Lifelong activist continues freedom struggle

[Editor’s Note: This article has been heavily condensed from the original to fit El Tecolote’s print constraints. For a link to the full story, visit www.ebar.com]

Olga Talamante was 11 years old when her parents plucked her from Mexico and drove their family across the U.S. border. Five decades later, Talamante will be riding in a red lowrider convertible during Sunday’s Pride parade as one of six community grand marshals selected by the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee for her outstanding contributions to the LGBT community.

“It’s an amazing honor,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of public life, but to be acknowledged is very humbling. I feel fortunate to be one among many deserving people.”

Immigrating to the U.S. was tough on Talamante as a young girl. Now 62, she remembers being held back in school because she didn’t know English, and after-school jobs were always waiting once class ended.

Some days she put in long hours harvesting crops in the fields alongside her parents and other farm workers, without access to bathrooms or water in summertime heat; but other times she would babysit for the growers’ families and witness firsthand the basic division between those with and those without.

“What struck me at a young age was the power relationship between the workers and the growers,” she said, “the control they had over our pay and even where we lived. It wasn’t so much like I envied what they had, but we worked really hard so we deserved to have good living conditions too.”

That was the point at which the seed for Talamante’s community organizing was planted—“literally and metaphorically,” she jokes.

After learning English, she skipped a grade and moved through school easily, taking the college prep classes with the “privileged” kids and getting involved in student body activities, all while returning to the labor camp in the evenings.

“My junior year, I wrote a poem called ‘My Two Worlds.’ I wondered where I belonged, who I was,” she said.

As if it wasn’t difficult enough maneuvering between those two worlds of race and class, Talamante also had her own emerging feelings of attraction to other girls added to the mix.

“In high school, I had the boyfriends, but the crushes and yearnings for the girls,” she said. “There was definitely a feeling of aloneness.”
Talamante was accepted at UC Santa Cruz, where she became a U.S. citizen while earning a degree in Latin American Studies.

While there, she participated in the Chicano, Farm Workers and Anti-Vietnam War movements, and was part of mass protests to increase representation of people of color in UC faculty.

In 1971, while doing field research in Chiapas, Mexico, she met a group of Argentines in Mexico City—a meeting that would change her life forever. Talamante kept in touch with them and, two years later, flew to Argentina for a visit.

[…]

Talamante immersed herself in grassroots organizing in the barrios of Azul for the next year. As the movement strengthened, the government cracked down and declared a state of siege, suspending all civil liberties.

Police stormed a building Talamante was staying in and captured her and several friends at gunpoint, holding them incommunicado for five days, during which time she was beaten, tortured and interrogated.

After 16 months of imprisonment for alleged subversion, the Argentine government released her.

“The State Department claimed they didn’t know I was there, but to this day I don’t believe that,” she said. “I think it was that I was a radical from California, a poor woman from Gilroy.”

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In 1978, Talamante moved to San Francisco where she joined the Democratic Workers Party, began working at Headstart and organizing in the Mission district.

Two years later, she moved in with her girlfriend, a period she qualifies as her coming-out.

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In 1986, Talamante became vice president of the Western branch of INROADS, an organization that helps students of color gain college scholarships and corporate internships.

Around the same time, the AIDS epidemic was tightening its deadly grip on San Francisco.

Talamante remembers organizing within the LGBT community to create support groups for friends infected with the virus.

“We needed to take care of our guys, bring them meals,” she said. “I lost some dear friends.”

Talamante continued with INROADS during the ‘90s and took her first step into official LGBT advocacy in 2002 when she joined the advisory board of Gente Latina de Ambiente, a community-based organization that primarily serves the queer immigrant Latino community in San Mateo.

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In 2003, Talamante became the executive director of the Chicana/Latina Foundation (where she remains today), a nonprofit that empowers Chicanas/Latinas through personal, educational and professional advancement. A year later, she joined the board of the National Council of La Raza, eventually becoming a co-chair.

“I felt like I had come home, like my two worlds had come together,” she said. “When I was at NCLR, I brought my Chicana consciousness and when I’m with Chicana/Latina, I bring my queer consciousness so that we all learn from each other. They’re two worlds but now there’s much more [of] a seamless interconnectedness for me.”

She currently sits on the boards of the Horizons Foundation, an LGBT resources and funding group, and the Greenlining Institute, a multi-ethnic public policy research and advocacy organization.

Her girlfriend of five years, Vola Ruben, and fellow community activist, Eleanor Palacios, will be riding with Talamante in the red lowrider convertible during Sunday’s parade. Her contingent will be emphasizing the “undocuqueer” (undocumented and queer) community.

“We’ll have a message for President Obama on a banner reading something like ‘thank you for evolving on same-sex marriage, please evolve on immigration’,” she said.

[…]