Google Doodle Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States, Doodle Today honors the Guatemalan-American labor organizer, journalist and activist. Louise Moreno. The artwork, which shows Moreno holding hands with people from the various communities she tirelessly advocated for, was illustrated by Guatemalan guest artist Juliet Menendez.

Moreno was born “Blanca Rosa Lopez Rodriguez” in Guatemala City on August 30, 1947. When she was a child, her family immigrated to Oakland, California. She returned to Guatemala as a teenager, but her education stopped because women were not allowed to attend universities at the time. In response, Moreno organized a group to lobby for women’s rights to higher education. Victory in this civil rights campaign sparked a lifelong passion for activism.

Moreno was interested in social issues for several years as a journalist in Mexico City before moving to New York in 1928. Shortly after his move, a group of Latino protesters were brutalized and killed by police after protesting a Warner Brothers film. . perpetuate anti-Mexican sentiment; He later stated that the incident inspired his work to unite Hispanic communities. When the Great Depression hit, she began working as a seamstress in a garment factory to support her family. He immediately saw the need for labor reform because workers were paid low wages for working overtime and suffered from dangerous working conditions.

In 1935, Moreno joined the American Federation of Labor as a professional organizer. As part of this role, her work with the United Canning, Agricultural, Packaging and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) took her across the country, helping workers such as cigarette factory workers in Pennsylvania, sugar cane workers and walnut shellers in the South, and beet workers. Farmers packing tuna in the West. She was eventually elected vice-president of UCAPAWA in 1941.

In addition to his labor rights work, Moreno advocated for racial and ethnic equality. In 1938, he founded the National Congress of Hispanic People, the first national assembly for Latino civil rights. The group advocated for fair treatment of Latino employees and desegregation of schools and neighborhoods. Notably, in 1942, he created a defense committee that successfully fought to have charges dropped against a group of Mexican American teenagers who had been arrested without evidence.

Despite Moreno’s tireless efforts to improve the lives of thousands of American workers, her status as a union leader made her a target of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The INS began threatening her with deportation if she did not testify against other union leaders. Refusing to do so, she was forced to leave the United States and return to Latin America. There he continued his work organizing workers in Mexico, Cuba and Guatemala.