Claribel Alegría
Claribel Alegría was a poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who was a major literary voice in 20th century Central America. She won the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other awards.
Tag Archives: Latina
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Policarpa Salavarrieta
Policarpa Salavarrieta was a Neogranadine seamstress who spied for the Revolutionary Forces during the Spanish Reconquista of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela). Considered a heroine of Colombian independence, she was captured by Spanish Royalists and executed for high treason. The anniversary of her death is commemorated with the Day of the Colombian Woman.
Salomé Ureña
Dominican poet Salomé Ureña was an early advocate for women’s higher education in the Dominican Republic.
Ana Mendieta
For a long time, Mendieta’s highly publicized death eclipsed any attention being paid to her intensely important body of work. A recent surge of interest in her jolting performances, however, has turned a focus onto her work as being an important member of the displaced and abused women canon. Mendieta has inspired a book about her death written by Robert Katz, a feminist protest outside of the Dia Art Foundation’s retrospective of Carl Andre replete with chicken blood and guts, and many of her own postmortem retrospectives. She has also influenced numerous modern artists, such as Ana Teresa Fernández, Kate Gilmore, Simone Leigh, Gina Osterloh, Antonia Wright, Nancy Spero and Tania Bruguera.
Carmen Herrera
Herrera’s legacy also lies in the example of her late-blooming career. Like other women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, her life has been dedicated to art, but she did not find an audience for her work until she was very old. Her legacy, then, is not just about her painting but about her tenacious creative perseverance in the face of an indifferent, oar biased, world.
Dr Antonia Novello
A dedicated public health advocate, Antonia Novello made history as the first female and first Hispanic U.S. Surgeon General in 1990. Novello has led several major public health campaigns in her efforts to improve health conditions and access to medical care, especially for women, children, and minority populations.
Anacaona
Anacaona was a Taíno cacica, (female cacique or chief), religious expert, poet and composer of Xaraguá, in what is now Haiti.
Cecilia Grierson
Physician, reformer and activist Cecilia Grierson was the first woman to receive a medical degree in Argentina.
Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent
Elisabeth Dieudonné Vincent was a Haitian-born businesswoman and international traveller, born the illegitimate child of a former slave and a Frenchman.
Dolores Huerta
Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement.
Born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta was the second of three children of Alicia and Juan Fernandez, a farm worker and miner who became a state legislator in 1938. Her parents divorced when Huerta was three years old, and her mother moved to Stockton, California with her children. Huerta’s grandfather helped raise Huerta and her two brothers while her mother juggled jobs as a waitress and cannery worker until she could buy a small hotel and restaurant. Alicia’s community activism and compassionate treatment of workers greatly influenced her daughter.
Discrimination also helped shape Huerta. A schoolteacher, prejudiced against Hispanics, accused Huerta of cheating because her papers were too well-written. In 1945 at the end of World War II, white men brutally beat her brother for wearing a Zoot-Suit, a popular Latino fashion.
Huerta received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific’s Delta College. She married Ralph Head while a student and had two daughters, though the couple soon divorced. She subsequently married fellow activist Ventura Huerta with whom she had five children, though that marriage also did not last. Huerta briefly taught school in the 1950s, but seeing so many hungry farm children coming to school, she thought she could do more to help them by organizing farmers and farm workers.
In 1955 Huerta began her career as an activist when she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which led voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for Hispanics. She also founded the Agricultural Workers Association. Through a CSO associate, Huerta met activist César Chávez, with whom she shared an interest in organizing farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the predecessor of the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), which formed three year later. Huerta served as UFW vice president until 1999.
Despite ethnic and gender bias, Huerta helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers and was the lead negotiator in the workers’ contract that followed. Throughout her work with the UFW, Huerta organized workers, negotiated contracts, advocated for safer working conditions including the elimination of harmful pesticides. She also fought for unemployment and healthcare benefits for agricultural workers. Huerta was the driving force behind the nationwide table grape boycotts in the late 1960s that led to a successful union contract by 1970.
In 1973, Huerta led another consumer boycott of grapes that resulted in the ground-breaking California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which allowed farm workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and conditions. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Huerta worked as a lobbyist to improve workers’ legislative representation. During the 1990s and 2000s, she worked to elect more Latinos and women to political office and has championed women’s issues.
The recipient of many honors, Huerta received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. As of 2015, she was a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, and the President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.