Maritza Cervantes, teacher, actor and founding member of the band The Luna Blues Machine, reads from Stella Nowicki's oral history about living, working and organizing a union in the meatpacking district of Chicago during the Depression.
Maritza performed this piece as part of "The People Speak, Live!" at the Metro Chicago on January 31, 2012, produced by Voices of a People's History (peopleshistory.us) in collaboration with Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival.
Here's what Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove had to say about "Stella" in their introduction to this reading in their book Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press 2004):
//The economic crisis of the 1930s led to a wave of union organizing and strikes all over the country. "Stella Nowicki" was the assumed name of Vicky Starr, a rank-and-file activist who was active in the campaign to organize unions in the meatpacking factories of Chicago. Years later, she spoke to Alice and Staughton Lynd, the labor historians and activists, about the conditions in the plants and the tactics radicals used to organize meatpacking and other workers.//