Interview with Maria Morales, November 1, 2014

ROMAN: Hi.

MORALES: Hello.

ROMAN: If you could please state your name?

MORALES: My name is Maria Morales.

ROMAN: Your date of birth?

MORALES: July 4th, 1944.

ROMAN: And your place of birth?

MORALES: Cotulla, Texas.

ROMAN: What are the names of your parents?

MORALES: My father's name was Rosalio Morales. My mother's name was Maria Luisa Morales.

ROMAN: What were, or are, their occupations?

MORALES: My father was a field worker; my mother was a homemaker.

ROMAN: Do you have any siblings?

MORALES: I have six brothers and four sisters. And my mother adopted another girl so actually its five.

ROMAN: What are their names?

MORALES: My oldest brother is Rosalio Morales Jr, and then it's Matias Morales, and then its Natividad, Felipe, Jessie, and Joe. And my two oldest sisters are Rosa and Luz and then I had a sister named Rosa, Jane, and Frances.

ROMAN: How would you define a community activist?

MORALES: I would define activist as someone who has the heart to want to be part of the community, to want to make changes and don't ask for a penny for it.

ROMAN: So, always self-voluntary?

MORALES: Right.

ROMAN: How would you identify yourself? As a Latina, a Chicana, feminist, or a Chicana Latina feminist?

MORALES: Soy Mexicana.

ROMAN: Who are some of your role models?

MORALES: Well, my very favorite of course is Cesar Chavez. I see him as almost a saint because of how he devoted his life, and how what he wanted to do was to help people and that's how I feel, I want to be. . . Just help people. I don't want a name, I don't want money, I just want to be there when somebody is-- If I can't do anything for them, just hold their hand. And that's how I see Cesar Chavez as. And another role model was Emiliano Zapata. He was a great man. He always fought for the little people. And he thought everybody should have the same right as everybody else. But, you know, he didn't think that we should just sit back quietly and accept life, whatever life has to offer us. He not 00:03:00necessarily fought that much, but he-- as he said, 'it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees'. And I have always, always thought that and I use it a lot, because I see that happening when people have no voice, and they just sit back and accept whatever is given to them. And another role model was my father. My father always used to tell me, 'You do somebody a favor and you don't expect any payment'.

He was there all the time to help people. My father never went to school, but he was so very intelligent. He knew so much. He taught me how to read and write. But he himself had never gone to school. He taught me so much history. Not just history from Mexico, but the history from the United States, and he could see 00:04:00things that were going to happen. And he made many comments such as, 'someday man is going to walk on the moon'. He passed away before that happened, but he foresaw that. My father was a rough character, too, sometimes though, so I don't want to say some of the stories he told us. He would tell us things that were going to happen, and I can see them now happening. Like taxes, some things that we would never consider were going to be taxed are now taxed. But he was always ready to have a helping hand, he was. . . He worked in fields all his life. He never went to school, he didn't learn a lot of English, but he could communicate very well with everybody. English or Spanish. He got along and he was all about helping people. And that's the way, you know, I picked that up from him.

ROMAN: Could you describe what it was like marching along Cesar Chavez in 1991 during the strike at Rainfair?

MORALES: It was exciting, but it was like 'oh my god'. I was awestruck in just to stand next to him and talk to him and see him take part of our little city here. Racine wasn't all that, but here he was marching with people at Rainfair. We were fighting for a good cause.

ROMAN: The cause being?

MORALES: The cause being wages, and we were fighting against the giant.

ROMAN: Do you have any idea how he heard about Rainfair?

MORALES: Well, I believe a union activist, there was one person in particular who was very active, his name was Gilbert Delgado. He was sort of our contact 00:06:00person with the United Farm Workers.

ROMAN: What was the outcome of that?

MORALES: They did get their raise. Unfortunately, they later on moved to another location and they ended up closing. But they did get their raise. The owner of the Rainfair happened to be a son-in-law of Johnson Wax, one of our biggest manufactures here in Racine.

ROMAN: If you could, tell me about your work with Voces de la Frontera. How did it start for you?

MORALES: Well, I heard about some workshops they were having on labor issues, so I attended them, and I got people to go. Later, I heard about the [inaudible] social security letters, I was very interested in that. I was still employed, so I just went to a couple of workshops. And then I heard about the freedom rights 00:07:00and some other people wanted to go to DC for the freedom rights, so I started a rally here. It was my very first action with Voces by myself. I started the rally and I sent messages to the schools. My granddaughters work for the high school. The teacher, Mr. Levy, he heard about it so he got all the students to go to the rally and afterwards, he asked me to go speak to his class. That's how they started; a group called Students United for Immigrants Rights. So, from then on, I just started becoming involved with Voces and it was going to be an election year, so they hired me in 2003 to do voter registration. So, as usual, I got the whole family involved, my kids, my grandkids, nephews, my nieces. So, 00:08:00we went out and got a little over two thousand new registers. Unfortunately, I took a little break, I had heart failure that July then right afterwards I went back to work with Voces. I worked with Voces until I got laid off in 2011.

ROMAN: What other issues did you address while working with Voces?

MORALES: Immigrant rights, legal rights, racial profiling, new visas, gun rights.

ROMAN: How did you feel about Voices being described by some as using "radical tactics"?

MORALES: I don't believe Voces is using radical tactics. I don't see that.

ROMAN: How do you see your activism being perceived? How do you believe it's 00:09:00being seen incorrectly if it's not radical?

MORALES: I don't believe that they're really radical. I think they're perceived as just working for immigrant rights, [inaudible] they are also involved with many other rights, and people perceive immigrants as being illegal, you know, that they don't want them here. So that's why they're seen as being radical. But I don't think that they are radical enough in my opinion.

ROMAN: Why are you so passionate about immigrant rights?

MORALES: It's a people thing to me, you know. I think people should not be hurt. I see us all people being good. I don't think we should be looking down upon them. I think they should all be represented and my father being from Mexico, coming as an immigrant, we came as immigrants to Wisconsin, and we saw how we 00:10:00were treated, many the same as how the new immigrants are being treated now.

ROMAN: So, it has remained the same form of treatment towards people that migrate to new cities or states?

MORALES: That's true. I see that.

ROMAN: Even today would you say?

MORALES: Even today. It's because there's laws that prohibit a lot of discrimination but there's still an undertone everywhere you go of discrimination in cities.

ROMAN: Do you think your activism has in some way changed at least one person's view of the work that you do for the people that you worked for?

MORALES: Yes, I have gone and talked in churches, and I could see the change. I could see their eyes opening up, their minds begin to absorb the fact that we are no different than they are and that they are seeing for the first time that 00:11:00a lot of the myths that are going on about the immigrants are simply not true.

ROMAN: When you say 'they' could you clarify, please?

MORALES: I say like church members from the church I go to, or different organizations that I have spoken to, even the school children that I have gone and talked to, they could see that we are just people just like they are, and once they get to know us, they might like us.

ROMAN: Looking back, is there a particular event in your life that leads you to take a stand on immigrant rights, or did you simply just happen to fall into it after you started to attend Voces de la Frontera meetings?

MORALES: As far as immigrant rights back in the 70's, in my neighborhood I would see the police go and circle a whole block with the immigration officers and 00:12:00just round everybody up and I would see how people would leave everything behind, their houses, their apartments, their cars, their checks and nobody would know what happened to them from one day to the next. And I just made a statement to the police, say 'why don't you tell somebody something, a dog gets picked up and they try to find who the owner is, but then these people are taken away in the middle of the night, in the morning, whatever and nobody knows what happens to them'. So that's when I started getting involved and trying to see if they could make some changes. They were being picked up at work, they were picked up at the taverns where they would go to cash their checks, and at one time they got picked up at the stairway of the church.

ROMAN: When you organized the immigration agents picking up undocumented people for minor traffic violations in Christmas of 2013, was there any reason you 00:13:00decided to do so without the help of any organization?

MORALES: 2013?

ROMAN: Yes, there was a protest on your behalf at one of the courts.

MORALES: Oh okay, what happened is that I found out that the immigration officers were there at the courts just picking up anybody who didn't have papers. They were in the waiting room asking people if they had papers, one person in particular on October 2nd; he went in to pay a ticket and he had no papers, so they whisked him away to Kenosha. On October 2nd they took away twenty people, men and women. So, I found out about it and I tried telling people about it, so I said, I'm not getting enough attention so I told my son, Steve, 'let's do a rally' so people would know what's going on and I rented a 00:14:00suit for my son, Grinch, the Grinch who stole Christmas, and I called people. It was cold, it was very cold, but they showed up. We did the rally in front of the courthouse and went inside for a while. After that, a coalition was formed by Voces and some public defenders and Racine Interfaith Coalition, they had formed a coalition where they would get in contact with different legislators, judges and try to find out who was organizing immigration officers to be there, how were they finding out that that's when the Hispanics were there. And you know, it's very simple because that's when the interpreters are there, so they know that somebody was scheduling and was tipping off immigration, they were legally there, they could do that, but they were not too happy that like the [inaudible] 00:15:00defenders, lawyers, judges because people were not even going to court to pay their fines, whatever they owed, they were just whisked off again. So, they put a stop to that.

ROMAN: After your rally?

MORALES: No, after the coalition started writing letters to the legislators. The rally was just a kick.

ROMAN: How long after did the legislators writing letters had an effect?

MORALES: Just a couple of months.

ROMAN: Very quick.

MORALES: Very quick it happened.

ROMAN: Who or what was your biggest inspiration for getting involved in immigrant rights?

MORALES: The people themselves, how I saw they were being treated, being just whisked away. You know, as a migrant worker, I did work with migrant rights 00:16:00before I started working with immigrant rights. I could see the similarity of the treatment that the people were just being disregarded as people, I could see the immigrants being just thought of as working people and not part of the community, just somebody that was going to come over here and do your job, quietly sit back and the migrants came, people started coming here. I worked in a foundry where they started bringing people in from some of the southern states to work because there wasn't enough people for that foundry, and we did end up getting people who did had papers. I was working in personal office so I was able to hire these people, they would show me their cards. I was not an immigration officer, so I didn't know if some were legal or not legal, they looked very legal to me. We hired them we needed the people to work there but 00:17:00then we started having the immigration officers come in and just round them up and they were using our police forces to round up the people and my neighborhood in particular from Jackson Street, Prospect Street, they would just go around the whole block and they won't tell anybody what happened to these people. One day they there and the next day they're gone. Their car is there, their apartment, the furniture is there. I worked in the factory personnel- their checks were there. We ended up sending many checks back because we didn't know where to deliver them to, they just disappeared. At that time, they would come in and they wanted to go into the factory and just pull the people off their jobs. The owner of the place, Gill [inaudible] and some of the other people that worked in personnel, they didn't think that was right. They said 'no, you are not going into our factory, this is our factory, it's our own personal property. You just can't walk in. And it's a foundry. You could fall in one of those pits 00:18:00and kill yourself by falling in there or burning yourself real bad' and said 'well, we know we have to obey the law if you come in here with a warrant and show us a picture of somebody. We will go pick them up for you and bring them out here but you cannot go into our factory. And the union, local five by three, at that time we had, we had just had [inaudible] was very, very active at that time [inaudible]. Him and Richard [inaudible] were there and the union also started getting involved because as people were being taken away to the airplanes, the lawyers were following after them, and there were some chasers who would just say, you know, give me so much money and I'll get you your papers. It never happened. A lot of people lost thousands of dollars with some of these lawyers and some people who just said they were going to help them would also ask them for money and they ended up getting sent back, deported and 00:19:00these people would keep their money. So, the union got involved and

told them you know they had the right to demand a lawyer and have a day in court before they got deported. So, the union backed them up for that, UAW local five by three.

And I would get to talk to the people from the immigration offices when they would come in. I would get to call the people in, call out to the factory and talk to the supervisors and say, well, 'bring somebody in, we want to talk to them'. After a while, they found out that when I would call them into the office it was because immigration was there. So, I called this one guy in and he didn't come. So, I called him again and they couldn't find him. We never found him until three days later he shows up, he's married. He went and got married so he could get his papers straightened away. And many of them did become legal, they 00:20:00changed their names and that was a big headache because one day we'd have one guy, a Jose or whatever, and the next day he would have a different name, but it would still be the same clock number. It was kind of a pain, but we understood what was going on. They would find a way to become legal, they got married or one of their family members would petition for them. So, I talked to I believe it was Swan who was the director of the immigration department at that time and I told him we wanted to meet with him, we wanted the people to hear why he was taking all these people away. Ask him, 'What happened to them?' So, we had our first immigration summit at St. Patrick's Church in 1977 and we had a lot of people go there. At the time not a lot of people that were from here were very 00:21:00much in support of their workers or immigrant workers and Mr. Swan came down here and I've always thought if we're going to do something, we want to hear something, we want to hear it from the horse's mouth, so I asked the Director of the Immigration Department to come down. And many a people at that time, organizations like LULAC, American GF Forum, and other organizations. We also had another organization that was here of the Mexican American educational party. So, they all met. They did have some changes, at least we got them to stop the roundups, because we didn't think that was legal to use the police assisting the immigration officers, so they stopped that. And they start telling us when somebody was going to be taken away so we could at least give them their check, so they have the money to go back. And some of them got married. Their 00:22:00wives didn't know they were picked up at a bar when they went to cash their check and their wives didn't know what happened to them. So, we got a lot of that changed at that time. Things seemed to die down a little bit. But just, as you can see recently, it's starting to pick up again. We are having way too many deportations.

ROMAN: At the time, what was the effect of the Director of Immigration coming to your summit?

MORALES: What I wanted was, what I said: 'Why was he doing this? Why couldn't he be more humane about it?' And I mentioned it, too, about the dog, somebody come in, and I says, you're just being like storm troopers, Hitler's storm troopers coming in and just taking everybody away. It did have an effect and did get the truth of why they were being taken away. It was their job. We realized that they had to, they got funds, and they had to deport x amount of people, but we wanted 00:23:00them to do it in a more humane way. And also, at that time I saw many of our people taking advantage of the some of these young men that came to work here. Some of the girls would marry them

and they'd get cars, apartments, and money and then they'd turn around and turn them in. We had that factor, too, of people being taken advantage of.

ROMAN: Do you feel that your childhood shaped your interest in activism in any way?

MORALES: Yes, definitely. We were from Texas, and we would travel up to different northern states to work. We'd come to Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, whatever. When, although at that time I didn't realize it, we were not treated very well. We accepted it as part of life but at some times we would live in a 00:24:00barn, cows were next to us. We would have a little building for the whole family. Sometimes we slept in our truck; my dad had a couple of trucks. Or we would sleep in a tent. Or we'd have a house for two families. They were just shacks. We had no indoor toilet; we had no place to wash our hands. We took our tacos sometimes in our backpack to eat. I saw how hard my dad worked, I saw my mom washing clothes on the washboard, her hands all red. I saw her mending tons of tortillas for everybody, we had a lot of brothers, sisters, and sometimes cousins were with us, and I'd see her just cooking, and cooking and making tortillas. Making sure everything was set when they came home, washing their heavy blue jeans on the washboard. I would see the big houses with the owners and their children, all sunning and drinking their lemonade while we were out 00:25:00there, sometimes, we didn't even have water. When we'd run out of water, we would just have to take it until it was time to go back to the house. Our education was cut because we would leave like in March, come up north and then we'd go back like around October. So, we missed out on that education. And where we're from, Cotulla, Texas, everybody spoke Spanish, so we really didn't pick up a lot of English. And when we finally did settle here, my father still continued taking us to migrant camps for our summer vacation. That was the extent of our vacation. Going someplace to work, picking tomatoes, picking potatoes. Whatever was in season at that time. So, we'd go back to school, and I could see the kids were telling us about going to vacation, going up north, going down south, whatever, and we'd go to work in the fields so we had nothing to talk about. And 00:26:00when they required us to take lunch, I'd see the rest of the kids taking sandwiches and we had took rolled up tortillas so we'd hide in the corner so they wouldn't see us. And the teachers, they changed our names. My name was Maria Luisa and they changed it to Mary Lou. My brother, Jose Guadalupe, they changed it to Joey, it was confusing. There was. . . as the discrimination is now, it was just as bad then for us, too. This is one reason I just have to speak up for the immigrants today because we went through that, but many people have forgotten, they have forgotten what we've gone through. The struggle that we had to go through. They have forgotten we came up here and they would call us dirty Mexicans and call us lazy Mexicans and they'd call us dumb because we couldn't speak English. I see that happening now, I saw that happening to us. It 00:27:00just makes me cringe every time I think about people not thinking that we went through that, too. We suffered that discrimination. We had to take whatever they told us. We had to live where they told us, there were certain parts in Racine we could not live in. They just would not rent to us. Afterwards as I got older, well, after I got married, I didn't work in the fields anymore, but I could see what was happening to other people that were working in the fields. So, we started this Cesar Chavez movement and everything and the Chicano movement. I started getting involved with the migrant movement and we did some marches and did some rallies. Our biggest march was the one we went to when Governor Lucy was in power, and that's when he changed a

couple laws and one was to make more sanitary conditions in the migrant camps. We did have several migrant camps here in Racine. Wind Lake, that was the last 00:28:00migrant camp around here. But there were other migrant camps around. And we had a big march and Governor Lucy did sign the migrant bill where they did have to have more sanitary conditions and one thing was to give in-state tuition to the migrant workers.

ROMAN: A CITGO gas station once started to sell a propaganda sticker that stated something along the lines of 'hunting season for illegal immigrants'. How was it that you heard about the situation, this sticker, and your involvement following it?

MORALES: Well, I have a lot of friends who have come from other countries to work. They tend to come to my house. I have sometimes like a little welcoming thing. I put little kits together for them like toothbrushes, toothpastes, 00:29:00underwear, undershirts, stuff like that. So, they still come to my house and this one young man came and he bought it to me to show it to me. I was mad, I was so mad, and I said, 'where'd you get this?' So, he told me and I went and showed it to them and I said, 'we got to do something about this'. So, I called them and I said, 'why are you selling this?' Well, he didn't even know it was there. So, then I told Kristina and I told my son, we got to do something, so we decided a rally. First, we asked them to stop selling it and I even had people like Kelly Gallagher, she has an adopted daughter that's an immigrant. We had a lot of people who were involved here in Racine. Kristina came from Milwaukee from Voces de la Frontera. We had a rally there and it turned out that the owner wasn't really selling it because he was being mean spirited it, it's just 00:30:00business. And it turned out that the owner was married to a girl from Guanajuato, Mexico. So, he really took it off and we thanked him, but it made such a stir that I ended up getting a letter in the mail and I have it at my office at the Urban League for Voces. they send me a letter, it wasn't a hate letter, it was just telling me that 'that's freedom of speech', they had the right to do that, a couple of other names, so I thought nothing of it. And it just made papers. Quietly we thanked the guy and we started calling other places, and asking them to take that off. I believe later on it came on television that somebody was suing somebody because their child was being harassed at school because of that sticker. So, we thought nothing of it after 00:31:00we had taken that off, but it was pretty upsetting because this is not just Mexicans, it's all immigrants. And then, my grandsons were out on the porch in the middle of the night, they were out there. It was a hot day. So, they saw a flame across the street in the reflection of the window and they went to see what it was and there were police officers patrolling down the street so they saw it too so they were trying to put it out and the police officers came, and my grandsons saw the police, they ran inside. It's typical, we are afraid of police anyways. So, they ran inside, so then the police put the fire out and they came over here and they tried to accuse my kids, my grandkids, that they had put the fire. They had, it was like a bomb, what do they call it? A Molotov 00:32:00cocktail? It was a bottle, of all things, a Corona. And it burned some grass a little bit. It hit the newspaper, so the newspaper came over and interviewed one of my grandsons. We were making fun of him because he speaks hardly no Spanish at all and he comes on Telemundo speaking Spanish. He didn't know he was being televised. It was quite an episode. A lot of people were concerned because, hey, they put a sticker out there, hunting permit can hunt immigrants with no limit. I mean, what does that tell you? What is the thought behind that person who made that or the company who made that? That

you can go out and kill immigrants? They are not people, they are less than people? I mean, this was really something that made me mad. This just makes me want to do more, get more active, get people to say 'hey, leave us alone'.

ROMAN: Could you tell us about your work with Congressman Paul Ryan?

MORALES: Well, first time I talked to Paul, I was a little bit naïve. I met him at a quinceañera. He was there with some family members of the lady that works for him and I was introduced to him so I said. 'Oh, Paul Ryan, a congressman'. That's when I was pretty involved with the School of Americas, getting people to sign up to go to the rally in November. And so I asked him, "Congressman, don't you think that's wrong that we are educating people to be torturers from other countries and sending them back there?" He said, "No, we're not doing that. We don't do that." And he was pretty defensive, he didn't want to talk about it. So, then I decided to study him a little bit and see what his issues were and 00:34:00then I got involved with Voces de la Frontera at that time that he was pretty anti-immigrant. I started going to his rallies, I started going to his forums, he did a forum for Hispanic issues. You know, I tried to ask questions, but I realized I wasn't getting any answers and other people asked questions and nobody had answers. And I went to some of his hearings and the only one we heard was him, he didn't hear us. So, I started getting involved in immigrant issues. We had a forum where at first he was sort of pro the Dream Act then all of a sudden, before 1910 it was [inaudible], he said he wasn't going to talk about it anymore, he had to study it. I asked him why wasn't he supporting the Dream Act and he said, "It's too complicated right now and I find I have to study it 00:35:00before I can make up my mind, this is not something I would support at this time". So later on, we had another rally, and I wanted that question answered. I wanted a yes or no. So, I asked this young girl if she would ask the question because at one point he stopped asking me when I raised my hand so I asked this girl if she would ask the question. So, I raised my hand too and he called me. I was surprised. So, I told him: "I want to give the floor to this young lady over here from [inaudible] High School" and he just. . . same answer. He never gives an answer, or he says that, yes or no. He goes into all his spiel about everything else, except that. I started doing rallies against him because we thought he was an important person as far as immigrants' rights and concerns, as 00:36:00far as immigrant reform. So, he's always at each and every forum I've been to. He will either not answer questions and I have found him at times to be untruthful. Like one time, I asked him what the unions thought about the guest worker program. He said unions were against it, all the unions did not want anything to do with the guest program or immigrants. I asked some of the unions and I was [inaudible] of myself and they were not against it, so I was pretty upset. Then, I went to visit him in Washington, DC with a group. I believe it was with the Racine Interfaith Coalition and I asked him how his constituents felt about the immigrant issue. He says, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. All the people that are against immigrants is this high [puts hand high in the air], 00:37:00they send me letters like this and the people that are for, [puts hand down] are like this.' And then when his staff worker came out and we asked her the same thing she said, "oh, it's about half and half". I rallied at his office because I saw on the internet that he had attended a function called Put Their Feet to the Fire [actual name of event: Hold Their Feet to the Fire] and he said, "No. He did not. We were not there". I said, why would it be on the internet? And he outright denied it and he put an answer in the newspaper, and I tried to put an answer in the newspaper, but they didn't let me put my

answer in there. So, we did a rally, and we went out there. I've done numerous rallies because of all the issues, he seems to be against everything with reform. Everything with workers' rights, everything with immigrant rights and I [inaudible]. . . reform but is not [inaudible] there. When he decided to run for 00:38:00Vice President, they had me in the newspaper saying that I was a 'professional protester', if there is such a thing. And I find that offensive because I don't go to learn how to be a protester. I'm not always protesting, I'm just there bringing a voice to the voiceless, to the people who don't or can't have a say for themself. I'm in there to tell them what these people feel. Rallies against him, I just have had too many. We've actually been escorted out of his office in Kenosha where the police have been escorted and cited, given tickets from the office here in Racine a couple of times. We been escorted out of his office in Washington, DC. So, he's tried to be untouchable. We can't get at him to, you know, really, really talk to him. And with this last time with the immigration 00:39:00reform, he had little meetings with different groups with Voces and Racine Interfaith Coalition and with the Hispanic Business Association here in Racine. And he is telling everybody, 'Yes, I am for immigration reform, yes, I will support immigration reform. But don't tell nobody, we want to keep it quiet'. So that tells me he really is not, he's just trying to patronize these little groups so we'll be supporting him, but he is not really supporting it.

ROMAN: Do you believe that the groups understand he is false?

MORALES: Okay, many of them, I believe, were taken in by him. They were. I think

some of them are beginning to see the light, but they were flattered by him. He would say, 'I'm going to talk to your little group here and I'm going to support 00:40:00you, I just have to do it quietly because there's a lot of people that don't like this'. But he was determined, and I could see through him right away. He is very articulate, he's a very personal person and he'll do little things like notice if you change your hair, compliment you but that does not mean that he supported it. With the immigration reform, they just came in and arrested us. Then we did another rally just last year for women's immigration. We sat on the street for the women for immigration rights, we sat on the street across 6th street for about an hour and again, they cited us. I have been cited maybe like 00:41:00eight times or something. I also got cited in Chicago at the immigration office and we sat at the door, and we didn't let them in or out. And then in Broadview, Illinois where the detention center is, we got arrested and put in jail there for immigration rights. We blocked the streets where the buses came to take the immigrants to the airport, and the others were for workers' rights around Johnson [inaudible]. For workers' rights we also went into this building, and they arrested us and took us to the jail in Milwaukee. We got [inaudible] there for a day. It's one of the nastiest jails. [laughter] They were pretty rough with us. I have this rosary, they threatened to cut it off because I had 00:42:00problems taking it off. They wanted to just cut it off. And they kept us there all day, we asked them are they going to feed us because we had been there since morning time, they said, 'We're going to give you some hash browns.' So then, they didn't give us anything and we were hungry, so I started a rally inside the jail. I said, 'What do we want? Hash browns! When do we want them? Now!' [laughter] And they walked in the room [inaudible] they thought we were fighting because we were yelling. And then we found out the guys, they separate the men and the women, we found out next door, the cement wall, the guys were in there. So, we took our shoes

off and started saying, 'this is what democracy looks like', started knocking on there. They finally brought us lunch which was a bologna sandwich, just bread and bologna, nothing else. And they brought us a little cup of water and I told them, 'I don't want your water because you don't have toilet paper', so they 00:43:00brought us each a little piece of toilet paper. And then they have an open door with the cameras there. So, I started a toilet patrol where we would all stand in front of the toilet while everybody was using it. But they were ready to shoot us down because they thought we was fighting in there. It was one girl that wasn't with us, and she was kind of scared listening to us yell. [Inaudible] . . .we were there the whole day and is not the cleanest place. Now the jail in Broadview, they were very nice. It was hot outside and we were sitting in the street and before they put us in their vans they turned the air conditioning on so it wouldn't be so hot in

there. They took us to the jail, and they gave us water. They actually gave us water. At the immigration office, when they put us and they kept us up there, they didn't give us water, they didn't let us go to the bathroom, they had us standing there for hours. Just standing and this is how they treat the immigrants when they take them up there, they just let them. . . No water, no 00:44:00bathroom, no nothing. So, we got a taste of what they go through.

ROMAN: What do you think they want to accomplish by restricting so much as in basic, you know, human respect, in terms of water and food?

MORALES: Well, they're trying to just show their power. Teach us a lesson, trying to tell us you're naughty, you're naughty, you shouldn't be doing this. That's how they're trying to show us that they can do what they want to do, and we can't do anything about it. It's just a show of power. I went to. . . When they passed the law 187-G in Waukegan, I was at that rally. We went in there and we had a hard time getting there because all the streets were blocked, there was police on every block. Finally, we get in there and there must have been maybe a 00:45:00couple of thousand or more people, Hispanics and supporters, Jesse Jackson was there. And then a couple blocks down there was a group of about maybe twenty to twenty-five people that were anti-immigrants. And they were having their meeting, the city council, for them to pass that law and as soon as they passed it, there were people in there listening. As soon as they passed it, well, we got the word that they had passed it. I was facing the people and I turned around and I see a wall of police officers fully geared with the helmets and shields and sticks, rifles, dogs, and then we saw some sharp shooters on top of the building and then we see helicopters. I have never been scared, I have been to many rallies, I have been to many protests, marches, and I've never been 00:46:00scared like I was at that time. Because to turn around and to see those people, police slowly moving towards you like a wall, black wall moving towards you. And the people, some started running, some started crying, some started to kneel down and they were kneeling down and they had babies on their shoulders and that was after they had had a rally in California where they had gotten beaten by the police. So, some of the people were saying they were going to beat us. They were holding the babies up because they were scared. I says, no, I am not going to kneel down to anybody. I will leave but I won't kneel. And we started walking, then we see military men and a tank, and all that was, was a show of power. I don't think they were going to do anything, but they just wanted to say that, hey, we've got every community in the rungs from Waukegan and Chicago here, 00:47:00you're going to go down. They just try to keep their thump upon us. Then right after that passed, they had another get together, the immigration in

Waukegan. The police officers, and the immigration department had gone through all the people's records, and found anybody who had three or more misdemeanors got arrested, went to their houses and arrested them. They rounded them up around Lake Mundelein in Waukegan and one particular little girl was crying. She had been adopted and she was thirteen years old. She was adopted as a baby and they asked her if her father was there and she said yes and they took him away, even though he had had, they were minor traffic, it was more than three, and he wasn't the person what they called undesirable because when you adopt a child, 00:48:00you go through a lot. He wasn't a undesirable like the President said they wanted to get rid of the undesirables only, criminals, but they were not criminals. But like I said, it's the only time I have been scared. In Chicago, I've gone to big rallies, and I see the police officers geared up, they're just standing there, but at this time they were just slowly walking toward us. That was scary for me.

ROMAN: We found you listed on a conservative website. How do you feel knowing thatyou're on lists and being watched by the conservative right?

MORALES: Actually, I really don't give it much thought. Because first of all, I didn't know that I'm on a list. I know my friend told me I might have been 00:49:00considered to act as [inaudible] terrorist or whatever, but I never gave it any thought. It doesn't bother me. I know what I'm doing is right. I don't think that I am hurting anybody in any way, so if somebody is watching me, I think that's kind of good. Because right now, my house and my area is being heavily racially profiled by the police department. And I think, well good, then that means we have more police around here to take care of us.

ROMAN: In 'A Day Without Latinos' march, what did it entail and was it effective in any way?

MORALES: Well, the were some laws they were trying to pass at that time and I think we would put a stop to that because it was so many people that went out. For once I think they realized we really had people supporting us, many of us 00:50:00were just us, but there were other unions, other Jewish communities were supporting us. Racine itself, I've had eighteen buses, filled them out. We, first of all, we had a lot of students so we started early in the morning and people from. . . We had busses from Racine, Kenosha, Burlington, Delavan, and from just from Racine alone we had the eighteen. We got the kids, we did a rally downtown and the marches, the songs, and the chants and then we got back on the bus and went over there. I think we did made changes, I think we did open people's eyes to the fact that we were not alone. Even though there was a lot of people, I do tell the kids, I work a lot with the kids, I tell them, 'Yes there 00:51:00was a lot of people, but it doesn't always take a lot of people'. I always remind them of the Cinco de Mayo, how it was just a few Red tag people, farmers, peasants who actually stopped a sophisticated, over two thousand trained army soldiers from Napoleon coming over here. And then I try to tie that in with Juneteenth Day because I tell many of the people that I work with that are from the Afro-Americas, 'look, Napoleon was coming over here to beat the confederate army but they came into Mexico knowing they would tear Mexico apart because they didn't have that many trained soldiers at that time in the city and they knew they would come up to Mexico, going to the south and beat the confederate army. If the Red army from Mexico, The Red Tag Army hadn't stopped them, they would had

come over here and helped the confederate army and we would all be singing dixie 00:52:00today'. So, this goes back to having Juneteenth Day. I have been trying in Racine to bring the two together because one leads to the other. I was also involved with the Afro-American women quite a bit. I wasn't always as radical as they say that I am. When my kids were young, I was in the revol-. . . Whoops, that's a little radical. I was in the revolution movement with some kids, but we did breakfast programs and we got rights for people who were in prison, got rights for their mothers and their wives to go out there, so it wasn't all that radical. We had the breakfast program. From there, you know, I was actually a den mother, I had my little cub scouts that would meet at my house. And then I assisted with the girls' scouts, also. Took them camping, day camping and night camping, stayed overnight at the different camp grounds with the little girl 00:53:00scouts. I was a catechism teacher, believe it or not. I helped formulate the posadas at Saint Patrick's at Cristo Ray and the Virgin of Guadalupe days, I helped formulate those. We're Catholics. I got married at Saint Patrick's church. Later on, I helped petition so it could get Cristo Rey. And also came along a Spanish center for Racine, we didn't have any of those. I helped them get the Fiestas Patrias, our first Mexican festivals that we didn't have before. We started out where the kids used to walk out of school, the high school kids, every sixteenth of September and the Cinco de Mayo they would walk out but they didn't know why but they walked out, they'd just be walking all over town. So, I made a picnic for them at the Island Park, they used to call it Chicano park. 00:54:00It's at the Island Park, even the company I worked for gave me money, electric and gas company gave me money, we went out to the farms and got apples and everything and we borrowed a big grill from one of the organizations. We just got them all together at this park and we told them why they were walking out. We told them, my friend Gloria Gonzales, the both of us [inaudible]. We told them what Cinco de Mayo was and we told them what the sixteenth of September was. And we had so many kids, it was a little frightening. So, the second time what I did is I got some of my nephews and others who were furloughs from the army or the marines, and we got some of the police officers who were not working at the time, and they were there helping me patrol. We never had any trouble, kids from all schools were there but just the fact that they were there, they could see the men that were actually role models. But also, I used them just in 00:55:00case there was trouble [inaudible]. Also, I started the Fiestas Patrias here in Racine, petition for Cristo Rey, petition for Spanish center, and it grew quite a bit, both of them. I started working with Head Start, I was volunteering, every day I was there volunteering, then they put me on their policy council, and from there I ended in Racine, Kenosha CAP, which is another program. So, I ended up in their council, too. Little by little I started getting a little bit more radical. I started working with the mothers of the Head Start and the AFDC. I was working with the welfare mothers, they cut off their benefits and we marched right out there, did our thing at the stores. We went to a what was 00:56:00called Alma Plaza at the time, to a store called Gobles. We marched there from Gobles to Franklin Center. We marched and we got our carts full of stuff and we put them on counter and because they had cut the benefits, we didn't have money to pay for it. So, we left everything there. [laughter] It was a good one. I did those kinds of things, too. Then I started getting pretty active with this one young lady. She had a school board member go to the school and they were talking about Head Start and how they really they didn't need Head Start. And the school board member actually said they were just big fat mamas, eating doughnuts, but we had our meetings. 'It's just big fat mamas eating doughnuts, that's all they're doing, they're just wasting the government's money; they don't need Head Start'.

So, the young girl got up, she said, "You mean you're calling us lazy, that we 00:57:00don't do nothing?' She said, 'yes, we are'. An argument ensued and the school board member slapped the little girl. Right in junior high school. Oh boy. I had a friend who was a lawyer and I told him, you know, we could do something about this, and he said, 'yes, you can, but it's your Mexicans against the city, it's going to be a blood bath. I'll take your case.' And then he told me how much money. So, we made tacos. We started making tacos at the Cristo Rey. It was Cristo Rey, the Spanish center was in the same building. We started making tacos and that's how we got the money to hire him, and we won. We won. [laughter] They sued her and then, afterwards, they gagged her. They gagged her. She could not talk at school events. But the sad thing was that she ran for school board again and she won. Which again, it makes you think if she won with her way of thinking, all these people who voted for her think the same way. We have a lot 00:58:00of work to do. It was a long time ago and now in the present time, we still have a lot of work to do. Racism is there. It's been there since the beginning of time. It'll be chipping away little by little but it's there. Because all these people that think the way politicians think now and they're voting for them, that means they're thinking the same way they are. Racine has never been the most un-racist city. I've been here since 1949. We moved from Texas, we were migrant workers, so we went back and forth. My mother ended up getting sick in 1949. We were in Kenosha so there on we moved to Racine where my dad bought a house. Like I said, we still faced a lot of discrimination when we came here.

ROMAN: What do you find to be the most effective form of protesting or gathering 00:59:00attention for a cause?

MORALES: I think the way I've gathered the most attention of the people, the officers, the city-blocking off the street. When we sat there on the street, I've done it, just cutting something off. Here, in the street we cut off the traffic at the immigration office. We didn't let people into the immigration office. At Broadview we didn't let the buses come out with the immigrants. So, I think cutting something off, just like I think like Cesar with the boycotts, they were very effective, and I think we're at a time right now when we actually 01:00:00need a boycott. In my heart, I don't think we are going to get immigration reform in my lifetime, unless we actually hit them in the pocket. We can do all the protesting, all the screaming, the yelling, letters, petitions, faxes, vigils, prayers, crying, jumping up and down. We have not gotten a reform yet. But I think if we do a boycott, something that is going to hurt them the way we are hurting, that we might. We might get reform. But like I said, unless something more radical is done, we are not going to get it, not in my lifetime. I have waited too long and I continuously tell everybody, try to make yourself legal any way you can but do not wait for reform. Too many people have pinned their hopes on it. It's like, 'well, we're going to get a reform.' No. We are 01:01:00not going to get a reform.

ROMAN: Please tell us about becoming the first Latina president of the AFL-CIO labor council of Racine?

MORALES: I had always been pro-union, my brother's been in unions, local 180 and local 172, and local 553. And when I got married, my husband was in the union, so I started working at the same place my husband started working, but I was management.

Even thought I was management I was very close to all the union members, and I interpreted all of the paperwork for them because we had Spanish-speaking people. I was pro-union to begin with, and then when I finally started working for Racine County, they were in the AFL-CIO, they were a mechanics. They were a aerospace mechanics union. The first meeting I attended, since I had been so much 01:02:00into the union, I started bringing up questions that the girls had never thought about, the ladies had never brought these questions up to the union, to the local. So, they right away asked me to be their rep so I became their rep for the county employees, to the union. I started getting involved, I started getting appointed to different committees, I started going to meetings and eventually I got appointed for the AFL-CIO council as a rep for our union. It was more of a twist of fate because this lady had been elected, her name was Connie, she was the President and she moved so then I went in, and I was elected for a first term. So, I became the very first Hispanic woman, female, in the AFL-CIO council president of that labor council. Later on, I was elected and I got very, very involved, chair person for the labor fest committee, and I 01:03:00started bringing different changes. I was always a little active. It was in me, somewhere it was in me to be active. I started going to all the meetings, gI started going to the conferences, conventions. I became a member of COPE, a delegate for COPE which is the community active arm of the AFL-CIO. And my husband being in the union became a steward, he was sent to a steward school. Walter Reuther Educational Center for union workers in Black Lake, Michigan. While I was there, I was just riding right along with him. We did make a lot of changes when we were there. Part of it was going to see their county supervisor, 01:04:00he made a proclamation supporting the union workers and the farm workers that were coming here. I started getting involved in meetings and making changes all around for our workers at work. So, it was just so much to do. I also became a member, as part of a union, of CAST which is a Central American solidarity coalition and were doing some work in sanctuaries for the people that were coming in from El Salvador and Nicaragua. We started providing sanctuary for them. Just as a memory to unions [inaudible] communities, I envisioned the union not just being union workers, but I envisioned all the workers joining, being a whole community, and I was trying to do this at that time. I also went and got 01:05:00some people together and went and protested because at that time there was an apartheid in South America, and they had a game here. I think it was in '81 or something like that, they came and played their game here at the park and I was pretty upset because we tried to have our festivals at the John Bryant Center and we had to go through a committee. We had to go the council to ask for permission to use the center to have a Mexican fiesta. And then here we are, all of a sudden, we hear that the rugby team from South Africa is going to come play ball at our park and that was an Afro-American thing [inaudible] being celebrated for naming that park there. And we were pretty bad, so we went, and we protested and that was scary because there was big rugby players coming at us and we were trying to make them stop playing and a couple of our people got 01:06:00arrested at that time. Those are the kinds of things that I did as a union member. And I started some of the things at the labor fest, I was selected to sit in a dunk tank, I was drowned. [laughter] But it was pretty exciting during all that time I was in the union. My husband was the secretary, financial secretary, and then vice president of his local. Union was kind of part of me. And I saw so many things happen, some of the workers would get hurt and they go to the company doctor. That sort of stuff inspired

me to stay in the union, because if they hadn't had somebody who would represent them, they'd end up working with broken hands or whatever.

ROMAN: If you would tell us about the Racine area in the '60s?

Morales: Oh ok, well, like I said, I came here in 1949. I was pretty young. Thing was, when you don't know anything better, you're happy. We were pretty content. I got married in '63 and I moved to the north side, and I started seeing more of life. I lived a pretty sheltered life at home, but I started getting involved with my own kids, joining different things, then I realized that the people from the barrio, when we were kids, half of our families lived there, my madres, comadres, and compadres, a lot of people from Cotulla, my hometown, lived there. We used to call that place the Mexican beach. The reason they called it the Mexican beach is because when it rained, it became a big mud puddle. The whole area was just mud. They had no pavement, they didn't have no 01:08:00sidewalks, the streets were not paved, the bathrooms were outside, they had outhouses, and the water was outside. They didn't have any water inside, you know, when we were in the city, we had everything like water, toilets and we didn't think much about it, they would visit us, and we would visit them. We were, being migrant workers, we were used to outdoor toilets. But we never thought that they were being deprived. We had toilets; they didn't have toilets. We had sidewalks; they didn't have sidewalks. We started campaigning, asking questions, "Why don't you have that?" The girls would have their babies and they'd be washing the diapers outside and breaking the ice, so they could get at the water to wash the diapers for the babies and there were no Pampers in those days, there were diapers. In the middle of the night, they had to almost form a line so they could walk to the toilet because they were scared. So, we organized 01:09:00them, me and some other people, my husband for one, Tom Avilla and Art Gonzales, and a few other people who lived in the city. We organized them. We went to the city council and asked them, "Why don't they have no toilets, why don't they have sidewalks?" Well, blah, blah, blah, and then we went again. They said, "Well, we thought they were happy, they never asked for anything. We thought they were used to that stuff. We thought they didn't want them. We thought they didn't want their toilets inside the house". So, we had to go again, but this time, I got a hold of the Brown Berets, and they were pretty active in Milwaukee. So, we went again and this time we were a little bit more vocal, this is, you know, these people, you have indoor toilets, you have indoor water, and you have streets, and you have sidewalks, these people need them, too. The Brown 01:10:00Berets, they walked in, and they stood behind us, they didn't sit down, they didn't say a word. The shock in the council members' eyes. They voted. And now many of the people that lived there back then are still there. The Gonzalez's, the Espinosa's, they're still there and it's a pretty nice neighborhood now compared to at that time. You walk in there and you have to wear galoshes and it was difficult to get in there because it was all mud. That was something that really blew my mind. I was still pretty young when they said, "We thought they didn't want those things. We thought they were happy." Even now, things are in some places, where even the schools, or whatever, the neighborhoods, they say, "Well, we thought they were fine, we thought that's the way they like it." They 01:11:00don't bother to ask the people, 'is this fine'? I went to a meeting on Brown vs. the Board of Education to say if. . . it really didn't make an impact. It hasn't made a difference, what's Brown and the Board of Education done?

Well, I say I went to one school, inner city, and like, maybe ninety percent of the population were Afro-Americans and I went to another one, inner school, and they had a function there, and like maybe eighty percent were Hispanics, and then I go to the school over here and maybe another ninety percent is Afro-Americans and Hispanics. So, I say Brown vs the Board of Education did not work. Like they come up with these neighborhood schools, they want to go back to 01:12:00neighborhood schools. I says, no, they are not neighborhood schools, they're segregation all over again. The way I see as working on issues, they're all interrelated, they're all one circle, whether you are working on immigrant issues, or workers' rights, criminal rights, courts, people doing drugs, it's all one big circle. One touches the other. You don't separate them because the immigrants need to work. Here you got workers' rights. And if there is no work, there's too much unemployment so they go into criminal activities and drugs and that. So, they all go around each other and they all touch each other, no matter what, even healthcare issue. You think, if you don't have money to go to the doctor, like for me right now I am getting my insurance cut off. I'm going to have to make a choice whether I am going to go buy my prescriptions or buy a 01:13:00gallon of milk. If I don't buy a gallon of milk then I am going to starve and then I am going to get sick, and everything touches just everything else.

ROMAN: So, what is your advice for the next generation?

MORALES: I don't know. I'm getting [inaudible]. You have to know your neighbor before you can know yourself. Once you know who they are then you'll know who you are, too. If you love your neighbor, then you can love yourself. If you respect your neighbor, you can respect yourself. That's what it amounts to, just be part of everybody's life and let them be part of yours. Don't separate them, don't think you are better than them, and that just goes for your neighbors in 01:14:00every aspect, not just in your area where you live, in your work, in your church. You don't say, just, "You haven't been saved, so I can't talk to you". I can't see that. We all got struggle no matter what we believe in, no matter what church we go to. We are all human, one big race, there is no white race, black race, yellow race, it is all human race. For my kids, I just tell them, it's the old rule that you learn way back in elementary school. 'Do unto others as you would like them to do to you'. Just think about it. And I always tell my kids no matter how bad a person is you can find a little good in them. Everybody has a little good in them, you don't write them off, you look for that little good.

ROMAN: Thank you.