology: and Juanita Ramos, 388 Compean, Mario: and La Raza Unida Party, 367 Concepción de Gracia, Gilberto, 60, 794 Concerned Citizens of Sunset Park Head Start Center: and Mujeres in Action, 503 Concilio de Iglesias Cristianas Damasco: and Leoncia Rosado Rousseau, 567, 618, 620, 644 Conesa, María, 746 Confederación de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros del Estado de California (CUCOM): and El Monte Berry Strike, 226 Conference on Women in Copenhagen (United Nations), 167, 265 Congreso del Pueblo, 172–173 Congreso Evangélico Hispanoamericano del Norte de América, 616 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): and Guadalupe (Lupe) Marshall, 425; and Alicia Otilia Quesada, 596; and San Antonio Pecan Sheller’s Strike, 659; and United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), 770, 771, 772. See also AFL-CIO Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues, 375, 377 Congressional Hispanic Caucus: and Rita DiMartino, 212; and Latinas in the U.S. Congress, 375–378; and Lucille RoybalAllard, 646; and Antonia Coello Novello, 528; and Ellen Ochoa, 534 Congressional Human Rights Caucus, 377 Connecticut House of Representatives: and María Clemencia Sánchez, 663
Constitution of 1917, 642 Consumer Credit, Housing, and Community Opportunity, 377, 792 Contreras, Carmen, 169 Contreras, Miguel: and María Elena Durazo, 220; and Labor Unions, 368–372 Cooper, Gary, 358 , 793 Coral Way School in Dade County, Florida, 89 Córdova, France, 7, 225, 677 Córdova, Lina, 173–174, 174 Córdova, Major Cathleen, 474 Cornell University, 295, 758, 801 Corona, Bert, 36, 137, 226, 411, 431 Coronado, Linda: and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), 506 Coronado’s expediction, 1, 700, 704, 710 Corpi, Lucha, 283: and Literature, 394, 395 Corretjer, Juan Antonio: and Julia de Burgos, 194; and Consuelo Lee Tapia, 382; and Emelí Vélez de Vando,794 Corridos, 175–176; and Literature, 395; and Lone Star, 398; and María Elena Lucas, 414; and Mexican Revolution, 462; and María del Jesús Saucedo, 673; and Soldaderas, 691 Corrine: and Salsa, 654, 655 Cortés, Hernán, 690, 704: and La Malinche, 364; and Encomiendas, 708 Cortez, Beatrice, 170 Cortéz, Carmen, 388 Cortéz, Gregorio, 175, 464 Cortina, Juan, 464 Coser y cantar: and Dolores Prida, 394, 582, 750 Cossio y Cisneros, Evangelina, 176–177, 177; and the Cuban-Spanish-American War, 184 Costa, María, 501 Cotera, Martha, 6, 177–178, 320; and Chicana Caucus, 150, 367; and La Raza Unida Party, 367, 368; and Mujeres por la Raza, 506 Council of Brooklyn Organizations, 31, 32, 635 Council on Foreign Relations: and Linda Chávez, 148; and Rita DiMartino, 212; and Vilma S. Martínez, 432; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 756 Court of Private Land Claims in New Mexico: and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 763 Covarrubias, Consuelo, 619 Cranston, Alan, 188 Crawford, Mercedes Margarita Martínez, 178–179, 179 Cristal, Linda, 160, 738 Cristero Civil War: and Corridos, 175 Cros Sandoval, Mercedes, 670 Cross-dressing: and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and Mercedes de Acosta, 189; and Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta, 502; and Loreta Janeta Velázquez, 790–791 Crossroads Tabernacle in the Bronx: and Aimee García Cortese, 282, 618 Crusade for Justice, 789 Cruz Takash, Paula, 578 Cruz, Celia, 179–181, 180, 799; and Cuban Women’s Club, 183; and “La Lupe,” 363; and Irma Morillo, 496; and Selena Quintanilla Pérez, 601; and Salsa, 653, 654, 655 Cruz, Irma Violeta, 620 Cruz, Migdalia, 750 Cruz, Penelope, 436–438, 497
858 q
Index Cruzada de Jovenes Cristianos de la Iglesia Cristiana de Damasco, 567, 618, 644 Cruzada Educativa Cubana (CEC), 288 Cruzada Femenina Cubana, 22 Cuadra, María, 512 Cuarón, Ralph, 67 Cuauhtémoc Club and the Aztecas: and Hull-House, 334 Cuban Adjustment Act, 580 Cuban American National Council, 212 Cuban American National Foundation’s (CANF), 183 Cuban American organization Of Human Rights, 434 Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party (PRC), 181–182, 288, 471; and José Martí, 19, 157, 433; and Cigar Workers, 157; and Cuban Independence Women’s Club, 182; Inocencia Martínez Santaella, 433; and Leopoldo Mederos, 434; and Paulina Pedroso, 563; and Ten Years’ War, 742 Cuban Children’s Program, 541 Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, 646 Cuban Independence Women’s Club, 19, 182, 433; and Cigar Workers, 156–159; and Cuban and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Party (PRC) 181–182; and Tabaqueros’ Unions, 732–733 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, 646 The Cuban Minority in the United States, 123 Cuban political prisoner, 296 Cuban Refugee Center in Miami, 21 Cuban Refugee Program (CRP), 20, 472; and Aprenda y Superese, 54 Cuban Revolution, 18, 19, 436, 582; and Lourdes Casal, 123, 124; and Immigration of Latinas to the United States, 340; and Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez “Betita,” 429; and Migration and Labor, 472; and Estela Portillo Trambley, 394; and Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez, 789 Cuban Teacher Training Program, 21 Cuban Women’s Club, 23, 183–184, 183 Cuban-Spanish-American War, 19, 20, 184–185, 185, 368, 473, 585; and José Martí, 93; and Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros, 176; and Inocencia Martínez Santaella, 433; and Rafaela Mederos, 434; and Migration and Labor, 470; and Paulina Pedroso, 563; and Ten Years’ War, 742–743; and Treaty of Paris, 766; and Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 803 Cuero, Delfina, 185–186 Cueto, María, 590 Cuevas, Evelyn, 503 Cuevas, Nydia: and Puerto Rican Women Political Prisoners, 590 Cugat, Xavier, 95, 144, 322, 609, 796 Cuomo, Mario: and Carmen E. Arroyo, 62; and Angelina “Angie” Cabrera, 106; and María Josefa Canino, 116; and Nilda M. Morales-Horowitz, 492; and Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski, 641 Curbelo, María Ana, 717 Curtis, Jesse W.: and Madrigal v. Quilligan suit, 418 Dallas Baptist University (DBU), 263 Dallas Morning News, 538, 539, 652 Danau, Rita, 7 Darío, Rubén: and Juana Borrero Pierra, 93; and Uva de Aragón, 190; and Concha Meléndez wrote about, 441, 442; and Lola Rodríguez de Tió collaborated with, 638
Davalos Ortega, Katherine: and Latina U.S. Treasurers, 374 Davis, Angela, 451 Davis, Grace Montañez, 187–188, 188; and Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 169 Dawson, Rosario, 344, 501 De Acosta, Aida, 188–189 De Acosta, Mercedes, 189–190 De Aragón, Uva, 190–191, 190 De Arcos, Elena, 183 De Arteaga, Genoveva, 191–192, 192 De Avila, Dolores C., 192–193 De Burgos, Julia, 6, 60, 193–194, 193, 794, 796, 797; and Journalism and Print Media, 355, 356; and Literature, 394 De Cardenás, Isidra, 465 De Castro, Dr. Marta, 183 De Erausco, Catalina, 704 De Fernández de Gamboa, Juana, 465 De Figueroa, Inocencia M., 181 De Figueroa, María Dolores, 7 De Gallo, Natividad R., 181 De García, María, 346 De Golconda, Ligia, 746 De Hostos, Eugenio María, 262, 315, 316, 638 De Jesús García, María, 27 De Jesús, Santa Teresa, 316 De la Cruz, Jessie López, 194–195, 775 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 6, 196–197, 316, 530, 762; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452; and Religions, 615; Pat Mora wrote a book about, 488 De la Encarnación, Leonor: and Encomenda, 708 De la Garza, Beatríz, 197–198, 198 De la Guerra y Noriega, Doña Anita, 346 De las Angustias de la Guerra, María, 777 De las Casas, Bartolomé, 90, 708 De León, Patricia de la Garza, 198–199, 718 De los Santos, Nancy, 739 De Moncaleano, Blanca, 354 De Narváez, Panfilo, 704 De Oñate, Juan, 704, 710 De Quesada, Angela R., 181 De Rivero, Adelaide, 181 De Soto, Rosana, 160 De Varona, Mercedes, 19, 182 De Zavala, Adina Emilia, 393, 719 Dealofeu, Bonifacia, 743 Del Castillo, Adelaida Rebecca, 6, 199–200 Del Prado, Pura, 200–201, 200 Del Río, Dolores, 201–202, 340, 495; and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 159; and Media Stereotypes, 436; and Movie Stars, 498 Del Toro, Gloria, 11 Del Valle, Carmen, 202–203, 202 Del Valle, Clara María, 184 Del Villard, Sylvia, 496 Delgado, Adela S., 209 Delgado, Jane L., 203–204 Delgado, Leonor, 717 Delgado Votaw, Carmen: and National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (NACOPRW), 513 Delta University, 540
859 q
Index Democratic Club: and Jovita Idar Juárez, 337 Democratic National Committee (DNC): and Anna María Arías worked for, 58; and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and Linda Chávez-Thompson, 150; and María Echaveste, 222; and Gloria Molina, 483 Democratic National Convention: and Angelina (Angie) Cabrera, 106; and James Hinkle, 143; and Jessie López de la Cruz, 195; and Lydia Camarillo, 696 Democratic Party, 356, 683: and Celia M. Acosta Vice worked with, 31, 32; and Carmen E. Arroyo, 61, 62; and Angelina (Angie) Cabrera, 105, 106; and Soledad Chávez Chacón, 143; and Grace Montañez Davis, 187, 188; and Francisca Flores, 265; and Jovita Fontañez, 270; and Carmen Cornejo Gallegos, 274; and Great Depression and Mexican American Women, 299; and Rosalinda Guillen worked with, 304; and Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell, 359; and Labor Unions, 369; and Latinas in the U.S. Congress, 375–378; and Rosie López, 404; and Frances Aldama Martínez, 431; and Gloria Molina, 483; María Concepción “Concha” Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, 546; and María Elena O’Shea, 548; and Alicia Otilia Quesada, 597; and Dora Ocampo Quesada, 598; Felisa Rincón de Gautier active member of the, 625; Loretta Sánchez switched to the, 663; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 674; and Emma Sepúlveda, 680; and Tempe Normal School (TNS), 741; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 754 Demography, 204–209 Dena, María, 26 Denis, Antonia: and Latinas in the Northeast, 8, 9, 13; and Patricia Rodríguez, 636 Department of Evangelization and Catechesis for Hispanics (DECH), 820 Department of Health Services (DHS), 584 Department of Homeland Security: and Lucille Roybal-Allard, 376 Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs in the United States: and Nydia M. Velázquez, 376, 791 DePaul University in Chicago, 129 Deportations During the Great Depression, 4, 5, 16, 209–211, 210, 623; and Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District, 46; and the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, 171; and Placida Elvira García Smith and Friendly House, 272, 689; and Mexican American Women, 297; and Journalism and Print Media, 355; and Migration and Labor, 469; and World War II, 811 Diana García-Prichard: and Scientists, 678 Diario Las Americas newspaper, 288 Díaz Miranda, Mercy: and Cuban Women’s Club, 183 Díaz, Cameron, 501 Díaz, Marcelina, 632 Díaz, Marie: and Hull-House, 335 Díaz, Matilde, 180 Díaz, Porfirio, 265, 326, 465, 469, 608, 680, 780: and Mexican Revolution, 460–464 Díaz, Sylvia: and National Association of Puerto Rican/Hispanic Social Workers (NAPRHSW), 512 Diego, Juan: and Virgen de Guadalupe, 801, 802 Dietrich, Marlene: and Mercedes de Acosta, 189 DiMartino, Rita, 211–212, 212 Dimas, Beatrice Escadero, 212–213, 213
Dinos, Carmen, 665 Diocese of San Diego: and Rosa Marta Zárate, 820 Directorio Estudiantil Revolucionario, 123 Directorio Estudiantil Universitario: and María Leopoldina “Pola”Grau, 295 Dobie, J. Frank: and the collection of folktales Puro Mexicano and Straight Texas, 236; and Jovita González Mireles, 293; and Fermina Guerra, 300; and María Elena O’Shea, 548 Domestic Violence, 24, 214–216, 428; and Guadalupe’s Refugio de Colores, 87; and Central American Immigrant Women, 134–137; and Chicano Movement, 154; and Juan Diego Community Center (JDCC), 321, 322; and Legal Issues, 383–384; and Líderes Campesinas, 390–392; and María Elena Lucas, 413; and Iris Morales, 491; and Mujeres in Action, Sunset Park, 503; and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), 505, 506; and New Economics for Women (NEW), 522; and María Concepción “Concha” Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, 546; and María Clemencia Sánchez, 663; and Clementina Souchet, 695; and Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez, 789 Domestic Workers, 216–217, 470; and Central American Immigrant Women, 134–137 Domínguez, Dominga, 763 Domínguez, Laura: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417 Domínguez, Margarita, 346 Domínguez, María del Carmen: directed La Mujer Obrera (LMO), 366 Dominican American National Roundtable (DANR), 217–218, 254; and Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo, 140 Dominican American Voter Registration Project, 218 Dominican Women’s Caucus, 562 Doña Ines, 704 Dopico, Elvira: and Cuban Women’s Club charter officer, 183 Dr. White Community Center in Brooklyn: and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258 Du Molins, Carmen María, 746 Dueto Carmen y Laura, 218–219, 600 Duke, Yolanda, 653, 654, 655 Duncan, Isadora: and Mercedes de Acosta, 189 Durán Méndez, Margarita: and Community Service Organization (CSO), 171, 172 Durán, Blanca: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417 Durán, María: and the Committee to Save Chávez Ravine for the People, 149 Durazo, María Elena, 6, 219–220; and Labor Unions, 370, 371 Dylan, Bob: and Joan Chandos Baez, 77; and Tish Hinojosa, 327 Early Settlement Life in the Borderlands, 704–708. See also Spanish Borderlands East Brooklyn Mental Health Project: and Inés Robles Díaz, 632 East Los Angeles Blowouts: and Victoria M. “Vickie” Castro, 131; and Chicano Movement, 151–154; and Patssi Valdez, 782 Eastern Academy, 645 Eastern New Mexico State University, 374 Echaveste, María, 221–222
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Index Echeverría Mulligan, Rose: and Intermarriage, Contemporary, 344 Eckles, Isabel: and Democratic Party, 143 Education, 222–225, 223, 224, 225; and Amelia Agostini del Río, 35; and Cecilia Concepción Alvarez, 42; and Linda Alvarez, 45; and María Teresa Babín, 74; and Julieta Saucedo Bencomo, 84–85; and Martha Bernal, 85–86; and Diana Caballero, 103–104; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 137; and Community Service Organization (CSO), 171; and Mercedes Margarita Martínez Crawford, 178–179; and Dolores C. De Avila, 192–193; and Adelaida Rebecca Del Castillo, 199–200; and Carmen Del Valle, 202; and Yolanda Almaraz Esquivel, 241–242; and Loida Figueroa Mercado, 261–263; and Socorro GómezPotter, 289–290; and Camila Henríquez Ureña, 315–317; and Sylvia Rodríguez Kimbell, 359; and the case Plyler v. Doe, 432; and Méndez v. Westminster, 444–447; and Esther Miller, 475; and Gabriela Mistral, 480; and Susana M. Navarro, 519; and New York City Mission Society (NYCMS), 522; and Sonia Nieto, 523–524; and Carlota Ayala Ortega, 545; and Adelina Otero Warren, 550; and Antonia Pantoja, 557–558; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano, 610; and María G. “Chata” Sada, 652; and María E. Sánchez, 664–666; and Aura Luz Sánchez Garfunkel, 668; and Louise Ulibarrí Sánchez, 769–770; and Young Lords, 816 EEOC v. Tortillera “La Mejor,” 383 Eighteenth Street Development Corporation: and Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, 576; and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), 506 Eisenhower, Dwight, 500: and Adela Sloss-Vento, 687; and María Luisa Legarra Urquides, 780 El Ballet Hispánico: and Tina Ramírez, 609, 747 El Barrio, 127, 172, 586: Evelina López Antonetty lived in, 48; and María Josefa Canino, 116; and Jesús and Concha Colón, 166; Jovita Fontañez grew up in, 270; Almacenes Hernández located in, 323; and Lillian López, 401; and Nicholasa Mohr, 480; and Young Lords, 491; Aurelia Rivera settled in, 626; Anita Vélez-Mitchell lived in, 795 El Centro de la Raza, 26 El cocinero español, 576 El Comité de Orgullo Homosexual Latinoamericano in New York City, 387 El Comité Femenino del Partido Nacionalista, 794 El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española, 5, 226, 253; and Communist Party, 168–169; and Josefina Fierro, 259; and Great Depression and Mexican American Women, 300; Luisa Moreno principal organizer of, 492 El Demócrata, 355 El Diario de Nueva York, 192, 355 El Diario/La Prensa, 281, 357, 670: and Journalism and Print Media, 355, 357; Luisa Quintero wrote the “Marginalia” column for, 356, 601, 602; and Rossana Rosado, 356; Ilka Tanya Payán columnist for, 562 El Diario, 239 El Grito del Norte, 429, 789 El Habanero, 288 El Heraldo Christiano, 337 El Imparcial de Texas, 355
El lector: and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and Cigar Workers, 157; and Labor Unions, 368–372; and Tabaquero’s Unions, 732–733 El Malcriado newspaper: and United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 333, 776 El Mesquite, 547, 548 El Misisipí, 392 El Monte Berry Strike, 226–227, and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), 117–118 El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 227–228, 241; and Yolanda Alaníz, 27; and Aztlán, 73; Guadalupe Castillo founder of, 129; and Adelaida Rebecca Del Castillo, 199; and Socorro Gómez-Potter, 289; and Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 327; and Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez “Betita,” 430; and Magdalena Mora, 487; and Anna Nieto Gómez, 525; and Student Movements, 727; Olga Talamante active member of, 733 El Movimiento Mujeres pro Derechos Humanos, 22 El Mundo newspaper: and Clotilde Betances Jaeger, 87; and Genoveva de Arteaga, 191; and Diana Ramírez de Arellano, 610 El Museo del Barrio, 32, 767 El Obrero: and Andrea and Teresa Villarreal, 354, 393, 465, 800 El Paso Inter-religious Sponsoring Organization (EPISO), 192, 193 El Paso Laundry Strike, 228–229 El plan espiritual de Aztlán, 73 El Progreso, 336, 337 El pueblo Chicano con el pueblo centroamericano, 64 El Puente Community Development Corporation (CDC): and La Mujer Obrera (LMO), 366 El Rescate, 229; and Central American Immigrant Women, 134–137 El Show de Cristina, 601, 672, 740 El Teatro Chicano, 199 El Valor Corporation: and Guadalupe Reyes, 576, 622 Eleanor Roosevelt Job Orientation in Neighborhoods Center (JOIN), 32 Elizonda, Evangeline: and Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA), 459 Elizondo, Matilde: and Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana, 163 Emilia Castañeda v. the State of California, County of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce: and Deportations During the Great Depression, 211 Emiliano Zapata National Liberation Army (EZLN), 691, 820 Emmy Awards: Aida Alvarez nominated for, 41; Linda Alvarez won eight, 45; and Sonia Braga, 99; Rita Moreno won two, 160, 494, 500, 739; and Cristina Saralegui, 672; and Emma Sepúlveda, 680; and Linda Cristal, 738; and María Hinojosa, 740 Empire Zinc Mining strike, 160, 369: and Phelps Dodge Strike, 574; and Salt of the Earth, 656–657 Emporia State University, 649 Encomienda, 708–709; and Black Legend, 90–91; and Mestizaje, 455; and Slavery, 684, 685. See also Spanish Borderlands Encuentro Femenil, 199, 327, 525
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Index English as a second language (ESL), 89, 90, 517, 729: and Mercedes Margarita Martínez Crawford, 178; and Carmen Gallegos, 274; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452; and New York Women’s Foundation, 504; and Basic Occupational LanguageTraining (BOLT), 516; and Carolina Malpica de Munguía, 508 English First, 89 English Plus Act, 792 Entre Ellas: health and community services program for lesbians in Texas, 388 Entrepreneurs, 229–232, 230 Environment and the Border, 232–236; and Bracero Program, 96–99; and Migration and Labor, 468–473 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 167, 513 Escajeda, Josefina, 236 Escalante, Beatriz, 26 Escalona, Beatríz (“La Chata Noloesca”), 236–237, 237, 747; and Theater, 747; and Playwrights, 749 Escobar, Carmen Bernal, 4, 237–238, 771; and California Sanitary Canning Company Strike, 110–111; and United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), 770–772 Espaillat, Rhina P., 238–239 Esparza, Laura, 750 Esparza, Ofelia, 41 Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, 388 Esperanza School for disabled children: and Guadalupe Reyes, 622 Espinosa-Mora, Deborah, 239–240 Esquivel, Gregoria, 240–241 Esquivel, Yolanda Almaraz, 241–242, 242; and Alvarez v. Lemon Grove School District, 45–46; and ASPIRA, 68; and Socorro Gómez-Potter, 289 Essays on la Mujer, 199 Estefan, Gloria, 240, 242–243 Esteves, Sandra María, 243–244; and Literature, 394 Estrada Palma, Tomás, 742 Estrada, Carmen A., 151 Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, 12, 62, 116, 225, 628, 759; and Nilda M. Morales-Horowitz, 492; and Lourdes Torres, 758 Evelina’s Heart/El corazón de Evelina, 49 Evolución, 337 Fábregas, Virginia, 746, 749: and Playwrights, 748 Faccio, Carmen, 202 Falcón García, Ana María: and Iglesias de Dios Pentecostal, 618 Familias Unidas, 543 Family Violence Prevention Act, 792 Family Violence Prevention Fund: and Líderes Campesinas, 391 Family, 245–249, 246, 247, 248; and Aging, 33–34 Fantasía Boricua: Estampas de mi tierra, 74 Farah Strike, 249–250; and Chicana Caucus, 150; and Feminism, 253; and La Mujer Obrera, 266 Faras, Concepción, 741 Farmworkers, 5, 16, 250–253, 251; and Latinas in the Pacific Northwest, 25, 27; and Bracero Program, 96–99; and Do-
lores Huerta, 332–33; and Labor Unions, 370; and Líderes Campesinas, 390–392; and Migration and Labor, 468–473; and Teatro Campesino, 752–753; and United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 772–773; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 773–776 Federación Cubana de Tabaqueros, 732 Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT), 8: and Franca de Armiño, 59; and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and the Cigar Workers, 158; and Labor Unions, 369; and the voting rights for women, 732 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): and Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 153; and Josefina Fierro, 260; and “Letter from Chapultepec,” 388–389; and Young Lords, 491; and COINTELPRO, 589; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 633; and Clementina Souchet, 695 Federal Correctional Institution for Women: and Rosa Cortéz Collazo, 164; and Dolores “Lolita,” Lebrón, 381 Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians: and Ida Inés Torres, 757 Feminism, 253–255, 802; and Gloria Anzaldúa, 51–52; and Clotilde Betances Jaeger wrote about, 88; and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and Rosie Castro, 130; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 137–138; and Chicano Movement, 151–154; and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 167–168; and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 196; and El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española, 226; and Farah Strike, 249–250; and Josefina Fierro, 259–260; and Francisca Flores, 264–65; and Camila Henríquez Ureña, 315–317; and María Latigo Hernández, 319–320; and La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 367–368; and Las Hermanas, 373–374; and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 416–419; and Ana Mendieta, 447–448; and Magdalena Mora, 487–88; and Luisa Moreno, 492–494; and Mujerista Theology, 507–508; and National Chicana Conference, 512, 513; and National Hispanic Feminist Conference, 515; and New Economics for Women (NEW), 521–522; and Anna Nieto Gómez, 525; and Adelina Otero Warren, 549–551; and Antonia Pantoja, 557–558; and Phelps Dodge Strike, 574; and Salt of the Earth, 656–657; and Soldaderas, 690–691; and Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell, 692–694; and United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA/FTA), 770–772; Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez wrote about, 789; and Andrea and Teresa Villarreal, 800 Feo, Hilda: and Operation Pedro Pan, 541 Fernández, Beatrice “Gigi,” 255; and Mary Joe Fernández, 256 Fernández, Christina, 64 Fernández, Dolores, 12: and Hostos Community College, 225 Fernández, Evelina, 160, 750 Fernández, María Elena, 750 Fernández, Mary Joe, 255–256; and Beatrice Fernández “Gigi,”255 Fernández, Nelly, 746 Fernández, Roberta, 395 Fernández, Rosita, 256–257, 257 Fernández, Ruth, 496, 652 Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, 420 Ferré Aguayo, Sor Isolina, 257–259, 258 Fierro, Josefina, 259–260, 259; and El Congreso de Pueblos
862 q
Index de Hablan Española, 5, 169, 253, 300; and The Sleepy Lagoon Case, 67; and Luisa Moreno, 226; and Feminism, 253 Fiesta del Sol: and Pilsen Neighbors Community, 576, 622 Fiesta Noche del Rio: and Rosita Fernández, 256, 257 Figueroa, Belén, 260–261, 260 Figueroa Mercado, Loida, 261–263, 262 Figueroa, María, 416 Figueroa, Rebecca, 417 Finkler, Kaja, 269 Fireworks Silueta series, 447 First Conference of Puerto Rican Studies, 665 Flores de Baker, Josefa, 719 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 259 Flores, Belén: and San Joaquin Valley Cotton strike, 661 Flores, Diana, 263–264, 263 Flores, Francisca, 264–265; and Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 67; and the Comision Femenil Mexicana National, 167; and Feminism, 254 Flóres, María: and the Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Strike, 408, 409 Flores, María Carolina, 373 Florez, Encarnación Villareal Escobedo, 265–266 Florida Atlantic University, 545 Florida International University, 376, 356, 645 Folk Healing Traditions, 266–270, 267, 268; and Pentecostal Church, 568; and Religion, 615–622; and Santería, 669–670; and Spiritism, 720–721; and Spiritism in New York City, 721–723 Fontáñez, Gloria, 816 Fontañez, Jovita, 270; and the Hartford School Board, 11 Fontes, Montserrat, 395 Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America (FTA): and Luisa Moreno, 494 Ford Foundation: and Guadalupe Castillo, 129; and Chicanos Por La Causa, 155; and “No Sweat ” campaign, 221; and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), 431, 457; and Sara Meléndez, 442; and Council of La Raza, 514; and Puerto Rican Research and Resources Center, 558; and Mily Treviño-Sauceda and Lideres Campesinas, 767 Ford, Gerald: and Anita N. Martínez, 427; and María Concepción (Concha) Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, 547 Fordham University, 105, 258 Fornés, María Irene, 270–271; and Playwrights, 750 Fourth United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing, China, 482, 569 Fraga, Teresa, 576 Frances De Pauw School in Los Angeles: and Americanization Programs, 46 Franco, Rose, 474 Freedom, 559 Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional (FIOB): and Líderes Campesinas, 391 Frida, 160 Friendly House, Phoenix, 271–272; and Americanization Program, 46; and Placida Elvira García Smith, 689, 690; and Mary Rose Garrido Wilcox, 809 From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 371 From out of the Shadows, 247, 414
Frontani, Hilda: and Mujeres Latinas en Acción (MLEA), 505 Fuerza Unida, 272–273 Gabriela Mistral Award, 38 Gadsden Treaty in 1853, 764 Gaitán, María Elena, 750 Galán, Nelly: and Television, 739, 740 Galeria de la Raza, 452 Galileo and the Mars Observer, 677 Galina, Laurita, 25 Galindo, Martivón, 64 Gallardo, Sister Gloria, 373 Gallegos, Carmen Cornejo, 14, 274 Galloway, María, 67 Galván Velázquez, Eugenia, 37 Galván, Dolores: and San Joaquin Valley Cotton strike, 661 Gamboa, María, 673 Ganados del Valle, 274–275; and María Varela, 787 Gamboa, Diane, 64 Gandhi, Mahatma, 153, 333 Gang Retirement and Continued Education/Employment (GRACE), 509 Gangs, 131, 276–278, 282, 334; and Judith Baca projects, 75; and Casita Maria Programs, 127, 683; and Socorro Gómez-Potter, 290; and United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), 320–321; and Juan Diego Community Center (JDCC), 321, 322; and Hull-House, 333- 336; and Young Lords, 491, 815; and Mujeres Latinas en Acción, 505–506; and Gang Retirement and Continued Education/Employment, 509; and Pachucas, 552, 553; and Pentecostal Church programs, 568; and Rape, 612; and the Teen Challenge program, 618, 645; and Lower East Side Neighborhood Association, 671; and Iglesia Luterana La Trinidad, 694; and West Side Story, 807–808 Garbo, Greta, 190, 498: and Mercedes de Acosta, 189 García, Alma: and National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), 511 García, Cristina, 278–280, 279; and Literature, 395 García, Elsa, 759 García, Eva Carrillo De, 280 García, Evelyn, 503 García, Francisca, 25 García, Juliet V.: and University of Texas at Brownsville, 225 García, Lorraine, 64 García, Margaret, 63 García, Millie: and Berkeley College in New York City, 225 García, Providencia “Provi,” 280–282, 281 García Cortese, Aimee, 282, 523; and Penetecostal Church, 568; and Religion, 618 García Márquez, Gabriel, 279, 800 García Roach, Lieutenant María, 474 García-Aguilera, Carolina, 283–284, 283 Garcíaz, María, 284–285 Garfias Woo, Yolanda, 452 Garment Industry, 285–286, 285; and Doña María del Valle, 202; and International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 348–350; and Migration and Labor, 470 Garza, Belda, 459 Garza, María Luisa: and Literature, 355, 393 Garza-Falcon, Leticia, 548
863 q
Index Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 395 Gay and Lesbians Latinos Unidos (GLLU), 388 Gay Latino Alliance in San Francisco, 387 Gay, Lesbians, and Bisexual Affairs, 86 The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, 352, 393 George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York City, 500, 626, 627 Georgetown University, D.C.: and E. E. Chávez, 145; and Carolina García-Aguilera, 283; and Sara Meléndez, 443; and Antonia Coello Novello, 527 Georgia Institute of Technology, 678 Giant, 286–287; and West Side Story, 807 Glendale Adventist Hospital in Glendale: and Sterilization, 724 Gody, Vera, 209 Golden Globe Awards: and Sonia Braga, 99; and Raquel Welch, 160; and Katy Jurado, 358; Rita Moreno won a, 494, 500, 808 Goldman, Emma, 119 Gómez Carbonell, María, 288–289, 288 Gómez, Elizabeth, 645 Gómez, Elsa, 12: and Kean College in New Jersey, 225 Gómez, Magdalena, 368 Gómez, Marga, 750 Gómez-Potter, Socorro, 289–290, 290; and Yolanda Almaraz Esquivel, 241, 242 Gonzáles, Elvira Rodríguez De, 290 Gonzáles, Isabel: and Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 67, 169 Gonzáles, Mary, 576 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”: and Lorna Dee Cervantes, 141; National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver organizer, 73, 153; and Chicano Movement, 153, 154; and Deborah Espinosa-Mora, 239; and Enriqueta Vásquez Longeaux, 789 Gonzáles, Sophie: and International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 745 Gonzáles, Sylvia: and National Hispanic Feminist Conference, 515, 516 González, Berta, 26 Gonzalez, Deena J., 707, 712, 778 González, Elma: and Scientists, 677 González, Laura, 290–292, 291 González, Luisa M., 719 González, Matiana, 292 González, Michelle, 621 González, Myrtle, 159, 498 González, Patricia, 696 González, Rebecca, 422 González Mireles, Jovita, 5, 292–294, 293, 548; and League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 378; and Literature, 393 The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food, 105 Good Neighbor Policy: and Carmen Miranda, 478; and María Montez (María Africa Gracia Vidal), 486; and Movie Stars, 498 Govea, Jessica, 294–295; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 775, 776 Graduate Association for Bilingual Education, 665 Gráfico, 87, 355
Grajales, Mariana, 19, 354 Grammy Awards: and Vikki Carr, 121; and Rita Moreno, 160, 494, 500, and Gloria Estefan, 243; and Reverend Aimee García Cortese, 282; and Graciela Pérez, 572; and Selena Quintanilla Pérez, 600 Gran Logia Masónica Gran Oriente, 261 Granda, Chabuca, 652 Grau, María Leopoldina “Pola,” 295–297, 296; and Operation Pedro Pan organizator, 183, 541 Great Depression and Mexican American Women, 20, 30, 297–300, 298, 334; and deportation and repatriation campaigns, 16; and protest against segregation in education, 46; and Clínica de la Beneficencia Mexicana, 162; and Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), 168; and Journalism and Print Media, 355; and Labor Unions, 368; and Migration and Labor, 469; and Tabaqueros’ Unions, 733; and World War II, 810, 811 Great Society programs: and Voting Rights Act, 579; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 674; and María Luisa Legarra Urquides, 779 The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 75, 149 Greater Boston Legal Services, 402, 668 Grijalva de Orozco, Teresa, 1 Grupo Anacaona, 652 Guadalupe Cultural Arts Xicano Music, 815 Guadalupe Organization: and Socorro Hernández Bernasconi, 87; and Alicia Otilia Quesada, 596, 597; and Dora Ocampo Quesada, 598 Guanche, Carmelina, 183 Guardiola, Gloria, 367 Guerra, Fermina, 300 Guerrero, Rosa, 300–302, 301; and Las Hermanas, 373 Guerrero, Victoria Partida, 302–303, 302 Guevara, Ernesto (Ché), 164 Guggenheim Fellowship, 271, 279 Guillen Herrera, Rosalinda, 303–305, 304; and United Farm Workers (UFW), 27 Guillermoprieto, Alma: and Journalism and Print Media, 356, 357 Guillot Olga, 183, 496, 799 Gustavo, Soledad, 733 Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Juana Belén: and Journalism and Print Media, 354; and Mexican Revolution, 463, 608; and Mexican Revolution, Border Women in, 465 Gutíerrez Gillians, Alicia, 474 Gutiérrez, José Angel: and La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 153, 305–306, 367 Gutiérrez, Juana B., 497 Gutiérrez, Luz Bazán, 305–306, 368 Gutiérrez, Marina, 66 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 700, 704, 711 Gutiérrez-Kenney, Phyllis, 27 Guzmán, Madre María Dominga, 306–307, 306 Hamlin, Rosalie Méndez, 308–309, 309 Hardy-Fanta, Carol, 577, 578 Harjo, Joy, 162 Harvard Business School, 211 Harvard University: and Spanish-speaking teachers programs, 7, 221, 375, 809; and Polly Baca Barragán, 75; and
864 q
Index María Josefa Canino graduated from, 116; and Margarita Cepeda-Leonardo, 140; and Rosario Marín, 375; and Sara Meléndez, 442; and Aura Luz Sánchez Garfunkel, 668; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 674; and Lydia Villa-Komaroff, 677; and Evelyn M. Rodríguez, 678 Hawaii Pacific University, 57 Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association (HSPA): and Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, 591 Hayek, Salma: and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 160; and Intermarriage, Contemporary, 344; and Movie Stars, 498, 501 Hayworth, Rita (Margarita Cansino), 309–310, 310, 494, 760; and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 160; and Movie Stars, 499, 500 Head Start, 310–311, 360, 503, 632, 636, 734; and Casita María, New York, 127; and Grace Montañez Davis, 187; and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258; and Graciela Olivarez, 537; and Tina Ramírez, 609; and Guadalupe Reyes, 622; and Loretta Sánchez, 662; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 674; and Aura Luz Sánchez Garfunkel, 668; Enriqueta Longeaux Vásquez worked for, 789 Health Care, 158, 170, 252, 254, 269, 522, 816: and Apolonia “Polly” Muñoz Abarca, 30; and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and Rose Marie Calderón, 108; and Rufa Concepción Fernández (“Concha”), 166; and Jessie López de la Cruz, 194; and Jane L. Delgado, 203–204; and Head Start, 310–11; and Health: Current Issues and Trends, 311–315; and Juan Diego Community Center (JDCC), 321, 322; and Houchen Settlement, El Paso, 329, 330; and Hull-House, Chicago, 333- 336; and Lucille Roybal-Allard, 376; and Líderes Campesinas, 390–391; and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 416–419; and Olga A. Méndez, 444, 445; and Rebecca Sánchez Cruz, 666, 667; and Esther Valladolid Wolf, 809 Health: Current Issues and Trends, 311–315, 314 Health Disparities National Advisory Committee, 642 Heart of Aztlán, 73 Henríquez Ureña, Camila, 7, 315–317; and Julia Alvarez, 44; and Education, 223; and Feminism, 253 Here Lies the Heart, 190 Heredia de Serra, Gertrudes, 8 Heredia, Dolores, 169 Hermanas de la Revolución Mexicana: and Francisca Flores, 264 Hermosillo, Consuelo: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417 Hernández, Concepción: and Villalongín Dramatic Company, 753, 754 Hernández et al. v. Cockrell et al., 151 Hernández Tovar, Ines, 368 Hernández, Antonia, 317, 724; and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417, 419; and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), 458 Hernández, Carmen and Laura. See Dueto Carmen y Laura Hernández, Colonel Dora, 475 Hernández, Ester, 318–319, 318; and Artists, 64; and Virgen de Guadalupe, 802 Hernández, Georgina: and Madrigal v. Quilligan, 417 Hernández, María Latigo, 319–320; and Círculo Cultural Isabel la Católica, 161; and Feminism, 253 Hernández, Melvina, 724 Hernández, Nancy, 723
Hernández, Olivia, 320–322 Hernández, Victoria, 9, 322–323, 323 Herrada, Elena, 323–324 Herrera Casarez, Theresa: and World War II, 811 Herrera, Carolina, 324–325 Herrera, Luisa: and Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT), 732, 733 Herrera, María Cristina, 325–326 Herrera, Petra, 691 Herrera-Sobek, María, 395, 801: and Corridos, 175 Hidalgo Society: and María Estella Altamirano Mendoza, 449 Hidalgo, Hilda, 11 High Noon, 160, 358, 500 Hijas de Borinquen, 8 Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, 326–327; and Student Movements, 525, 727 Hijas del Pueblo in New Orleans: and Ten Years’ War, 19, 471 Hinojosa de Ballí, Rosa María, 717 Hinojosa, Antonia, 300 Hinojosa, Tish, 327–328; and Joan Chandos Baez, 78; and Television, 740; and Eva Ybarra, 815; and Las Super Tejanas, 815 Hisbrok Cole, Orelia, 507 Hispanic Business magazine, 434, 549, 755: and Anna Carbonell, 120; and Entrepreneurs, 231, 232 Hispanic Chamber of Commerce: and Anna María Arías, 58; and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and María del Carmen Muñoz, 510; and Hilda L. Solis, 692; and María Elena Toraño-Pantín, 756; and Nydia M. Velázquez, 792 Hispanic chapter of the United Federation of Teachers, 665, 730 Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award, 534 Hispanic magazine, 600: and Anna María Arías edited the, 58 Hispanic Mother-Daughter Program (HMDP), 328–329; and Rosie López, 404 Hispanic National Bar Association, 111, 416, 611 Hispanic Theological Initiative: Zaida Maldonado-Pérez director of, 621 Hispanic Women:Prophetic Voice in the Church, 374, 507, 621, 735 Hispanic Women’s Center (HACER), 121 Hispanic Women’s Network (HWN), 28 Hispanic Young Adult Association (HYAA): and Antonia Pantoja, 558, 584 History of Puerto Rico from the Beginning to 1892, 262 History Speaks Project: Visions and Voices of Kansas City’s Past, 649 Hofstra University, 103, 475, 492 Hollywood: and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 159–161; Celia Cruz worked in, 180; and Mercedes de Acosta, 189; and Dolores Del Río, 201, 202; and Josefina Fierro, 259; and Rita Hayworth, 309, 310; and Katy Jurado, 358; and Lone Star, 397; and Media Stereotypes, 437; and Carmen Miranda, 479; and María Montez, 485, 486, 487; and Salt of the Earth, 656–657; and West Side Story, 807 Hospital Workers Union, 635 Hospital, Carolina, 395 Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), 6: and María Elena Durazo, 219, 220, 370, 371
865 q
Index Houchen Settlement, El Paso, 329–331, 330; and Americanization Programs, 46, 47, House Appropriations Committee and Lucille Roybal-Allard, 376, 646 House Armed Services Committee: and Loretta Sánchez, 377 House Banking and Financial Services Committee, 377, 792 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): and Josefina Fierro, 260; and Francisca Flores, 264; and Salt of the Earth distribution was blocked by, 656 House International Relations Committee, 646: and Latinas in the U.S. Congress, 375–378 House Judiciary Committee, 377 The House of the Spirits, 38 The House on Mango Street, 161, 162, 395, 629 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 13, 44, 395 Huber, Lidia, 616 Huerta, Cecilia Olivarez, 331–332 Huerta, Dolores, 5, 332–333, 332, 370; and Yolanda López art, 64, 405; and Community Service Organization (CSO), 171, 172; and Jessie López de la Cruz, 195; and Jessica Govea, 294, 295; and Teatro Campesino, 752; and The United Farm Workers of America (UFW), 772, 773; and Women in the United Farm Workers (UFW), 774, 775; and the Watsonville strike, 805 Huertas, Gloria, 9 Hull-House, Chicago, 333–335, 425, 624; and Americanization Program, 46, 47 Of Human Rights, 22, 436 Humanitas International, 77 Hunter College, 62, 582, 657, 666: and Evelina López Antonetty, 49; Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at, 61; María Teresa Babín taught at, 74; Center for Puerto Rican Studies at, 116; and Nydia M. Velázquez, 377, 791; and Lillian López, 401; and Esther Miller, 475; and Antonia Pantoja, 558; and Student Movements, 727–728; and Nitza Tufiño, 767, 768 Huntington Park Vendors Association (HPVA), 726 Hurtado, Aida, 395 Hurtado, María, 416 I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures, 750 Idaho State University, 26 Idar Juárez, Jovita, 336–337, 336, 461; and Education, 222; and El Paso Laundry Srike, 228; and Journalism and Print Media, 354; and Literature, 393; and Sara Estela Ramírez, 608 Idar, Jovita Vivero, 336 Ideal Records, 218, 219 Iglesias que trabajan por la communion Cristiana: and Ruth Esther Soto León, 385 Iglesias, Sister María, 620 Immigrants with HIV Project of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, 562 Immigration and Naturalization Act, 18, 67 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 391, 744: and Felicitas Córdova Apodaca, 52; and Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), 67; Bracero Program agreement, 96; and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 138 and Domestic Violence, 214–216; and Matiana González, 292; and Violence against Women Act, 384; and
Juan Diego Community Center (JDCC), 321; and Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), 341–342; and Salt of the Earth, 656 Immigration of Latinas to the United States, 337–341, 338, 339, 340; and Americanization Programs, 46; and Central American Immigrant Women, 134–137; and Farmworkers, 250–253; and Josefina Fierro, 259; and Mexican Revolution, 463, 464, 469 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), 341–342; Immigration of Latinas to the United States, 338, 341; and Rosario Vásquez, 172 In the Time of the Butterflies, 44, 395 Independent Juvenile Baseball League, 671 Independent Progressive Party: and Josefina Fierro, 260 Indiana University, 538, 678: and Martina Arroyo, 62; and Martha Bernal, 85, 86; and María Cristina Rodríguez Cabral, 637 Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF): and Saul Alinsky, 169; Community Service Orgnization (CSO) supported by, 172; and Dolores De Avila, 192; and Elba Iris Montes-Donnelly, 485 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 465: and Communist Party, 168 Influencias de las ideas modernas, 119, 354, 394 Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), 270 Institute for Paraprofessional Farmworker Women: and Líderes Campesinas, 391 Institute of Cuban Studies (ICS): Lourdes Casal cofounded, 123, 124; and María Cristina Herrera, 326; and the Cuban government, 326 Intermarriage, Contemporary, 342–344; and Alice Dickerson Montemayor, 483; and Pérez v. Sharp, 573; and Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, 591; and Estela Portillo Trambley family, 762 Intermarriage, Historical, 344–347; and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, 3, 650; and Josefa Carrillo de Fitch, 122–123; and Giant, 286–287; and Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, 454; and Mestizaje, 453–457; and Victoria Comicrabit Reid, 614, 615; and Bernarda Ruiz, 647; and Spanish Borderlands, 697–700; and Early Settlement Life in the Borderlands, 704–708; and Women in California, 709–710; and Women in New Mexico, 710–714; and Women in Texas, 716–719 Internal Security Act, 67 International Arts Relations (INTAR): and Santa Contreras Barraza, 81; and María Irene Fornés, 271; and Amalia Mesa-Bains, 452; and Dolores Prida, 582; and Playwrights, 750; and The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, 752 International Cigarmakers Union (ICU), 20: and Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York, 585; Dolores Patiño Río joined the, 560 International Labor Defense (ILD), 559 International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 348–350, 348, 349, 757; and Margarita Durán Méndez, 172; and Community Service Organization (CSO), 172; Elena Durazo worked for, 219, 370; and Garment Industry, 285–286; and Great Depression and Mexican American Women, 299; and Labor Unions, 368–372; and The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City book, 371; and Los Angeles Garment Workers’ Strike, 408–410; and Lucia González
866 q
Index Parsons, 559; and Esperanza Acosta Mendoza Schechter (“Hope”), 674; Emma Tenayuca founded the San Antonio local of, 744; and Tex-Son Strike, 745–746 International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers: and Communist Party, 169; and El Paso Laundry Strike, 228; and Labor Unions, 269; and Mining Communities. 478; and Salt of the Earth, 656 International Retail/Wholesale Department Store Union (RWDSU), 757 International Society of Women Airline Pilots, 561 International Women’s Year, 167, 435, 485, 513 International Workers’ Organization (IWO): and Puerto Rican Radical Politics in New York, 585; and Vanguardia Puertorriqueña, 785, 786 Intimate partner violence (IPV), 214 Introducción a la cultura hispánica, 74 Isales, Carmen, 17 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, 118, 507, 735: and Las Hermanas, 373, 374; and Religion, 621 Jackson, Reverend Jesse, 304, 590: and the Watsonville strike, 805 Jaime, Rosa: and Tempe Normal School (TNS), 741 Jaramillo, Annabelle, 27 Jaramillo, Cleofas Martínez, 351–352, 351, 393; and Literature, 393 Jasso, Mary, 169 Jiménez Underwood, Consuelo, 65: and Artists, 66 Jiménez y Muro, Dolores: and Mexican Revolution, 463, 608 Jiménez, María de los Angeles, 352–353 Jiménez, María Elena: and Bracero Program, 97 John Dos Passos Prize, 801 John F. Kennedy Center: and Rosa Guerrero performed at the, 301; and Tania León, 386; Cherríe Moraga, 489; and Marisela Norte performed at the, 526; and Chita Rivera was honored by the, 627; and The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT), 752 John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, 578, 692 John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Programs at Harvard University, 140; and María Echaveste, 221; and Rosario Marín graduated from, 375; and Esther Valladolid, 809 John Hay Whitney Foundation, 271 John Wesley Hospital in South Central Los Angeles: and Sterilization, 724 Johns Hopkins University: and Aida de Acosta, 189; and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258; and Cristina García, 279; and Antonia Coello Novello, 527; and Marian Lucy Rivas, 678 Johnson, Lyndon B.: and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; Joan Baez performed for, 77; and Grace Montañez Davis, 187; Rosita Fernández performed for, 257; and María Concepción (Concha) Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, 547; and the Cuban Adjustment Act, 580 The Jones Act, 564, 684 Journal of Latino/Hispanic Theology, 390 Journalism and Print Media, 353–357; and Anna María Arías, 58; and Franca de Armiño, 59–60; and Juanita Arocho, 60; and Luisa Capetillo, 119; and Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, 125–126; and Jovita Idar Juárez, 336–337; and Mercedes Olivera, 539; and Adelina Otero Warren,
549–551; and Lucia Eldine González Parsons, 558–559; and Sara Estela Ramírez, 608; and Lola Rodríguez de Tió, 637–639; and Silva de Cintrón, Josefina “Pepiña,” 682–683; and Denise Oller, 740; and Emma Tenayuca, 743–745; and Andrea and Teresa Villarreal, 800 Jované de Zayas, Elvira: and Operation Pedro Pan, 541 Jóven Cuba, 23, 50 Juan Bobo and the Queen’s Necklace: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale, 83 Juan Diego Community Center (JDCC): and Olivia Hernández, 321, 322 Juana: and Padua Hills Theater, 748 Juárez, Debora, 27 Juilliard School of Music, 628 Junior LULAC: and Houchen Settlement, 330; and Alice Dickerson Montemayor, 378, 484 Junta Patriótica de Damas de Nueva York: and Ten Years’ War, 19, 471 Jurado, Katy, 358; and Cinema Images, Contemporary, 160; and Dolores Del Río, 201; and Movie Stars, 500, 501 Juventud y Comunidad Alerta: and Sor Isolina Ferré Aguayo, 258 K. Starr, Brenda: and Salsa, 654, 655 Kahlo, Frida, 319, 452, 481, 644, 64 Kanellos, Nicolás, 141, 281 Kathy Vargas, 64 Kennedy, John F., 238, 578, 765: and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and Olga Ballesteros Olivares, 535; and María Concepción (Concha) Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, 547; and Cuban exiles, 580; and María Luisa Legarra Urquides, 780 Kennedy, Robert F.: and Polly Baca Barragán, 76; and Angelina “Angie” Cabrera, 105; Gloria Molina campaigned for, 483; and Antonia Pantoja, 558; and Luisa Quintero, 602 Kennedy, Ted, 431 Kimbell, Sylvia Rodríguez, 359–360, 359 Kingsolver, Barbara, 574 Kiss of the Spider Woman, 99, 160, 500, 627 Kissinger, Beatrice Amado, 360–361, 361, 439, 575 Knights of Labor, 19 Koch, Edward: and Amalia V. Betanzos, 88; and Aimee García Cortese, 282; and Shirley Rodríguez Remeneski, 641; and Petra Santiago, 672; and Anita Vélez-Mitchell, 797 La Asamblea Apostólica: and Pentecostal Church, 566 La Asociación Cívica Lareña, 60 La Asociación de Cultura His
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