She's been a quiet rebel for six decades, organizing grape boycotts for Cesar Chavez, 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 advisor for Democratic and Republican presidents, was recognized last week in a tribute at UCLA.
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.
Anguiano was an ideal figure to kick it off, said Chon Noriega, director of the center.
"She has over 50 years of service in dealing with key social issues for the Latino community," he said. "This is clearly an area we want to expand so that a new generation of scholars can use them to write the history of what's happened over the past century."
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 was in 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 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."
Anguiano was the fourth of six children born to Mexican migrant workers in La Junta, Colo. The family moved to Oxnard when she was a young girl, and Anguiano remembers picking apricots and walnuts after school.
"I've never considered working in the fields degrading," she said. "My dad used to say, 'All work is dignified.' "
