Luisa Moreno
Moreno was born August 30th, 1907 in Guatemala City (I'll let you guess what country that's in). As a teenager, a time when most of us are worried about dating and proving to our peers how great our musical tastes are, Moreno was already organizing. She created La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral, which successfully fought for the right of women to gain admittance into Guatemalan universities.
In her later teenage years she moved to Mexico City to look for work as a journalist while writing poetry on the side. While there she continued fighting for women's rights. She also met and married her first husband, Angel de León. The two moved to New York City in 1928, where they gave birth to their daughter Mytyl. Moreno worked as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem to help pay the bills.
It didn't take long for Moreno to gravitate toward both labor and Latinx rights causes. In 1929 this wacky little thing called the Great Depression happened. You may have heard about it. To put it mildly, it sucked during this time for anyone who wasn't wealthy, and even moreso if you weren't white or male. Instead of buckling in the face of economic turmoil, however, Moreno led the charge to organize her fellow garment workers (most of whom were Latina) into a union to help weather the storm of the Great Depression.
On the Latinx rights side of things, Moreno and her husband Angel both became active organizers. In 1930 they protested the movie Under a Texas Moon, which portrayed Mexican Americans as lying womanizers. Police violently repressed these demonstrations, which led to the death of one of the main organizers, Gonzalo González. This only intensified the protests, which Moreno credited with really opening her eyes to the severity of the violence Latinx people faced in the United States.
These events kicked off two decade of tireless organizing in the US by Moreno. She organized around both labor and Latinx issues. At first she did so in addition to her day job, but in 1935 the American Federation of Labor hired her as a professional labor organizer. She moved to Florida with her daughter while leaving Angel behind, as he had become abusive. She also joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a representative of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) and organized workers, predominantly female workers of color, around the country.
In 1937 she moved to San Diego, California, where she remained for the rest of her time in the United States. Her accomplishments during her time in San Diego were too many to recount here without making this post the length of a book, but I'll quickly run through some of her biggest highlights.
In 1939 she helped organize El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (the Spanish-Speaking People's Congress), commonly known as El Congreso, which was a California-based civil rights group for people of Latin American descent in the United States. El Congreso was notable in comparison to other Latinx groups like LULAC because it had a strong working class/labor element and didn't focus on Americanization/respectability politics the way other such groups did. El Congreso advocated not only for the civil rights of Latinx people, but also labor rights.
In 1940, due to her tireless organizing for the UCAPAWA, her way with words, and her background in journalism, she became the chief editor for the Spanish-language UCAPAWA paper. The same year, she spoke for the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), where she gave a speech commonly known as the Caravan of Sorrow speech about the plight Mexican immigrants faced, a speech which sounds like it could've been made yesterday. Here is an excerpt:
"These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California's industrialized agriculture, the sugar companies and the large cotton interests, that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers."
That speech has Paul Rudd levels of good aging.
During the World War 2 years, young Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits, known as Pachucas/Pachucos, created a wave of fear among white America, and both police and off-duty sailors acting as vigilantes brutalized them. Luisa Moreno was incredibly active in defending them and organizing grassroots campaigns around police brutality toward both Latinx and black communities.
As the end of World War 2 gave way to the Cold War, however, anti-communist hysteria started to gut the labor movement and other leftist elements of people who weren't of a more moderate, liberal persuasion. At the same time, Operation Wetback (which was as horrible as the name implies) deported waves of Mexican and Mexican-American people back to Mexico, as well as people of Latin American descent society assumed to also be Mexican. Those active in the labor movement were particularly targeted, combining both racism and Cold War paranoia into one ugly, ugly package.
Luisa and her new husband Gray Bemis, a former sailor and member of the Socialist Party of America, received numerous threats from both vigilantes and the government. On November 20th, 1950, they left the United States for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. They stayed there for almost a year, then returned to Moreno's home country of Guatemala. Upon their arrival friends from the Guatemala Confederation of Labor welcomed them. At the time Guatemala was led by democratically elected, FDR New Deal-inspired president Jacobo Arbenz. Things went well until 1954, when the United States CIA overthrew the democratically elected Arbenz and replaced him with military dictator Castillo Armas in what the CIA called Operation PBSUCCESS.
They returned to Mexico and her husband died a few years later. Despite all the hardship she faced, she spent the next couple decades still fighting for labor and civil rights in Mexico, Cuba, and Guatemala. She kept doing so until her health began to fail her in 1985 after suffering a stroke. Her brother brought her back to Guatemala and she died November 4th, 1992 at 85 years old.
Here's her picture one more time, just so we remember what awesome personified looks like.
Luisa Moreno fought tirelessly for almost half a century to make the world a better place for countless people. She exemplified intersectionality before it even became a word. Her story serves as an important reminder that civil rights, women's rights, and labor rights are both important in a world where racism, sexism and classism are often interconnected. Her story also connects to a broader story of civil rights and labor organizing in the 1930s and 40s, a time we often only associate with suffering and war.
Luisa Moreno was a true hero. Rest In Power, Luisa, and thank you for all that you did.
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