Moreno, Luisa

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 East 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 Hablan 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 y González Saravia. When she was nine, her father sent her and her older sister Graciela to a California convent to finish their education. After four miserable years, they returned home. Both desired a university education but discovered that women were barred. In response, they organized their elite peers into Sociedad Gabriela Mistral to push for greater educational opportunities for women.

At the age of nineteen, Rosa left home without a chaperone to pursue her education at the prestigious Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) as a foreign student, a remarkable feat for a woman at the time. She also pursued a career as a society columnist for El Diario de Guatemala. Participating in the rarified world of Mexico’s cultural avant-garde led by Diego Rivera, she published a poetry collection El Vendedor de Cocuyos (Seller of Fireflies) in 1927. That November she wed Miguel Angel De León, a Guatemalan artist sixteen years her senior. On January 1, 1928 they arrived in New York City with the hope that De León would achieve the success that had eluded him in Mexico. Their only child, Mytyl Lorraine, was born on November10, 1928. With the onset of the Depression, they lived in a crowded tenement in East Harlem while Rosa labored as a seamstress. The tragic death of a friend’s infant spurred her to action. She joined a leftist community group, and from 1930-1935 was a member of the Communist Party, USA. She also organized La Liga de Costureras, a small-scale garment workers’ union.

In 1935, leaving a tattered marriage, Rosa Rodríguez De León accepted a job with the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU-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,” a name diametrically opposite her given name “Blanca Rosa.” With her light skin, education, and flawless English, she could have “passed”; instead she chose to forego any potential privileges predicated on race, class, or color. Moreover, the first name “Luisa” could be interpreted as a tribute to Puerto Rican labor activist and feminist Luisa Capetillo, who had preceded her in Florida twenty years earlier.

CMIU officials believed the Ku Klux Klan would think twice before harming a female organizer. Slender and only 4’10”, Moreno was a stunning woman whose physical appearance belied her brilliance. Given her own fears about the Klan and the nature of union work, Moreno decided to board her daughter with a pro-labor family. Until a teenager, Mytyl lived with foster families; some treated her well, 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 the CMIU 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 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO).

Her first task as an UCAPAWA representative: 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 strikers move from street demonstrations to a functioning trade union. Shortly thereafter, Moreno also began to organize a pan-Latino civil rights conference. The result was El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española attended by more than 1,000 delegates in Los Angeles on April 28-30, 1939. They drafted a comprehensive platform, calling for an end to segregation in public facilities, housing, education, and employment.

Reunited with her daughter, Moreno returned to Los Angeles in 1941 to strengthen organizing among southern California cannery workers, many of whom were Mexican and Jewish women. Moreno, as UCAPAWA’s vice-president, threw herself into this task, earning the nickname “The California Whirlwind.” Building strong democratic locals, union members significantly improved their working
conditions, wages, and benefits.

Moreno faced her biggest professional challenge in 1945 as the union now called the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America (FTA) launched a northern California cannery campaign. Under her leadership FTA decisively won the NLRB election covering seventy-two plants. In 1946 the NLRB rescinded the results and called for a second election, one that favored the Teamsters, who engaged in a successful campaign of sweetheart contracts, red baiting, and physical assaults.

In 1947 Moreno married Gray Bemis, a leader in the International Workers Order whom she first met in New York. A year later, she faced deportation proceedings. She refused to testify against Longshoremen leader Harry Bridges, refusing 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 in Guatemala on November 4, 1992.

Camarillo, Albert. Chicanos in California. San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1984.

McNamara, Sarah. “Borderland Unionism: Latina Activism in Ybor City, 1935-1937,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38:3 (Summer 2019): 10-31.

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

.___________. “Una Mujer Sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism,”
Pacific Historical Review 73: 1 (February, 2004): 1-20.