Graciela Amaya de García was a Central American feminist and labor organizer. Born in El Salvador and trained as a teacher, she moved to Honduras at the age of twenty. Joining the socialist movement, she became a party operative, founding trade unions to resist the labor practices of the industrialists operating in the country. She formed the first feminist organization of Honduras, the Society of Feminist Culture, in 1923 and organized night schools for working women to teach them about their rights. Expelled from Honduras for leading demonstrations against the government in 1944, she fled home to El Salvador but remained only a few months because a coup d'etat brought in a dictatorship. Relocating to Guatemala, García continued with her activities organizing labor and educating working-class people, until she was expelled by the president in 1946. Moving to Mexico, she worked for the Secretariate of Education and wrote articles in support of leftist politics and women.
Early life
María Graciela Amaya Barrientos was born on 11 January 1895 in San Salvador, El Salvador to María Dolores Barrientos and José Bernardino Amaya. Her maternal grandfather was Felipe Barrientos, a lawyer and military general and her cousin Fernando Barrientos was a labor organizer. Her mother died when she was two years old and she was raised by her grandmother along with her only sibling, Felipe Armando. Amaya attended the Escuela Normal de Maestras in San Salvador learning pedagogy and taught in schools in El Salvador. In 1915, she and her father moved to Tegucigalpa, Honduras and the following year, she married Jose García Lardizabel. Her father discouraged her from working and she spent several years taking care of her young son, Tómas. In the early 1920s, her brother, Armando, who had been a socialist labor organizer in the United States joined the family in Honduras and introduced García to the ideas of socialism.
Career
By 1921, García, her brother Armando, Víctor M. Angulo, Manuel Cálix Herrera, and Carlos Gómez were recruited by Juan Pablo Wainwright as Marxist labor organizers. He led them in organizing strikes in Northern Honduras against the banana producing companies and railroads for higher wages and benefits. Under the umbrella organization, Honduran Workers' Federation, the various members created member labor unions. García headed the union Redención, which was a member of FOH. In 1923, she founded the Society of Feminist Culture to train workers, as she had done earlier in Honduras. Opposition to trade unions by conservative factors in the society led to García's expulsion by Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo in February 1946. She and her husband fled to Mexico City and continued to work for the resistance movement against Carias' dictatorship. She took employment with the Secretariat of Public Education, where she worked from 1946 to 1979. She also remained active in trade unions and leftist political movements, publishing articles in various newspapers, such as El Popular and the bi-monthly journal Pagenias de Ayer y de Hoy. García published her memoirs, Páginas de lucha revolucionaria en Centroamérica in 1971 and En las trincheras de a lucha por el socialismo in 1975. In 1977, she was invited to attend a tribute held in her honor at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. She attended the event, which represented the first time she had returned to Central America in over three decades. After the tribute, a collective feminist group called Graciela Amaya García was founded by a group of women at the university to honor and recognize García's contribution to women's rights and education in the country. Their goal was to educate their members on feminist ideals.
Death and legacy
García died on 11 October1995 in Mexico City. 3 months before her 101st birthday and several years after suffering a stroke. She is remembered in Honduras as the founder of the women's movement and throughout Central America for her fight for laborers.
