Chicano Center honors unsung heroine

LOS ANGELES -- She's been a quiet rebel for six decades, running grape boycotts for Cesar Chavez, helping welfare mothers find work, and founding, along with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, a powerful women's political group. But the greatest battle for Lupe Anguiano, 78, the soft-spoken daughter of Oxnard fieldworkers, came when her political activism as a Catholic nun put her at odds with Los Angeles church leaders.

She ended up leaving the convent after 15 years.

"It took me a year to decide to actually leave," she said. "I had taken perpetual vows and was very close to the Lord. But I decided I could still do as a civilian what I would have done as a nun."

Anguiano's little-known story, from nun to seasoned activist to policy adviser for Democratic and Republican presidents, was recognized earlier this month in a tribute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The university announced the opening of her archives at the Chicano Studies Research Center as part of the school's new Mujeres Initiative. The program seeks to preserve and make accessible to scholars the history of Latinas in the United States.

At a celebration to mark the opening of the archives, Steinem and former Clinton administration housing secretary Henry Cisneros praised Anguiano as an unsung civil rights heroine.

Anguiano was the fourth of six children born to Mexican migrant workers in La Junta, Colo. The family moved to Oxnard, and Anguiano remembers picking apricots and walnuts after school.

By the time she graduated from high school, Anguiano knew that she wanted a religious life. At 20, she joined Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters and took the name Sister Mary Consuelo. She chose the Indiana-based order, Anguiano said, because it was known for being a great advocate for the poor.

Her first posting was in East Los Angeles, where she taught religion at Garfield High School. From the start, she got out into the community, working to improve the lives of the poor families around her. "I didn't want to hide behind a convent wall," she said.

In 1963, the California Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Anguiano strongly supported the law, which banned racial discrimination by landlords.

When the California Association of Realtors set out to reverse the law with a state initiative the following year, Anguiano was vocal in her opposition.

She joined picket lines and wrote letters to newspapers, she said. The then-archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal John Francis McIntyre, wanted priests and nuns to stay out of the fight, and sent a letter instructing Anguiano to stop her activities.

She wrote a letter to the pope, asking to be released from her vows. It took a year, but she left the church in good standing, Anguiano said.

She crisscrossed the country in secular life, going wherever she thought she could help. Chavez sent her to Michigan to organize grape boycotts, a job she did for $5 a week, Anguiano said.

In East Los Angeles, she worked on youth training and employment programs. Through that work, she met a lot of poor, single mothers on welfare and developed programs to get them jobs.

That propelled her into President Johnson's administration in 1965, where she was an education specialist in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and helped write the nation's first bilingual-education bill.

When Richard Nixon became president, Anguiano again worked as an adviser on Hispanic and women's issues.

In the 1970s, she met Steinem, who already was a central figure in the budding women's movement. Steinem and Anguiano were among a group of women who created the National Women's Political Caucus.

Steinem appointed Anguiano to chair a welfare reform committee. Anguiano used the platform to push for changes in the welfare system. Her effort came to fruition in 1996, when Congress passed landmark welfare reform legislation that contained many of her welfare-to-work ideas.

A decade ago, she moved back to Oxnard to be closer to her family. She has turned her focus to environmental causes.

But Anguiano senses that her days of activism are coming to an end. "I am 78," she said. "I am passing the torch."