One Mexican American woman often forgotten in history is Graciela Olivarez. Olivarez fought for the civil rights of minorities and economic justice for the poor. As an activist, lawyer, and public servant, she was one of the premier defenders of the Mexican American people of the Southwest in the 1960s and 1970s.
Born March 9, 1928 to a Spanish father and Mexican-American mother, Graciela Olivarez lived in Sonora and Ray, Arizona. She grew up in the small mining towns of Arizona that were populated by Mexican-American miners and their families. She dropped out of high school after her junior year and moved to the booming city of Phoenix. For a short time, she attended business college. Eventually she began to work as a secretary, engineer, radio personality, and program director for the Spanish-language radio station, KIFN (1952-66).
The ensuing years were busy ones. Her son Victor was born in 1959. Olivarez divorced her husband by 1961. She used her fame as a local radio announcer to help Mexican Americans in Phoenix. When the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held a hearing in Phoenix during 1962, she addressed the panel. During 1962-1966, she served as a member of the philanthropic Choate foundation and sought ways to lower juvenile delinquency among Mexican-American youth. In 1963, she organized a national conference on bilingual education. During the War on Poverty, Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her to the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity. In 1966, Olivarez became the director of the state’s Economic Opportunity Office.
A high school drop out, Olivarez returned to school later in life. Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, Civil Rights Commission member and University of Notre Dame President invited Olivarez to attend law school. In 1970, she became the first female graduate of the law school at Notre Dame. She became the first Mexican-American women to sit on the board of directors of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, and later its chairperson.
One of Olivarez’s most significant positions in American politics was her appointment by President Richard Nixon to be the vice-chair of the President’s Commission on Population and the American Future (1970). The majority in the commission’s report, Population and the American Future (1972), supported the liberalization of abortion laws. Olivarez disagreed. A Mexican-American Catholic who disagreed with her church’s contraception ban, she believed abortion denied justice to the unborn child, encouraged male irresponsibility, and fostered a utilitarian and unjust society. In her dissent, she wrote: “Mexican-American (Chicano) farm laborers were ‘wanted’ when they could be exploited by agri-business. Chicanos who fight for their constitutional rights are ‘unwanted’ people.”
Olivarez feared that abortion made human life a product and enabled the powerful to continue economic injustice. Olivarez feared like Pope John Paul II utilitarian judgments being made that would strip the dignity of the human person. This stance placed Olivarez outside mainstream feminism including the National Organization of Women of which she was a founding member.
This is probably the main reason why many do not know much about this dynamic Mexican American Women because her views put her outside the pale of modern feminism.
The 1970s were busy years for Olivarez; she led anti-poverty efforts as the head of anti-poverty organizations and as a public official. She served as a consultant for the National Urban Coalition (1970) and director of Food for All, Inc. (1970-72). Olivarez moved to New Mexico and served as the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Social Research director (1972-75), and as the State Planning Office director (1975-77). In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Olivarez head of the federal government’s anti-poverty agency, the Community Services Administration (CSA). Upon the CSA’s abolishment in 1980, she founded Olivarez Television Company. Olivarez died from cancer on September 19, 1987.
While forgotten in accounts of Mexican-American history, modern feminism and the civil rights movement, Olivarez was n one of the most accomplished women in the nation after World War II. She was definitely one of the first and most important Mexican American women in our national government. Olivarez was the highest ranked Hispanic woman in the Carter Administration as the director of the CSA.
Considering herself a feminist, Olivarez challenged both macho Mexican-American culture and the middle and upper class white women who viewed abortion as a guarantee of equality.
Known as “Amazing Grace” by her friends, it was fitting given Grace’s championship of minorities, poor, and the unborn rightly.
