"Rosie the Riveter" Erlinda Avila Has A Message For The Next Generation

Erlinda Avila still remembers her mother crying by the radio on December 7, 1941, as she listened to news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I was wondering, why is she crying?” Erlinda said. “My mother had gone through the First World War and had lost family members. So that was my first knowledge of what war was like.”

Erlinda, who has Navajo, Hopi, and Spanish roots, grew up in Arizona. As soon as her brother Pete turned 18, he was drafted, sent to Texas for training, and then shipped to Japan. Erlinda, then just a teenager, decided to try enlisting in the US Army herself.

“I went to the recruiting office,” she said. “This young man said… ‘We don’t take women.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not a woman. I’m a girl, and I still want to go!’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t take girls, either.’ I wanted to say something bad to him, but I couldn’t because I had better manners than that.”

Erlinda didn’t give up. When she learned women were needed in defense plants, she found another way to serve, becoming one of the women known as “Rosie the Riveters.” From 1943 to 1945, she worked as a bucker on B-29 bombers at the Goodyear Aircraft Company in Goodyear, Arizona.

Making the 21-mile journey every day from Phoenix to Goodyear - and then back again - required walking and taking the bus, but that didn’t deter her.

“I didn’t care how far I had to walk in order to do it,” she said. “I was determined I was going to do something for my country, because I wanted my brother to have the best equipment.”

The smallest women, she said, were often assigned the job of crawling inside the wings to do the rivets.

“We had three different bucking bars,” she said. “The bars were heavy, but we were strong! I had strong hands and I could hold that bar… until that rivet was bucking at the right length.”

One memory that stood out to her was not just seeing the finished planes on the runway, but also seeing who would be flying them.

“To see them flying… that was the most beautiful sight that I saw,” she said. “Women pilots flew those planes out of Goodyear, Arizona, and took them wherever they needed.”

For nearly a decade after the war, Erlinda’s own family didn’t know about the work she had done. Like many women who served on the home front, she rarely spoke about it. Across the country, countless Rosies returned quietly to their everyday lives, their wartime contributions largely overlooked not only within their families, but by society as a whole.

On April 10, 2024, the Rosie the Riveters of WWII were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington D.C. - finally recognizing the millions of American women who worked in the defense industry during the war.

Now 101 years old, Erlinda has a clear message for future generations.

“Never forget that freedom did not come free to them,” she said. “It cost blood and tears, for the land that they live… they had to fight very hard for it. Keep it safe. Keep it safe.”    

Watch Erlinda’s reels here and here.

Watch Erlinda’s complete oral history.