Growing Up

Growing up in a family where politics was the main topic of discussion, Kathy Luz Herrera has always viewed personal life through a political lens. Her formative years were steeped in politics.

Her father, John J. Herrera, was a man who embodied the phrase of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. John earned his law degree from South Texas Law School in 1940 while working as a laborer and taxi driver.

In 1939, he helped revive the dormant Council #60 of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Houston, which promoted what was then a radical notion — that Mexican-American citizens should exercise their right to vote. John J. Herrera twice ran unsuccessfully for the Texas State Legislature, using the results of his campaigns to show Lyndon Baines Johnson and other Texas politicians that Latinos could wield power at the voting booth and had earned a place at the table.

By 1954, when Kathy was two years old, John J. Herrera worked with Gus Garcia and LULAC to win two landmark civil rights cases for Hispanics. The 1948 case outlawed the segregation of Hispanics in schools (Delgado vs. Bastrop Independent School District). The second case, Pete Hernandez vs. Texas, made illegal the practice of systematically excluding Hispanics from juries. This was the first civil rights case dealing with Hispanics argued before the United States Supreme Court. The Hernandez case is the subject of Carlos Sandoval’s and Peter Miller’s award-winning documentary, A Class Apart, which details the bold and risky strategy the legal team used to plead their case at the nation’s highest court.

Kathy’s father demonstrated that although social change requires a lifetime of dedication, the hard-won victories that take place along the way provide tremendous personal satisfaction. This knowledge has motivated Kathy in every arena of her life.

Kathy’s mother, Olivia Herrera, was the youngest of thirteen children. Like most girls of her culture and class, she quit school in the fifth grade to help out her migrant worker family, who worked in the fields harvesting vegetables and picking cotton. She was blessed with remarkable curiosity and intelligence, could read and write both Spanish and English, and was equally fluent in both languages. She enjoyed collecting colloquialisms, tracing Spanish and English expressions to their Latin roots.

Olivia was a devout Catholic, skilled seamstress, and ardent reader of the classics, biographies, mystery novels, and science fiction. She could hold her own in conversation with anyone, from college professors and medical doctors to South American domestic workers and dockworkers. Olivia had six children, John Michael, Anthony, Douglas MacArthur, Joyce Mary, Kathy Luz, and Felice Anne. Anthony died of a childhood disease and, as a devout Catholic, Olivia adopted St. Anthony as one of her patron saints.

A favorite family story about Olivia details her shopping habits. Olivia would shop at several grocery stores, with a list that quoted to the penny the sale price of the items she would buy. She reasoned that if she could buy just the cheapest sale items in each store, she would save money, and could tell you how much she was saving the family, again, to the penny. It has been noted that Olivia would linger in the produce section, reminding neighbors about the lettuce boycott and advising them against purchasing grapes while Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were on strike. Saving money was only part of Olivia’s motivation; she was an activist in her own right, at the grassroots level.

A native Texan, Kathy worked in her twenties for Southwestern Bell and joined the Communication Workers of America (CWA). It was at Southwestern Bell that she became a trailblazer in her own right. As one of the first female telephone installers in Houston in 1973, when women were still not welcome in a “man’s job,” Kathy excelled at the technical, physical, and customer service aspects of her work, winning the respect and support of her coworkers.

Retaining this affinity for nontraditional work, Kathy was hired as an apprentice electrician by Cornell University in 1989, joining the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union #241. It is a measure of the respect Kathy has earned that her coworkers elected her Shop Representative. She also served for a time as the Cornell Building Trades Head Representative to the Tompkins-Cortland Building Trades Council.

Throughout her career at Cornell, Kathy has consciously mentored and supported other workers. She was appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Status of Women in 1990, and from it learned about the history of women at Cornell University.