The Mothers of East Los Angeles: (Other)Mothering for Environmental Justice

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA)—an environmental justice group started and led by older Mexican American women—and the organization’s campaign to prevent the construction of a state prison in their neighborhood. The women enact motherwork that protects the well-being of the neighborhood’s children, in addition to crafting motherhood into a communal responsibility to look after the neighborhood as a mother would their child. MELA’s maternal appeals rely on and eclipse identification with traditional gender categories, suggesting new ways for motherhood to function as an organizing principle to mobilize collectives. More broadly, this essay contributes to scholarly discussions on rhetorical agency by considering motherhood as a means for women’s collective resistance and empowerment.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• environmental justice
• motherhood
• rhetorical agency
• social change and protest

Notes

1. George Skelton, “A Split Decision on Deukmejian’s Legacy: Governor: Increasing Prison Space and Imprint Judiciary Are Among His Accomplishments. Critics Say He Lacked Vision and Was Stubborn,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-12-30/news/mn-10337_1_george-deukmejian.

2. Department of Corrections Letter, June 5, 1985, Box 9, Folder 12, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Prisons–Correspondence to MELA, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

3. Louis Sahagun, “Mothers of Conviction: Eastside Women Become a Force to Be Reckoned With After Blocking Prison Plan,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992–09-16/local/me-794_1_east-los-angeles.

4. The New York Times, “Mothers’ Group Fights Back in Los Angeles,” The New York Times, December 5, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/05/us/mothers-group-fights-back-in-los-angeles.html.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005), 52.

8. MELA members are commonly referred to as “the Mothers.”

9. During a meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies (ARS) in fall of 2004, a working group of forty scholars spent the better of four days trying to understand how rhetorical studies ought to understand the concept of rhetorical agency. The group organized their thoughts into three major themes: the illusion of agency as an object to be “given” or taken away, the skill of the agents to navigate contingent rhetorical situations, and the situational and structural conditions for agency that enable and constrain symbolic and material action. Cheryl Geisler documents that the ARS working group acknowledged that the term “agency” has shifted some in the previous decades of rhetorical scholarship, becoming “less concerned with determining the universals for rhetorical actions’ and “more interested in the specific local and or historical conditions that undergird it.” This essay does not attempt to parse through these debates, not because they are irrelevant but, rather, because my starting point for theorizing rhetorical agency is with these agreements. From there, however, I am interested in exploring how collaborative and collective means of resistance and empowerment complicate and expand existing theories of rhetorical agency. Cheryl Geisler, “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report From the ARS,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2004): 14. For more on these debates and key “turns” in rhetorical studies regarding rhetorical agency, see Dilip Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. A. G. Gross and W. M. Ketih (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25–88; Michael Leff, “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 2 (2003): 135–47; Sonja K. Foss, William J. C. Waters, and Bernard J. Armada, “Toward a Theory of Agentic Orientation: Rhetoric and Agency in Run Lola Run,” Communication Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 205–30; Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 50–78.

10. This definition is adapted from Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 139.

11. For both quantitative and interpretative analyses, see Giovanna Di Chiro, “Defining Environmental Justice: Women’s Voices and Grass-roots Politics,” Socialist Review, 22 (1992): 93–130; Celene Krauss, “Women and Toxic Waste Protests: Race, Class and Gender as Resources of Resistance,” Qualitative Sociology 16, no. 3 (1993): 247–62; Helen E. Kurtz, “Gender and Environmental Justice in Louisiana: Blurring the Boundaries of Public and Private Spheres,” Gender, Place, & Culture 14 (2007): 409–26.

12. I focus primarily on the Mothers’ anti-prison campaign that occurred between 1985, when the organization first began, and 1992, when the prison was postponed indefinitely. My focus on the anti-prison campaign is intentional as it occurred prior to the organization’s split into two groups: MELA and the Madres del Este de Los Angeles, Santa Isabel (MELASI). Rather than parse through that disagreement, this essay is more interested in how motherhood acted as an organizing base to bring the women together.

13. Sarah Hayden, “Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief: The Racialized Rhetorical Contexts of Maternity,” Women Studies in Communication 40 (2017): 20.

14. This definition is informed by canonical texts on environmental justice; see Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai, Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Robert D. Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism (Boston: South End Press, 1993).

15. Government Accountability Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation With Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities, U.S. Government Accountability Office (Washington, DC, 1983); United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-economic Characteristics of Communities With Hazardous Wastes Sites (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987).

16. Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 15. For similar critiques regarding environmental justice: David Schlosberg, Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism: The Challenge of Difference for Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

18. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 22.

19. Phaedra Pezzullo, “Performing Critical Interruptions: Stories, Rhetorical Invention, and the Environmental Justice Movement,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 3.

20. Pezzullo, “Performing Critical Interruptions,” 3.

21. Rachel Stein, “Introduction” in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. Rachel Stein (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 11.

22. Ibid.

23. Giovanna Di Chiro found in her 1990 study that 90 percent of the active members in neighborhood environmental justice groups were women. See Di Chiro, “Defining Environmental Justice,” 118. Building upon that, Stein documents that women account for up to 60 percent of the leadership of people of color in environmental justice organizations. Stein, “Introduction,” 11.

24. NYT, “Mothers’ Group Fights Back.”

25. Mary Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 114.

26. Giovanna Di Chiro, “Living Environmentalisms: Coalition Politics, Social Reproduction, and Environmental Justice,” Environmental Politics 17 (2008): 286.

27. Krauss, “Women and Toxic Waste Protests,” 259.

28. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1.

29. Erin Rand, Reclaiming Queer: Activists & Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2014), 12.

30. The resistive elements of rhetorical agency are often signaled by the constitution of individual and group identity, the forwarding of a collective criticism or advocacy, and the challenging of dominant structures and institutions. Sowards speaks to the ways certain identity categories, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, are presumed to constrain marginalized speakers’ ability for symbolic action. However, they may also operate as enabling resources to speak to an already marginalized community who sees themselves in the same or similar situation. Stacey Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency as Hacienda Cara and Differential Consciousness Through the Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta’s Rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 241.

31. Refer to Sara Hayden, “Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care Through the Million Mom March,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003): 196–215; Tasha Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings’ Abortion Speak-out of 1969,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (2005): 395–422; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (published as D. Enck-Wanzer), “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (2006): 174–201; Isaac West, “Performing Resistance in/From the Kitchen: The Practice of Maternal Pacifist Politics in LA WISP’s Cookbooks,” Women Studies in Communication 30, no. 3 (2007): 362; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (published as D. Enck-Wanzer), “Race, Colonality, and Geo-body Politics: The Garden as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 3 (2011): 363–71.

32. It is important to note that Sowards’ analysis focuses on Huerta’s capacity to speak to and on behalf of her community, a “scaled up” perspective on agency that sees an individual as representational of a broader collective. Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency,” 226.

33. Hayden, “Family Metaphors,” 212.

34. While helpful for thinking about collective motherhood, Peeples’ analysis is not explicitly about gender but rather the reliance on identity and place as strategies for communicating opposition in a community-level environmental justice dispute. Jennifer A. Peeples, “Trashing South-Central: Place and Identity in a Community-Level Environmental Justice Dispute,” Southern Communication Journal 69, no. 1 (2003): 86.

35. Peeples, “Trashing South-Central,” 89.

36. Emphasis added; Tracy Rysavy, “Mothers for Eco-Justice,” Yes!, June 30, 1998, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/rx-for-the-earth/mothers-for-eco-justice.

37. I use the term “canary cry” as an allusion to the phrase “canary in a coal mine,” an idiomatic phrase to describe something or someone whose sensitivity to adverse conditions makes them useful in warning others of health and safety concerns.

38. Kurtz, “Gender and Environmental Justice,” 412.

39. For foundational texts theorizing othermothering in terms of activism see Stanlie S. James, “Mothering: A Possible Black Feminist Link to Social Transformation?” in Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, ed. S. M. James and A. P. Busia (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), 44–54; Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4 (1987): 3–10; Cherly T. Gilkes, “If it wasn’t for the women …”: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001).

40. Hayden, “Michelle Obama,” 19.

41. James, “Mothering,” 47.

42. For example, Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency”; Diane Hope, “The Rhetoric of the Autobiographical Voice in Women’s Environmental Narratives” in The Environmental Communication Yearbook Volume 1, ed. Susan L. Senecah (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2004): 83–106; Jennifer Peeples and Kevin DeLuca, “The Truth of the Matter: Motherhood, Community, and Environmental Justice,” Women’s Studies in Communication 29 (2006): 58–87; Ellen Gorsevski, “Wangari Maathai’s Emplaced Rhetoric: Greening Global Peacebuilding,” Environmental Communication 6, no. 3 (2012): 290–307.

43. See Wanzer-Serrano, “Trashing the System”; Wanzer-Serrano, “Race, Colonality, and Geo-body Politics.”

44. Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47.

45. Scholars have noticed othermothering practices in African American, Latinx, and indigenous communities dealing with environmental and social justice issues. For work on African American women, see James, “Mothering”; Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood”; Hayden, “Michelle Obama.” For work on Latinx women, see Margaret E. Burchianti, “Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories,” History and Anthropology 15, no. 2 (2004): 133–150; Karen Foss and Kathy Domenici, “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 237–58; Nancy A. Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activists Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (New York: Routledge, 2014). For work on indigenous and Native women, see Krauss, “Women and Toxic Waste”; Collins, “Shifting the Center”; D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Kim Anderson, Mothers of the Nations: Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovery (Ontario: Demeter Press, 2014).

46. James, “Mothering,” 48.

47. Hayden, “Michelle Obama,” 24.

48. Hayden, “Family Metaphors,” 210.

49. La Opinión Article Translation, 1989, Box 9, Folder 17, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Prison Article Translation Raymundo Reynoso, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

50. Ibid.

51. It is important to note that the women eventually took over speaking to the media. At first, many of the women only spoke Spanish and felt uncomfortable in front of the cameras. However, as the campaign grew so too did the women’s knowledge, experiences, and confidence. The women’s transformations are documented heavily in Mary Pardo’s ethnographic study of the organization. See Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists.

52. Stephen A. Nuño, “Politics Starts Locally: The Legacy of the ‘Mothers of East L.A.,’” NBC News, September 25, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hispanic-heritage-month/politics-starts-locally-legacy-mothers-east-l-n211286.

53. Mission statement, n.d., Box 1, Folder 2, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Administrative Data: Biographies; Mission Statements 1989, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

54. Many of the archive materials are in both Spanish and English and required no translation. However, some documents are only available in Spanish and are not analyzed in this essay.

55. For example, Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2009); Danielle Endres, “Environmental Oral History,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 4 (2011): 485–98.

56. Endres, “Environmental Oral History,” 486.

57. James, “Mothering,” 45.

58. See Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood”; Collins, “Shifting the Center”; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000).

59. Peeples and DeLuca, “The Truth of the Matter,” 68.

60. Hayden, “Family Metaphors,” 198.

61. Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 143.

62. Informational Flyer, n.d., Box 1, Folder 1, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Informational Pamphlets: Flyers 1984–2000, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

63. History Booklet, December 1989, Box 1, Folder 2, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Administrative Data: Biographies: Mission Statements, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

64. Projects Flyer, n.d., Box 1, Folder 4, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Meetings and Personnel Lists: Agendas; Personnel Lists; Statements 1992–1994, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

65. Ibid.

66. La Opinión Newspaper Photograph, n.d., Box 9, Folder 10, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Prison Clippings: Newspaper Clippings 1983–1986, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

67. Tribuno Del Pueblo Newspaper Photograph, n.d., Box 9, Folder 20, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Prison Clippings: Newspaper Clippings 1983–1986, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

68. Child Protesters Newspaper Photograph, n.d., Box 9, Folder 20, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, MELA: Newspaper Clippings, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

69. Pamphlet, n.d., Box 1, Folder 1, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Informational Pamphlets: Flyers 1984–2000, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

70. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 115.

71. A “feminine” style functions politically as a strategy for inviting audience empowerment and resistance through modes of reasoning made available to women in response to their exclusion from public life, such as anecdotes, concrete example, cooperative practices, and communal ethics. Dow and Tonn’s analysis of Texas Governor Anne Richards is a helpful example here: Richard’s rhetoric celebrated traditional “feminine” qualities and used them to render political judgments, particularly her application of wisdom from the private sphere of home and family to the public sphere. Doing so permitted Richards to be militant in her criticisms of the Republican Party but also appear to be inviting the audience to feel empowered to make the changes they felt necessary. Bonnie J. Dow and Mari B. Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 286–302.

72. Dow and Tonn, “Feminine Style,” 287.

73. Dow and Tonn, “Feminine Style,” 295.

74. Los Angeles Herald Examiner Newspaper Photograph, n.d., Box 9, Folder 10, Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez Mothers of East Los Angeles Collection, Prison Clippings: Newspaper Clippings 1983–1986, Oviatt Library Special Collectives and Archives, California State University, Northridge, CA. March 2016.

75. Peeples and DeLuca contend that the rhetoric of environmental justice “leaves no other options for being a good mother than to be a militant one.” This is because, the authors continue, no other course of action will save their children than to transform the identity of “mothers” from “staid domestic women to engaged community activists.” Maternal militancy, within environmental justice contexts, is directed toward the enemies of the community, pushing people to see “the truth of the situation in which the women exist” and who may need “aggressive prodding” to make the most just decision. Peeples and DeLuca, “The Truth of the Matter,” 73–74.

76. See Krauss, “Women and Toxic Waste Protests”; Kurtz, “Gender and Environmental Justice.”

77. Diane-Michele Prindeville and John G. Bretting, “Indigenous Women Activists and Political Participation,” Women & Politics 19, no. 1 (1998): 53.

78. Peeples and DeLuca, “The Truth of the Matter,” 73.

79. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 115.

80. La Opinión Translation, 1989.

81. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 115.

82. After being harshly criticized by city and state officials for being “too local” and, thus, self-invested, Gutiérrez responded by proclaiming that MELA cares “about the bay” and “about the redwoods … What I say is I don’t want these things in my back yard, and I don’t want them in any backyard.” Connie Koenenn, “To Protect the Children of East L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1991, http://articles.latimes.com/1991–12-23/news/vw-829_1_east-los-angeles.

83. I am referencing a particular protest in which MELA flooded a job fair for the prison hosted by the DOC at a Boyle Heights high school. The women interrupted the job fair to voice their disapproval of the project, citing their exclusion from other citywide discussions regarding the prison. For a more detailed account, see Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 122.

84. For research on the constraints motherhood poses to women’s activism, see Foss and Domenici, “Haunting Argentina”; Lynn Stearney, “Feminism, Ecofeminism, and the Maternal Archetype: Motherhood as a Feminine Universal,” Communication Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1994): 145–59; Shanara Reid-Brinkley, “Mammies and Matriarchs: Feminine Style and Signifyin(g) in Carol Moseley Braun’s 2003–2004 Campaign for the Presidency,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma Chaves and Cindy Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011): 35–58.

85. West, “Performing Resistance in/From the Kitchen,” 362.

86. It is important to note that this “belief” was quickly challenged by the women. Women in the organization became notorious for their confrontational tactics with city leaders and DOC officials over the prison project. And as the women’s organization grew and they took on other issues, the women continued to be a militant force for justice. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 113. For a more sustained discussion of MELA’s more confrontational and militant tactics, see Kamala Platt, “Chicana Strategies for Success and Survival: Cultural Poetics of Environmental Justice From the Mothers of East Los Angeles,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 48–72.

87. Ibid.

88. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 129–130.

89. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 130.

90. Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists, 129.

91. Another limitation to note: While MELA evoked a collective sense of motherhood, Father Moretta and Juana Beatriz Gutiérrez, by and large, were the faces of the organization. Much of the archive materials analyzed in this essay are produced by, in correspondence with, or center on their voices. Partially, this is because many of the Mothers did not speak much English and had limited experience talking to the media. While it should not diminish the salience of the collective agency crafted by the Mothers, it suggests that even loose networks of activists require some type of representative to articulate the group’s concerns and appear intelligible to the responding institutions and structures.

92. See Stearney, “Feminism, Ecofeminism and the Maternal Archetype,” in Ecofeminism and Rhetoric: Critical Perspectives on Sex, Technology, and Discourse, ed. Douglas A. Vakock (Oxford: Berhahn Books, 2011); Kathleen P. Hunt, “‘It’s More Than Planting Trees, It’s Planting Ideas’: Ecofeminist Praxis in the Green Belt Movement,” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 3 (2014): 235–49; Joe Hatfield and Jake Dionne, “Imagining Ecofeminist Communities via Queer Alliances in Disney’s Maleficent,” Florida Communication Journal 42, no. 2 (2014): 81–98.

93. Nellis Kennedy-Howard, “The Backbone of the Camp: Meet the Women of Standing Rock Camp,’ Sierra Club: The Planet, October 25, 2016, http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/2016/10/backbone-camp-meet-women-standing-rock-camp.

94. Sahagun, “Mothers of Conviction.”

95. Scott Harris, “Coalition Sues EPA in Bid to Halt Incinerator Project,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990–04-20/local/me-1461_1_hazardous-waste-incinerator.

96. Sahagun, “Mothers of Conviction.”

97. Marilyn Martinez, “Legacy of a Mothers’ Dedication: Juana Gutierrez, a Beacon for East L.A., Wins National Award,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1995, http://articles.latimes.com/1995–09-07/local/me-43025_1_juana-gutierrez.

98. Gloria Angelina Castillo, “‘Mothers of East LA’ Founder Passes Away,” EGP News, April 19, 2012, http://egpnews.com/2012/04/%E2%80%98mothers-of-east-la%E2%80%99-founder-passes-away/.

99. Erin J. Aubry, “East Los Angeles: Mothers Group Awards Scholarships,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1995, http://articles.latimes.com/1995–06-25/news/ci-16891_1_east-los-angeles.