Tala De Wynter, a diminutive woman who was a giant among leaders in Napa Valley’s immigrant and Spanish-speaking community, passed away Saturday evening at her home in Browns Valley. She was 88.

A native of Lima, Peru, De Wynter worked tirelessly to improve the lives of Napa Valley residents. She established Clinic Olé, which now provides medical services to more than 54,000 people a year, and worked passionately on behalf of migrant farmworkers and students. De Wynter’s work crossed boundaries from education to health care and journalism to immigration, and her contacts ranged from struggling farmworkers to Napa County’s most powerful politicians.

Hope Lugo, a longtime advocate in the Latino community who worked with De Wynter, summed up her role in many endeavors. “What I remember most about Tala was her complete commitment, dedication to what she was doing,” Lugo said.

From Lima to Napa

De Wynter was born Talalca Tello in Lima, Peru. She came to the U.S. in May of 1949 to live with an uncle and his family in New Jersey.

According to her daughter, Arlene Gunter, De Wynter met her future husband in a class where newcomers were learning English.

Gaston De Wynter was from Belgium, and using dictionaries — from Flemish to English and then English to Spanish — he passed her a note asking for a date. According to Gunter, Tala accepted the proposition without being able to understand the note, telling her daughter years later that she accepted because she thought Gaston was cute.

On April, 14, 1951, the two were married. They moved to Napa, along with their children Arlene and Michael, in January 1966.

Two years after she arrived, De Wynter began making her mark as an advocate for others, becoming the director of the Rutherford Information and Service Center. The center provided assistance to farmworkers on issues ranging from health care to securing status to work and live legally in the United States.

In autobiographical notes De Wynter wrote for the Napa County Commission on the Status of Women in 1998, she stated,  “One of the services that were most needed (in Rutherford) was immigration, and I was able to help more than 200 families to obtain their immigration documents … something that really could make a difference in their lives.”

The clinic

Arlene Gunter, De Wynter’s daughter, recalls late night calls that her mother would field from staff at Queen of the Valley Medical Center. Whenever the staff needed someone to translate for patients, De Wynter would zoom to the hospital to help out, Gunter said.

In 1972, De Wynter was given the opportunity to offer more substantial support for Spanish speakers with health problems.

In her autobiographical notes, De Wynter stated, “While I was working as director of the Information Center, in January of 1972, I was entrusted by the board of directors of the Latin American Organization for Economic Freedom, a farmworkers organization, to start a clinic for farmworkers and, as a result, we have Clinic Ole.”

It wasn’t that simple. De Wynter and others held modest fundraisers among farmworkers and others to scrape together funds for the clinic.

Frances Ortiz-Chavez, a close friend, said that De Wynter believed so strongly in the clinic that she spent her own money to keep it going and help it gain non-profit status.

“The idea (for the clinic) was put out there,” Ortiz-Chavez said. “She was the one who took off with it. She did all the legwork. She started it at this dinky little Victorian house in Rutherford.”

At first, the clinic provided only basic health services such as immunizations and physical exams, as well as services for women and children. Doctors saw an average of about 30 patients a week.

Today, Clinic Olé has offices in Napa, Calistoga and St. Helena and sees more than 150 patients a day, according to Dr. Robert Moore, Clinic Olé’s medical director. The clinic offers primary health care for children and adults, dental services and an outreach program that instructs clients on nutrition and exercise.

Much of Clinic Ole’s funding comes from grants offered every year through the proceeds of Napa Valley Vintners’ Auction Napa Valley.

“In the early years the clinic had some very tough times and it was her vision for sticking with it” that kept it alive, Moore said. “We all at the clinic owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude … and working with the vintners it’s become one of the best clinics in California. It started with Tala.”

Administrators with Queen of the Valley Medical Center have said the clinic absorbs much of the local need for care among those who have little or inadequate medical coverage.

Moore said that 74 percent of the clinic’s clientele are Latino. “We are still the main server of all the agricultural workers in Napa that are not insured,” he said. “We still take care of predominately the low income (families) of Napa.”

In 1984, De Wynter opened her own immigration consulting service, a service that continues today in the hands of Teresa Foster. When Congress passed the Immigration Reform Act of 1986, Immigration and Naturalization Service named De Wynter a direct service provider, which gave her the authority to assist undocumented aliens to become legal residents.

De Wynter estimates that her office helped 2,000 or more individuals become legal residents. Her daughter Arlene recalls growing up with a freezer full of chickens, because many of De Wynter’s clients were too poor to pay in cash.

Getting the word out

De Wynter also advocated for more news coverage of Napa County’s growing Latino community. She worked alongside then-Register Editor Doug Ernst to establish a page in the Register that featured news in both English and Spanish. Noticias Bilingue del Valle ran once a week.

The page was discontinued, but that didn’t stop Tala from pushing the Register for editorial content in Spanish. Tala and others formed Tiempo Latino, a Spanish language publication that was a hit in the Hispanic community and was later purchased by the Register.

Tiempo Latino stopped publication several years ago. But in 2007, Napa Valley Publishing launched Napa Valley Hispanos Unidos, a Spanish language newspaper that appears twice a month. De Wynter penned a regular column for Hispanos Unidos until the decline in her health made it impossible for her to continue.

In the mid-1970s De Wynter, served as a trustee of the Napa Valley Unified School District School .

“When she served on the school board, she was an inspiration to the Spanish-speaking community because she was the first one to ever represent the Spanish-speaking community on an elected board,” said Donna Heine, who chaired the board when De Wynter was part of it.

“She served very effectively. Bilingual education was something that was in its early beginnings and she certainly championed bilingual education at a time when it was not popular; it was thought of as unnecessary. She had a will of steel and when she set her eyes on a goal, she got it accomplished.”

De Wynter’s dedication to education was also apparent in her involvement with the Napa County Hispanic Network, a group that has raised thousands of dollars in scholarship funds for Latino students.

De Wynter’s prominence is memorialized on a downtown mural on the Carither’s building on the 1100 block of First Street, opposite Dwight Murray Plaza, painted by Jose Charles in 2002.

Services for De Wynter are tentatively planned for the end of the month.

“Her passing was the same as her life, controlled and dignified,” Arlene Gunter, De Wynter’s daughter, wrote in an e-mail to the Register. “She told me just a few days ago she has had a wonderful life … 57 years married to a man who cared deeply for her and who always supported her efforts. She reflected on her children and her children's children and was happy for their lives and how they shared them with her. She was especially proud of her connection to the Napa Valley. In short, she said ‘I have had a very good life.’ What more could any of us hope for?”