2025/03/01 by Jordan Villegas-Verrone · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaae266
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Between April and September 1938, the Chicago Daily Worker reprinted a pair of letters written by a seventeen-year-old Mexican American textile worker named Margaret Florez regarding a “girl strike” at Lone Star Bag & Bagging Company. The first letter was an appeal for aid, emphasizing the strikers' vulnerability as “mostly young girls from 16 to 18 years old.” Florez explained that the girls needed “plenty of help” to sustain their picket line, describing the deadly strikebreaking efforts that had already killed one of the strikers. Five months later, Florez's second letter offered an update on the girls' labor action. She thanked the Daily Worker for printing her first letter and for raising awareness of “what was going on in this part of the world,” and she described recent National Labor Relations Board (Nlrb) actions regarding their “long struggle.” The teenage organizer closed her brief letter with three words that described not just whom she represented in her letter but also, perhaps, her motivations as a burgeoning labor organizer: “For the Girls.” Why would Florez so purposefully and centrally embrace girlhood as the foundation of her organizing, especially when such an identity seemingly threatened to undermine the Mexican American girl workers' already fragile claims to entitlements in the context of the Great Depression—when “affirmative action was white,” federal labor policy was deliberately constructed to privilege adult male breadwinners, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Mexicans were removed from the United States through coercive repatriation campaigns as a national project of unemployment relief?1