[title slide]
INTERVIEWER: Thank you for having us once again for a follow up. I am going to
start by asking about Latinas En Accion. Would you like to give an insight on LEA?RODRÍGUEZ: Actually, it evolved from a core group of women getting together,
actually it was women from across the state. From Madison, Racine, Milwaukee and there might have been a couple of other cities. It was a group of women that got together and felt that there needed to be some training around advocacy and organizing around issues that affected Latino families. At that time it was called the Latina Task Force and one of the things that happen in time is that you change names, change your strategies, you soften, I guess it's the word. 00:01:00Some people felt that task force was a strong word at that time so it evolved to lea. it became formalized. So around early 2004-2005 myself and another woman decided to formalize it and begin to work with the Women's Fund of Greater Milwaukee (WFoGM) to build a fund so that we could fund activities that affected women and girls particularly here in Milwaukee. Projects that would advance them in education, projects that were advocating for specific things; it could be 00:02:00translation services around the issue of Alzheimer. One of the things we are also very committed to is projects that affect young girls.So, Las Cientificas de Haze elementary school, that was a project. We don't give
out huge grants, but the grants that we do augment the work that they give the community. It helps to carry out their mission, and of course it is our mission to advance young girls in the sciences. It kind of led to that and over the last couple of years we've raised over $70,000, we've awarded small grants just 00:03:00starting a few years ago and we have already given out over 35000. So it is small but it is growing.INTERVIEWER: When did you become involved with LEA or LTF?
RODRÍGUEZ: From the
very beginning it was, the task force actually started in the 80s and so for years we would work on small projects to advocate for different things and we were very politically involved. So, we would interview candidates, we would fundraise for candidates, once we decided to back them we would sponsor fundraisers for candidates, and the candidates had to be individuals we felt were committed to issues that affected the Latino community. That is how it 00:04:00started, and then again, as it evolved to lea it was really more putting money behind projects.INTERVIEWER: Your contributions to LEA?
RODRÍGUEZ: I was one of the founding members. Basically formalizing it and
creating the fund, so that was I along with 1 other person n then we developed the steering committee after that.INTERVIEWER: What made you decide to be part of the steering committee?
RODRÍGUEZ: In 2000, which really wasn't a long time ago, I was thinking that
00:05:00our generation, because I'm 62, my generation really needed to start not only having the steering committee be of younger women, but strategically looking for young women who were out there doing things and we knew would be leaders. So now we are stepping away the old, the original group is stepping back and letting the younger members of our committee kind of take over. Formalizing a group was one thing, getting it started, building the fund, having it is part of the WFoGM, and negotiating how we use those dollars in the community was all part of 00:06:00the steering committee. But in the last couple of years we really wanted, very strategically, to bring in young women and we've done that. I think we are better, we are stronger, and they are going to carry out the mission of LEA into the next generation, hopefully.INTERVIEWER: What was the driving force of LEA? Was there a reason or event that
kind of resonated with you before?RODRÍGUEZ: I don't know if it had been a specific reason other than I had been
involved in other organizations, sort of mainstream women's organizations that 00:07:00kind of advocated for some of the same things we cared about. But we sort of felt that, there was a few of us who felt that there needed to be a greater emphasis on Latinas. So creating lea and being part of the WFoGM, women's fund, sort of gave us an edge, first of all, because we were part of an institution, and they have a sort of a bigger reach that really is, and I hate to say this, sometimes we don't have in terms of philanthropy and people that are out there. Broadening the understanding of our issues and concerns that we think are 00:08:00priorities with a group that traditionally just deals with reproductive health and sort of that thing it just makes sense to go that route. One of the things we always talk about is what did we do back in the day and what do we do now? And it is very different although in some instances, where injustices are done right now, there are some strategies that are very similar or mirroring something that happened like in the 60s and 70s. But for us was more of 00:09:00broadening the knowledge of who we were as Latinas and that we were part of this community and that we needed to really focus in on some of the things that would affect women and bringing them to, well dealing with social justice issues and making sure that women were advancing.INTERVIEWER: Why specifically target girls and women?
RODRÍGUEZ: It is an interesting thing; I think part of it is that it came from
my mother. She was an interesting kind of low key woman, but very strong. She never went to school, I was get emotional when I talk about this, and she always said that if you don't stand up for yourself no one else will stand up for you. The person was probably my mother. All along, I should say she never finished school, and she was a migrant worker. How she ended up in Wisconsin is because she thought there was no racism here. You have to think, she is from Texas, so in that time in Texas the signs would say "no Mexicans allowed." So when she 00:10:00came to Wisconsin, she didn't encounter that. She really liked Wisconsin and once she went back to Texas, and she met my dad, she encouraged him to move here. He also did not go to school. But she always wanted us to go to school, graduate high school and go on to school, but the thing that she always talked about was having strength in your education so that you could take care of yourself and not have to rely on anyone else. I think that is because she had encountered so much abuse as a young person and also in her marriage, and found herself very much alone. Trying to work and did not speak English and really did 00:11:00not have any skills other than working at a farm and taking care of her family, so she struggled. Those were the pieces of advice that she gave, that you have to be self-sufficient in your own and be able to take care of yourself.She lived to be 86 years old and, my eye, the way I saw her, was that she was
the person who really held everyone together in our family, but she would say 00:12:00"crie a mis hijos para que se cuidaran ellos mismo, que ellos se cuidaran, no para que alguien mas los cuidara." So you have to be strong and you have to do for yourself. And she was not a wimp by any means. She was pretty strong and was only 5 ft. tall.But there was another time when I was going to take a job with Planned
Parenthood. I was sort of leaving the organizing career and moving onto something else, and I talk to her before I took that job, and I said "mom what do you think I should do?" And she said, you know, women in my time didn't know anything about their bodies, didn't control how many children they could have. 00:13:00You know, this is a good thing. Women, especially Latina women need to know about this kind of stuff. And so, my job in Planned Parenthood was to create awareness about care, awareness of how to take care of your body, and it was about that kind of stuff.At first, I thought she would be mad at me or say don't go, or oh don't take
that job, but she was very in tune to what had happened to women in her day and what woman had done to themselves and the community. So it was, I was like wow mom. She was very supportive. But she was the one that all along kind of said, 00:14:00there are injustices in this world and we have to do what we can. There isn't always a vehicle for someone, that they might not have the knowledge, might not have the capacity, she would say that there is always something you can do to help, and you know, somebody that needs help.INTERVIEWER: Are there any anecdotes that have resonated through your activism
in LEA that you would like to share?RODRÍGUEZ: For me, it's from the very first activity that we organized under
the group getting together in the 80s. It was bringing very grassroots women 00:15:00from the neighborhood who really did not understand their power/potential to a place in Madison, never been out of the city kind of people, women, didn't speak English and working with them to sort of arouse the fact in them that they had potential to organize, potential to make change in a city like Milwaukee. For me, it was the one point about this involvement that clearly said to me that 00:16:00there's so much potential in women. That just stayed with me, we worked on helping them figure out the things that they did. Very grassroots, little things that helped to organize in the community, and they were amazing women and could see themselves doing these things.INTERVIEWER: Are there any specific women that funded LEA?
RODRÍGUEZ: Our money is very small money that comes to us. I think it is our
steering committee that pull resources and give to this fund, and then it is the 5-10-15 dollars that come from other people. We will keep money in the fund and 00:17:00have it grow; we'll allocate what we can.INTERVIEWER: Has your ideology changed while in LEA? How has LEA impacted your
past ideologies?RODRÍGUEZ: The ideology is really different in terms of working with very
mainstream philanthropic kind of women, the career volunteer, the wife of the Dr., the wife of the executive. They don't work; they work from the home and might not understand entirely what goes in the community. They are just doing a 00:18:00good deed. I found myself sometimes saying the wrong thing to women, these type of women. I found myself being scolded. I was told "this is not how we do things here." Here we are in 2000, we are talking about philanthropy and giving to groups that are needy. But I'm doing something wrong. I said the wrong thing. I am being scolded and I am the only Latina in this committee who is trying to decide where money should go for the Women's Fund. I sat on that committee for 6 years, and there were women who felt that I should not be there, and that felt 00:19:00very strange to me. But again, I learned that you have to know how to work with folks like that because you can't change them.INTERVIEWER: Has there been a particular male role model that has contributed to
the LEA committee?RODRÍGUEZ: Yeah, there were probably 2 or 3. One was Ernesto Chacon because he
was my boss for 9 years, and he was the head for the Latin American Union for Civil Rights. And Roberto Hernandez who I also worked with for many years, who is now the name for the Roberto Hernandez center at UW-Milwaukee. The other is 00:20:00Tony Vias. Those three are probably the individuals where I learned about organizing, and how to deal with people, and the importance of education. I think those were the main influences on me. Those were the areas. I worked very closely with all three for at least 9-10 years.INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about working in partnership with Cientificas de Milwaukee?
RODRÍGUEZ: I thought that, that's an elementary school, and they came to us
00:21:00asking for dollars to work on some robotic projects. They were all young women in elementary school, so we felt strongly that we needed to back them. So the parents came and they asked us for some help and of course we responded. We funded them 2 years in a row for their projects. It is really to maintain interest of young women in STEM, to really promote those areas amongst Latinas and we were very excited.INTERVIEWER: Can you speak a little about why the disparities in STEM?
RODRÍGUEZ: First of all, young women do not go into these fields, and then
again, Latinas would be even less involved in these fields. I'm not sure why, is 00:22:00it the media? Is it the emphasis that technology is always focused on males? We felt strongly that we needed to break that little barrier there and promote it with this elementary group. I don't know the statistics, but I do know that there's a large gap, first of all women, then minorities, and even more so with Latina women.INTERVIEWER: What is your intake on the recent recognition by the Latino
Non-Profit Leadership Program?RODRÍGUEZ: I mentioned before, that we strategically of we wanted to involve
younger women as part of LEA, and some of those young women started out in the 00:23:00Latino Non-for-Profit Leadership Training and came to us, one or two came to us as part of their project, and then stayed with us. They felt that this was very impactful and that LEA should be recognized for that. And since then we've been able to include more women in the Latino Non- for- Profit Leadership Training.INTERVIEWER: Could you talk about other funds that LEA has funded or the
relationship to other organizations?RODRÍGUEZ: The only relationship we have right now in terms of funds and
working with funds is the Woman's Fund of Greater Milwaukee, but we work with, 00:24:00within that group there are other funds, like the Hmong-American and the African-American Women's Fund. We are the second largest within Women's Fund, and of course the first is the African-American Women's Fund, and basically that's been our only collaborative in helping LEA with the women's fundINTERVIEWER: How do you feel your work with LEA impacted other communities of
women of color?RODRÍGUEZ: As this group of steering members, they're getting out and about and
talking more about what we do, and that is starting to resonate in other 00:25:00communities. The fact that we collaborate and work with the WFoGM we have a broader connection to other communities because many organizations look to Milwaukee for leadership about how to form funds, what communities they work with and what things they fund. And so, we've been visited and challenged by other communities, so it's been pretty interesting in terms of people looking at the women's fund and our specific fund in terms of our impact and what we're doing by other communities and other cities as far away as California. 00:26:00INTERVIEWER: Would you like to give an example?
RODRÍGUEZ: Well the example is that there was a very specific grant that
challenged us to, it was another grant from California and I don't remember the name of this, but the grant was really, I should say that they influenced us because it was larger in California in terms of women and Latina women. They basically challenged us to grow our fund, and really matching our dollars at the very beginning. This was about 4 or 5 years ago and that actually came from California, I can't remember the name. We had a challenge grant, so it was that 00:27:00that really gave us the boost.INTERVIEWER: Would you like to explain any challenges you faced in LEA?
RODRÍGUEZ: I think the challenge is really looking at ourselves looking beyond
us, and trying to really organize and reach out. I think we're always in our stuff, we're always on our own stuff. What we do during the day in terms of work, what we, sort of our commitments. What I've found is that we always have limited time. And that poses a challenge to the work that we do. We don't have a staff. That is what I see as a challenge sometime for us. Just getting together, 00:28:00meeting monthly, meeting every other month is a challenge because all of us work and it seems like we're always working.The other is the expertise in terms of fundraising. Fundraising. We look to ourselves as doing some traditional kinds of things, but also trying to learn how to do better fundraising, new ways of doing fundraising, or even looking beyond our circle--or, looking at our circle first, then going beyond our circle to find dollars. Those are some of the challenges that we have. The women that are there on the steering committee now are extremely bright, but again, the challenge is always the time, because we have to do it all. We have to do it all. There isn't somebody there to do it for us.
00:29:00INTERVIEWER: How did you foster community within LEA?
RODRÍGUEZ: At first it was sort of the purpose of Latinas en Accion, we got
together and really decided what that purpose would be. Once we formalized LEA and what our goal was going to be, and our focus, and so it really did make us more connected because we weren't challenged anybody's ideas. I should not say challenging; we were putting any ideas down. We thought whatever came out of the 00:30:00group, as far as priorities, that's what we'd do. Going from something like Cientificas and promoted that to an area of advocacy and awareness of Alzheimer's in the Latino community. That's a big stretch, so people have different ideas of what's important to them and what things we should be advocating for and supporting, and I think that is what helped to build out community within our group. Then also, inviting different groups like the Hmong American and the African American women also, to be part of the things we did. Just coming together, that really helped. 00:31:00INTERVIEWER: Would you consider LEA a feminist organization?
RODRÍGUEZ: I think to some degree. One of the things Latinas struggle with is
that word. They struggle with that word because it seems so selfish and we are so family oriented. So we struggled with that but we want to help women find their potential. And if it is a good word or a bad word for someone, I think in some way we are.INTERVIEWER: On that note, would you consider it a Chicana feminist organization?
RODRÍGUEZ: Hmmm. Maybe. Maybe. You know, I have grandchildren, and I have five
00:32:00granddaughters and I think I struggle everyday with what's going to be out there for them. There's a challenge every step of the way for young people, and you as a student are probably noticing how hard things are. I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful for them but I still think it's going to be hard and I worry about them.INTERVIEWER: What is the difference between Anglo feminism and Chicano/Latino feminism?
RODRÍGUEZ: I think we're more collaborative and we're willing to accept men as
00:33:00our partners in our fights or in our struggles. We're willing to accept them as advisors. And so it think were more collaborative with men. I think that's the difference.INTERVIEWER: Do you run into problems because of the differences or difficulties
of feminism?RODRÍGUEZ: Yeah, not so much anymore. I'm an older woman, I've raised my kids.
There's a different view of you as you get older. In the community, there might 00:34:00be some of that. There's a lot of First Generation Latino men in these communities, so there are still some of those same stereotypes. Those are some of the challenges we have to educate men on.INTERVIEWER: Would you like to give an example?
RODRÍGUEZ: Someone who's been here a little bit longer is very different than
someone who's just arrived. The expectation of what your wife or girlfriend should do for you and your family is a little different right now. Especially, 00:35:00and I hate to say this, if they're uneducated. Like so many in our community now, young people are being raised pretty much on their own. You know, there aren't the values or the sense of respect for women that would've been having had strong parents. That's what I'm finding, so it's a whole re-educating thing. They raise themselves.INTERVIEWER: What are examples of educating Anglo women the difference of feminism?
RODRÍGUEZ: I think what they don't understand many times is that we do things
collectively and they tend to be very single minded on issues. We want to bring 00:36:00our families, our partners, we want to bring them along because it impacts all of us. If there is to be change or impact, it has to involve all of us and they have to understand that. Anglo women many times don't see it that way and sometimes it's hard because we as Latinas women struggle with that. We want our families to come along. We want our husbands and our partners to be part of whatever the change is.INTERVIEWER: What is the most radical work you have engaged in?
RODRÍGUEZ: Most radical? Hmmm-- That's a hard one. In terms of being catholic
00:37:00and working for Planned Parenthood, at that point in my life, I felt like I was at a crossroads in my life seeing if I was okay with that. Because in one instance you're going against something that is part of your beliefs. I thought that was pretty hard. I accepted that because I thought that not only Latina 00:38:00women in general, but all women needed that kind of information, education and those services. I was lucky enough that I could use that platform to also talk to women about also being aware of their own bodies and that they could make choices about having children. That really went to my core. There were other things that I worked on, but I think that went to my core.INTERVIEWER: What is the most impactful activism you have done? Would you
consider yourself working with Planned Parenthood one?RODRÍGUEZ: That was one. Another one was just building this sort of, helping
00:39:00families and Latino women and men understand the importance of bilingual education. Helping to organize them and helping to train then in that and knowing they have power to make that change. Being an organizer, around organizing parents around bilingual education was one of the ones that I found to be the most rewarding.INTERVIEWER: Would you change anything about the journey you've taken thus far?
RODRÍGUEZ: I think I would've probably gone to school more and taken on more
00:40:00education. I wasn't a good student. And I was dyslexic! Which makes it that much harder.INTERVIEWER: Do you have any words of advice for future generations of
Chicano/Latino activists?RODRÍGUEZ: I hope that young educated Latinos, Chicanos, whatever you want to
call yourself, become involved in social change and things that impact your community in any way, shape, or form that you want to do it, but that you do it. It could be something small, it could be something in your church or school, but 00:41:00I think that they've got to be involved otherwise things will go backwards.INTERVIEWER: Would you like to give an example of that?
RODRÍGUEZ: Given the climate of this country right now, we have to be steadfast
about what's important to our people. The country right now is becoming real extreme, also.