Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
FIGURE 1. Demonstrators marching along Broadway in Los Angeles demand the repeal of the Smith and McCarran Acts, circa July 19, 1950.
Studying these women as part of the same frame of interracial antiracist struggle in Los Angeles reveals a critical moment not visible when we study them separately. The rhetorical strategies of interethnic affiliation and identification created by and around these women’s mutual endeavors significantly shaped the narrative of the Black–Brown political alliance and its cultural corollaries for years to come. Bass and Moreno were principal architects of midcentury cross-racial politics. That these women of color were likely the most influential local activists in these LA communities at this time is a fact that cannot be overestimated. They made critical interventions against structures of racism, imperialism, and spatial oppression over several decades, and both were among the most visible participants in the infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within the Black and Brown communities of Los Angeles.
Even without material evidence of their interactions, it strains common sense to assume that Bass and Moreno never met. In 1943, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) was formed in Los Angeles by an interracial, intergenerational—and at times, trans-national—coalition of labor leaders, journalists, and community activists in defense of Mexican youths falsely convicted of murder. Both women were active on the SLDC and in its relevant communities at the same time. Undoubtedly, each was aware of the other’s work to generate new political sensibilities and identities among the women and men in their respective communities. Both engaged in affirmative declarations of the rights of minority communities in order to convey their disappointment in the difference between the rhetoric of American universality and the realities of home-front inequality.
This chapter argues that Bass and Moreno, in the same moment and city, envisioned and enacted a plural, egalitarian, democratic, and intercultural “America,” in concert with artists, intellectuals, and activists and that this vision and practice deployed spatial and cultural politics that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in the historiography of this period and these struggles. To understand their significance in this context, it is helpful to consider this story within my theoretical framework of a constellation of struggle, which delineates the array of activism, histories, and identities that each woman symbolically brought to her activity with the SLDC. “Constellations” suggest mobility, as well as the ability of these activists to re-form around different nuclei of causes and struggle. The constellations of struggle that coalesced around the SLDC were foregrounded by the radical critiques raised by Black and Brown working-class communities in Los Angeles. Civil rights struggles in and for both communities had long made their mark on the national landscape of civil rights struggles and created a genealogy of empowerment critical for the articulation of social membership in the post-WWII era. A constellation of struggle is likewise a feminist intervention in the androcentric characterization of this time as the era of the GI generation.14 Looking at constellations enables us to take seriously the intersection between women’s embodied social identities and the larger historical developments of the moment.
The particular timing of the SLDC politics precipitated an intensification of persecution against Bass and Moreno by government and city officials. By the end of the decade, The California Eagle would no longer be in Bass’s hands and Moreno would be deported. For these reasons and many more, the coalitional politics of the SLDC mark an important historical moment. And though this interracial mobilization arose out of the violence of the Sleepy Lagoon case, its consequences created a far more important legacy: new language about and strategies for the assertion of humanity and social entitlement. The particular alliance politics practiced by Bass and Moreno set a crucial precedent for the committee’s strategic interracial mobilization and for subsequent spatial and sonic politics in Los Angeles.
EACH IN THEIR OWN CONTEXTS
The full import of the constellations of struggle brought by each activist to the SLDC is best understood by considering their respective histories of activism and community sensibilities, including the community activism that engendered and resulted from their work.
Moreno was born into an elite Guatemalan family and traveled as a teenager to Mexico City, where she worked as a journalist and pursued her talents as a poet. Vicki Ruiz conjectures that it may have been Moreno’s “sense of adventure and certainly . . . a streak of rebelliousness” that may have underpinned her early rejection of her family’s privilege. In any case, Moreno’s renunciation of her family’s wealth “permanently strain[ed] her relationship with her parents and siblings. . . .”15 After a few years in Mexico’s artistic circles, she migrated to New York with her husband in 1928 and became a mother the same year. Her experience as a garment worker living in Spanish Harlem provided the impetus for her political awakening: In 1930, Moreno joined the Communist Party. Her activism in Spanish Harlem’s Centro Obrero de Habla Española, a leftist community coalition, led her to mobilize her peers on the shop floor into a small-scale garment workers’ union called “La Liga de Costureras.” In 1935, she accepted a job organizing Latino, African-American, and Italian cigar rollers in California as an American Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer. In 1938, after resigning from the AFL to join its newly established rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).16 That year, Moreno also helped organize El Congreso del Pueblos que Hablan Española (Congress of Spanish-speaking people), held in April of 1939. It was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States; it attracted over a thousand delegates representing over 120 organizations. El Congreso addressed employment, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights; they fought for workers’ and women’s rights while advocating for Latino studies curricula and bilingual education.17 This event was particularly extraordinary, since Moreno and other congress leaders rejected the as-similationist strategies proposed by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); instead, they insisted that whites accept blame for the racial and ethnic stratification that had evolved in the Southwest.18
FIGURE 2. Luisa Moreno at the 1949 California CIO Convention.
The twofold demand for the full spectrum of human rights, as well as white historical accountability, illumines a long-shared philosophy among Blacks and Browns in the United States about the nature of their rights as human beings. For example, in the struggle for emancipation, slaves in the mid-nineteenth century created what W.E.B. Du Bois named “abolition democracy.”19 In the years leading up to the victory of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Blacks articulated a radical political perspective that demanded freedom in its entirety—nothing less than the material realization of all of the rights supplied to elite whites. In so doing, they critiqued a democracy compromised by its racist institutions and created a legacy that “opened the door for subsequent claims for social justice by immigrants and their children, religious minorities, women, workers, and people with disabilities. From voting rights to affirmative action, from fair housing to fair hiring, the 14th Amendment is an enduring and abiding force for social justice in US society.”20 These shared histories of radical critique among Blacks and Mexican Americans helped make it possible for them to view their related but nonidentical struggles as part of the same constellation.
El Congreso’s call for equality in labor, housing, education, and health, as well as for the positive and consistent representation of their history and worth as human beings in school curricula constitute an audible echo of the radical tenets of abolition democracy. Moreover, Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright co-authored an unprecedented resolution indicting “the discriminated status of women within the Mexican community as well as without . . . [demanding] the full recognition of women’s equality, independent of their relationship to men.”21 This resolution upended stereotypes of the docility of women in the face of a culture of machismo, recuperating women’s activism and dispelling stereotypes about their passivity:
Whereas: The Mexican woman, who for centuries had suffered oppression, has the responsibility for raising her children and for caring for the home, and even that of earning a livelihood of herself and