Una mujer sin fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina labor activism

Making strategic choices regarding her class and ethnic identification for the cause of social justice, Luisa Moreno was the most visible Latina labor and civil rights activist in the United States during the Great Depression and World War IT Vice-president of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO), this charismatic Guatemalan immigrant organized farm and cannery workers across the Southwest, achieving particular success among Mexican and Russian Jewish women in southern California plants. In 1939 she was also the driving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Espa (n) over tilde ola (the Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples), the first national Latino civil rights assembly. A feminist and leftist, she faced government harassment and red-baiting in the late 1940s, especially for her past Communist Party membership.