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The FBI harassed her. The U.S. government deemed her an un-American communist. The Immigration and Naturalization Service nearly deported her. But Luisa Moreno dedicated herself to civil rights and to improving working conditions for laborers, especially Latinas.

Luisa Moreno was born in Guatemala in 1907, and in her youth advocated for women's rights. She spent time in Mexico before she migrated to New York in 1929 and became a labor organizer.

As a young woman Luisa Moreno was an avid writer. She worked for a brief period as a journalist and enjoyed writing poetry. At the age of 20 years old, she published El Vendedor de Cocuyos (The Seller of Fireflies).

Luisa Moreno worked with several unions throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Her bilingual outreach sought to improve working conditions in fields and canneries in the Southwest. She wrote pamphlets, organized strikes, and encouraged participation in unions.

Affiliated Congress of Industrial Organizations, around late 1930s

International Ladies Garment Worker Union Convention Badge, 1937

Moreno worked with groups, such as the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), that largely represented Latina laborers. These women in particular were paid low wages for long hours of manual labor and faced workplace abuse.

Moreno brought together more than 100 groups in 1938 for El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española, the Spanish-Speaking People's Congress. The organization advocated for fair treatment of Latino/a laborers in the United States, both immigrants and citizens, and was one of the first U.S. assemblies focused on Latino/a civil rights.

"They can talk about deporting me . . . but they can never deport the people that I've worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers . . ." - Luisa Moreno

Pamphlet to rally national attention and halt Luisa Moreno's deportation, around 1949

Luisa Moreno's labor organizing and civil rights activism drew the ire of the U.S. government during a time when anti-Latino and anti-Communist sentiments were high. Facing imminent deportation, Moreno left the United States in 1950.

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The FBI harassed her. The U.S. government deemed her an un-American communist. The Immigration and Naturalization Service nearly deported her. But Luisa Moreno dedicated herself to civil rights and to improving working conditions for laborers, especially Latinas. Luisa Moreno was born in Guatemala in 1907, and in her youth advocated for women's rights.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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How Anti-Mexican Racism in L.A. Caused the Zoot Suit Riots | History

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Mendez v. Westminster School District et al, OC Human Relations Legacy Awards

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As a child, Sylvia Mendez thought her parents' court case was all about a playground.

That's because in 1944, the school bus would drop her off at the white school, which had "manicured lawns" and a "beautiful playground," but she wasn't allowed there. Instead, she would have to keep walking down the street to the Mexican school - two wooden shacks on a dirt lot next to a cow pasture.

"We went to court every day, I listened to what they were saying, but really I was dreaming about going back to that beautiful school," Mendez said.

But it wasn't a playground that Mendez's parents, Gonzalo and Felicitas, were fighting for.

The Mendez family won the landmark Orange County case, "Mendez, et al vs. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al," which laid the groundwork for school desegregation throughout California - and eventually the nation - decades before the civil rights movement captured the country's attention.

Seventy years later, Mendez, 79, is a fierce advocate of her parents' legacy, traveling the country to tell the story of Mendez vs. Westminster, one that weaves together historic figures like Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren and events including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

"This is the history of the United States, the history of California," she said. "Mendez isn't just about Mexicans. It's about everybody coming together. If you start fighting for justice, then people of all ethnicities will become involved."

When Sylvia Mendez was growing up in the 1940s, Orange County was largely segregated, according to Gilbert Gonzalez, author of the book "Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation." Public parks, swimming pools, restaurants and movie theaters were all segregated, and houses were often sold with racially restricted covenants, stipulating that the property could only be resold to whites.

"This is the general pattern throughout the Southwest where the Mexican community appeared," said Gonzalez, professor emeritus in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Irvine.

School segregation first appeared in Orange County in 1919, and by the 1940s, more than 80% of students of Mexican heritage were attending separate schools from whites, said Gonzalez. The so-called Mexican schools were designed to Americanize the students - speaking Spanish was prohibited - and also to train boys for industrial work and agricultural labor and girls for housekeeping.

Mendez remembers this well.

"We weren't taught how to read and write," she said. "We were taught home economics, how to crochet and knit."

Mexican families pushed back against this immediately. In 1919, a group of parents appeared before the Santa Ana Board of Education to protest the construction of segregated schools - but their concerns were dismissed.

"The argument at the time was, 'We have these schools because Mexican children have special needs,'" said Gonzalez. "'It's not that we don't like them. We're doing what's best for them.'"

Then in 1930, a group of Mexican parents in San Diego County organized a boycott and lawsuit against the Lemon Grove School District for forcing their children into segregated schools. The parents won, and the landmark lawsuit became the first successful school desegregation case in U.S. history.

But the Lemon Grove Incident, as it came to be known, didn't carry legal precedent for the rest of California, so segregation continued elsewhere in the state.

The Mendez family discovered this firsthand in 1944 when they moved to Westminster to lease a farm owned by a Japanese American family who had been put in an internment camp during World War II. The Mendez children attempted to enroll at the nearby 17th Street School but were turned away, while their fair-skinned cousins with the French last name Vidaurri were accepted.

"My aunt took a Rosa Parks stand and said, 'I'm not leaving my kids here if you don't take my brother's kids!'" Sylvia Mendez recalled.

Thinking the school simply made a mistake, Sylvia's father, Gonzalo Mendez - who himself had attended the 17th Street School as a child - went to talk with the higher-ups.

"He talked to the principal and he said, 'I'm sorry, Mr. Mendez, we don't have Mexicans here,'" Sylvia Mendez recalled. "Then he went to the superintendant of schools for Orange County, and he said, 'Mr. Mendez, four cities, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Orange and Westminster, have built two schools, one specifically for Mexicans, and they have to go to that school. I do not have the power to change it. The cities have decided to do that.'"

The Mexican school she and her siblings were forced to attend was "terrible," said Mendez. Besides the two wooden shacks, the books were "hand-me-downs" and the desks were "all falling apart." An electric fence - which she said shocked one of her classmates - separated the school from a neighboring cow pasture.

"Every day I saw the white school with its beautiful playground," said Mendez. "And I just dreamt about going to that beautiful school."

Gonzalo knew he had to do something. But he didn't know what until he read about another successful desegregation case in Riverside that challenged the rules barring Mexicans from public parks.

So he hired David Marcus, the Jewish American civil rights attorney who had won the Riverside case, to fight for his children. But Marcus wanted to take it one step further.

"Let's not do this just for your children. Let's do it for all the children," Sylvia recalled Marcus telling her father. Gonzalo agreed and drove Marcus around Orange County looking for other plaintiffs who could join him in a class action suit.

Four others eventually got on board - Lorenzo Ramirez from Orange, Frank Palomino from Garden Grove and William Guzman and Thomas Estrada from Santa Ana.

The case, which argued that the four segregated school districts violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, attracted attention outside Orange County. Thurgood Marshall, who at the time was chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote an amicus brief in support of Mendez. The Japanese American Citizens League, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the American Jewish Congress and the American Civil Liberties Union also lent their support.

In 1946, Mendez won, but as a harbinger of the civil rights movement decades later, the ingrained attitudes would be another battle.

'Don't you know what we were fighting? We weren't fighting so you could go to that beautiful white school. We were fighting because you're equal to that white boy.'

Some schools in Orange County started to desegregate. In Westminster, Sylvia Mendez explained, the schools were integrated by placing all of the older children in the Mexican school and the younger children in the white school.

"The white people got so upset to see their children in that horrible school, so they went to the superintendant and they closed it down," she said.

Other schools didn't integrate at all.

The Mendez family moved back to Santa Ana and found that the schools wouldn't integrate until an appeal of the case was complete. Other schools, Gonzalez said, continued their use of IQ testing as a way to justify keeping Mexican American students separate.

"My dad went to the superintendant and said, 'I don't care what you say, I'm taking my kids to the white school,'" Mendez said. She successfully enrolled at the white school in Santa Ana, but it wasn't an easy transition.

"A white boy came up to me and said, 'You're a Mexican. What are you doing here? Don't you know that Mexicans don't belong?'"

Mendez recalled of her first day: "I was crying and crying, and told my mother, 'I don't want to go to the white school!' And she said, 'Sylvia, you were in court every day. Don't you know what we were fighting? We weren't fighting so you could go to that beautiful white school. We were fighting because you're equal to that white boy.'"

Mendez said that was the first time she understood the full weight of what her parents had achieved.

A year later, the ruling was upheld in federal court, and within months, California Gov. Earl Warren signed legislation to desegregate schools - becoming the first state in the country to do so.

Soon, Mendez vs. Westminster would have nationwide ramifications.

After closely following the case, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, which called Mendez a "dry run for the future," used much of the same legal reasoning in 1954 in Brown vs. Board of Education, a landmark case that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.

Marshall argued this case before the Supreme Court, which by then included Chief Justice Warren, who wrote the unanimous decision that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Despite the far-reaching implications of their case, the Mendez family resumed a sense of normalcy after the decision came down. Sylvia graduated from Santa Ana High School and Santa Ana College and worked as a registered nurse for 33 years. She didn't think much about Mendez vs. Westminster - until decades later after her father died and her mother became seriously ill.

"She said, 'It's history of the United States, history of California,'" Sylvia Mendez recalled her mother saying. "She said, 'Sylvia, you have to go out and talk about it!'"

While Mendez was initially reluctant to take up her mother's request, she relented and started a nationwide effort to educate the public about her parents' activism.

Felicitas died in 1998, just as the case started gaining recognition. In 2000, a new high school in Santa Ana was named after the family - the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School. Westminster native Sandra Robbie produced the Emmy Award-winning documentary "Mendez v. Westminster: For All the Children" in 2002, and two years later, President George W. Bush invited the Mendez family to the White House for Hispanic Heritage Month. In 2007 the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the case.

And in 2011, Sylvia was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

"When I got it I couldn't stop crying, because I was thinking finally my mother and father are getting the thanks they deserve," said Mendez. "This is theirs, not mine. They stood up against the establishment."

Today, Mendez continues to do educational programs for youth across the country.

But going to so many schools has also taught Mendez that the struggle for educational equity is not just in the past.

"Brown and Mendez fought segregation by law, but now we have what's called de facto segregation caused by poverty," she said.

Still, Mendez hopes that teaching the public about her family's legal victory 70 years ago will spark change - particularly for Latinos.

"The Latino students who are dropping out of high school need to know that Latinos have always fought for education," she said. "And that's something to be proud of."

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Mendez vs. segregation: 70 years later, famed case 'isn't just about Mexicans. It's about everybody coming together'

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As a child, Sylvia Mendez thought her parents' court case was all about a playground. That's because in 1944, the school bus would drop her off at the white school, which had "manicured lawns" and a "beautiful playground," but she wasn't allowed there.

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“Operation Wetback”: The 1954 mass deportation scheme praised by Donald Trump

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1960: The Mirabel Sisters: Las Mariposas

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1960: The Mirabel Sisters: Las Mariposas

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1966 Delores Huerta Delano Grape Pickers Strike

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1966 Delores Huerta Delano Grape Pickers Strike

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DOLORES HUERTA: I think the one thing that really kind of hooked me for life was going to the home of some workers who did not have linoleum or wood on their floor, only dirt. And yet these are people who are working. They're working very hard, and you know that this is wrong.

Growing up as a person of color, you just see so many injustices. As a teenager, you saw the way that I was treated, my friends were treated. And it just-- at some point you just wish that things were different.

Conditions in the fields were very bad. Farm workers are not respected at all, to the point that they didn't have toilets in the fields for workers. They didn't have cold drinking water. Workers were earning, like, maybe $0.75 an hour.

I said, Cesar, I think the only way that we can do this is if we boycott all California table grapes. And Cesar thought no, I think we should boycott potatoes because this particularly grower also had potatoes. And so I said, well, you know when people think of potatoes, they think of Idaho, they don't think of California.

[CHANTING]

Boycott grapes. Boycott grapes.

So we went ahead and started the grape boycott.

One of the tactics that we used very successfully is we got the chain stores to take the grapes out of the whole chain.

[SHOUTING]

During the strike, there were times when my home was terrorized in the middle of the night, my windows broken when I'm there alone with my children. And we had shotguns and rifles aimed at us. When you're in the movement, when you're on this path for justice, you know that things are going to happen.

Within months we were able to win the boycott.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We, as women, that we've got to put big lights around our accomplishments, right, and around our ideas, and not feel that we're being egotistical when we do that because it's a way of letting the world know that yes, we as women can accomplish great things.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DOLORES HUERTA: At some point I remember being in a meeting of the United Farm Workers when all of the guys were just making sexist comments. And so I just started jotting down every time somebody made a sexist comment. And so at the end of the meeting Cesar would always say, does anybody else have anything they want to add to the agenda or anything to add to the meaning, and I just said, during the course of this meeting you, saying to the men on the board, have made 58 sexist comments. And of course they were shocked.

And no one said anything. But at the next meeting I kind of did the same thing. We forgot about it. And they ended up like with 23 sexist comments. So finally we got them down to five. And then the three. Of them maybe but then it was like they would come in the room and they would just be really careful about what they were saying. But I think it was important that we start-- we had to start from the top. So to speak.

DOLORES HEURTA: I believe that it's almost like natural that especially men will appropriate the work of women as theirs. And I think women, often, we don't think in terms of fighting for our ideas or fighting to make sure that our work is recognized. And again, when we think of the quote on quote team effort, it's kind of natural that we just give our ideas and give our work away and don't even think about how we put our name or our stamp on that work. We as women have to figure out a plan to make sure that we get credit for the work that we do.

DOLORES HUERTA: In the year 2006 on May 1st there were probably millions of Latinos marching around the immigration issue. And they were all chanting, Si, se puede, which in Spanish means, yes, we can. Well I originated that phrase. But everyone thinks that Cesar originated it, right? So I like to sometimes when I speak in front of a audience and especially Latino audience, and Si, se puede was originated by Dolores Huerta. And of course everybody laughs and claps when I say that. So-- but it's always a little awkward. But I think that it's also important for women to be able to take credit for the work that they do.

DOLORES HUERTA: So many of us think that we have to shower our children with so many material toys and benefits and things of this nature. And the most important thing is to give your children values and to teach them how to do things for others. From the time that they're growing up, that is again inculcated in them as children. And never ask your children do you want to go to a march, do you want to go to a demonstration or a picket line. Say to them we're going. Don't give them the chance to say no because even though they might complain, when they grow older, they'll be so thankful. And we want to give our children an inheritance of justice, right? Not jewels or property or money because they'll just fight over it, right? So the main thing to do is to give them this love for justice. And so that they can feel early on when they're young that they are part of a movement.

DOLORES HUERTA: I've got quite an arrest record. And that's for civil disobedience. You know. Civil disobedience. And actually most of the arrests though were just because we would go into the fields to talk to workers, and they would arrest us. And in fact, sometimes, we got arrested before we even spoke to the workers. You know, we just drive up to the fields, and then the police would just get us and arrest us.

I think everybody should go to jail some point in time. I think because when you're in jail, then you see people that are there that probably shouldn't be there. And I imagine now it's even worse than it was then.

DELORES HUERTA: I was raised with two brothers. And I think that made me think differently. I have an older brother, and I have a younger brother. So my mother, because she worked two jobs, you know, we were after the Depression when she was raising us. And so we were alone a lot. And so I did everything that my brothers did. I mean that was very natural to me. You know, we climbed the trees, and you know we played the Cowboys and Indians. And whatever my brothers did, I did. When they had their clubhouses, you know with all the boys, I was always been to the clubhouse because they needed a secretary, right? And so that was my brother's way of including me in everything that we did.

So it was kind of unusual for me to just see that women would just hang out with women. And that was novel to me.

DELORES HUERTA: During the grape boycott, while the farm workers went and they told stories. They went to churches, they went to union meetings. Community organizations. We passed thousands of leaflets on the street. I mean we would have in Grand Central Station, we were passing out like 20,000 leaflets a day. Grand Central Station, at the bus stops, at the theater district. Everywhere. We just blanketed the city with leaflets. We didn't have the money to pay for media. So we did it all with leaflets. And it was effective. And then farm workers would picket in front of the stores.

And we had like volunteers. We had schoolchildren in Long Island that would have their speakers bureau of junior high school kids that would go out to other schools and talk to other kids about the boycott. We had the teachers union that had a little video about boycotting the grapes by my young daughter, Juanita, was only like three years old. And she made a video saying boycott grapes. Right? So. I mean it was just, you know, just reaching everybody.

DOLORES HUERTA: I think the woman's moment really gave me the inspiration. I might say. Even though I did had this wonderful childhood with seeing my mother as a dominant figure of the family. Seeing this woman who was a business woman who could do so much, that was unusual. But then when I got into this other setting with farm workers, where women were more subservient, and it was different. It was very different for me. I almost had to kind of learn a role that I didn't-- I hadn't grown up with.

So when you saw people like Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda and people like that really getting out there in the front, it just made a tremendous amount of difference. It was-- it gave me like permission to be able to go out there, and not only be a leader in what I was doing, but to be able to put on that mantle, you know. And say I'm a leader.

DOLORES HUERTA: César Chávez and I started the Farm Workers Union. We had our constitutional convention for our union. And César was at the podium, running the meeting. And then he steps down from the podium and he says, did you get someone to nominate you for the vice presidency? And I said, no, I don't want to be an officer. I just want to serve.

And so then he said, well, you are crazy. You've got to get someone to nominate you right now. So I did, I went and got somebody to nominate me. And I think that was a typical mentality that women had and still have today. We have been so inculcated with this idea that we are the nurturers and the servers, that we don't think of ourselves as the leaders and the decision-makers. So that was something that I had to learn, that it's OK to be in a position of leadership, and in a position where you are giving orders and guidance to other people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DOLORES HUERTA: I love to quote Benito Juarez who was the first indigenous president of the Americas, in Mexico. And he had this wonderful saying, that said, Respecting other people's rights is peace. Respecting other people's rights is peace. And I use that quote when I talk not only about women's right to choose, women's right to abortion, but also when it comes to women-- anybody's right about who they want to marry, who they want to live with, in terms of gay rights and lesbian rights. You know. Respecting other people's rights is peace.

DOLORES HUERTA: I was 25 years old. We wanted to pass this bill that would give people who were legal immigrants of the country their old age pensions. These are people whose children had gone to war, and so I went to see the assemblyman, and after I explained to him the bill that I wanted him to vote for, he threw his hotel key across the desk and said, come and see me at my hotel tonight if you want my vote. So I just stood up and walked out. I didn't even honor that with a response. I just stood up and walked out the door.

The sexual harassment was something that was prevalent. You just expected it to happen. I remember working and having to run around the desk every night. How could I get out of here without the boss trying to make a pass at me? Every single day, having to scheme, how am I going to get out of this office? And I think for younger women today, at least, we know that still happens. But now, at least women have a recourse-- somewhere that they can go to take care of a situation like this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DOLORES HUERTA: Cesar and I both came out of this organization called the Community Service Organization. And Cesar actually didn't really pay very much attention to me. I was always following him around like a groupie, because I knew he was this great organizer. And he would just ignore me.

But then at one convention that I stood up and gave my report about we were trying to end the guest worker program of the time called the bracero program. And what I had done in my particular community to get 800 jobs for some of the farm workers that had been locked out because of the bracero program. Well, he was there, Mr. Fred Ross was there. Saul Alinsky from the Industrial Areas Foundation. They were all very impressed with my report.

Later on, when we were working together in Los Angeles, Cesar was organizing farm workers, and I had organized another group of farm workers in northern California. But both groups fell apart when we turned them over to their two other unions. So it was at that point that Cesar said, no, farm workers will never have a union unless we do it, unless you and I do it. And that was the beginning of the United Farm Workers.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DELORES HUERTA: I think we've got to change the way women are raised. And we're taught that we have to not get our little dresses dirty. That we can't be out there wrestling with our brothers. And our sisters. That we can't fight because that's not ladylike. And so as a result it just makes it so easy for us that we cannot defend ourselves physically, we can then be dominated and manipulated on the emotional level. On the psychological level. And then on the political level. And so we are not taught to be strong.

So that's why it's-- you know we think it's unusual then, which it shouldn't be unusual, that a woman can get out there and do things as well as a man can do.

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Dolores Huerta is a union leader and an activist for the rights of farm workers and women. Along with Cesar Chavez, she founded the first successful farm workers union in the country, the United Farm Workers, in 1962. She is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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The 1968 student walkout that galvanized a national movement for Chicano rights

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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1969: The Transgender Movement: Sylvia Rivera

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1969: The Transgender Movement: Sylvia Rivera

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For years, transgender voices have struggled to be heard. But for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who participated in the Stonewall Riots in 1969, keeping quiet was not an option.

Rhys Ernst, the Emmy-nominated co-producer of Transparent, and Focus Features, the film company behind The Danish Girl, teamed up to create a new documentary series, We've Been Around. (Alicia Vikander won an Oscar on Sunday for playing the wife of transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, now out on DVD and On Demand.)

The five-video series, launching exclusively on PEOPLE.com, EW.com, Essence.com and Advocate.com, looks at remarkable, often little-known stories of trans people who made history.

Best friends Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were fighting for the "people who fell between the cracks of the gay and straight worlds," as the documentary says.

Johnson and Rivera were active in the gay rights movement and fought for more attention to the struggle of people who identified as transgender or non-gender conforming.

"I have been beaten," Rivera says to a crowd of gay rights activists in the video. "I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation."

Together, they decided to start Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or S.T.A.R., which provided support, information and a community for the disadvantaged trans people in their area.

"We're tired of running," read the pamphlet for the group. "We intend to fight for our rights until we get them."

Rivera left New York for a while, but returned in the '90s to revive the S.T.A.R. house and provide more support for transgender rights. She died of cancer in 2002.

Johnson stayed in New York and joined the organization ACT UP, which started in the late '80s to combat the AIDS crisis. In 1992, her body was found floating in the Hudson River. The case was initially ruled a suicide, but her family and friends believed she may have been murdered in a hate crime. Her cause of death was changed to "undetermined" in 2002, and the N.Y.P.D. reopened the case in 2012.

The clip concludes by dubbing Rivera and Johnson the "fierce mothers of our generation."

For more from the We've Been Around series, watch these videos:

* Albert Cashier, a transgender man who fought in the Civil War
* Wilmer Broadnax, a popular gospel singer known as "Little Axe"
* Lou Sullivan, a pioneering AIDS activist
* Lucy Hicks Anderson, a transgender woman of color who thrived during Prohibition and fought for her marriage rights

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VIDEO: The Transgender Heroines Who Started a Revolution: Video Series Explores Activists' Hidden History - and a Possible Murder

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For years, transgender voices have struggled to be heard. But for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who participated in the Stonewall Riots in 1969, keeping quiet was not an option. Rhys Ernst, the Emmy-nominated co-producer of Transparent, and Focus Features, the film company behind The Danish Girl, teamed up to create a new documentary series, We've Been Around.

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1987 LGBTQ Leader: Nicole Murray Ramirez

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1987 LGBTQ Leader: Nicole Murray Ramirez

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LGBT Pride Month: 2011 Honoree

San Diego City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez has been a Latino and gay activist for more than 40 years. He is a national board member of the Harvey Milk Foundation and chairman of the International Court Council, one of the oldest and largest predominantly gay organizations in the world with chapters in the USA, Canada and Mexico. Mr. Murray Ramirez is also serving a four year term on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

He has served as a board member of the Human Rights Campaign, national chair of National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGO), national chair of Stonewall 25 and state chair of Equality California. Mr. Murray Ramirez is the only gay activist in the country who has been elected to all four national boards of the LGBT marches on Washington, D.C.

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lesbian gay bisexual transgender community

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San Diego City Commissioner Nicole Murray Ramirez has been a Latino and gay activist for more than 40 years. He is a national board member of the Harvey Milk Foundation and chairman of the International Court Council, one of the oldest and largest predominantly gay organizations in the world with chapters in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

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1992: Nobel Peace Prize: Rigoberta Menchú 

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1992: Nobel Peace Prize: Rigoberta Menchú 

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Rigoberta Menchu, The Nobel Peace Prize Winner of 1992

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ytCropper | KQED Newsroom Segment: The Legacy of Prop. 187, October 17, 2014

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CLOSE

As we enter a new year, 800,000 Dreamers await news of their fate in this country. Thwarted by a president who soon will terminate the only program giving them temporary reprieve from harassment or deportation, stood up by a Congress that couldn't muster the will last year to grant them a pathway to permanent residency, they wait.

But not all are simply standing by. On New Year's Day I scanned the internet, seeking photos and stories of Dreamers willing to share something of their lives and their contributions to America. On a USA Today site, I read about Ellie, whose DACA status enabled her to attend community college full time, earn an associate degree, and eventually become the first person in her family to attend a four-year university. I learn about Julio, for whom DACA meant the opportunity to become a mortgage loan officer and a tax-paying, contributing member of his community. There is Carla, who started a digital marketing business, and there, too, is Reyna, who founded an organization that advocates for migrant youth.

These are only a few of the many Dreamers who have not been deterred from speaking out and sharing their stories. When President Donald Trump announced last September that he would terminate the Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Program by March 2018, many Dreamers began protesting in Washington and other cities for a just resolution of the crisis, seeking to galvanize public support. They have persisted in telling their truths in an era of official distortions and betrayals.

In her 2008 study of immigration policy, Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform, political scientist Lina Newton showed how changing images of immigrants colored debates and influenced legislation in the 1980s and 1990s. Though many Americans expressed concerns in the 1980s about job security when they discussed immigration, they nevertheless acknowledged the contributions that immigrants were making to American society; 61 percent of Americans surveyed in a 1984 Newsweek/Gallup poll agreed with the assertion that "immigrants help improve our culture with their different cultures and talents." In the political climate of the time, Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, opening a pathway on which 2.7 million undocumented immigrants would eventually advance to permanent residency.

LAS VEGAS, NV - SEPTEMBER 10: Nevada Senate Majority Leader Aaron D. Ford (D-Las Vegas) (3rd L) joins immigrants and supporters as they march on the Las Vegas Strip during a "We Rise for the Dream" rally to oppose U.S. President Donald Trump's order to end DACA on September 10, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protects young immigrants who grew up in the U.S. after arriving with their undocumented parents from deportation to a foreign country. Trump's executive order removes protection for about 800,000 current "dreamers," about 13,000 of whom live in Nevada. Congress has the option to replace the policy with legislation before DACA expires on March 5, 2018. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) (Photo: Getty Images)

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By contrast, the 1990s, the era of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," saw a shift in congressional debates about both government and immigration. Playing on Americans' growing economic insecurities, lawmakers, particularly Republicans, increasingly characterized government as an engine of redistribution that shifted citizens' tax dollars to the undeserving, and they lumped into that "undeserving" category both welfare recipients and immigrants. They not only characterized legal and undocumented immigrants as freeloaders; they also played up a more ominous image of the "criminal alien" who constituted a threat to law and order. In that era, the most significant piece of immigration-related legislation, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, unsurprisingly introduced stiffer new enforcement measures while offering no new avenues to permanent residency or citizenship.

In the ensuing decades, negative images of immigrants as freeloaders and as threats, played up by politicians and nativist think tanks, have continued to predominate in public debates about immigration, whether those debates have concerned policies dealing with legal immigration or with the presence of undocumented individuals in the country. This situation has persisted despite countervailing developments, such as President Obama's executive order creating DACA in 2012 or the publication in 2016 of a National Academy of Sciences report affirming immigration's "overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S."

With the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, the negative and threatening discourse about immigrants has been taken to unprecedented levels, spurring an uptick in hate crimes and bias incidents and creating an atmosphere of fear that many public officials have described as corrosive to public trust in local law enforcement. It has been in this fearful atmosphere that many Dreamers have been speaking out and even engaging in civil disobedience, often at great risk to themselves. They know that it is possible for a Dream Act still to be passed in this Congress, and the coming weeks will be revelatory about the nation's capacity to resist falsehood. In the meantime, the Dreamers continue to remind us of the talents and the promise they offer to this nation. They bear witness to Americans' potential for recognizing a shared humanity and for acknowledging an inclusive America that is home to us all.
Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice
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MOSS: Dreamers continue to speak out, tell stories

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CLOSE As we enter a new year, 800,000 Dreamers await news of their fate in this country. Thwarted by a president who soon will terminate the only program giving them temporary reprieve from harassment or deportation, stood up by a Congress that couldn't muster the will last year to grant them a pathway to permanent residency, they wait.