Los Angeles – She’s been a quiet rebel for six decades, organizing grape boycotts for César Chávez, helping welfare mothers find work, and founding, along with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, a powerful women’s political group.
But the greatest battle for Lupe Anguiano, 78, the soft- spoken daughter of Oxnard fieldworkers, came early in life, when her political activism as a Roman Catholic nun put her at odds with Los Angeles church leaders. She ended up leaving the convent after 15 years.
“It took me a year to decide to actually leave,” she said. “I had taken perpetual vows and was very close to the Lord. But I decided I could still do as a civilian what I would have done as a nun.”
Anguiano’s little-known story, from nun to seasoned activist to policy adviser for Democratic and Republican presidents, was recognized this month in a tribute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The university announced the opening of her archives at the Chicano Studies Research Center as part of the school’s new Mujeres Initiative. The program seeks to preserve and make accessible to scholars the history of Latinas in the United States.
At a celebration to mark the opening of the archives, Steinem and former Clinton administration housing Secretary Henry Cisneros praised Anguiano as an unsung civil- rights heroine.
Cisneros got to know Anguiano in the early 1980s when she came to San Antonio to create a welfare-to-work program called the Women’s Employment Network. He was mayor at the time and Anguiano wanted the city’s support, Cisneros told the Los Angeles Times.
Her low-key, gentle demeanor belied an underlying persistence, he recalled.
“She is not going to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Cisneros said. “She never raises her voice, but there is a core of steel that is irreducible. She just wears you down with sweetness.”
By the time she graduated high school, Anguiano knew that she wanted a religious life. At 20, she joined Our Lady of Victory Missionary Sisters.
From the start, she got out into the community, working to improve the lives of poor families around her.
“I didn’t want to hide behind a convent wall,” she said.
In 1963, the California Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Anguiano strongly supported the law, which banned racial discrimination by landlords. The then- archbishop of Los Angeles wanted priests and nuns to stay out of the fight and sent a letter instructing Anguiano to stop her activities.
She removed her habit as a concession, Anguiano said, but continued her public activism. One day, her mother superior entered her room.
“She said, ‘Sister, you are not obeying the rules. You are not obeying the cardinal. Why are you staying?”‘ Anguiano recalled. “And I thought, ‘You are right! Why am I staying?”‘
That night, she wrote a letter to the pope, asking to be released from her vows. It took a year, but she left the church in good standing, Anguiano said.
She crisscrossed the country in secular life, going wherever she thought she could help. In East Los Angeles, she worked on youth training and employment programs. Through that work, she met a lot of poor, single mothers on welfare and developed programs to get them jobs, Anguiano said.
That propelled her into President Johnson’s administration in 1965, where she was an education specialist in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. While there, she helped write the nation’s first bilingual education bill.
When Richard Nixon became president, Anguiano again worked as an adviser on Latino and women’s issues. She also was an adviser on private-sector initiatives for the Reagan administration.
