Jean Alonso
Template:TOCnestleft Jean Alonso... was a Massachusetts activist.
Life of activism
As a social worker with two master’s degrees, Jean Alonso brought a different background than most to her assembly line work at Raytheon Co., for which she helped build missiles from 1978 to 1993.
She took the job, said her son, Marcus Alonso, of Miami, because of her long-held passion for community activism, her stance against war, and her desire to improve rights in the workplace.
“She was passionate about social justice, very involved in local labor and women’s movements,” he said, adding that his mother brought together groups of employees during the Persian Gulf war to talk about the experience of working for a defense plant during wartime.
Ms. Alonso, a longtime writer and activist, died of ovarian cancer July 15 2013, in her Dorchester home. She was 76 and previously lived in Cambridge and Newburyport.
Steve Meacham, organizing coordinator for City Life/Vida Urbana, a community organization in Jamaica Plain, said Ms. Alonso was a “radical person with radical ideas who very skillfully combined her beliefs with a profound level of humility.”
Although she was a “dedicated woman of the left,” he said, Ms. Alonso developed strong relationships with conservatives, including some who worked with her on the Raytheon assembly line.
“She really connected with people, all people,” he said. “She would take an interest in your life no matter where you were coming from.”
During her time at Raytheon, Ms. Alonso formed a discussion group of assembly line workers who met regularly to discuss job-related issues, including how defense work affected people. She gathered enough information, mainly through recorded interviews, to write a book about her Raytheon experience, which she self-published in 2011.
In the book, called “The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant,” Ms. Alonso changed the name of the company to “American” and also changed the names of her co-workers, whom she quoted extensively based on conversations that took place in group meetings as well as on the factory floor.
Writing in the book, she called Raytheon her “second family,” but also said she sometimes felt “on display . . . the pet radical.” That, she wrote, was the reason some workers elected her to intervene with the union.
“They got fed up with how the union ignored all their grievances, so they voted me in as shop steward,” she wrote. “ ‘You’re a thorn in their sides, Jean,’ they would chuckle, knowing that for conservative folks like them to send a radical woman in the ranks of the union officials was a nice shot across the bow.”
She was born Jean Anderson in Wethersfield, Conn., in 1937, the only child in a family that was descended from the Mayflower, her children said.
In the late 1950s she graduated from Radcliffe College with a bachelor’s degree in English.
In 1959, she married Juan Alonso, who is now a novelist and a professor at Tufts University. They divorced in 1967.
In 1962, she graduated from Tufts with a master’s degree in literature. During the 1960s, she had two children and became involved in social issues, including the women’s movement. She also advocated for nuclear disarmament and for the rights of Native Americans.
Her daughter, Melissa Alonso, of New York City said that during those years, Ms. Alonso also helped edit her husband’s books, and co-wrote a cookbook featuring recipes from a café in Harvard Square.
In the early 1970s, Ms. Alonso received a second master’s degree, from the Goddard-Cambridge Graduate Program in Social Change, and began a career as a social worker and community activist.
She moved to Newburyport and worked as a counselor at a storefront crisis center and a therapist in a prison.
She also founded a shelter for homeless teens, her daughter said, and an alternative school.
Ms. Alonso wrote or co-wrote articles for the Women’s Review of Books and the Monthly Review. She donated her time and talents to many Boston-area organizations, including the Greater Roxbury Workers Association, the National Writers Union’s Boston chapter, and a labor committee in Dorchester and Roxbury.[1]
Forward Motion
In 1993 Jean Alonso worked at Raytheon, and was a contributor to Forward Motion May/June 1993.
Support for Barack Obama
In 2009 Jean Alonso was listed as a signer[2]of the Progressives for Obama website and as active in Roxbury-Dorchester Labor Committee.
References
- ↑ [Boston Globe, Jean Alonso, 76, social worker and activisty Kathleen McKenna GLOBE CORRESPONDENT AUGUST 12, 2013]
- ↑ http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com/