workers’ union called “La Liga de Costureras.” In 1935, she accepted a job organizing Latino, African-American, and Italian cigar rollers in California as an American Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer. In 1938, after resigning from the AFL to join its newly established rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).16 That year, Moreno also helped organize El Congreso del Pueblos que Hablan Española (Congress of Spanish-speaking people), held in April of 1939. It was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States; it attracted over a thousand delegates representing over 120 organizations. El Congreso addressed employment, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights; they fought for workers’ and women’s rights while advocating for Latino studies curricula and bilingual education.17 This event was particularly extraordinary, since Moreno and other congress leaders rejected the as-similationist strategies proposed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); instead, they insisted that whites accept blame for the racial and ethnic stratification that had evolved in the Southwest.18
FIGURE 2. Luisa Moreno at the 1949 California CIO Convention.
The twofold demand for the full spectrum of human rights, as well as white historical accountability, illumines a long-shared philosophy among Blacks and Browns in the United States about the nature of their rights as human beings. For example, in the struggle for emancipation, slaves in the mid-nineteenth century created what W.E.B. Du Bois named “abolition democracy.”19 In the years leading up to the victory of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Blacks articulated a radical political perspective that demanded freedom in its entirety—nothing less than the material realization of all of the rights supplied to elite whites. In so doing, they critiqued a democracy compromised by its racist institutions and created a legacy that “opened the door for subsequent claims for social justice by immigrants and their children, religious minorities, women, workers, and people with disabilities. From voting rights to affirmative action, from fair housing to fair hiring, the 14th Amendment is an enduring and abiding force for social justice in US society.”20 These shared histories of radical critique among Blacks and Mexican Americans helped make it possible for them to view their related but nonidentical struggles as part of the same constellation.
El Congreso’s call for equality in labor, housing, education, and health, as well as for the positive and consistent representation of their history and worth as human beings in school curricula constitute an audible echo of the radical tenets of abolition democracy. Moreover, Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright co-authored an unprecedented resolution indicting “the discriminated status of women within the Mexican community as well as without . . . [demanding] the full recognition of women’s equality, independent of their relationship to men.”21 This resolution upended stereotypes of the docility of women in the face of a culture of machismo, recuperating women’s activism and dispelling stereotypes about their passivity:
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 of herself and her family, and since in this country, she 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, concerning home problems . . . that it 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.”22
In their challenge to the traditional distinction between the public and the private spheres, the demands made by women within the organization constitute important examples of spatial entitlement, as do the demands of the El Congreso as a whole. Women activists chose and utilized the discursive and political spaces they made in the organization to articulate a long-standing grievance relevant to their communities. Indeed, the identification of sexism and a collective inclination to hold the members of the organization and constituent communities accountable to advancing gender justice may not have been successful in another organization, place, or time. Women such as Moreno and Fierro de Bright made strategic choices as they pertained to human rights and to the meaningful spaces their struggles were born of and created. Similarly, this is what makes Moreno’s contributions to El Congreso and the organization’s impact so significant: both focused on the potential to represent and be represented in a variety of spheres on the literal and symbolic landscape of American democracy, or at least what aggrieved communities expected it could be. This expectation and the process of struggle to fashion them into a realizable reality created counternarratives that called into question the relationship of aggrieved minorities to nation and to citizenship, rendering visible the material conditions of work, geography, education, race, gender, and class as they pertain to social membership. In other words, in demanding white accountability and an equal place at the table, they fashioned a counternarrative of citizenship that included aggrieved minorities. They exposed the inequities and material hardships faced by non-whites in a racial hierarchy that granted privileges to white citizens.
The success of El Congreso was a significant milestone in Moreno’s record of activism, but it was the UCAPAWA that remained at the core of her commitment. The union’s dedication to rank-and-file leadership was important to Moreno. Its official commitment to recruiting members across race, nationality, and gender resonated powerfully with her political aims.
This was true of UCAPAWA’s allies as well. The Community Service Organization (CSO) was not a labor union, but it functioned powerfully as a community agency that occupied many of the same spaces where UCAPAWA did its work. The CSO recognized that building multiracial alliances was “the most effective strategy for protecting and advancing their various interests, especially given financial constraints, the absence of any majority minority with enough strength to act alone, and mounting Cold War red-baiting that threatened civil rights activists.”23 The CSO was responsible for launching the political career of Edward Roybal, who began as a member of the Los Angeles City Council and eventually became a member of Congress. Roybal was elected in 1949 by a multiracial political coalition that “reflected the racial interaction in multicultural neighborhoods and the geographic concentration of liberal-left politics in them.”24 This coalition, nurtured and strengthened by the CSO and its principle organizer, Fred Ross, was comprised of Mexican Americans and Jews in Boyle Heights and was influenced by the civil rights struggles in adjacent communities. Roybal’s subsequent reelection in 1951 and later climb into the U.S. Congress was remarkable, considering his unflagging support of social justice struggles waged by laborers, Communists, and Black, Mexican, and Jewish working-class communities in one of the most conservative postwar eras. Subjected to intense and consistent pressure to capitulate to conservative policymakers, Roybal maintained an unswerving allegiance to equality. His record of support for fair hiring and labor practices, as well as his commitment to desegregation in city jobs and public stance against police brutality targeting Black and Mexican-American youth, secured him key endorsements by the California Eagle and by the Black community as a whole.
Moreno remained with UCAPAWA for the remainder of her career, rising to the position of vice-president in 1941, which marked the first time a Latina would be elected to a high-ranking national union post in the United States.25 Best known for organizing Chicana cannery workers and for her work as cofounder of the Congreso, Moreno championed the interests of Black workers as well. She garnered a little-documented victory in a struggle by UCAPAWA to break discriminatory hiring practices at CalSan. That effort forced factory owners to hire Black women in early 1942, creating a new interracial space from which the constellation of struggle could draw supporters and support.26 Moreno also viewed the sites of struggle as extending beyond the geographic and juridical boundaries of the United States. Alicia Camacho offers a critical understanding of the value of Moreno’s contributions to Latina/ Latino cultural and political identities,
