Note: This story appeared in the “On the Rise” special section with the March 28 edition of the Free Lance.
During Mexican President Vicente Fox’s six-year term between 2000 and 2006, lifetime Hollister resident Mickie Luna served on a commission focused on migrant travel to and from the border during the holidays. In those years, she took part in a handful of meetings that involved the Mexican president. For one of those occasions in which she had the chance to mingle in Fox’s circle, Luna had received an invitation to attend a breakfast gathering in Tijuana and was told she could bring someone along.
Luna, a founding member of the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and an icon in Hollister’s Mexican-American community, chose another active member of LULAC to accompany her. She chose the late Don Chon Reynoso, then longtime owner of Hollister Drive In Market.
In a recent interview, Luna recalled how Reynoso hadn’t been into politics all that much.
“He would help everybody all the time. I asked him whether he wanted to go,” said Luna, then reciting how she convinced him to go. “You know what?” she recalled saying. “It’s the president of Mexico. I thought of you.”
With some extra encouragement from his children – one, a future LULAC president, and another, a captain on the Hollister police force – Reynoso was in for the trip. The Mexican government escorted the group from San Diego to Tijuana, and Luna remembered having a “great lunch.”
“It was so neat,” she said. “President Fox was walking out. He stopped, and Chon Reynoso was talking to him. I thought, that’s wonderful.”
Luna had that and many other stories to reflect on her decades of involvement in LULAC and her deep-rooted influence on thousands of Latinos in San Benito County.
Luna’s influence, however deep in San Benito County, has run much, much farther geographically. Having already served as a local and state president for LULAC, Luna in 2010 was elected as the national organization’s vice president of the farwest region – and has held that seat on the national board ever since then through an annual election process.
It has meant having an influential voice from Hollister – when former Hollister Councilman Ken Duran died earlier this year, the family asked Luna to speak about him – to Washington, D.C. Most recently in early March, she returned from a weeklong trip to Capitol Hill – which has become like a second home due to the frequency of her trips for youth and adult LULAC activities ¬- for a legislative conference.
She got back to Hollister just in time to get involved in both ends of the LULAC leadership spectrum. In the same week, Luna was heading to King City so she could represent the national LULAC board in discussions with officials in the Monterey County city regarding far-reaching allegations about police officials confiscating and selling vehicles, “largely to low-income immigrants,” according to the L.A. Times, days after guiding a group of teens in the Adelante youth mentoring program on a tour of the new county courthouse.
One day, Luna was fighting for Latinos’ civil rights regionally and nationwide On another, she was trading lighthearted stories with the LULAC teens like a mother or aunt or friend while awaiting Judge Steven Sanders’ oversight of the courthouse tour.
“Vince is bringing the T-shirts to you guys, so you guys don’t have to cross the street,” Luna told the group of 20 students waiting outside the old courthouse before walking to the new one across Fourth Street, while referring to her husband of 44 years, who is often by her side with such involvement.
As she can often do, though, Luna quickly got serious when it came to the students she has mentored for decades.
“Every one of these kids is going to go to college,” she said, adding how it’s a model for LULAC to have 100 percent of students being college bound. “I’m not kidding you. They know that. They take note of it.”
One of those students was Bernice Hernandez, a San Benito High School sophomore. She was in the group on the courthouse tour and lauded Luna’s impact on her life.
“She’s an amazing role model for me,” Hernandez said. “She proves to us that Latinos can make it, that they can make a change.
“She’s making a change in my life.. She inspired me to go to college, get a job, make a difference.”
Luna’s own challenges
Luna, after all, has plenty of experiences to share, not only through her experiences with LULAC and the Mexican American Committee on Education, but also through her own life experiences.
Luna was the youngest of 12 children in a migrant family whose members would travel back and forth between the San Joaquin Valley and Hollister, where they lived in a tent within orchards off Westside Road in her younger years. Her parents had moved from Mexico to the U.S. to pursue a better life.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “We just didn’t have all that other people had. We were a humble family and everybody worked really hard.”
She recalled not having a floor, for instance, and her mother using one of those kerosene stoves – used by campers – to cook meals. Eventually, the family moved into a small house in a local labor camp.
“I remember one of the ladies that used to come from Madera,” she remembered. “She would sit around one of the houses and read to all of us kids. That was a time that I loved. I’d pull my blanket out, sat while she read to us. It was just stories she read. It was very interesting.”
Luna was first enlightened about social justice early on as well. Routinely in her years at Fremont School in grades first through fourth, she was forced to stay inside during recess to help other students with their work, despite her spotless record in the classroom, Luna remembered. She had a brother who became infuriated when she told him about it, spurring him to address the matter with the principal.
“It was just something I didn’t forget,” she said. “The light lit up – wait a minute: I have rights.”
Aside from the early years raising her two boys, Luna has spent much of her adult life translating that childhood lesson into everyday life.
And other Latino leaders here and throughout the country have recognized her impact as a leader. In her first two elections on the LULAC national board, Luna gained 70 percent and 80 percent of the vote, respectively, against other competitors. In her most recent election, she gained 92 percent, she said.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d get to serve on the largest national Latino organization as an executive board member that actually takes action on a national Latino agenda,” she said.
She doesn’t have plans to run for national LULAC president, she said, but does intent to continue spreading her influence.
“When it comes to issues, you know I’ll always have something to say about something,” Luna said. “I just wish more people would get involved.”
