#VoicesfromtheStacks

Migration is Beautiful: Mary Campos

From the Iowa Women’s Archives Oral history interview conducted for the Mujeres Latinas Project by Rachel Garza Carreón, December 7, 2006, and background by Catherine Babikian.

Mary Domingues Campos was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1929 after her family came to the U.S. from central Mexico. Her father’s family was from Zacatecas, and her mother’s from San Luis Potosí.

Campos remembers: “We’d go to school and we’d take our little tacos or we’d want to talk Spanish and I’d talk to my sisters, you know, and the teachers would come around and she’d say, ‘No, no, no. You must speak English.’ Or, ‘What are you doing?’ …This one teacher that was very, very prejudiced, I think – she just thought everybody should speak English and she preferred it if everybody was white. Well, sorry.”

Mary Domingues married Primo Campos, a former U.S. Marine, in 1952, and had twin daughters in 1954. Shortly thereafter, she began working for Dr. Stanley Griffin, from North Carolina.  “We were the first multi-cultural doctor’s office,” Mary remembered. “He was black and I was brown... We had the first bilingual medical practice that I know of here in Des Moines.”

After Dr. Griffin’s retirement in 1984, Mary worked in Senator Tom Harkin’s office and for the Polk County Department of Social Services. A longtime advocate for social justice through gender and racial equality, Mary was a member of the women’s council of the Des Moines League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC Council 308), the first Latina appointed to the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women, and co-chair of the Iowa Brown-Black Presidential Forum.

“I had experienced some of that [discrimination] when I was a small person. And there was nothing I could do about it as a small person, but I didn’t want that to happen to kids at a particular age, young men and women going out of school and not being able to find a job, or families being transplanted from one place to the other with hopes and dreams and then coming here and getting nothing…I thought I can’t be just comfortable because I got something, I needed to know that somebody else was gonna have something.”

**Migration is Beautiful is a digital humanities project drawn from the holdings of the Mujeres Latinas collections preserved in the Iowa Women’s Archives in the University of Iowa Libraries. The Migration is Beautiful website highlights the journeys Latinas and Latinos made to Iowa and situates the contributions of Latino communities within a broader understanding of Iowa’s history of migration and civil rights activism.  Read more about the project here.

--Diane R.

If you are interested in contributing memoirs, photographs, or other documents about your family history to the Mujeres Latinas Collection, please contact the Iowa Women's Archives.

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