Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
as a woman and as a Mexican.
Be it Resolved: That the Congress carry out a program of . . . education of the Mexican woman, concerning home problems . . . that it support and work for women’s equality so that she may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civil liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and of American democracy.”22
In their challenge to the traditional distinction between the public and the private spheres, the demands made by women within the organization constitute important examples of spatial entitlement, as do the demands of the El Congreso as a whole. Women activists chose and utilized the discursive and political spaces they made in the organization to articulate a long-standing grievance relevant to their communities. Indeed, the identification of sexism and a collective inclination to hold the members of the organization and constituent communities accountable to advancing gender justice may not have been successful in another organization, place, or time. Women such as Moreno and Fierro de Bright made strategic choices as they pertained to human rights and to the meaningful spaces their struggles were born of and created. Similarly, this is what makes Moreno’s contributions to El Congreso and the organization’s impact so significant: both focused on the potential to represent and be represented in a variety of spheres on the literal and symbolic landscape of American democracy, or at least what aggrieved communities expected it could be. This expectation and the process of struggle to fashion them into a realizable reality created counternarratives that called into question the relationship of aggrieved minorities to nation and to citizenship, rendering visible the material conditions of work, geography, education, race, gender, and class as they pertain to social membership. In other words, in demanding white accountability and an equal place at the table, they fashioned a counternarrative of citizenship that included aggrieved minorities. They exposed the inequities and material hardships faced by non-whites in a racial hierarchy that granted privileges to white citizens.
The success of El Congreso was a significant milestone in Moreno’s record of activism, but it was the UCAPAWA that remained at the core of her commitment. The union’s dedication to rank-and-file leadership was important to Moreno. Its official commitment to recruiting members across race, nationality, and gender resonated powerfully with her political aims.
This was true of UCAPAWA’s allies as well. The Community Service Organization (CSO) was not a labor union, but it functioned powerfully as a community agency that occupied many of the same spaces where UCAPAWA did its work. The CSO recognized that building multiracial alliances was “the most effective strategy for protecting and advancing their various interests, especially given financial constraints, the absence of any majority minority with enough strength to act alone, and mounting Cold War red-baiting that threatened civil rights activists.”23 The CSO was responsible for launching the political career of Edward Roybal, who began as a member of the Los Angeles City Council and eventually became a member of Congress. Roybal was elected in 1949 by a multiracial political coalition that “reflected the racial interaction in multicultural neighborhoods and the geographic concentration of liberal-left politics in them.”24 This coalition, nurtured and strengthened by the CSO and its principle organizer, Fred Ross, was comprised of Mexican Americans and Jews in Boyle Heights and was influenced by the civil rights struggles in adjacent communities. Roybal’s subsequent reelection in 1951 and later climb into the U.S. Congress was remarkable, considering his unflagging support of social justice struggles waged by laborers, Communists, and Black, Mexican, and Jewish working-class communities in one of the most conservative postwar eras. Subjected to intense and consistent pressure to capitulate to conservative policymakers, Roybal maintained an unswerving allegiance to equality. His record of support for fair hiring and labor practices, as well as his commitment to desegregation in city jobs and public stance against police brutality targeting Black and Mexican-American youth, secured him key endorsements by the California Eagle and by the Black community as a whole.
Moreno remained with UCAPAWA for the remainder of her career, rising to the position of vice-president in 1941, which marked the first time a Latina would be elected to a high-ranking national union post in the United States.25 Best known for organizing Chicana cannery workers and for her work as cofounder of the Congreso, Moreno championed the interests of Black workers as well. She garnered a little-documented victory in a struggle by UCAPAWA to break discriminatory hiring practices at CalSan. That effort forced factory owners to hire Black women in early 1942, creating a new interracial space from which the constellation of struggle could draw supporters and support.26 Moreno also viewed the sites of struggle as extending beyond the geographic and juridical boundaries of the United States. Alicia Camacho offers a critical understanding of the value of Moreno’s contributions to Latina/ Latino cultural and political identities, arguing:
Moreno and others called for the recognition of the trans-border polity that linked Latinas/os in the United States to a broader field of social, economic, and political affiliations. To deny these relationships in favor of a limited path to naturalization, Moreno and others warned, would not only reduce Latinas/os to a laboring caste within the United States; it would also deform American democracy at its source, its definition of “the people.”27
Moreno’s vision of relationships of Latinas/Latinos to the “social, economic, and political affiliations” of other aggrieved groups constitutes a keen awareness of what David Harvey calls a “cartographic imagination”: an understanding of how lives in one place are affected by the unseen actions of distant strangers elsewhere.28 Moreno had personal knowledge of and political experience in many “else-wheres,” making every place she worked in significant for its mutual others.29 This flexible cognitive mapping of relations between places no doubt assisted Moreno in recognizing how Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles could form relations between races. They did not need uniformity to have unity. They did not need to be identical to share similar identities.
When Moreno testified before the HUAC in September 1948, she displayed a determination to hold the United States accountable to its own stated ideals, echoing the deployment of moral arguments in the political movements that constituted abolition democracy and eventually led to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. “Citizenship . . . means a lot to me,” Moreno declared when she was threatened with deportation, “but the Constitution of the United States means more.”30 Moreno knew, just as Carter G. Woodson had known when in 1921 he argued publicly and compellingly that “the citizenship of the Negro in America [was] a fiction,”31 that in the absence of the most basic of human and civil rights, citizenship would mean very little.
Charlotta Bass shared a similar view, as evidenced by her sustained commitment to an uncompromising vision of total freedom for the oppressed. Born in Sumter, South Carolina, in the late 1870s, Bass was the sixth of eleven children. She moved to Rhode Island at the turn of the century, then in 1910 migrated to Los Angeles to improve her health. Soon after arriving, Bass sold subscriptions for the Eagle, a Black newspaper founded by John Neimore in 1879. Bass became the editor and publisher of the Eagle in 1912, upon the deathbed request of Neimore. She held those positions for more than forty years. In 1914, Bass hired and subsequently married Joseph Blackburn Bass, a Kansas newspaperman, who edited the paper until his death in 1934.
Bass ran for several elected offices, including the Los Angeles City Council, Congress, and the U.S. Vice Presidency. She was also a founding member of California’s Independent Progressive Party. Moreover, she established, participated in, and led numerous civil rights organizations, and in these she met and befriended prominent activists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Bass was always active at the national level, but she used her positions as journalist, candidate, and activist to expose and oppose racism and injustice in Los Angeles.32
Both Moreno and Bass made white accountability and intercommunal affinities central components of their activism, long before their work on the SLDC. In her important and generative work, Regina Freer has argued that Bass’s activism in defense of Chicanos on the issues of police brutality and repatriation “implicitly challenged racialized definitions of citizenship, revealing the speciousness of hyper-sanctioned cultural purity and authenticity of the 1940s and red-baiting in the 1950s.”33 Indeed, from the time she began editing