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Maria Elena Durazo
1media/Screen Shot 2023-03-22 at 5.31.55 PM_thumb.png2023-03-23T00:33:00+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4912“María Elena was born the seventh child in a family of eleven children to migrant worker parents. Growing up, María Elena traveled with her family, following the crops throughout California and Oregon, and experiencing the exploitative conditions and hardships that migrant laborers suffer. In spite of these obstacles, María Elena attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and graduated in 1975. In college she became involved in the Chicano Movement at the urging of her older brother. Then she entered the labor movement as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (later called UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). While working as a union organizer, she pursued an education in law at the People’s College of Law and earned her degree in 1985. By 1987, María Elena was ready to lead a drive by the rank and file of HERE Local 11 to make the union more responsive to its majority-Latino membership. The organizing drive successfully instituted a shop steward system that educated the rank and file on their rights, workers were now able to participate in negotiating their union contracts and all meetings and publications were from then on bilingual.”plain2023-08-12T01:24:38+00:001989“Hotel union leader Maria Elena Durazo photographed for a profile in the Los Angeles Times reporter shortly after her election to the union’s top office, 1989. Los Angeles Times Photograph Collection, UCLA Department of Special Collections.”sparcinla.org185fc5b2219f38c7b63f42d87efaf997127ba4fc