Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López (August 30, 1907 – November 4, 1992), known professionally as Luisa Moreno, was a Guatemalan-American labor and civil rights activist. She worked as an organizer for the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), eventually becoming the union's vice president in 1941, making her the first Latina to be elected to a high-ranking national position in a trade union in the United States. She was also the primary organizer behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española ( "The Spanish-Speaking Peoples' Congress"), the first national Latino civil rights conference held in the United States.
Born in Guatemala to a wealthy family, Moreno founded the Gabriela Mistral Society to advocate for women's education before moving to Mexico City. There, she worked as a journalist and wrote poetry before emigrating again, this time to East Harlem, New York City, where she worked in a garment sweatshop to support her family. She became politically active in New York, joining the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and organizing Latina garment workers there under La Liga de Costureras ( "The League of Seamstresses"), a union affiliated with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Dissatisfied with the ILGWU's lack of support for Latina workers, she accepted a position with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize Black and Latino cigar workers in Florida.
Moreno worked with the AFL in Florida for two years but became disillusioned with their unwillingness to advocate for workers of color and their revisions to a contract she had negotiated on behalf of local workers. As a result, she resigned from the AFL and joined the UCAPAWA, which assigned her to organize a pecan shellers strike in San Antonio, Texas. She later moved to Los Angeles, California, where she became known as the "California Whirlwind". She organized cannery workers throughout the state, including at the California Sanitary Canning Company (Cal San) and Val Vita, where her efforts led to significant improvements in wages and conditions, as well as an on-site daycare. Moreno also established two defense committees for young Chicano men during the early 1940s: one in the aftermath of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and one in the aftermath of the Zoot Suit Riots.
Moreno retired from public life in 1947. After being threatened with deportation in 1948 and testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), she left the United States and returned to Guatemala. While there, Moreno organized educational campaigns for Indigenous women. After the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, she was forced to flee to Mexico and later to Cuba. She eventually returned to Mexico and subsequently Guatemala, where she died in 1992. Her contributions to organized labor have been recognized by labor activists including Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez, and Fred Ross. Scholars such as Vicki L. Ruiz and Theresa Gaye Johnson offer various interpretations of Moreno's legacy, highlighting her significant but often unacknowledged work in labor and immigrant rights activism as well as her promotion of interethnic solidarity.
Early life
Luisa Moreno was born Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López on August 30, 1907, in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Her father, Ernesto Rodríguez Robles, was a coffee grower, while her mother, Alicia López Sarana, was a prominent socialite from Colombia. Her family was wealthy. She lived on a large estate and was educated in both Spanish and French. When she was eight, she fell ill with a high fever. The attending doctor expressed concerns about her chances of survival, and her father vowed to dedicate her to a convent if she regained her health. Upon her recovery, he enrolled her at the Convent of the Holy Names in Oakland, California. During her four and a half years at the convent, she faced discrimination from her classmates due to her Hispanic heritage. She also became disillusioned with the Catholic Church—a disillusionment that stemmed, in part, from her observation that the nuns at the convent indulged in lavish meals during Lent while the aspirants subsisted on bread and water, which struck her as hypocritical.
Moreno returned to Guatemala at the age of 15. While she hoped to pursue a university education, women in Guatemala were excluded from such opportunities. As a result, she organized a group of other affluent young women into the Gabriela Mistral Society, named for the Chilean educator, journalist, and poet. The society campaigned for women's entry into universities by circulating petitions and lobbying politicians, as well as publishing a literary magazine. Moreno was accepted into university during the early 1920s but had a "change of heart" and instead moved to Mexico City to explore her interest in art and poetry.
While in Mexico City, Moreno mingled with local bohemians such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, supporting herself by working as a journalist. She published a book of poetry titled El Vendedor de Cocuyos ( Vendor of the Fireflies) in 1927. On November 27, 1927, she married Miguel Ángel de León, a Guatemalan veteran of the French Foreign Legion during World War I who was 16 years her elder. In a 1987 interview, Moreno reported that on their wedding night, de León took her to a "horrible hotel", where he claimed to have "business, womanizing". However, the couple remained together, and Moreno became pregnant within a few months of the marriage. In 1928, the couple moved to New York City aboard the SS Monterey in pursuit of economic opportunities.
Activism East Harlem Moreno and de León settled in a tenement building in the neighborhood of East Harlem. East Harlem would eventually become known as "Spanish Harlem" due to a wave of Puerto Rican migration beginning in the 1930s, but during the 1920s, it was a diverse neighborhood with significant Black, Eastern European Jewish, Finnish, Italian, and Scandinavian populations. Moreno's daughter, Mytyl Lorraine, was born in November 1928. In order to support Mytyl and de León, who was unemployed, Moreno took a job at a garment sweatshop. Moreno later identified an incident from this time period—the alleged death of a friend's baby, whose face was eaten by a rat—as the beginning of her "political awakening". Determined to change the material conditions of her fellow workers, Moreno joined the Centro Obrero de Habla Española ( 'Spanish-speaking Workers' Center'), an influential communist community organization.
In 1930, Moreno joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). That same year, she organized La Liga de Costureras ( 'The League of Seamstresses'), a small garment workers' union that consisted of her coworkers at the sweatshop and was affiliated with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Uniquely for its time, the employed a "fraternal group", a male auxiliary tasked with generating publicity, raising funds, and procuring refreshments for the union. Also in 1930, Moreno participated in a protest against the murder of Gonzalo González, who was killed by police during a picket he had organized against the film Under a Texas Moon, which he believed contained anti-Mexican themes. She later told Mexican-American labor and community activist Bert Corona that González's murder and the subsequent protest "motivated her to work on behalf of unifying the Spanish-speaking communities".
As of 1935, Moreno was working full-time as a union organizer for the ILGWU, but she had become disillusioned with the union's unwillingness to advocate for Latina workers. She had also befriended a taxi driver named Gray Bemis, who attended political meetings with her and gave her rides. While she was attracted to Bemis, she did not act on her feelings because both she and Bemis were married. In late 1935, she left her husband and the CPUSA and accepted a position with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), where she was tasked with organizing Black and Latino cigar workers in Florida. She and Mytyl traveled to Florida by bus.
Florida
Moreno arrived in Florida in early 1936. At the time, the Ku Klux Klan was known for employing terror tactics against labor activists there. Another labor activist and friend of Moreno's, Joseph Shoemaker, had been murdered by the Klan several months before her arrival. The AFL hoped that that Klan would not target Moreno because she was a light-skinned woman, and according to Moreno, the Klan never threatened her while she was in Florida, though a worker did attempt to kill her with an ice pick during a union meeting. It was in Florida that she assumed the professional name "Luisa Moreno". Historian Vicki L. Ruiz theorizes that she adopted the name "Luisa" in reference to Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo, who also organized cigar workers in Florida, and that she adopted the name "Moreno", which means "dark", to contrast with her given name, Blanca Rosa, which means "white rose". According to Ruiz, Moreno's close friends continued to call her "Rosa". Due to her busy schedule and her concerns about the Klan, Moreno left Mytyl with various informal foster families during their time in Florida. While some of these families treated Mytyl well, she later reported that one of her caretakers sexually abused her without Moreno's knowledge.
While in Florida, Moreno helped to negotiate a contract that covered 13,000 cigar workers across the state. However, AFL officials ultimately revised the contract to make it more favorable to management. As a result, Moreno advised the workers to reject the new contract. At a subsequent AFL convention held in Tampa in 1936, Moreno was part of a delegation of organizers demanding adjustments to union members' dues, as well as the creation of an international union for food processing and agriculture. She also delivered a speech criticizing the earlier contract revisions and arguing that the union was not adequately serving workers of color. While the AFL ignored Moreno's delegation's demands, the delegation ultimately went on to establish its envisioned union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), on July 9, 1937, in Denver, Colorado. Concerned that Moreno's involvement with the delegation would negatively impact their Florida operations, the AFL made plans to transfer her to Pennsylvania.
Before she left Florida, Moreno helped to organize two significant demonstrations in Ybor City. The first was a protest held on May 6, 1937, in support of the Popular Front, a Spanish electoral alliance consisting of a variety of left-wing organizations that had triumphed in the 1936 Spanish general election. Participants in the march included female cigar workers and garment workers employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), who engaged in a city-wide march towards city hall where they presented their demands for solidarity with the Popular Front to the mayor. The second was a strike action staged on July 8 by WPA garment workers, who demanded the reinstatement of 88 women who had been fired in order to limit the impact of a possible strike, as well as a 20% wage increase. Although the strike initially included both white and Latina women, the white workers, unused to labor actions and worried about the potential repercussions for themselves and their families, returned to work after the first day. Weakened by the white women's return to work, the strike ended on July 14 without achieving its demands.
Texas