Thirty years after César Chávez’s first visit to Santa Fe, Delma DeLora still remembers.

Outside St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on Osage Street, there were cries and clamor on that December day in 1981. The crowd was supporting an organizing effort at St. Vincent Hospital and had come to rally with Chávez, the Arizona-born farmworker who went on to lead a union that would change the way the nation looks at farming, food and public health.

“He was a good man to the people nobody wanted,” DeLora said.

DeLora waved her fist in the air as she energized loyalists — and that photo was displayed on Page One of the next day’s New Mexican.

But it was the scene inside that DeLora enshrined.

“Here comes in this small, humble man,” she recalls of the 5-foot, 6-inch Chávez. “He spoke so softly. He never shouted but, he had everyone’s attention.”

The next day, Chávez went to the hospital and talked with maintenance workers and housekeepers who were voting on unionization. He moved quietly, talking to employees individually. It was a lesson DeLora took to heart.

“I listen to people,” said DeLora, herself only 5-feet tall. “Sometimes when you go out and act like you have the whole story, people don’t want to talk to you as much.”

It is for DeLora’s 40 years of listening and organizing — an effort that helped forge the first-union contract for hospital workers in New Mexico, that gained her recognition as one of the 10 Who Made A Difference.

“She’s made a difference in the lives of thousands of people — not just at Christus St. Vincent,” says Fonda Osborn, local president of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. “She’s never quit, she’s always been there. And as far as I know, she’s never taken a penny in salary.”

There have been 11 hospital administrators since DeLora started as a nurse in 1962, when St. Vincent was at Palace Avenue and Paseo de Peralta with a five-bed emergency room. The hospital was owned by the Sisters of Charity until it moved to its current location in 1977.

There were no policies on patient care, no row. A small group formed an association in the early 1970s and voted DeLora the president.

They likely saw what nurse Gail Williams still sees. “I think she just really loves people … she understands what it’s like to be poor and understands what it’s like to raise a family.”

The association wrote a letter to the nuns asking for a meeting. They were promptly ignored. Then in 1974, the National Labor Relations Act was extended to hospital workers — and management had to respond or face a strike.

Attorney Morty Simon was a recent law-school graduate at the time and has known DeLora since.

“There are few people in this labor management arena who don’t have a great deal of respect for her,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone question her honestly and integrity.”

DeLora, who will be 68 next month, has lived in the same home off Agua Fría Street for 42 years. It is now shared with family members while her mother, 86, lives next door.

It is a family that knows work. Her grandparents mined copper and then moved to Carlsbad to mine potash. Her father was a carpenter, her mother waited tables.

At age 17, DeLora and a cousin came to Santa Fe to start their careers in nursing because the Santa Fe program was accredited and would lead to a steady job.

DeLora seems like she has boundless energy. In addition to her union work, she helped start a group to raise awareness and support for families affected by sudden infant death syndrome. In the 1990s, she also was instrumental in getting the nurses’ union involved in looking at the lack of emergency preparedness along the proposed WIPP hazardous waste route. When her husband, Santiago, was alive, the family and friends would cook meals for the homeless at Ashbaugh Park.

Still, she has never driven a car due to narcolepsy, a condition that can cause her to fall asleep without warning. She was often chauffeured to union events by her husband — and she spent her 25th anniversary on a strike line in 1988. Now other nurses and family members drive her to appointments and to and from work at Christus St. Vincent Sports Medicine, where she is a patient advocate.

“It’s been that kind of life,” she said. “People just show up and help — good people who understand what we are doing.”

Delma DeLora

Hometown: Carlsbad, moved to Santa Fe at age 17

Age: 67

Accomplishments: Union leadership for nurses/hospital workers.

Nominated by: Gail Williams