She Turned Faith to Civil Rights

Photo Credit: Sarah Craig/Faces of Fracking, Taken July 18, 2014

Faith inspires people to fight for their own and others’ rights every day. They can join religious organizations that work directly to improve lives. They can work for organizations that use religious language and networking to campaign for equality. But sometimes, belief requires more action than such groups may be able to do. Lupe Anguiano never lost her faith, but she turned toward action to fight for her own rights, the rights of others, and the future.

 Anguiano was born the fourth of six children to seasonal farmworkers on March 12, 1929. Seasonal farm work was a common occupation for Mexican Americans in the west. Her parents were migrants, but Anguiano was born in the United States. During her childhood, the family traveled between Colorado, where her father worked for the railroad during the school year, and California for agricultural work over the summer. Yet during these recurring moves, Anguiano was able to go to school and eventually earn a master’s degree in administration and education from Antioch College in Ohio.

Anguiano turned to her faith to help others by joining the Indiana-based Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters, also called the Victory Noll Sisters, in 1949. The Sisters focused on helping the poor, but they did it as a function of their religion, the Catholic Church. Anguiano wanted to do more, and she began to join public protests for civil rights after the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which banned racial housing discrimination. After 15 years of being part of the Sisters, it became clear to both Anguiano and her superior in the order that the Church was not the best fit for her call to activism, so she was released from her vows in 1964.

Anguiano worked for one year for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) in 1965, the beginning of a string of government jobs, consulting positions, and work on official task forces throughout her life. She was the East Los Angeles Coordinator of the Teen Post program in 1966, which was funded as part of President John’s “War on Poverty.” From 1967-1969, she served as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Office of Education, where she created the Mexican American Unit; it looked at the challenges of equal education opportunities for Spanish-speaking students. Out of that position, she helped draft the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, also known as Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In 1971, Anguiano returned to the DHEW to serve on a task force looking at women’s concerns, which grew into her being named Program Officer of DHEW for a short time in 1973.

Working within the government is not the only way that Anguiano has fought for equal rights. In 1965, she began working for around five dollars a week for the United Farm Workers (UFW) under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, organizing the successful grape boycott in Michigan from 1965-1979. In 1973, she took a job as director of the Southwest Regional Office for the Spanish Speaking in San Antonio. Through her work there she began several campaigns to help women living in public housing while she lived alongside them. In 1978 she founded the National Women’s Employment and Education Inc. (NWEE) in San Antonio, Texas. Over a decade, the program spread to several other cities.

Anguiano’s concerns for equality led her to become one of the leading feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. In most biographies about her, Anguiano is listed among the women who founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. She was a delegate to the 1977 Houston “First Women’s Conference” and spoke out for the Equal Rights Amendment, perhaps being instrumental in the Catholic Church’s support for it through her continued work with her religion, even after leaving the Sisters.

Years of working with government agencies and Catholic, feminist, and worker’s rights groups inspired her to create her consulting business, Lupe Anguiano and Associates, in 1981. Until 2009, her company helped businesses form cooperative relationships with the neighborhoods they served and helped non-profits find funding for their work.

Anguiano has been recognized for her human rights work several times. She was rewarded a grant from the Wonder Women Foundation in 1982 for her work helping other women. In 1983, she was given the President’s Volunteer Award by Ronald Reagan. In 1988, Ladies Home Journal named her one of their “100 Most Important Women” for her work on behalf of the NWEE, which sadly closed that same year for lack of funding, even though they had a much higher success rate for job placement than government-run programs. In 2007, Anguiano was one of several Chicana feminists covered by the documentary film Las Mujeres De La Caucus Chicana and was also honored by the National Women’s History Project that March. In 2017, in honor of Anguiano’s activism, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center established a scholarship fund. The fund is partly supported through individual donations but also receives 50% of the royalties from Debora Wright’s book, Uncompromised: The Lupe Anguiano Story, so if you purchase a copy, you can help support the scholarship, too.

Anguiano continues to fight for civil rights but has also turned her attention to environmental issues in her later years, becoming a full-time volunteer for California Coastal Protection Network (CCPN) in 2015. In a 2019 interview, she stated her support for the New Green Deal and her continued support for equality for all people, though since she will mark her 91st birthday today when this article goes live, she may be spending more of her time away from public activism.