The Arizona Latino Arts and Cultural Center (ALAC), in Phoenix, Arizona was created in 2007 to advance Latinos in the state through education, advocacy and the celebration of Latino arts. Latinopia visited with two of the group’s founders to learn more about ALAC

Dan Guerrero is an accomplished actor and producer. In his one-man show, “Gaytino,” he recalls what it is like to grow up gay in a macho Mexican society. He also remembers his life-long friendship with acclaimed Chicano artist Carlos Almaráz.

Mark Guerrero is a singer and songwriter whose lyrics often reflect social issues. He performs here an original composition about the whitewashing of the mural “America Tropical” painted in 1932 by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The mural was whitewashed because of its controversial theme.

Soñia Rivera-Valdés was born in Cuba. Her book, “The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda,” was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas Award in Havana in 1997. She has published short stories in the Untied States, Latin America and Europe. She currently resides in New York where she also teaches. For Latinopia, she reads from her latest collection of short stories, “Stories of Little Women & Grown-Up Girls.”

DOLORES HUERTA, LABOR ORGANIZER

Dolores Huerta, UFW

Dolores Clara Fernandez was born in the Northern New Mexico mining town of Dawson, on April 10, 1930. Her father, Juan Fernandez, was a miner and occasional farm worker, union organizer and in later years would become a New Mexico State Assemblyman. Dolores’ parents divorced when she was three and she moved with her mother, Alicia Chavez, and two brothers to Stockton, California where, before long, her enterprising mother had bought two hotels and a restaurant and set up a business that catered largely to the Mexican American farm workers. As a young woman, Dolores helped out at the hotel while attending Stockton high school, was active in the Girl Scouts and distinguishing herself early on by winning second place in a national Girl Scout essay contest.

Growing up in the farm working community of Stockton, Dolores became aware of the discrimination suffered by Mexicans and Mexican Americans, particularly field hands working in the hot San Joaquin Valley sun. Her brother, Marshall, was the victim of World War Two xenophobia when he was beaten and stripped of his clothes for wearing a Zoot-suit to a dance during a Victory in Japan Day celebration. Dolores graduated from Stockton High School in 1947 and then attended the University of the Pacific’s Delta Community College from which she received a teaching degree. It was during this time that she was briefly married and had the first two of what would eventually be eleven children.

In 1955, she was recruited by Fred Ross, Sr., to work in the Community Service Organization, a grass roots group that addressed issues of segregation, discrimination and police brutality and that undertook voter registration drives such as the 1949 campaign that succeeded in electing Edward Roybal to the Los Angeles city council- the first Latino in 68 years. During this time Dolores married Ventura Huerta, another farm labor activist; the two would have five children together. It was while working at the CSO that Dolores met Cesar Chavez who by 1960 had become the CSO’s national director. Dolores shared with Chavez a concern for the plight of the farm workers.

In 1962 Chavez proposed to the CSO that the organization expand and organize farm workers. But the CSO, with its urban bias, denied Chavez’s request. Chavez and Dolores decided to quit the CSO. Using the town Delano, California as a base, the two, with the help of Gilbert Padilla, formed the Farm Workers Association with Chavez as President and Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla as Vice-Presidents. They worked the first year without a salary. In 1965 they changed the name to the National Farm Workers Association. In September of 1965 Coachella Valley grape growers decided to pay Filipino farm hands reduced salaries which forced Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, to call a strike. Itliong approached Chavez for support and on September 16, 1965 the 6,000 members of the NFWA voted to go out on strike. Shortly thereafter both unions merged to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC).

The Delano grape strike lasted five years and during that time Dolores Huerta served as the chief negotiator for the union, winning the first union contract with Schenley Wine Company in 1966. Among the gains of the union contract were improved working conditions, health benefits, and the cessation of the use of deadly pesticides. In order for the strike to be effective, the union had to take the struggle to the cities, particularly to the East Coast. Through Huerta’s tireless leadership the farm workers were able to pressure grape growers to the bargaining table through a successful national grape boycott.

UFW Flag

Victory came on July 29,1970, when the United Farm Workers, now affiliated with the AFL-CIO, signed a historic agreement with 26 grape growers. Dolores continued to lead the union in its struggles for the rights of farm workers, devoting herself to the lettuce boycott in the 1970s and eventually securing passage in California of the historic Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) of 1975. This act was the first to recognize the right of farm workers to have collective bargaining agreements. By the 1980s Dolores had married again, this time to Richard Chavez, Cesar Chavez’s brother with whom she had four children.

Throughout her five decade long association with Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta has served as Vice-President of the union, involved in all areas of strategy and negotiations, shifting in her roles as necessitated by the circumstances of union struggles. She has been arrested twenty-two times and nearly lost her life in 1988 when she was severely beaten by San Francisco police at a rally against the polices of President George Herbert Walker Bush; she suffered six broken ribs and her spleen had to be removed in an emergency operation that saved her life. Huerta continued to work with the union even after the sudden death of Cesar Chavez on 1993 and has been a close advisor to Arturo Rodriguez who became President of the union after Cesar’s passing. She has received numerous national recognitions, awards and honorary degrees, including the Ellis Island Medal of Freedom, the Eleanor D. Roosevelt Human Rights Award, and being inducted into the Nation’s Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2002, she received the Puffin Foundation/Nation Institute Award for Creative Citizenship; she took the $100,000 given with this award and created the Dolores Huerta Foundation’s Organizing Institute, an institution whose purpose is to bring organizing and training skills to low-income communities. She continues to lecture and speak out on a variety of social issues involved low income people, women and the rights of Latinos.

MARIA ELENA DURAZO, LABOR ORGANIZER

María Elena Durazo

María Elena Durazo is widely regarded as one of the most powerful and savvy union organizers in the United States. On May 15, 2006 she was elected  to serve as the Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO,  an organization which represents more than 800,000 workers through more than 300 separate unions. In 2010 she was reelected to this post.

María Elena was born the seventh child in a family of eleven children to migrant worker parents. Growing up, María Elena traveled with her family, following the crops throughout California and Oregon, and experiencing the exploitative conditions and hardships that migrant laborers suffer. The pay was meager, the weather was either baking or freezing, there were no bathrooms in the field, no fresh water for the workers and contractors were eager to take advantage of young female workers.

This early experience left her with indelible memories. In a conversation with film maker Jesús Treviño she recalls, “As migrant farm workers, my dad would load us up on a flatbed truck and we would go from town to town and pick whatever crop was coming up. We moved from school to school so I didn’t have any friends–my family was my friends. I think of my dad when he had to negotiate with contratistas (contractors). I knew we worked so hard and the contratistas were chiseling us down to pennies. What was pennies to them meant food on the table for us.”

The poverty had tragic results on her family. She lost a young brother because her  mother lacked proper medical care. In her interview with Treviño, she recalls “He was a new born baby. And he died when we were working in the fields in San Jose because my mother didn’t have access to health care.  I have a memory of a small coffin. My parents couldn’t afford to bury him. They had to go to the local priest to have him buried.”

In spite of these obstacles, María Elena attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and graduated in 1975. In college she became involved in the Chicano Movement at the urging of her older brother. Then she entered the labor movement as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (later called UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees).

In 1983, she joined the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) Local 11 as an organizer. She soon found that the union as then constituted was not responsive to much of its  membership– 70% of its members were immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, but held few leadership positions. Meetings were held in English and workers often didn’t know their rights.

While working as a union organizer, she pursued an education in  law at the People’s College of Law and earned her degree in 1985.

By 1987, María Elena was ready to lead a drive by the rank and file of HERE Local 11 to make the union more responsive to its majority-Latino membership. The organizing drive  successfully instituted a shop steward system that educated the rank and file on their rights, workers were now able to participation in negotiating their union contracts and all meetings and publications were from then on bilingual.

In 1988, she married fellow union activist Miguel Contreras whom she met while at HERE Local 11. Soon thereafter, in May of 1989,  María Elena ran for and was elected President of Local 11. She served in that capacity from 1989 to 2006.

María Elena being arrested at New Otani protest

Her approach is not timid, often placing her in harm’s way. During the union’s campaign against the New Otani Hotel, the first hotel to be built non-union in downtown Los Angeles, she led workers in civil disobedience protests for which she was arrested after she and New Otani workers sat down at an intersection and would not move until police dragged them away. She felt a point had to be made.

As María Elena  explains it, “The New Otani started a trend toward workers not having union rights and not being part of the union movement. Latino hotel workers versus very, very wealthy powerful corporation. I think its important that when a corporation takes on house keepers and dishwashers that they not feel they can squash us or that there will get away without repercussions.”

María Elena Durazo is a formidable force in Los Angeles and nationally.

In 1996, she became the first Latina elected to the Executive Board of HERE International Union.

In 2003, she served as National Director of the Immigrant Worker’s Freedom Ride which mobilized national support for legislation to revamp national immigration laws.

In 2004, she became the Executive Vice President of UNITE-HERE International, the organization made up of the UNITE and HERE unions which had merged.

In 2008 María Elena Durazo served as the Vice Chair of the Democratic National Convention Committee and as National Co-Chair of the Barrack Obama Presidential Campaign.

In 2010 she was reelected to serve as Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Besides her union work, María Elena has served on many civic commissions and boards. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the Los Angeles Commission on Airports, Mayor Richard Riordan appointed her to the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Committee and she has also served on the California State Coastal Commission.

María Elena was married to the late union leader Miguel Contreras, who served as  Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles Federation of Labor from 1996 until his untimely death on May 6, 2005.  She has two children with Miguel Contreras, , Mario and Michael Contreras.

Currently she serves as Chair of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a non-profit grassroots organization committed to creating quality jobs in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles City Economy and Jobs Committee; the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau and the California League of Conservation Voters.

“Zoot Suit” is arguably the most successful Chicano play in theater history.  It derives much of its success from powerful performances by an ensemble of Latino actors including Edward James Olmos who plays the iconic role of El Pachuco (the Zootsuiter). Latinopia asked playwright and director Luis Valdez how the role of the Pachuco character came about and discovered that the personage of El Pachuco had its origins in earlier plays written by El Teatro Campesino and Luis Valdez.

Angela Ortiz is a Panamanian-born still photographer who resides in Los Angeles. Her works covers the gamut from celebrity photography to serious artistic endeavors. She shared with Latinopia three major thematic photographic series she has pursued, Lines And Textures,  Urban Hiking and Best Photo of the Day.

Diane Velarde Hernández returns with another great Lenten recipe: chiles rellenos. Stuffed chile peppers is a favorite staple of Mexican cuisine. Diane walks us through the basic recipe for stuffing made of shredded Jack Cheese and onions. But this recipe can also be used for chiles stuffed with beef, chicken or other foods. Enjoy!

Los Lobos is an internationally acclaimed Chicano rock and roll music group with multiple Grammy awards to their name. Although the group released their first album, “Just Another Band from East L.A.” in 1977, it was their recording of the soundtrack for the 1987 movie “La Bamba” that garnered them an international reputation. Latinopia caught up with songwriter and drummer Louie Pérez and asked him how the music for La Bamba came about.

In 1974, Chicano poets José Montoya and José Antonio Burciaga traveled to New York to meet with Puerto Rican poets of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. On a street corner in Loisaida (the Lower East Side of Manhattan) legendary Puerto Rican poet Miguel Piñero asked the Chicanos what was the greatest Chicano poem ever written. The answer has surprised poets for decades.

The Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was in response to decades of discrimination and social inequality experienced by the Mexican American community in the Untied States. The Movement brought about sweeping social changes that have since benefited all Latinos living in the United States. The Movement also had a profound personal influence on the social activists themselves. Latinopia attended the 2009 Chicano Activist reunion and asked, “How did the Chicano Movement change your life?”

The Librotraficante Banned Book Caravan swept through Southwest cities in March of 2012.  The caravan was bringing banned books to the high school students of Tucson, Arizona. It was there that local school authorities had banned books by many Latino authors  from school classrooms.  On their stop-over in El Paso, Texas, local poets and community activists welcomed the group. Among those were Richard Yañez and Vincent Emery Jr. who read Pulitzer Prize nominee and banned author Luís Alberto Urrea’s poem, “Hymn for Vatos Who Will Never Be in the Poem.”

Rose Portillo is an accomplished actress of stage and screen who starred as Della in the acclaimed play Zoot Suit as well as acting in in numerous television roles. She is currently  a director for the About Productions theater company. Latinopia was interested to learn that the character of Della in the Zoot Suit play underwent a transformation from how it was originally conceived by dramatist and director Luis Valdez.  Rose explains how her collaboration with Luis Valdez helped to  shape the Della character.

Jaime Escalante (1930-2010) was a renowned mathematics teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. His teaching success inspired the motion picture Stand and Deliver, directed by Ramón Melendez and starring Edward James Olmos. Upon his untimely death he was remembered with a wake at his old classroom at Garfield High School, a funeral march, and a memorial. Hundreds of former students and residents of East Los Angeles were in attendance.

Maceo Montoya is both a graphic artist and an author. His first novel, “The Scoundrel and the Optimist,” was published by the Bilingual Review Press in 2010. Maceo’s paintings often inspire and complement his writings as in this original piece, “Cielo Rojo,” (Red Sky) which he reads here with his accompanying paintings.

Cuñao’s frontman is Julio Montero. He born in Ecuador and raised in New York city. His music is very much influenced by the Latin American social protest songs of the 1970s. Here he performs his original composition, “Gaitán,” an homage to a beloved Colombian social reformer and Presidential candidate who was gunned down in downtown Bogotá in 1948.

In 1966, Chicano activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales created a community based civil rights organization called the Crusade for Justice. Corky was disillusioned by traditional government agencies that seemed to ignore the discrimination and injustice experienced by Mexican Americans at the time. He argued for self-determination and creating alternatives to traditional educational and political structures. Ernesto Vigil, a member of the Crusade from 1968 to 1981 spoke to Latinopia about the Crusade for Justice and its late leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales.

Juan Tejeda is music director of the San Antonio Conjunto Music Festival held each year and sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Center. Now in its 30th year, the festival brings together Conjunto groups from throughout the United States for a week-end of performances and workshops. Latinopia asked Juan to explain what Conjunto music is and how it originated. To our surprise, we found that  Conjunto music has its origins in German polka music brought to Texas in the 1880s.

Los Angeles-based artist, sculptor and muralist José Ramírez is a Chicano artist in the tradition of the greats of Mexico (Los Tres Grandes) as well as pioneering Chicano artists. Latinopia caught up with José in his studio in the City Terrace neighborhood of Los Angeles where he shared with us his artistic vision.

Rose Portillo is a gifted actress who starred as Della in the acclaimed play Zoot Suit as well as many roles in television and movies. Her first major role was in the movie “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” playing opposite Richard Burton. Latinopia discovered that Rose’s first movie shoot was full of surprises.