Mario Apzeitia, president of the Cigar Makers’ International Union (CMIU). (Photo courtesy of the CMIU Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland)

The first Hispanic to head a national union rose from these ranks. Mario Azpeitia served as president of the CMIU for two decades, from 1948 to 1969.

Azpeitia grew up in Key West, Florida, a Hispanic community where craftsmen used Cuban tobacco leaves to produce internationally renowned cigars. He followed the bulk of the cigar factories north to the Tampa neighborhoods of Ybor City and West Tampa. These Spanish-speaking enclaves soon became the cigar capital of the United States.

The two-story Centro Obrero de Ybor (Labor Temple) served as the center of the Tampa labor movement. But the cigar makers, the most knowledgeable sector of the working class, concerned themselves with far more than wages and working conditions. For decades they had supported liberation struggles in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain. José Martí used Tampa as his U.S. base of operations as he sought to drive Spain out of Cuba.

In the mid-thirties the cigar makers became part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Democratic Party. They helped elect progressive Claude Pepper of Florida to the U.S. Senate. They also backed the progressive Popular Front government in Spain and championed the cause during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

Azpeitia rose within the union during this era. In 1935, at age 36, he joined Local 500 in Ybor City, the largest and most militant local within the national organization. He was elected general secretary in 1940. From there he became a vice president of the national union.

The job involved more than a little controversy.

Immediately after World War II, Azpeitia and two other CMIU vice presidents signed a statement sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress deploring the attacks on civil liberties. The House Committee on Un-American Activities criticized him for associating with the organization because it was believed to be linked to the Communist Party.

In 1948, with cigarettes having largely replaced cigars, Tampa remained alone as a major producer of hand-rolled (as well as machine-made) cigars.

Mario Apzeitia signed this union-made cigar label used from 1948 to 1952. For more on cigar union history, go to Tony Hyman’s on-line Cigar History Museum, www.cigarhistory.info/Site/Cigar_history.html

The CMIU recognized Azpeitia’s leadership and elected him president at its convention in Philadelphia. He helped maintain working standards for an aging workforce. Efforts to grow the union by organizing new shops proved frustrating, however, as the industry continued to shrink and the U.S embargo on Cuban tobacco after Fidel Castro assumed power hurt business.

Azpeitia assumed his role as a labor movement statesman. He joined other AFL-CIO leaders for a meeting with President John F. Kennedy at the White House. He also presided at the union’s 100th birthday celebration in 1964.

He also enjoyed a family that included five children and a social life in which membership in El Círculo Cubano and El Centro Espano provided a link to glory days when Hispanic life in Florida was organized around the cigar factories.

The cigar factories may be gone but, on this Labor Day, the spirit of the iconic craftsmen lives on in the immigrants and in their U.S.-born children who continue to come together to improve their collective lot and to transform the larger society.

Mario Apzeitia, second from right, joins other national labor leaders in meeting with President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. (CMIU Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland)

The group also served as an important multicultural meeting place where African American, Japanese American, Jewish, and Mexican American leaders got to know each other and work in coalition with organized labor and Catholic and Protestant leaders.

The American Council for Race Relations (ACRR), which had been active during World War II, established the California Council for Civic Unity in 1946; it became the CFCU in 1947. CFCU members included minority organizations such as the NAACP, the Japanese American Citizens League, and local councils organized in cities around the state.

Latinos were part of the organization from the very beginning, but the nature of their representation changed over time: World War II– era leaders were augmented by newly organized representatives of the Unity Leagues; these figures were, in turn, replaced by leaders from the Community Service Organization (CSO).

Fred Ross played a major role in empowering Mexican Americans at the local level and further enhancing their reach and influence by networking the new leaders with more established leaders in other minority groups.

Ross, as an ACRR employee, organized the Unity Leagues in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties between 1945 and 1947. He left ACRR in 1947 to organize the CSO as an employee of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Ross established four CSO chapters in Los Angeles County between 1947 and 1951. The organization highlight was electing Edward Roybal to the L.A. City Council.

In 1952, the CFCU hired Ross, who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. One of his assignments was to organize the CSO in San Jose. This led him to “discover” Cesar Chavez and Herman Gallegos, whom he mentored for the next decade, enabling them to emerge as two of the most prominent Latinos of their generation.

Herman Gallegos served on the CFCU board along with CSO leaders Gilbert Anaya and Tony Rios from Los Angeles. Anaya and Rios were also leaders within the United Steel Workers. Gallegos, a social worker, later achieved prominence as head of the National Council of La Raza, as a Ford Foundation consultant, and as one of the first Latinos to serve on a corporate board.

The CFCU enjoyed an interlocking membership with the California Committee for Fair Employment, created in 1954, to lobby the California State Legislature to enact a fair employment practices act.  Gallegos,  Anaya, and  Rios were also active in the California Committee for Fair Employment. Governor Pat Brown signed the FEPC into law in 1959. This same basic coalition got the state to enact fair housing legislation in 1963.

The CFCU represents the best of this golden era of civil rights coalition politics. It provided an invaluable training and networking opportunity for emerging Mexican American leaders.

This colorful CIO-PAC poster was used by UCAPAWA/FTA Local 7, which stretched from Alaska to San Francisco. Latinos served as union officers and activists, although Filipinos represented the largest ethnic group in the local. Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers’ Union, Local 7, Special Collections, University of Washington.

The CIO believed that they could shape elections by increasing the number of working class voters who went to the polls. This was one of the lessons taken from the 1936 presidential election where millions of new voters helped reelect President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and supported candidates for state and local office.

The CIO-PAC was formed in 1943 and played a role in Roosevelt’s 1944 reelection and in Harry S. Truman’s election in 1948. This colorful voter registration poster was likely used during the 1946 congressional elections. Copies would have been displayed at union halls and on union bulletin boards within the many factories under contract.

What makes this early candidacy so intriguing is that Gonzales ran as one of only three candidates in the state who were part of the Progressive Party.

The third party ran Henry Wallace for president two years earlier, in 1948, at which time it organized Amigos de Wallace as way of reaching into the Latino community.

The author is seeking information on Jesus Gonzales, Jr., his 1950 legislative campaign, and the Progressive Party outreach to Latinos in the Midwest.

City Councilman Edward Roybal and Monsignor Thomas O'Dwyer c. 1950.

The CLI was sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles during the final days of Archbishop John Cantwell, an Irish-born New Dealer.

The CLI supported organized labor in dealing with unfair employers, encouraged companies to respect the collective bargaining process, and trained Catholics to become more active in their unions.

The CLI was political on several levels.

First, it assumed controversial positions on issues of public policy. Most significantly, the CLI director, Father Thomas Coogan, used the 1947 Labor Day Mass at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral to blast the Taft-Hartley Bill, recently enacted by Congress over President Truman’s veto. He said the law “denies basic rights of workingmen.” This outraged the conservative Los Angeles Times, but provided instant credibility within the ranks of organized labor.

Second, the creation of the CLI dovetailed with the creation of the Mexican American–oriented Community Service Organization (CSO). CSO, an affiliate of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), initially focused on ameliorating neighborhood concerns, starting with the need for stop signs and stoplights. CSO also dealt with discrimination in employment and housing, as well as police abuse.

The ILGWU, USWA, and liberal labor priests served as the three organizational pillars of both CLI and CSO. In many ways, CLI and CSO represented a strategic effort by the three partners to create new progressive—but non-Communist alignment— that would strive to improve life on the job and in the community.

The liberal clergy knew that too often the Church had provided immigrants with the sacraments and charity, but had not focused enough on social justice. And within labor circles, the AFL Central Labor Council was seen as little concerned with community issues. On the other hand, the CIO Council placed a high priority on racial equity and social justice, but it was run by Phil Connelly, a Communist.

Third, priests associated with the CLI sought to influence events in the electoral arena. The Church played a major role in CSO’s voter registration drive in 1948, and in the election of founding CSO president Edward Roybal to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949.

Monsignor Thomas O’Dwyer, CLI’s patron in the chancery and in East Los Angeles, publicly endorsed Roybal. The clergy helped mobilize Latino voters.

Roybal was more than the first Mexican American on the City Council in modern times. His election also doubled the number of Catholics on that body. The other thirteen members were Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That mattered in 1947.

In 1948 the CLI opened its third labor school, the Pius XI School of Labor Relations, at St. Mary’s in Boyle Heights. It was pastored by O’Dwyer, and it became the mother church for many Eastside Spanish-speaking congregations.

The CLI became a flashpoint in the early 1950s when it took the initiative to prevent the Communist-led United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers (UE) Local 1421 from winning a representational election at Standard Coil, a secondary parts manufacturer with a largely Latina workforce.

Standard Coil produced parts for the Sabre jet, which was then battling Soviet MIGs over Korea. This infused national security into the union election that ultimately revolved around long-established CLI-CSO-ILGWU-USWA relationships.

The labor priests convinced CSO president Tony Rios to take a leave of absence from his job as a steelworker to lead the anti-UE campaign.

(For more on this dynamic story, see “The Battle For Standard Coil: The United Electrical Workers, the Community Services Organization and the Catholic Church in Latino East Los Angeles,” in Robert Cherny, William Issel, and Kierran Walsh Taylor, eds., American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004]).

The Catholic Labor Institute in Los Angeles in the late 1940s and early 1950s provided an important thread in the fabric of Latino Los Angeles that reached into the pew, on the job, and throughout the neighborhood.

Another part of CLI’s effectiveness may derive from its efforts to reach workers on a spiritual level. It invited blue-collar Catholics to see themselves in the image of a working-class Christ. Mexican Americans recited the “The Prayer of the Worker” as adopted from the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists:

The Prayer of the Worker

Lord Jesus

Carpenter of Nazareth

You are a worker as I am.

Give to me and all the workers of the world

the privilege to work as You did

so that everything we do

may be to the benefit of all our fellow man

and the greater glory of God the Father.

Thy Kingdom come

into the factories and into the shops

into our homes and into our streets.

Give us this day our daily bread.

May we receive it without envy or injustice.

To those who labor and are heavily burdened

send speedily the refreshment of Thy love.

May we never sin against Thee.

Show us Thy way to work and when it is done

may we with all our fellow-workers

rest in peace. Amen.

]]> http://kennethburt.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=729 0 http://kennethburt.com/blog/?p=718 http://kennethburt.com/blog/?p=718#comments Sun, 16 May 2010 21:12:46 +0000 Ken http://kennethburt.com/blog/?p=718 Jarrett Barrios is a pioneer as the first Latino in the Massachusetts State House and as the first Spanish-speaker to head a national gay rights advocacy group.

Jarrett Barrios talking with constituents.

Proud of his Hispanic heritage and deep roots in Florida, Barrios describes himself as a “Tampa Cuban” to differentiate himself from the more conservative Cubans based in Miami.

Barrios moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard University, where he became interested in state politics. Elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1998, Barrios moved to the Senate in 2002, where he served until 2007.

His first bill required hospitals to provide translators. He subsequently helped lead the effort within the state legislature to protect marriage equality.

Barrios became the president of GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, in 2009. He travels widely and maintains offices on both coasts.

Harvard Magazine profiled Barrios in 2003; it provides a window into the life of a talented public servant with progressive Hispanic roots.

*     *     *

The overheated national debate over immigration has obscured the fact that U.S. policy fluctuates between welcoming and demonizing immigrants. In completing my new book of the birth of Latino politics, The Search for a Civic Voice, I discovered a little- known but significant decision to make noncitizens eligible for state old age pensions.

The Community Service Organization (CSO) transformed the role of Latinos in California politics, starting with the election of Edward Roybal to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949. By the early 1960s, the organization had registered more than 400,000 voters, helped elect city council members in a number of cities, and—guided by CSO lobbyist Dolores Huerta—shaped public policy in the state Capitol.

The issue of assistance for the elderly poor had emerged in 1947 during a series of “house meetings” conducted in Boyle Heights, where CSO leaders would ask the neighbors about their grievances. The nascent organization decided to start with the issues that were easiest to resolve. These included the installation of streetlights and stop signs, which became necessary as people started to buy automobiles after World War II.

By 1953, CSO had become an established force in Los Angeles, San Jose and Madera. It was then that the group felt strong enough to organize around a statewide issue.

L.A. Assemblyman Vernon Kilpatrick, a realtor and an ally of the labor movement, introduced Assembly Bill 2059 to enable long-term noncitizens to be eligible for state old age pensions. The bill lost in the Republican-dominated legislature but was reintroduced in 1955 and again in 1957, each time making greater advances.

After the election of Gov. Pat Brown and a Democratic legislature in November 1958, the bill was once more introduced. Seeking bipartisanship, Bruce Allen, a Republican from San Jose, and Edward Elliot, an East Los Angeles Democrat, jointly introduced the pension bill as Assembly Bill 1.

The bill soon ran into trouble because it was not part of Brown’s package of social service reforms, and the chair of the policy committee charged with reviewing the bill in the Assembly refused to hear it.

In an unusual parliamentary move that underscored the depth of support CSO (with the help of labor) enjoyed among its legislative allies, bill backers voted 54 to 19 to withdraw it from committee over the chairman’s objections.

The bill then went to the fiscal committee where its fate rested in the hands of Ways and Means Chairman Jesse Unruh, who was not a friend of CSO. In addition, it faced objections from Brown, whose staff told Huerta the bill was “too expensive.”

Still, the pressure on the governor and other legislators continued to build as CSO brought to bear the power of its coalition partners. Supporters included the County Supervisors Association of California, Catholic Welfare Agencies of Los Angeles, Catholic Welfare Agencies of San Francisco, Los Angeles Federation of Jewish Welfare Agencies, California Federation of Labor and California CIO Council.

By the end of the legislative session, it appeared that a majority of lawmakers would approve the bill. However it still faced opposition from the governor and Unruh, and on the final day of the session it was referred to the Senate Rules Committee, where it died.

Believing that the 1960 presidential election would be close, the AFL-CIO provided CSO the funds to hire 20 organizers to register voters across the state. The Kennedy campaign bragged about the additional 140,000 voters in Time magazine.

With Kennedy’s victory, CSO once again sought to reform state law to make long-term noncitizens eligible for old age pensions.

Assemblyman Phillip Burton of San Francisco introduced the measure, Assembly Bill 5, along with 4 co-authors. They reflected a range of organizational relationships and included Assemblyman James Mills, who won his election because of the mobilization of Latino voters in San Diego for Kennedy.

“We did a big campaign,” said Huerta. CSO generated thousands of letters, and delegations lobbied their legislators in the state Capitol. Such efforts by CSO were reinforced and magnified by old friends in the larger civil rights coalition. Bill Becker and Max Mont of the Jewish Labor Committee delivered labor, Jews, and other minority groups. Monsignor Thomas O’Dwyer rallied religious leaders. All tapped into their long-established relationships with legislators.

Still, the measure faced multiple obstacles. The least problematic was Brown, who was sympathetic but was still concerned about the bill’s fiscal impact. The greater problems came from Unruh, then in the process of putting together the votes to become speaker, and Senate Social Welfare Committee Chair James Cobey, who represented Madera and Merced counties in the Central Valley.

Burton began to alleviate Brown’s concern and to clear legislative hurdles by locating federal money to cover almost half of the $5 million additional costs anticipated in the first year, a prospect no doubt enabled by a political alliance with the Kennedy administration.

At the same time, Brown held out a carrot to Los Angeles and other counties seeking financial relief by noting that individuals covered by state pensions would no longer apply for General Assistance for which the counties paid 100 percent. Burton also emphasized the modest nature of the bill, claiming that it would add only 8,000 seniors to the rolls.

The Brown administration, confidant that federal money would come, adopted the bill as part of its “welfare reform” package and budgeted for the added expense.

Soon thereafter, AB 5 passed the Unruh-controlled Assembly Ways and Means Committee and sailed through the full Assembly. CSO focused its attention on Sen. James Cobey, of Merced, within whose committee the bill now rested.

“We went to barber shops, grocery stores and door-to-door to get people to sign letters,” recalled Huerta. They also went to the lawmaker’s office.

Some of the seniors “had four or five children in World War II, but they didn’t speak English,” Huerta recalled. “I dropped them off at Cobey’s office [in Sacramento]. They sat there and held the pictures of their children in the service, some of whom had died for their country. They were told only to say, ‘Pass AB 5.’”

Burton also got Cobey’s attention. He “held up all of his bills” in the assembly committee, recalls Huerta. She noted, “This broke the logjam.” The full Senate then passed the measure 28 to 1.

Brown signed the bill on July 14, 1961, before an audience of 200 CSO members from 30 chapters who had carpooled to the state Capitol in Sacramento. In applying his signature, Pat Brown stated that “Simple justice is done, at last.” He added that it was a “significant part of the New Frontier,” thereby linking his action and the successful CSO efforts to the Kennedy administration.

CSO explained the victory to its members in terms of Latino self-organization, voter registration and coalition politics.

“In 1961, with 400,000 votes behind them and support from many other groups, the bill was passed and signed,” according to CSO.

The bill’s legislative odyssey also illustrated the power of leadership. The bill would never have passed without the extraordinary efforts of Assemblyman Phillip Burton. But it also would never have happened without the support of Gov. Brown and the Kennedy administration.

This week’s guest article is by labor historian Harvey Schwartz, author most recently of Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has been famous for seven decades for its progressive politics, internal democracy, corruption-free record, and inclusive stance toward ethnic and racial minorities.

Since its landmark victory in the 1934 West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes, the union has enrolled numerous Latino activists and rank-and-file members on the waterfront and in the warehouses and cotton compress plants of California.

The Maritime Federation of the Pacific served as the umbrella organization for all the marine unions during the 1936-37 strike, which included Mexican Americans and Latinos from a number of South American nations. Buttons courtesy of Harvey Schwartz.

During the pre-union 1920s, numerous Mexican Americans worked in California along the Los Angeles/Long Beach waterfront. But by and large they were segregated into the most difficult and least desirable jobs. The majority labored as lumber handlers in segregated yards, where the work was dangerously fast-paced and the pay low. Many others cleaned ship’s boilers in unhealthy conditions that caused lung disease with appalling regularity.

The ILWU was international in orientation from its inception. The union supported the democratic forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and called for boycotts of German and Japanese-made products prior to World War II.

After the union’s victory in 1934, things began to change on the Southern California waterfront. Latinos started to get more decent jobs as longshoremen, although it took time to overcome entrenched discrimination against Mexican Americans. It actually took the labor shortage of America’s involvement in World War II between 1941 and 1945 for truly significant numbers of Latinos to enter the better waterfront jobs, including the most skilled positions like winch driver. During the post-war era, Mexican Americans assumed a central importance in ILWU longshore Local 13 at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. They served on local committees, were elected to union offices, and contributed to the ILWU in various other ways.

The decision by Harry Bridges and the ILWU to affiliate with the CIO gave new impetus for progressive civil rights and labor organizing.

There were also many Latino workers in the warehousing industry in downtown Los Angeles during the pre-union years. Organizing into a group that became ILWU warehouse Local 26 started there in 1936. The celebrated Mexican American social justice leader Bert Corona, who was a warehouse worker in his youth, was elected president of Local 26 in 1941. Corona also represented the union in the Los Angeles CIO Council.

In cotton compressing, a skilled trade in which huge cotton bales are reduced in size for storage and shipment, numerous Mexican Americans joined the ILWU in Bakersfield and Fresno during the 1950s. Many of the Latino ILWU workers in warehousing and cotton compressing became activists, organizers, and officers at various times.

For more on Latinos and the ILWU, see Harvey Schwartz, Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU; Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona; Kenneth C. Burt, The Search for a Civic Voice: California Latino Politics.

One of the few written records of this organization can be found in Mary Heaton Vorse’s Labor’s New Millions: The Growth of a People’s Power. The book was written in 1937 as the CIO was chartering a variety of new unions in the afterglow of the triumphant 1936 presidential election.

Workers at the PFE plant in Roseveille move ice blocks along a conveyer belt from the storage room to the railroad car. Photo courtesy of the Roseville Historical Society.

The largest ice producer in California was the Pacific Fruit Exchange (PFE), a joint operation of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. It operated the world’s largest plant in Roseville, near Sacramento.

In 1936, the PFE provided ice to cool 339,336 carloads of perishable commodities.

Cutting 300-pound blocks of ice and moving them via a conveyer belt to the top of freight cars was a physically demanding job. Many of the workers were Mexican American. Latinos were among the key CIO leaders.

Fabian Garcia served as a United Railway Icemen’s Union committeeman at the PFE plant in Roseville, California. Salvador Martinez and Manuel Gardea served as union committeemen at the PFE plant in Bakersfield.

Ice being placed into the top of reefer cars. Photo courtesy of the Roseville Historical Society.

The CIO union sought strength through an affiliation with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).

Despite some initial organizing success, icehouse management in Roseville and Bakersfield signed contracts with the rival AFL Teamsters. It represented a lost opportunity to create a progressive voice for these Latino workers.

The United Railway Icemen’s Union quickly faded from the scene.

The production of ice continued for a number of decades until self-refrigerated cars replaced all of the older cars. The Roseville PFE plant stopped production in 1973 and was torn down the following year.

“For decades, only one Latino held unquestioned public power: Edward R. Roybal, the first Latino to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. He spent 13 years there, then moved to Congress to serve 30 years, most of that time as the region’s only Latino representative.

“Now the power positions held by Latinos in the Los Angeles area are multiple and manifest. Besides the Mexico-born archbishop, who is in line to become the first U.S. prelate of Latino heritage to become a cardinal, there is the mayor. The speaker of the Assembly. The sheriff. A county supervisor. Several members of the City Council, of Congress, of the Legislature, of the Los Angeles school board. The head of the most influential civic entity, organized labor.”

The Los Angeles Times piece quotes this author:

Kenneth Burt, the author of “The Search for a Civic Voice,” a history of California Latino politics, credited Mahony for keeping peace in Los Angeles between groups seeking power and those afraid of losing it.

“He had a tremendous impact in empowering the Latino community and in sending a powerful signal that the rise of Latinos should not be seen as a threat,” he said. “Even though he’s Irish, he’s the first Latino cardinal in spirit.”

Check out the whole article on the Los Angeles Times website.