Corona, Bert

CORONA, BERT (1918-2001). A labor activist in close collaboration with the Left, Humberto Noe “Bert” Corona became one of the leaders in defending immigrants and immigrant workers in the United States, 1930s-1980s, and a major influence on the next generations of the Mexican-American/Chicano Left.

Corona was born in El Paso, Texas in 1918 to Mexican immigrant parents. His U.S. citizenship status was important for decades, as the F.B.I. and other agencies used “Communist” charges to deport immigrants, including many of his friends and allies among Mexican-born union leaders.

While a student at the University of Southern California, Corona was already organizing workers at a warehouse where he worked, forming Local 26 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) in 1937. He became president of the local in 1941. As a member of the ILWU, he learned organizing and taught himself labor law. His close connection to ILWU president Harry Bridges and the CIO shaped the later decades of his life, including the intense red baiting he experienced in the U.S. army during World War II.

After the leaving the Army at the end of the war, Corona went to work for a time as an organizer with the Community Service Organization, along with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, then still little-known figures.

By the 1950s, Corona used his extensive organizing skills and network to become a leader in the new Association Nacional Mexico-Americano (ANMA), an association of activists funded by leftwing unions, many of which were eventually expelled from the CIO. Defending Mexican workers against deportation focused their activism, prompted by “Operation Wetback” initiated by the Eisenhower Administration. In 1954 and 1955 as many as one million Mexican workers were deported each year, including many children of immigrant parents who were U.S. citizens. Corona and ANMA vigorously condemned these deportations as well as the government’s simultaneous targeting of Mexican union leadership in the United States. Scores of Mexican and other immigrant union leaders were deported to break the back of Left union activism. ANMA did not survive these attacks.

Like a number of men and women with leftwing pasts, Corona was recruited into the “Viva Kennedy” effort of 1960, a major effort to engage the Mexican American community in national electoral politics. (There had been a prior Mexican and Latino union organizing in the Amigos de Wallace campaign of 1948, usually focused in the ILWU and the United Electrical Workers.) Corona and a network of Mexican American allies who organized the Viva Kennedy Clubs in California, continued their work by forming the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA). As a MAPA leader, he became a national campaign chair for the Viva Johnson efforts of Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Corona served as President of MAPA from 1966-1971 and engaged in a myriad of political movements. He worked with young people in the explosive growth of the United Farm Workers, the Chicano youth movement, the Chicano Moratorium, and the creation of MECHA, (Moviemento Estudiantil Chicanos de Atzlan), the organizing of the La Raza Unida Party, and the Plan de Santa Barbara and more. The Plan was a collectively developed organizing strategy for activist Chicano politics in the nation.

By the late 1960s, MAPA, like many other civil rights organizations, became increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress with the Johnson Administration, the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and the retreat from civil rights and anti-poverty campaigns. MAPA came into conflict and competition with the Democratic Party establishment at both the state and national levels. In 1968, Corona led the Mexican American outreach in the insurgent and successful challenge of Robert Kennedy to the Johnson Administration in the California Democratic Party. This position ended when Kennedy was assassinated at the victory party in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968.

In 1968, Corona joined with Soldead “Chole” Alatorre and set out to organize Mexican-American workers in a new way, with a labor and working-class focus rather than electoral politics in an organization called La Hermandad Mexicana (The Mexican Brotherhood). This membership-based community organization successfully defended families from exploitation by the corporations and from assault by police and government based on the family’s undocumented status.

“Bert saw Mexicans in the United States, not just as a people suffering racial and national discrimination, but as a working-class community, exploited for their labor,” said Nativo Lopez, who helped Corona organize the Hermandad Mexicana, and worked with him for more than three decades. “He believed that change would come about by creating organization and leaders among grassroots people, in unions and in the neighborhoods.” Hermandad Mexicana became a recognized force in organizing immigrant workers first in Los Angeles and later around the nation.

Organizing the undocumented was a bold and consequential shift in strategy. Most Chicano and Mexican American organizations focused on organizing U.S. citizens and expanding and protecting citizen’s rights. The Hermandad leaders argued that the working class in the Southwest was a united entity, of citizens and non-citizens. Competition between citizens and the undocumented had to be overcome and the hardening of the border had to be opposed. This working-class based unity with the undocumented became a model for Latino and union organizing in the Southwest.

Although Corona and MAPA were allies of Cesar Chavez / Dolores Huerta and the United Farmworkers (UFW), they disagreed sharply in 1973 over the treatment of strike breakers in the fields. During the grape strike, undocumented farm workers, mostly from Mexico, were brought in by growers to defend the Teamsters’ sweetheart agreement and to break the UFW. During a long and difficult strike, Chavez and many strikers opposed the presence of undocumented workers as strikebreakers. Corona openly criticized the union for adopting this position, and Chavez took Corona’s criticism as a betrayal. By 1976 the UFW returned to organizing all workers, regardless of immigration status.

Bert Corona also taught Chicano Studies at California State University-Los Angeles from 1970 to 1982, when he was fired contrary to the efforts of his union. As an instructor, and as an organizer of La Hermandad, he influenced, organized, and recruited young people who became a generation of Chicano leaders.

Among those recruited and trained by Corona and his comrades would be future mayor of Los Angeles Anthony Villaigosa, Los Angeles councilman Gil Cedillo, and California labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, who served as state senator). Another young activist who worked with Hermandad was Eliseo Medina, who went from being a leader in the UFW to becoming an international vice president of the SEIU.

Using the strategy of building solidarity by organizing whole communities in cooperation with labor, church, and civic organizations, Bert Corona and La Hermandad led the way in defeating national anti-immigrant legislation in the 1982 Simpson -Rodino bill and the 1984 Simpson-Mazzoli bill.

By 1986, the Catholic Church, some civil rights organizations, the Democratic Party, and several major unions agreed to work with the Reagan Administration to create a compromise “comprehensive” immigration reform.” The growing power of Reagan Republicans and divisions in organized labor allowed a deeply flawed Immigration Reform and Control Act to pass congress. President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was signed by Reagan in 1986. The IRCA was promoted as a step forward in that it gave legal status to some 2.1 million people. Unfortunately, the act also codified a number of anti-immigrant provisions that were toughened by amendments in 1996 allowing the militarization of the border. Nor did the act cover all migrants, and it included employer sanctions for hiring the undocumented. It also provided a form of Guest Worker or “Bracero” program. Because of its flaws, the IRCA legislation was opposed by La Hermandad and the large network of immigrant rights organizations that Corona had helped to create.

After the IRCA bill passed, with the help of Republicans and Democrats, a new era of community organizing began. More than a million farm workers gained access to citizenship. More than two million immigrants who gained access to permanent residence status and a road map to citizenship had to learn to process their papers, to read and speak English, and to pass citizenship classes. Hermandad responded by establishing classes to assist thousands applying for citizenship. Meanwhile, some unions advanced new styles of organizing and promoted electoral engagement, particularly in the Southwest. In 1984 and 1986, Corona helped Jesse Jackson found the National Rainbow Coalition, and later he served as co-chair of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Corona’s legacy continued into the twenty-first century. Since 2006, a new immigrant rights movement grew in the United States, in part motivated by the failures of immigration laws and in part led by the activism of the children and grandchildren of those who received “amnesty” from the 1986 IRCA legislation.

Campbell, Duane. “Bert Corona: Labor Radical,” Socialist Review, 19 (January-March, 1989), 41-55.

Garcia, Mario. Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994.

Ibarra, Armando, Carlos, Alfredo and Rodolfo Torres, editors. The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes, and the Next Left. London: Pluto Press, 2018.

Shaw, Randy. Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2008.

Bert N. Corona Papers, 1923–1984 Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries. Online Archives of California https://web.archive.org/web/20080604212605/http:/library.stanford.edu/depts/spc/spc.html