Feminism and Human Services: Neighborhood to National
Many of the [community] programs were actually directed or run by women. So even if they didn't say they were feminists, what they were doing was incredibly feminist. - Diana Solís
The human services, feminist, and community organizing groups involved with the Festival suggest the broad connections of MLEA in 1979, a neighborhood to national vision, and varied strategies for addressing the challenges facing Chicago’s Latinas. Some of the individuals and organizations, such as Andra Medea and her early women’s self-defense program, started in Chicago and grew in impact beyond Illinois.
In addition to clinics and groups that specifically addressed health care, Mujeres invited human services programs that addressed well-being more broadly. Against stereotypes, many of the groups and organizations created to better lives in Pilsen during the 1960s and 1970s were founded and/or led by women of Mexican ancestry born in Mexico and the U.S.; some were represented at the Festival along with the Mujeres social services component.
In the Festival video (08:55), we see Adelia Hurley (1920-2014) from El Hogar del Niño in a flowery dress selling watermelon, pineapple, banana, and cranberry aguas frescas. For the video’s multicultural audience, she says that “rice water” (horchata) is most popular that day. Hurley was born in Laredo, TX when her father worked on the railroad. In the early 1970s with other local mothers, she founded El Hogar out of a local church basement to provide the first bilingual, affordable daycare agency for the Latino communities of Pilsen and Little Village. “Although she was the mother of 12 children… hundreds of toddlers, and adults, called her “Mama” (Salas, “In Memory,” 15). Also attending the Festival was Gads Hill Center; according to its website, Gads Hill opened as a social settlement house in 1898 in a former saloon to serve Pilsen’s Czech and other European immigrants, later transitioning to serve the growing Mexican immigrant community.
El Valor, an agency that serves adults with disabilities and their families, was also invited to table at the Festival. It was founded in 1973 by Guadalupe Reyes (1918-2000), a mother of 11 who grew up picking beets in the Midwest with her Mexican migrant farmworker family and became one of the earliest, reknowned Latina activists in Chicago. When Reyes could not find a school in her community for her severely disabled son Bobby, she decided to start her own. Reyes met with other parents of disabled children in a church basement to organize and found the Esperanza School in 1969, a year before her steelworker husband died of cancer. Her many accomplishments also included serving on the board of the Chicago Transit Authority and, as a leader of Pilsen Neighbors Community Council, helping to guide the struggle for Benito Juarez High School and organizing the first Fiesta del Sol in Pilsen, now the largest Latino festival in the midwest (Fernández 2006). This ad (L.) lists El Valor’s services in 1980 using language of the time.
MLEA was a rare Latino organization in Chicago to focus on the specific needs of women and girls, and groups contributed to the Festival to serve, physically empower, and address policy for women. Women Support Women participated in the Festival. Described as a “battered wives group” in Festival notes, the group held a public forum at Chicago’s Daley Center Plaza shortly before the Festival on June 9. To publicize the forum in English and Spanish, the poster featured below highlights the motto “Women are people not property/Mujeres son personas no propiedad,” the same motto printed on Festival balloons. MLEA was a “pioneer” (Fernandez, 2011: 256) in addressing domestic violence against women in 1979; it would open the first Chicago shelter geared towards serving Spanish-speaking battered women in 1981 with another local women’ organization (Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City, 256).
Chimera demonstrated women’s self-defense at 2PM. Chimera was a local organization founded by Andra Medea, a Lithuanian American who grew up in a racially changing Southwest Side. Medea started to defend herself when she was beat up by other White girls from Catholic schools because she attended a public school with a growing Black student body. After helping to launch Chicago’s anti-rape movement in in the early 1970s and publishing with Kathleen Thompson the book Against Rape (1974), one of the earliest books on sexual assault and self-defense, Medea founded Chimera and began teaching the self-defense techniques from the book (Joravsky, “Fighting Chances”). Diana Solís was introduced to Chimera at University of Illinois Chicago Circle, where she took her first self-defense class with them. She included their classes (offered on the North Side) in the 6/79 MLEA newsletter; the Festival was an opportunity to promote women's self-defense awareness and training in Pilsen.
Based in Chicago, the Midwest Women’s Center “offered job training, placement services, and literacy education to help women enhance their skills and self esteem” and engaged in public policy advocacy on women’s issues (Jacobsen, Midwest Women’s Center Records). This Women’s Center helped women enter the construction trades through their Women’s Pre-Apprenticeship Project funded by the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) (https://www.lib.niu.edu/1979/ii7909281.html).
For 50 cents, Festival attendees could buy a button that announced “I’m for ERA NOW;” the NOW ERA Committee also gave out bright red “E.R.A—YES!” bumper stickers. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to achieve the required three-fifths majority in the Illinois House of Representatives, leading to its national defeat by the 1982 deadline. The ERA was finally ratified in Illinois almost 40 years later, in 2018.
For more on Andra Medea and Chimera: Fighting Chances: Andra Medea wrote the book on how to deal with bullies
You can learn about When Illinois Conservatives Blocked the ERA during the 1970s and 1980s, including national anti-ERA organizing led by Alton, IL attorney Phylis Schlafly, and the pro-ERA feminists who went on a hunger strike and chained themselves to a rail at the Illinois State legislature.
SOURCES
Ciokajlo, Mickey. “Guadalupe Reyes; Activist worked to improve the lives of others.” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 2001.
Fernández, Lilia. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Fernández, Lilia. "Reyes, Guadalupe (1918-2000). In Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. edited by Vickie L. Ruiz and Virginia Korrol, 622-3. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Jacobsen, Kim. Midwest Women’s Center (Chicago, Ill.) Records. Abakanowicz Research Center, The Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL. https://bmrc.lib.uchicago.edu/portal/view/?id=BMRC.CHM.MIDWEST-WOMENS-CTR.xml.
Joravsky, “Fighting Chances.” Chicago Reader, April 15, 2004. https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/fighting-chances/
McClelland, Edward. “When Illinois Conservatives Blocked the ERA.” Chicago, January 16, 2020. https://www.chicagomag.com/news/january-2020/illinois-and-the-era/
Salas, August. “In Memory: Adelia ‘Mama’ Hurley.” Lawndale Bilingual News, August 14, 2014. http://www.lawndalenews.com/archives/2014/LN081414.pdf.