Good Docs
When one thinks of farmworker labor leaders, names like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta will always be at the top of the list. But Laurie Coyle’s new documentary rescues an undeservedly unsung heroine of the farmworker labor movement, Maria Moreno, a Texas-born Mexican American woman who during the Great Depression was hired by the unions as the first female labor organizer in American history. Moreno, a feisty mother of 12 children, somehow found time also to travel around dustbowl America—with stints in California, Colorado, and Utah—and make rousing speeches advocating for workers’ rights. Yet for all of the gains she made for farmworkers in America from the 1940s to the 1960s, she died in obscurity in the late 1980s, having long been spurned by the ever-changing alpha-male leadership of the labor movement, who thought Moreno was making too much trouble for her own good. Chavez himself considered her a thorn in his side as a rival labor leader (Coyle includes a letter from Chavez condemning Moreno’s “big mouth”) The impetus for Coyle’s film came about when she came across photos of Moreno while researching, oddly enough, a documentary on Cesar Chavez. But Coyle also had another valuable informational resource at her disposal, which was Moreno’s surviving children, some of whom are interviewed for the film and give some emotional testimony to the power, charisma, and incredible courage their mother showed throughout her life fighting for those who had no voice in the agricultural workplace. But for all of her efforts, only a few tape recordings of Moreno’s speeches could be tracked down for the film. As it happened, Moreno ended up being nearly erased from US labor history: she finally gave up the labor fight and became a traveling Pentecostal minister, just like her father had been. Although Adios Amor is clearly the product of many years of intensive research on the part of director Coyle, Moreno still seems like a distant enigma by the end of the film. One hopes that this documentary is only scratching the surface of the life of one of the most important and long unheralded American women of the 20th century. Aud: C, P. Recommended.