ASU Research E-Magazine: A Voice for Latinas

Vicki Ruiz has devoted a career to chronicling the quiet courage of everyday Spanish-speaking women who made lives for themselves and their families in the United States, often against great odds.

Coronado, Pancho Villa, and Ponce de Leon were the only Hispanic names Vicki Ruiz ever heard in her high school history classes. Were there others, she wondered? Their footprints must have disappeared in the drifts of time.

As for Hispanic women, none were mentioned—as if they didn’t exist at all.

It was only in her mama’s kitchen that Ruiz heard the tales of Mexican pioneers of the American West, people who ran the ranchos, men and women who fought discrimination and worked in the mines and organized labor strikes. Her mother and grandmother regaled her with stories of their Colorado girlhoods, laced with folklore and family tradition.

And always, their memories had a strong female presence.

Ruiz began to wonder about the missing women in the history books. Captivated by the powerful pull of her Hispanic roots, she started digging. As a college student, she learned that Hispanic women were early settlers and frontierswomen, landowners who could hold property separately from their husbands under Spanish-Mexican law, long before the society matrons on the East Coast had that right.

Women took part in the Coronado expedition in 1540, traveling with the conquistadors and the padres. Their indelible legacy is traced in archives, photo, and oral histories, in the migrations of people back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, and in stories that sift down through generations.

Ruiz is a history professor and chairs the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Arizona State University. She is a carrier of these stories. Ruiz has devoted her research career to chronicling the quiet courage of everyday Spanish-speaking women who made lives for themselves and their families in the United States, often against great odds.

Her first book, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, tells the story of Mexican women who helped unionize the California food processing industry between 1930 and 1950. They were key figures in fighting for better conditions for workers, often at their own peril.

Ruiz also wrote From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th Century America, which won the Outstanding Academic Book 1998 award from the American Library Association. She used individual stories to bring history to life in that book, a technique fairly new to scholarly work.

She currently is gathering stories on a wider scale for a two-volume opus, Latinas in the United States: a Historical Encyclopedia. She shares the workload with Virginia Sanchez Korrol, chair of Puerto Rican Studies at Brooklyn College. The scholars are collecting tales of public activists and politicians, shopkeepers and immigrant housewives, women who bucked the stereotype of the submissive, passive Latina to make a difference.

An example is Concha Ortiz y Pino, the first Hispanic woman in a state legislature. She served in the New Mexico House of Representatives in 1936 to 1942, and introduced the first bill to admit women on juries in the state (though it failed). Delores Huerta is another. She was co-founder of the United Farm Workers and worked in the shadow of Caesar Chavez.

Aida de Acosta, a Cuban-born American prominent in New York society, flew solo in a dirigible just outside of Paris on July 9, 1903, nearly five months before the Wright brothers’ flights at Kitty Hawk.

Latinas even fought in wars. Loreta Janeta Velasquez posed as a man and saw battle in the Civil War before she was wounded, discovered, and sent home.

Verneda Rodriguez was one of the elite Women Air Force Service Pilots in World War II. She flew target missions and ferried aircraft from factories to airfields before returning to Texas where she married and had several children.

Ruiz takes particular pleasure in the life stories she receives from people around the country. Monica Gonzalez of Texas wrote about her mother, Matiana, who spent her early years in a one-room shack. The daughter of migrant farm workers, Matiana had to kill crows for food. Her parents took her out of school in the sixth grade to do domestic work.

After her marriage, Matiana asked her husband for permission to learn English. Years later, she went to college and became a bilingually certified elementary school teacher at the age of 45. She reared four children, three of whom graduated from Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania. She continues to mentor other women.

“It’s been overwhelming, the number of stories we’ve received from the public,” says Ruiz, a petite, energetic woman who has received a steady stream of e-mails and phone calls since the news of her project appeared in the fall of 1999. “Many are remarkable. After nearly every presentation I make, someone comes up to tell me about their mother or grandmother.”

Ruiz is a public scholar in the best sense of the word. She draws crowds wherever she speaks.

“I gave a talk in Bisbee last summer,” she says. “I learned about a wonderful network of eight women who formed a Latina softball team when their husbands and sweethearts were away in World War II. They went across the country and played other teams. They still have a club, Club Selene, with very strong bonds.”

Ruiz says that networks have always been an important part of Latina culture, because of both cultural tradition and economic survival. Women developed a pattern of mutual assistance to help support each other in a society that was often rigid in its expectations. Most Latinas who got involved in public life did so for the sake of their children.

For example, Wana Gutierrez helped found a community action organization, Mothers of East Los Angeles, to fight for justice for her children. In Buffalo, N.Y., activist Carmen del Valle organized Latinos to lobby for accessible, low-cost health care, so her children would not have to struggle as she had. Though she died of breast cancer before her efforts came to fruition, several health clinics now bear her name.

“Family is an important thread that goes through the history of the Mexican American community,” says Ruiz, herself the mother of two college-age boys who were born during the hectic years just before and after she earned her doctorate from Stanford University in 1982. She was only the fourth Mexican-American woman to receive a doctorate in history.

“The importance of the family unit, and the sense of obligation for all family members, is paramount,” she says. “For Mexican-American women, the feminist conception of separate spheres for private and public life do not exist.”

Ruiz grew up in Florida, where her father ran his own charter fishing business. She was steeped in history by her mother, Erminia, who learned to sing union songs at the knee of her own father, a Colorado coal miner and member of Industrial Workers of the World.

At age 5, Ruiz’s parents sent her along with her 16-year-old sister on dates, a nod to the custom of chaperonage for young women that has been part of Mexican-American culture for generations. Ruiz plans to examine that tradition in her encyclopedia, along with other generational and cultural markers such as clothing styles, employment, and women’s pay.

For her mother’s and grandmother’s generations, strict supervision for girls meant going everywhere with a dueña, an older woman charged with keeping her eye on the young woman at all times. One woman told Ruiz about ditching her dueña by sneaking down the stairwell at church so she could meet her boyfriend. Another locked her grandmother in an outhouse as they worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, so she could elope.

Ruiz’s mother left school at 13 to work after her father died. She wasn’t allowed to date, so she met boys secretly when she was out with her girlfriends. As a teenager in the 1970s, Ruiz herself considered it a major victory when she was allowed to sit apart from her parents at a high school football game. Later she dated, though her curfew was strict.

It was common for second-generation Mexican-American women of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s to go to work after completing the eighth grade, Ruiz says. Though they contributed most of their wages to the family to pay for rent and food, they often negotiated with their parents to have spending money or to save for a radio or a phonograph record.

“These are women who really struggled with choices, who wanted to be considered good daughters, but also wanted the excitement and the accoutrements of youth,” says Ruiz. “A lot of my research has focused on intergenerational tension, and the way in which women created a common culture rooted in the region and time period they grew up.

“In the Mexican community, you see definite cultural markers, by region, class, generation, and personal experience. What people call themselves—Hispano, Tejano, or Chicano—speaks volumes about how they identify themselves culturally and politically.”

Ruiz and Korrol are doing a national study of Latina women from all across the United States, with a balance of ethnicity that includes Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans. The final work will include about 800 biographical entries interspersed with contextual essays that give a sense of the commonalities as well as ethnic differences and regional perspectives.

A network of Latina scholars has begun writing the entries. All entries will go through a thorough process of fact checking. Publication is scheduled for 2003. The encyclopedia will join parallel works that have been published in recent years, including Jewish Women in America (Routledge, 1997) and Black Women in America (Indiana University Press, 1994).

It won’t be a reference book that sits on the shelf, according to Ruiz. Materials from the book will be taught in teacher workshops, including her department’s annual two-week ASU summer institute, “Teaching Arizona’s Hispanic Heritage.” Ruiz and Korrol plan to develop lesson plans and make them available on a CD-ROM and on the Internet.

“I’m fortunate that a number of wonderful women have let me into their homes to record their stories and have given me permission to share them,” says Ruiz. “I have an obligation to get their stories out there and to tell them as accurately and respectfully as I can, to honor their lives.

“I’m always amazed that students think history is something that occurred in the past. These women are real people, with hopes and dreams and triumphs and tragedies, whose decisions had a wide impact. They’re part of the human drama.”

Her oral interviews always focus on how people made the decisions they did, she says. What were their dreams when they were 16? What were the forces affecting their lives? What was possible for them, and what was not?

The stories Ruiz heard from her mother and grandmother around the kitchen table were the spark that lighted her interest in history. Reconciling those accounts with the history she learned in school drove her passion for historical inquiry, and later led her to expand her own dreams from high school teaching to a distinguished research career.

She is uncovering the footprints of Latinas who have long been overlooked. And now they can speak for themselves.—Sarah Auffret