Hispanic Women Shaping the Next Generation of Leadership

Hispanic Heritage Month begins on the fifteenth of September rather than the first, and the reason is worth knowing because it explains something about how this history has been organized. The date marks the independence anniversaries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, with Mexico following on the sixteenth and Chile on the eighteenth. The observance began as a week under Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and was extended to a month under Ronald Reagan in 1988. It was built around national independence rather than around any single origin, which is accurate to the population it describes and inconvenient for anyone wanting a tidy narrative.

The same inconvenience applies to the women. There is no single lineage of Hispanic and Latina leadership in the United States, because there is no single community, and the differences between a Puerto Rican organizing tradition in New York and a Mexican American labor tradition in California and a Cuban American professional class in Florida are substantial. What runs through all of them, and what makes a lineage traceable despite the differences, is that in each case women did the sustained unglamorous work while other people held the titles, and then in a few cases the women got the titles too.

Start with Dolores Huerta, because everything downstream runs partly through her. She co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962, which became the United Farm Workers, and she negotiated the contracts and ran much of the organizing apparatus behind the Delano grape boycott. Her name is less attached to that history than his is, which is its own data point about how credit gets distributed. She learned organizing through the Community Service Organization and Fred Ross, she was in her thirties when the union work began, and she is in her nineties now with the Dolores Huerta Foundation still training organizers in the methods she developed in the fields.

Sylvia Rivera was born in New York City in 1951 to a father from Puerto Rico and a mother from Venezuela, and her childhood was severely difficult, including her mother's death by suicide when Rivera was three and her running away from home at eleven. She and Marsha P. Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in 1970, an organization that provided shelter and food to homeless LGBTQ youth. Through the 1970s she fought the exclusion of transgender people by gay rights organizations that had been formed after Stonewall, and she fought for years to include transgender people in New York's Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, which finally passed in 2002. She died that same year at fifty, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was founded afterward by people who understood what she had built without resources.

Antonia Pantoja belongs in this line and is less known than she should be. A Puerto Rican educator who arrived in New York in 1944, she founded ASPIRA in 1961 to address the fact that Puerto Rican students were leaving school in devastating numbers and that no institution was treating this as a problem worth solving. In 1972, ASPIRA and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the New York City Board of Education over bilingual education, arguing that students who spoke little English were receiving inadequate instruction in violation of the Civil Rights Act. The parties signed the ASPIRA Consent Decree in 1974, establishing the right to transitional bilingual education and English as a Second Language for New York City students, and the case paved the way for expanded bilingual education across New York and nationally. In 1996 she became the first Puerto Rican woman awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by Bill Clinton.

The litigating generation established the part most often skipped, and it is the part that made everything after it available. When Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, two California farmers, sent their children to a local school and were told they would have to attend a separate facility for Mexican American students, the family recruited other aggrieved parents for a federal case challenging segregation. Felicitas ran the family's agricultural business, which gave Gonzalo the time to meet with community leaders about the segregated school system, and after receiving little support from local Latino organizations he hired civil rights attorney David Marcus, who filed suit in March 1945 on behalf of roughly five thousand children. Judge Paul McCormick ruled for the plaintiffs in March 1946, and the Ninth Circuit upheld him in April 1947. Brown followed eight years after the district court ruling.

Then the institutional generation, arriving in positions the previous generations had made possible without being able to occupy themselves. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's 1989 election made her the first Hispanic American woman in Congress. Nydia Velázquez became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the House in 1992, and in 2006 the first Latina to chair a full congressional committee. Ellen Ochoa flew on the shuttle in 1993 as the first Hispanic woman in space and later directed the Johnson Space Center. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2009.

The thread I keep pulling at is what got transmitted between these generations, since the transmission was not institutional and could not have been. There were no pipelines. What passed forward was method, meaning the specific practice of building an organization when no organization will serve you, of litigating when the legislature will not act, of running the business so that someone else can attend the meetings. Huerta learned from the Community Service Organization. Pantoja built ASPIRA out of what she learned failing to get existing institutions to care. In each case the knowledge moved through practice rather than through curriculum, which is how most of women's professional knowledge has always moved.

That is also why the current generation looks different in kind rather than only in degree. The women moving into leadership now are the first cohort with a substantial number of predecessors to learn from directly. They have access to mentorship Pantoja did not have, professional associations that did not exist, and a documented record they can study. What they inherited was not only the legal rights the litigating generation won. It was the existence of people who had done it before, which is a resource the earlier women were building for others while doing without it themselves.

I am wary of the version of this piece that treats the inheritance as complete, so I want to name what has not transferred. Latinas remain substantially underrepresented in corporate leadership and hold a small share of Fortune 500 board seats. The wage gap for Latina women is among the widest of any group the Census Bureau measures. The absence at the top is not explained by pipeline, since the pipeline has been full for two decades, which means whatever produces it operates after entry.

What the lineage suggests about that is clarifying rather than encouraging. Every advance in this history came from women building the thing that did not exist rather than waiting for an existing institution to admit them. Huerta built a union. Pantoja built ASPIRA and then a lawsuit. Rivera built housing out of nothing at all. Felicitas Mendez ran a farm so that a case could be brought. The pattern is consistent enough that it reads less like a series of individual choices and more like a transmitted strategy, and it is the piece of the inheritance most relevant to whoever is currently stuck.