Adios Amor - The Search for Maria Moreno

We hear Maria Moreno’s voice for the first time when her former co-worker, Henry Anderson, finds an old audiotape in which Maria testifies about the poverty and discrimination her family faced while harvesting food for a wealthy nation. She is joined by other farmworkers, whose voices evoke a lost past whose traces emerge in the abandoned shacks and overgrown fields of California’s Central Valley.

In her first recorded speech in October 1959, Maria Moreno testifies before the California Industrial Welfare Commission, describing the challenges faced by her family and other farmworkers who harvest the food on our nation’s tables while their own children go hungry.

Maria’s daughters Elizabeth and Martha sing in a car and talk about their desire to “see this thing through.” They arrive at the County Clerk’s office in Karnes City, Texas and find their mother’s birth certificate.

Maria’s eldest son Abel talks about growing up working in the fields and following the crops all the way from southern California through Arizona, Colorado and Idaho. He describes how the whole family was involved in farm labor, and how his sisters and brothers were made fun of by the local kids for bringing burritos to school.

Maria Moreno is elected to represent her union at the 1961 conference of the AFL-CIO, a national federation of labor unions. President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Reuther are the main speakers, but Maria gets a chance to deliver an address on behalf of farmworkers, pleading for industrial workers to support their struggle for justice.

With home videos recorded in the 1980s, Maria Moreno’s daughters describe the anti-poverty mission that the family built on the U.S.-Mexico border, and how nothing would stop Maria from pursuing her passionate ministry, even if it meant hitchhiking to get to her next church service where she was a sought-after speaker.