Born into a family dedicated to revolution, and coming of age in a time of intense labor strife, Bert Corona devoted his life to the least advantaged of all workers -- undocumented immigrants, workers the unions ignored or rejected. Today, those he organized form a powerful political bloc and an equally important part of the labor movement. PNS commentator David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues. Photographs are available by request. Please e-mail dbacon@igc.org for details.

Bert Corona was a child of the border, and the problems of the millions of people crossing the line in the sand between the U.S. and Mexico dominated his life. Corona, who died on became a hero to urban Latinos -- factory workers, domestics, people waiting on the corner for day work.

Corona's generation was hardened by the great depression -- the Los Angeles of his youth was the scene of violent industrial wars, a place where immigrants were met with the business end of police billy clubs, where blacks and Latinos sat in one section of movie theaters and whites in another.

Today, the key to getting elected in LA is winning the votes of hundreds of thousand of working-class Latinos. And the undocumented workers Corona fought for have found their own voice - - their strikes and organizing drives sweep through industry after industry, and LA's unions have taken up their cause.

Corona's father --- a comandante in Francisco Villa's Division del Norte, one of the two main insurgent armies of the Mexican Revolution -- moved across the Rio Grande after Villa was defeated by counter-revolutionaries. Born in El Paso, Burt Corona grew up moving back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico in an era when the border wasn't the militarized zone it is today.

Corona came to Los Angeles, where he was caught up in the labor ferment of the late 1930s. He became president of Local 26 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and an organizer for the CIO. That labor experience, welded to the his family's revolutionary history, framed Corona's understanding of the world.

"Bert saw Mexicanos in the United States, not just as a people suffering discrimination, but as a working-class community, exploited for their labor," says Nativo Lopez, who helped Corona organize the Hermanidad Mexicana, a community organization of Mexican workers. "He believed that change would come about by creating organizations and leaders among grassroots people, in unions and in the neighborhoods."

Corona saw in the barrios not just a population excluded from the political mainstream, but a future in which their votes would shape the politics of the city and the state.

After the war, Corona became a leader of the Asociacion Nacional Mexicano Americano, a militant left wing organization with close ties to the industrial unions. More than 50 years ago, an ANMA chapter organized by Corona launched sympathy strikes at American Smelting and Refining Co. in solidarity with co-workers employed by the same company in Mexico and Latin America.

ANMA also organized braceros -- workers brought into the U.S. from Mexico and housed in huge, fenced-in barracks in rural areas, where they worked in the fields for extremely low wages. Corona, Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez and others struggled to end the program, since braceros were not only exploited but used to undermine wages and efforts to form unions.

ANMA did not just lobby against the program, however, but sought to organize the workers.

That became a hallmark of Corona's approach. After the bracero program was ended, immigrants without papers continued to come to the United States Unions of the cold war era were very hostile, calling for deportations and measures banning them from jobs, saying the undocumented couldn't be organized. Corona never stopped fighting that idea.

Corona's ultimate vindication came last year, when the AFL-CIO itself adopted a new pro-immigrant policy, calling for amnesty for undocumented workers and an end to employer sanctions. At the end of his political life, he was finally honored at the labor federation's huge rally for amnesty at the sports arena in June.

Corona was an unrepentant radical. "I would call myself a socialist," he wrote in his autobiography, Memories of Chicano History. But his vision was a very indigenous one. "I believe in the American dream," he said, "or at least in my version of it -- it's similar to the dream of the Mexican Revolution, which also promised freedom, equality and democracy. Clearly, that hasn't been fully achieved. In both cases, they're unfulfilled dreams."

Corona was not an isolated voice. He helped found the Mexican American Political Association and worked in the Democratic Party, trying to make it deal with the political aspirations of Mexicanos and workers. "He saw that our struggle for immigrant rights and Mexicano political power was tied to much larger movements," Lopez says.