The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
364
21
365
Dolores Hayden
indifferent neoclassical architecture designed by Fitzhugh, Krucker, and
Deckbar in 1914, the Embassy Theater is far more important as the historic
gathering place for labor unions and community organizations—including
Russian Jewish and Latina garment workers, Latina cannery workers, and
Russian Molokan walnut shellers. Unions, especially women’s unions, met
inside and marched outside the Embassy between the 1920s and the 1940s,
as did El Congreso (the Spanish Speaking People’s Congress), the first national
Latino civil rights organization. 9 By the 1990s it had become a residential
college for the University of Southern California.
The Embassy in its heyday was frequented by many of that era’s
most colorful organizers, including Rose Pesotta of the ILGWU (International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union), who led the 1933 Dressmakers’
strike, Luisa Moreno of UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing,
and Allied Workers Association), and Josefina Fierro de Bright of El
Congreso. All three reached Los Angeles after epic journeys of the same
proportions as Biddy Mason’s—from Russia for Pesotta, Guatemala for
Moreno, and Mexico for Fierro de Bright. All three experienced the height
of their careers in Los Angeles, recruiting thousands of Spanish-speaking
women into their organizations—but it must be added that their work was
so controversial and disturbing that Pesotta resigned as ILGWU vice president
and Moreno and Fierro left for Mexico during the red-baiting years.
Graves’s project highlighted these three organizers. Artist Rupert
Garcia created a poster with their portraits to advertise a public humanities
workshop, “La Fuerza de Union,” held in the historic main auditorium in
the spring of 1991. Participants included two artists, Garcia and Celia Alvarez
Munoz; a restoration architect, Brenda Levin; and historians George
Sanchez and Albert Camarillo (Moreno’s biographer), as well as union leaders,
students, and retirees. (Historian Vicki Ruiz, whose wonderful book
Cannery Women, Cannery Lives had first drawn attention to Moreno, also
worked on the team briefly.) 10
Following the workshop, Celia Alvarez Muñoz created an artist’s
book, If Walls Could Speak, which intertwined public and private story lines
in English and Spanish, beginning: “If walls could speak, these walls would
tell / in sounds of human voices, music, and machines / of the early tremors
of the City of Angels.” And on the same three pages, she wrote: “As a young
child, I learned my mother had two families. / One with my grandmother,
my aunt, and I. / The other at la fabrica, the factory.” The endpapers were
union logos, and so was the conclusion. A typical spread included historic
images of Rose Pesotta with her arm around a worker, and another worker
stitching a banner reading “Win the War,” or Josefina Fierro organizing for
El Congreso, and workers with linked arms. The small artist’s book was dis-