Fierro, Josefina

FIERRO, JOSEFINA (1914-1998). Josefina Fierro was a powerful civil grassroots activist in Los Angeles during the Great Depression and World War II. She played a leading role in the 1939 El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Spanish-speaking Peoples Congress), the first national U.S. Latino civil rights conference and later in its Los Angeles chapter. When sailors indiscriminately attacked Mexican youth while the local police looked on during the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, Fierro flew to Washington DC with a representative of the Mexican Consul to meet with Vice President Henry Wallace. A beautiful, charismatic young woman, Fierro organized Mexican American communities to combat discrimination at work and at play, using her celebrity connections to help underwrite their efforts.

Born in Mexicali to Rodolfo Fierro and Josefa Amador in 1914, Fierro hailed from a long line of rebellious women. Her grandmother and mother were Magónistas, followers of socialist leader Juan Flores Magón and Partido Liberal Mexicano. While apocryphal tales abound of women running guns in their baby carriages across the border during the Mexican Revolution, Fierro insisted that her mother actually smuggled arms. Growing up with a single mother, Josefa and her brother settled in Los Angeles where they helped Josefa prepare and sell food. Josefina remembered hawking empanadas on the beach in Santa Monica. At one point, Josefa packed her children into a car with a makeshift trailer in tow. They headed to the San Joaquin Valley where they would prepare meals for migrant workers in the fields, an early version of a food truck.

In 1934, Josefina, at age twenty, graduated from high school, an educational achievement generally out of reach for young Mexican women of her era. She headed to UCLA and lived with her aunt who sang at a nightclub. There she met noted screenwriter John Bright, a future member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. They married, and Josefina became a full-time community organizer in Los Angeles.

With her radio show on a local Spanish language station, she, in conjunction with the Office of the Mexican Consul, launched a successful boycott of the Eastside Brewery, a business that refused to hire Mexicans. As part of a new hiring agreement, the brewery agreed to fund her radio show for a year. She was already a veteran organizer by the time she met Luisa Moreno. Together with local activist Eduardo Quevedo, they organized a national civil rights congress in months. Josefina, accompanied by a bodyguard, traveled across the state encouraging local mutualistas to send delegates to the conference, While Moreno had taken the lead in organizing El Congreso, Fierro proved instrumental in buoying the day-to-to day operations of the fledging southern California chapters. Recalling her East LA days and Hollywood nights, she stated simply, “I was always sleepy.”

Forging a friendship that would last a lifetime, Moreno and Fierro believed in the dignity of the common person. As Josefina remembered, “Movie stars, such as Anthony Quinn, Dolores Del Rio, and John Wayne contributed money, ‘not because they were reds. . .but because they were helping Mexicans help themselves.’” El Congreso’s southern California chapters created a woman’s committee and a platform, which expressly recognized the “double discrimination” facing Mexican women. In her words: “We had women’s problems that were very deep. . .discrimination in jobs. . .migratory problems. . .schooling. No, we didn’t have a Lib Movement so we didn’t think in terms of what women’s roles were—we just did and it worked.” As an immigrant, Josefina did not let her vulnerability to deportation stand in the way of her activism. By her estimate, the southern California Congreso organized a caravan of 20,000 people to Sacramento to protest legislation that would have suspended benefits to immigrants. She claimed that such pressure prompted Governor Olson to veto the bill.

Josefina Fierro’s legacy must be placed in the milieu of the deportations or repatriations of the early 1930s. Between 1931 and 1934, an estimated one-third of the Mexican population in the United States (approximately one million people) were either deported or repatriated to Mexico even though the majority (an estimated sixty percent) were native U.S. citizens. Viewed as foreign usurpers of American jobs and as unworthy burdens on relief, Mexicans were the only immigrants targeted for removal. Thus, advocating for immigrant rights was a courageous course given the recent history of removal.

Furthermore, Fierro helped raise funds for the legal defense of Mexican American youth unjustly convicted in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case, young men characterized by the press as dangerous, zoot suit wearing pachucos. In June 1943, sailors and soldiers descended into downtown Los Angeles and neighboring barrios, assaulting young Mexican men. Witnessing the violence, Fierro pleaded with a police officer to intervene, but instead, he threatened her “Keep your mouth shut or they’re gonna beat the sh— out of you, too.” After her meeting with Vice President Wallace, he intervened with military authorities to order Los Angeles off-limits to armed forces personnel. Historian Albert Camarillo credits Fierro “as almost single-handedly” ending the Zoot Suit Riots.

After she and Bright divorced, Josefina returned to Madera and married a local rancher, Peter Daniels. She became involved in the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, but already felt the heat from the California Un-American Activities Committee. Rather than face probable deportation, she and her husband departed for Guaymas, Mexico. Josefina Fierro died on March 2, 1998.

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

____________ . Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, s.v. “Fierro, Josefina.”

García, Mario T. Mexican Americans. Leadership, Ideology, Identity, 1930-1960. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Larralde, Carlos. “Josefina Fierro and the Sleepy Lagoon Crusade, 1942-1945, Southern California Quarterly 92 (Summer 2010): 117-160.

Obituary, “Josefina Fierro Borba; Pioneering Latino Activist,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1998.

Ruiz, Vicki L. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.