By Hadley Meares – LAMag.com – Photo: Courtesy of the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), Department of Special Research Collections, UCSB Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Photo: Francisca Flores (second to last on the right) at the First Convention of Women from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, Mexico City, 1961.
In December 1941, an FBI document was approved and signed by the bureau’s bullish chief J. Edgar Hoover. It had information regarding a woman the FBI had classified as “Group A,” a designation reserved for “individuals believed to be the most dangerous and who in all probability should be interned in the event of war.” Though she wasn’t arrested, she would be monitored by the FBI for decades. The woman, who looked more like a nice home economics teacher than a threat to the American way, was Francisca Flores.
