2026 Hispanic Heritage Month

This post was adapted from content sent out in the 10/1/26 Weekly UAEA Email

September 15th - October 15th is Hispanic Heritage Month so I wanted to once again highlight a few Hispanic labor icons. I’ve highlighted some famous ones like Dolores Huerta, Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, Bert Corona, Santiago Iglesias Pantin, and Luisa Moreno in prior emails - you can read about those people on our blog. As a reminder from last year, this historic month starts in the middle of September and runs through October 15th so it can include the Independence Days of countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico. 

Linda Chavez-Thompson (1944-present): I took most of this information from an interview Linda gave in 2004 - it’s a great interview that goes into depth about the struggles she faced, the difficulties of balancing family life with union work, and her insights into organizing - you can find the whole thing here. 

Linda was born in Texas to a sharecropper family - her father raised cotton on other farmer’s lands. Linda was born “Lydia” but had her name Anglicized to “Linda” by a teacher when she entered school - the same was done to her brother Felipe, who became “Philip,” and her brother Jose, who became “Joe.” In 1954 her father was unable to get a sharecropping contract and instead began weeding cotton fields, something Linda started to help with at age 10 during her summer breaks. At age 15 her family encouraged her to drop out of school so she could weed cotton full time. She continued her education with textbooks that her family members brought home and taught herself how to read and write Spanish - up until that point, she had only been able to speak it. In later interviews she said that her greatest hope as a child was to be a Sales Clerk for Sears, Roebuck, seeing that as one of the only opportunities for someone from her background and with her skills. 

At age 19 Linda switched to housecleaning during the non-growing season and continued that for several years until 1967 when she was hired as a secretary for the Construction Laborer's Local 1253 in Lubbock. She had no background in secretarial work but was bilingual and could clearly communicate between members, 60% of whom only spoke Spanish, and management, the majority of whom spoke English. She was passionate about the opportunities presented to union members and the benefits that union work had, and slowly became involved with other groups like the AFL-CIO and AFSCME as opportunities presented themselves (one of her first outside roles was organizing resources after some tornados devastated Texas in 1970). She actively organized local city staff, ran union work on a daily basis, and helped create coalitions across Texas and other southwestern states, including the Public Employee Council of San Antonio and Bexar Counties. She became the Executive Director of her local AFSCME chapter in 1977 and became an International Vice President of AFSCME in 1988, the first Latina woman elected to both roles. While she was thrilled at both roles, she frequently faced barriers, and had to learn the subtle art of national union politics to exert influence and draw attention to the needs of the southwest. Many national unions paid little attention to southwestern delegates in the 1970s and 1980s due to the fact most of the states were “right-to-work,” - organizing was both costly and often unproductive. Linda pushed back against this by directing attention towards state races where national support could yield major pro-union changes to state policy. 

In 1993 Linda was the first Latina woman elected to the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO, then was elected as the first-ever Executive Vice-President of the AFL-CIO in 1995 after a heated internal election, and remained in the role through 2009. She helped push a number of national campaigns throughout the 1990s, including one to raise America’s minimum wage, something which eventually occurred in 1996 and 1997. She later served on a number of non-profit and governmental groups to advance labor and Hispanic interests, including working with the National Committee for Community and Justice, the President’s Commission for Diversity, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, United Way of America, and ORIT, the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers. I could not find a lot of information about Linda from 2009 to present, but I believe she is still organizing today at the age of 82.

Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984): Ernesto was born in the Nayarit state of Mexico - his family immigrated to the US when he was 6 to escape the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, but lost both his mother and uncle to influenza. His remaining uncle pushed him to focus on education even as they worked as laborers in Sacramento - when Ernesto was only 8, he reportedly spoke better English than most of the men in their laborer camp, and became an advocate to fight against their poor working conditions and contaminated drinking water. Ernesto slowly gained work experience as a messenger, clerk, court interpreter, and cannery worker, and won a scholarship to attend Occidental College in 1923. He continued to do field and cannery work during the summers while he attended school. After completing his first degree at Occidental, he gained a Masters in History from Standord, and then finished his education in 1944 with a PhD in Economics from Columbia. He was then recruited by the National Farm Labor Union, an early agricultural organizing union, to conduct research and education in 1948.

While he certainly assisted with their education efforts, Ernesto also remained involved in organizing, and helped plan and execute 20 farm strikes between 1948 and 1959. While he was happy with some of the successes, he felt that the labor movement’s efficacy was hindered by the exploitative nature of the working environment. Agricultural workers were often immigrants who were part of the “braceros” program, a temporary federal initiative to allow migrant workers into the US for brief periods each year during picking seasons. These workers lived isolated from towns and cities on private land and could not be reached by organizers - since they were also temporary workers, it was easy for organizations to abuse them since they knew they would only be around for a few months at most. This also meant that domestic farm workers had difficulty getting fair wages since farmers could undercut them with braceros. Ernesto proceeded to study and write about the abuses of the program, and published “Merchants of Labor” in 1964. This was an in-depth look at the discrimination, low wages, dangerous pesticide exposure, terrible living conditions, and other abuses of the program. This book is largely credited with changing public perception of the program, and the federal government canceled the whole initiative later that year. This made it much easier for labor groups to start organizing agricultural workers, and the surge in agricultural unions throughout the 1960s and 1970s is, in turn, partially attributable to this. 

Ernesto continued to research and study labor and Hispanic policy issues throughout his life, and is credited on over 100 research papers or books. Ernesto was highly respected for his insights into labor and work-on-the-ground studying labor issues, and he worked throughout his later life as a professor at the University of Notre Dame, San Jose State University, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Multiple schools and academic buildings around Southern California are now named after him.