Luisa Moreno

Luisa Moreno (born August 30, 1906, Guatemala City, Guatemala—died November 3, 1992, Guatemala) was a Guatemalan-born labour organizer and civil rights activist who, over the course of a 20-year career in public life, became one of the most prominent Latina women in the international workers’ rights movement.

Blanca Rosa Lopez Rodrigues was born to an upper-class family in Guatemala and attended primary school in Oakland, California. She returned to Guatemala as a teenager, but she was unable to continue her education, because women were not permitted to enroll in Guatemalan universities at that time. In response, she organized a group to lobby for female students to be included in higher education. Having developed an interest in social issues, she later moved to Mexico City, where she worked as a reporter for a Guatemalan newspaper.

In 1928 she moved to New York City, where she supported her husband, an artist, and her infant daughter by working as a seamstress in a garment factory. She was outraged by the garment industry’s harsh working conditions and low wages as well as by the extent of racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. She soon became involved with a group of Latino labour activists and participated in several strikes. In 1930 she joined the Communist Party. About that time she adopted the name Luisa Moreno so as to disassociate her family from her political positions and labour activities, of which they disapproved.

In 1935 the American Federation of Labor (AFL) hired her as a professional organizer and the next year assigned her to organize Florida tobacco workers. She later broke with the AFL and joined the newly formed Unified Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA; also called the FTA, or Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America), which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). She was soon elected to the CIO council and became its first woman and first Latino member. She was named the international vice president of the UCAPAWA in 1941 and traveled to southern California to organize labour at food-processing plants. During that time she helped organize numerous labour affiliates of the UCAPAWA, including unionizing Local 2 of Fullerton, California, at the largest cannery in southern California at the time. In 1943 she and Dixie Tiller founded the Citrus Workers Organizing Committee in Riverside and Redlands, California.

During the late 1930s and the ’40s, Moreno was also a champion for Hispanic civil rights. She was the organizer and founder of the National Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples in 1938. In 1942 she helped establish a defense committee for hundreds of Mexican Americans who were wrongfully arrested and detained in Los Angeles after the unexplained death of a man in an incident that came to be known as the Sleepy Lagoon murder. She retired from public life in 1947 and was deported to Guatemala in 1950 because of her identification as a communist.