ACLU of Washington honors three Valley women

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Three Yakima-area residents are being honored today in Seattle by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Paula Zambrano and Patricia Flores, both of Yakima, will receive the Civil Libertarian Award.

Gaby Rodriguez, a 2011 Toppenish High School graduate, will be given the Youth Activist Award.

The trio will be honored at the ACLU's annual Bill of Rights celebration dinner at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront Hotel.

The Civil Libertarian Award honors people who have made a recent outstanding contribution to the ACLU or civil liberties in Washington state.

Zambrano and Flores are immigrant rights activists.

A community organizer, Zambrano is a member of OneAmerica, and President of Amigas Unidas in Yakima, an organization that supports abused women in the Latino community. She's also an organizer of the annual May Day march in Yakima, designed to draw attention to the plight of immigrant families and their contributions to society.

Flores has spent most of her life in the Yakima Valley and is active as a consultant and community organizer in the Latino community of Central/Eastern Washington.

The award notes that both women "organized parents in the Yakima community to engage in the legislative process through community meetings, petitions and letters. They have been outspoken and committed advocates for fairness for low-income youth of color in Yakima."

Both also mobilized grass-roots opposition to the Attorney General's gang bill.

The Youth Activist Award is presented to a young person whose activism "exemplifies work to defend and extend liberty and justice for all."

As part of her senior project, Rodriguez spent six-and-a-half months pretending to be pregnant and observing the responses she received. She wore a false belly and kept her secret from the student body in an effort to bring attention to what she saw as an inhospitable climate many teens face when carrying a child.

She captured international media attention for her project. Now a student at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, her story is being told in a book she is co-authoring, due out in January, and a made-for-TV movie.