Elena Herrada Bio Sketch

By: Ari Weinberg, Grace Fisher, Tina Muñoz Pandya, Jasmine Pawlicki

Elena Herrada was born in Detroit to Mexican and Irish parents. She grew up on the East Side and was influenced by the Black Panthers. Her family’s influence was also important and, at the age of 18, (from the encouragement of her grandmother) she organized and led a factory strike. Although she had very intermittent attendance in high school, she went on to attend Wayne State University as part of the (experimental) Chicano/Boricua studies program. Herrada was one of the first to go through the program, which was established by La Sed (Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development) in 1971. While she was there, she was involved in struggles to ensure the program’s rigorous courses counted towards graduation and was instrumental in helping her fellow classmates (as well as herself) secure a degree. She went on to get her Masters in Industrial Relations from Wayne State, while also achieving a certificate from the Labor School at Wayne State.

In 2001, she began an oral history project entitled “Repatriados” that was an illuminating work on the repatriated Mexican community in Detroit. This community was pressured to repatriate themselves to Mexico during the Great Depression (despite many community members’ status as American citizens). Her own grandparents were among “los repatriados” so she had a direct connection to this history, and she worked tirelessly to gather information and experiences from others who had been part of the repatriation and had subsequently returned to Detroit. She made the film “Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land,” with Fronteras Norteñas, a project she founded to support her work on the repatriation.

Most recently she has been active as a Detroit community activist, specifically contributing critiques on the process of Detroit’s bankruptcy (2013), as well as serving on the Board of Education. She is also the Director of Detroit’s Centro Obrero which she founded in 2006. Centro Obrero is a nonprofit immigrant and workers’ rights organization that performs wage reclamations, and provides ESL classes and legal clinics among other services. Both her research on the Repatriados and her work on behalf of immigrants and residents of the city of Detroit are invaluable contributions to the Latino community and to the city of Detroit.