Title: Latino Social Movements | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Latino Social Movements
Latino Social Movements
Latino Social Movements
LULAC, MENDEZ, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS
SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
MEXICAN AMERICANS AND UNIONS
THE CHICANO MOVEMENT
WOMEN AND THE MOVIMIENTO
MARGINALIZED MOVEMENTS
LATINO MOVEMENTS IN THE 1990S AND BEYOND
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Content: The organization also largely excluded women from leadership positions, even though some, such as Alice Dickerson Montemayor, fought for greater inclusion (Orozco 1997). Most Chicano scholars and activists in the 1960s criticized LULAC for taking these fairly conservative positions, asserting that the organization was too tepid and
mainstream. Some even called LULAC members “vendidos,” or “sell-outs.” This assessment was probably too harsh, however, because LULAC helped dismantle school segregation and racially based jury discrimination, though it did very little to transform the harsh lives of working-class Mexican Americans who faced sweatshop conditions in factories and fields all over the United States. MEXICAN AMERICANS AND UNIONS
Between the 1930s and 1950s, two organizations—the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress (also known as El Congreso) and the Asociacion Nacional Mexico-Americana (National Association of Mexican-Americans [ANMA])— focused on organizing and supporting union campaigns that primarily involved Mexican Americans. Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright were El Congreso’s two most notable activists. Moreno, a native-born Guatemalan, focused her efforts on organizing agricultural workers in California and Texas, while Fierro de Bright concentrated on fighting racial discrimination in Los Angeles (Ruiz 2004). Moreno helped organize, for instance, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) to fight for the release of eleven Mexican Americans and one Euro American who had been falsely prosecuted for the murder of José Diaz in August 1942. The SLDC was a multiracial coalition that received financial support mostly from labor unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a progressive labor federation that emerged in the 1930s (Barajas 2006). CIO-affiliated unions spearheaded numerous campaigns involving Mexican Americans in the Midwest and Southwest in the middle and late 1930s.