Bert Corona

The family emigrated to El Paso, Texas in 1914 or 1915, marrying at about the same time.

His parents married in the Juarez customs house under Villa's sponsorship.

They settled into a home in the predominantly Mexican Segundo Barrio neighborhood where their four children Aurora, Humberto, Orlando, and Horacio were born.

In El Paso, his father worked in the logging and rock cutting industries, while simultaneously continuing clandestine revolutionary activities.

Humberto Noé Corona (May 29, 1918 – January 15, 2001) was an American labor and civil rights leader.

Throughout his long career, he worked with nearly every major Mexican-American organization, founding or co-founding several.

He organized workers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and fought on the behalf of immigrants.

He longed to return to Mexico, however, and in 1922, when the Obregón government granted the family's petition for amnesty, they returned to Chihuahua.

After several months, Noé Corona secured a position with the federal government as a forest ranger in Texcoco.

There he and several other Villistas were murdered while attempting to extinguish a forest fire.

According to Corona, "We believed the assassins were agents of President Obregón, who feared that the villistas were planning to reorganize and overthrow the government."

After his father's death, the Corona family returned to El Paso, where young Humberto grew up surrounded by tales of the Revolution and the Protestant social networks of his mother and grandmother.

"Religion, specifically Protestantism, was also very significant in my socialization and in influencing my own later political activity."

Corona began his education at Mexican Protestant kindergartens, but enrolled in public school in the first grade.

There his command of English, which his mother had taught him, caused him to excel.

He remained in the Texas public system until the fourth grade, when his mother, disgusted with the mistreatment of Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant students, sent him to Harwood Boys School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There, he learned a sense of discipline, but also experienced racism.

In protest of the threatened expulsion of students who spoke out against physical abuse from a coach charged with disciplining students, in addition to negative portrayals of the Mexican War, the Mexican Revolution, and Pancho Villa, the students struck, refusing to attend classes.

The administration rescinded the expulsions and forced the coach to apologize.

He returned to El Paso for high school, attending the "Mexican" (segregated) Bowie High School, and later, El Paso High School, a "White" school that had recently begun to integrate some middle- and upper-class Mexican students.

Humberto, whose name had by this point been Americanized to Bert, played on the varsity basketball team for three years.

As a young student, he was particularly struck by the impact of the Great Depression on the Mexican repatriados and Dust Bowl migrants, many of whom were treated by his grandmother.

During high school he became politicized through reading the work of muckrakers and engaging in an anarchosyndicalist discussion group.

He and other Mexican students strategized to elect a Mexican student body president, the first ever at El Paso High.

After graduating in 1934, Corona worked in a drug store and played in a local basketball league.

In 1936 he accepted an athletic scholarship from the University of Southern California (USC).

He moved in with an aunt and uncle in Boyle Heights, then a predominantly Jewish area of East Los Angeles.

He quickly became acquainted with the barrios, however, through volunteer work with El Salvador Church.

In collaboration with Reverend Kendrick Watson, he organized for better housing conditions.

During his time in Los Angeles, Corona was exposed to Communist-influenced International Workers Order (IWO) and Workers Alliance of America, who agitated for government relief.

He also listened to Magonista anarchosyndicalist speakers at La Placita Olvera.

At USC, Corona undertook a five-year law program.

He hurt his ankle early in his freshman year, and subsequently sat out the rest of the season.

As a result, he dedicated his energy to his studies and to the "Non-Org Association", a coalition of lower-class students who soon came to dominate school politics.

By 1937, Corona was involved with the CIO, and shortly afterward he decided he preferred labor organizing to basketball.

By the time of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he was known as El Viejo ("the Old Man"), and was well-known and respected as a veteran activist.

Corona's father Noé Corona was a commander in Francisco Villa's División del Norte during the Mexican Revolution, which he joined after members of his family were killed in a massacre at Tomochic, Chihuahua.

Noé Corona was an anarcho-syndicalist and member of Partido Liberal Mexicano.

His mother, Margarita Escápite Salayandía, was a Chihuahua schoolteacher educated at Protestant missionary schools.

His maternal grandmother was a physician.