State Rep. Christine Trujillo. Photo by Sherry Robinson/© 2023 New Mexico News Services

By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2023 New Mexico News Services

“Mom, you’re president of the AFL-CIO!”

Not many women ever heard that sentence. In 2001 Christine Trujillo had been teaching for 21 years, served on the state school board, and was president of the 6,500-member American Federation of Teachers-New Mexico. That December she became the first woman and the first teacher to lead the New Mexico Federation of Labor AFL-CIO.

Trujillo routinely juggled so many responsibilities that it took her daughter’s remark for her to pause long enough to appreciate this new honor. Busy women know that feeling.

This month Trujillo announced her resignation as a state representative after ten years of service. News coverage focused on Trujillo as legislator and teacher, but she was a labor leader for 12 years. It was no cake walk.

Growing up poor in Taos, 12th in a family of 16, she saw how people struggled to make a living, and she herself had plenty of challenges, she told me in a 2002 interview.

As a high-school dropout and single mom, she completed a GED. Next she got a degree from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas while working as a bilingual secretary. In 1980 she became a bilingual teacher with Albuquerque Public Schools and joined a union. She was active in women’s and human rights groups and the union before winning a position on the state school board in 1999.

There she opposed teaching creationism in public schools.

“Religious dogma in the science realm is not something that I support,” she said at the time. She also used the position to champion bilingual education.

In 2001 she became president of the teachers’ union and five months later, the state AFL-CIO. She joked about being a workaholic but said being involved came naturally to her. As for being the first woman president, she said, “We’re all working people. We all work for better conditions, better salaries, for respect for our crafts.”

The organization’s men took her election in stride. Lawrence Sandoval, of the Communications Workers of America, called the change refreshing.

“I think she’s probably one of the strongest labor leaders in the state,” he said.

Her immediate challenge was electing Democrat Bill Richardson governor. Gov. Gary Johnson, then a Republican, allowed the state’s collective bargaining law to sunset in 1999, and Richardson promised to revive it. Richardson won in 2002 and signed a new bargaining rights law, which spurred new organizing.

The Great Recession was a blow to labor beginning in 2008. Union numbers continued to slide as Republicans, ahead of 2010 elections, pushed harder to cripple or destroy labor unions. Trujillo worked with every single union.

Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, took office in 2011. She quickly fired all three members of the state’s Labor Relations Board and forced out its executive director.

“She’s trying to destroy all the efforts that we have made over the past ten years,” Trujillo said. Unions appealed to the state Supreme Court, which reinstated two members.

Next Martinez laid off 44 state employees, three-quarters of them from the state Public Education Department, including the local president of Communications Workers of America. An administration spokesman said the recession forced budget cuts. Trujillo called it retaliation.

In 2012 Trujillo stepped down from the AFL-CIO at the point of its highest membership ever and won a seat in the state House of Representatives. She threw herself into education issues as chair of the Legislative Education Study Committee and more recently was active in health issues.

I never saw her raise her voice.

Now she’s resigning from the House because of health issues and the sense that it’s time. As a leader, a politician, a warrior for her beliefs, Christine Trujillo is unmatched. If she were an athlete, they’d retire her number.