Luisa Moreno

Luisa Moreno (August 30, 1907 – November 4, 1992) was a Guatemalan social activist and participant in the United States labor movement.

She married Angel De León, an artist, in 1927 and together they moved to New York City the following year.

While there, her daughter Mytyl was born.

The Great Depression struck in 1929, and in order to support her daughter and unemployed husband, Moreno worked as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem.

She organized her co-workers, most of whom were Latinas, into a garment workers union.

While in New York, the Warner Bros. movie Under a Texas Moon (1930) was protested as anti-Mexican by a group of Latinos led by Gonzalo González.

Police brutalized the picketers, killing González.

The murder sparked a Pan-Latino protest, in which Moreno participated.

She later told Bert Corona that the experience "motivated her to work on behalf of unifying the Spanish-speaking communities."

She was a graduate of the Catholic women's university College of the Holy Names in Oakland, California.

Later, Moreno joined the Communist Party USA in 1930.

In 1935, Moreno was hired by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a professional organizer.

She left her husband, who had become physically abusive, and settled with her daughter in Florida, where she unionized African-American and Latina cigar-rollers.

She then joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and purportedly participated in some violent protests in late 1935 to early 1936.

During that time, the CIO acted as a militant organization.

In 1937, she settled the Encanto neighborhood of San Diego, which she used as a base for her nationwide activism.

She unionized workers, led strikes, wrote pamphlets in both English and Spanish, and convened the 1939 Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española, the "first national Latino civil rights assembly", before returning to Guatemala in 1950.

Moreno was born Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez to a wealthy family in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Disenchanted with the gender restrictions on educational attainment, she organized her elite, wealthy peers into La Sociedad with Gabriela Mistral.

This group used petition drives and informal lobbying to successfully advocate the admission of women to Guatemalan universities.

Rejecting her elite status, she went to Mexico City at the age of nineteen to pursue a career in journalism.

While there, she also wrote poetry.

In 1939 she was one of the main organizers, alongside Josefina Fierro de Bright and Eduardo Quevedo, of the El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (Spanish-speaking People's Congress).

She took a year off from UCAPAWA to travel throughout the U.S., visiting Latino workers on the East Coast, in the Southwest, and allying refugees of the Spanish Civil War to her cause.

After leaving, she became a representative of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), becoming the editor of its Spanish-language newspaper in 1940.

As UCAPAWA representative, she helped organize workers at pecan-shelling plants in San Antonio, Texas, and cannery workers in Los Angeles.

There, she encouraged alliances between workers at different plants.

Her leadership was of the type that empowered other workers, especially women, and she strongly encouraged women to take leadership roles in union organizations.

In 1940, she was asked to speak before the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB).

Her speech, which became known as the "Caravan of Sorrow" speech, eloquently described the lives of migrant Mexican workers.

Portions of it were reprinted in Committee pamphlets, creating a legacy that lasted much longer than the duration of the speech itself.

In it, she stated,

"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."

In the same year, she co-founded an employment office in San Diego with her friend Robert Galván.

She also organized San Diego-area cannery workers and persuaded employers not to hire scab workers.

With the dawn of World War II, the defense industry became a major employer in the United States, particularly in San Diego.

Mexicans, however, were forbidden to work in the petroleum industry, shipyards, and other war-related fields, and were relegated to the lowest-paying jobs.

Moreno criticized the discrimination, pointing out that "California has become prosperous with the toil and sweat of Mexican immigration attending to its number one industry, agriculture. Now they have sustained a true and lasting patriotism to a democratic country that refuses to give them citizenship or even basic civil rights."

In 1942, Moreno became involved in the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, a cause célèbre for the American left and Mexican-American civil rights activists.

Along with longtime friend Bert Corona and attorney Carey McWilliams, she organized the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee to exonerate the indicted youths.