Luisa Moreno (August 30, 1907 – November 4, 1992) was a leader in the United States labor movement and a social activist. She unionized workers, led strikes, wrote pamphlets in English and Spanish, and convened the 1939 Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española, the "first national Latino civil rights assembly", before returning to Guatemala in 1950. Early life Moreno was born Blanca Rosa López Rodríguez to a wealthy family in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Disenchanted with the gender restrictions on educational attainment, she organized her elite, wealthy peers into La Sociedad Gabriela Mistral. This group used petition drives and informal lobbying to successfully advocate for the admission of women to Guatemalan universities. Rejecting her elite status, she went to Mexico City at the age of nineteen to pursue a career in journalism. While there, she also wrote poetry. She married Angel De León, an artist, in 1927 and together they moved to New York City the following year. There, her daughter Mytyl was born. While in New York, the Warner Bros. movie Under a Texas Moon (1930) was protested as anti-Mexican by a group of Latinos led by Gonzalo González. Police brutalized the picketers, killing González. The murder sparked a Pan-Latino protest, in which Moreno participated. She later told Bert Corona that the experience "motivated her to work on behalf of unifying the Spanish-speaking communities." She was a graduate of the Catholic women's university College of the Holy Names in Oakland, California. Union and civil rights activism The Great Depression struck in 1929, and in order to support her daughter and unemployed husband, Moreno worked as a seamstress in Spanish Harlem. She organized her co-workers, most of whom were Latinas, into a garment workers union. In 1935, Moreno was hired by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as a professional organizer. She left her husband, who had become physically abusive, and settled with her daughter in Florida, where she unionized African-American and Latina cigar-rollers. She joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and became a representative of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), becoming the editor of its Spanish-language newspaper in 1940. As UCAPAWA representative, she helped organize workers at pecan-shelling plants in San Antonio, Texas, and cannery workers in Los Angeles. There, she encouraged alliances between workers at different plants. Her leadership was of the type that empowered other workers, especially women, and she strongly