The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

This blog post is the second part in a two-part series on Emma Tenayuca. The first part, Emma Tenayuca, Latina labor leader in San Antonio, was published last Thursday, March 11.

Special thanks to the San Antonio Express-News and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Libraries Special Collections for their permission to use The San Antonio Light's photographs of Emma Tenayuca that illustrate this article.

In continuing celebration of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the life, labor leadership, and legacy of Emma Tenayuca, a prominent Latina labor leader from San Antonio. This two-part blog series features numerous secondary sources from our small Emma Tenayuca Collection. As noted above, the photographs are thanks to the San Antonio Express-News and the UTSA Libraries Special Collections. UTSA also has a video oral history and an audio oral history of Tenayuca, while her papers are at Texas Woman's University in Denton.

In the early 20th century, most pecan-processing companies used machines to crack the nuts, after which workers manually separated pecan meat from the shells. However, after opening the Southern Pecan Shelling Company in 1926, San Antonio businessman Julius Seligmann determined that he could employ Mexican Americans on the West Side of the city and run the whole process more cheaply with their labor alone, without any machines (Bell 1986 p. 10-11). San Antonio Latina labor leader Emma Tenayuca herself recalled that the pecan shelling industry at the time was full of subcontractors and numerous small shops working for large companies like Southern Pecan (Tenayuca 1983 p. 10). It was this exploitation of Mexican American workers that inspired Tenayuca’s “devotion to communism,” in the estimation of scholar Julia Kirk Blackwelder (Blackwelder 1984 p. 147). In the 1930s, Texas produced 40% of all pecans in the United States, while Southern Pecan alone, with its some 400 small shops and myriad subcontractors, shelled a full 25% of all pecans sold in the entire country (Bell 1986 p. 11).

Scholars Roberto Calderon and Emilio Zamora observed that, in 1930, 88% of Mexican American workers were employed in relatively low-paying jobs in low-status economic sectors, such as agriculture (41%), manufacturing (23%), transportation (11%), domestic or personal service (10%), and mining (3%). Mexican American women were especially clustered into two of these sectors, domestic or personal service (45%) and agriculture, specifically as farm laborers (20%) (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 31). While she was growing up in San Antonio, Tenayuca herself recalled that “the only Mexican workers employed by the City Public Service and the Water Board were laborers, ditch diggers” (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 39). Compounding the problem was the fact that the City of San Antonio did not provide local aid to residents in need (McDonald 1990 p. 58). In this environment, however, many Mexican American women seized the opportunity by taking leadership roles in labor organizations, as Tenayuca did (McDonald 1990 p. 58).

In January 1938, the Southern Pecan Shelling Company reduced wages for pecan pieces from $0.06 per pound to $0.05 per pound. This cut lead to an initially unorganized walkout by about 6,000 shellers (Bell 1986 p. 10-11) (McDonald 1990 p. 60). By the middle of February, less than a month later, approximately 10,000 workers were taking part in the strike (Bell 1986 p. 10). Scholar Dedra S. McDonald called it the city’s “longest and most bitter strike of the Depression” (McDonald 1990 p. 60). Tenayuca quickly became “one of the most respected and dedicated unionists in San Antonio” during the early days of the strike (Calderon and Zamora 1986), despite being just 22 years old at the time (McDonald 1990 p. 61).

The San Antonio police chief during the pecan shellers' strike was Owen Kilday, who had previously taken a hard line with Finck cigar strikers and arrested those who simply “[blocked] the sidewalks with their CIO signs” (Bell 1986). He employed similar tactics during the three-month pecan strike, arresting over 700 people in total. At one point, 200 strikers were confined in a jail designed to hold 60 people (Bell 1986). Strikers were also tear-gassed on at least six separate occasions (Calderon and Zamora 1986). Blackwelder describes Tenayuca as “a favorite target of Kilday” who was both arrested and released frequently (Blackwelder 1984 p. 147). When the pecan shellers' strike began in January 1938, Tenayuca was held by San Antonio police for 30 hours straight before being released (Blackwelder 1984 p. 148). Tenayuca viewed this, among other experiences, as proof that “the American system has fought tenaciously and viciously against the organization of labor” (Tenayuca 1983 p. 14).

Control of the strike was contested between Tenayuca and the Workers Alliance, on the one hand, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), on the other. The CIO did not initially endorse the strike. Tenayuca ultimately conceded that the strike would have a greater chance of success without her leading it because of negative perceptions about her communist ties, and (under pressure) she agreed to step back on the second day of the strike. However, when she resigned her active role, the workers demonstrated how much they respected her by electing her “honorary strike leader” (Blackwelder 1984 p. 148). Tenayuca later remarked that there was "tremendous pressure upon the CIO to remove me as the strike leader because I was a Communist” (Tenayuca 1983 p. 10). With Tenayuca forced aside, CIO-affiliated United Cannery Workers president Donald Henderson arrived in San Antonio to negotiate with the company, Mayor Maury Maverick, and even Governor James Allred (Tenayuca 1983 p. 10) (Bell 1986 p. 12). While she did not publicly participate in the strike after stepping down, Tenayuca actively reviewed committee reports, met with picket captains, and created leaflets for the duration of the strike (McDonald 1990 p. 63).

The pecan shellers' strike ended in March 1938 with a small increase in shellers' wages (Bell 1986 p. 12). Later that year, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a minimum wage that was substantially higher: $0.25 per hour (Bell 1986 p. 12). While the strike did initially improve pecan shellers’ wages, this victory was "whittled away a few months later when the industry remechanized” (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 34). While Southern Pecan went back to using machines, journalist Tom Bell noted that the strike helped the predominately Mexican American West Side of San Antonio realize its power and find its "first glimmers of unity” (Bell 1986). Furthermore, women were integral to both the leadership of the strike and the rank and file membership of the involved unions (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 34). Speaking in 1984, Tenayuca recalled, “One of the first groups of organized workers that I remember were women and it is with them that we saw the beginning of the breakup of the type of political organization that existed in San Antonio” (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 39). A contemporary article written by Esther Cantor in the Communist Party-affiliated Daily Worker in June 1938 concluded that the pecan shellers’ strike “resulted in increased rights and wages for the Mexican workers and helped to break the power of the reactionary political machine in San Antonio” (Cantor 1938).

In 1939, Tenayuca starred in one more major public role when she obtained a permit to hold a Communist rally at the American Legion Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio (Blackwelder 1984 p. 149-150). That year, she had been named the chair of the Texas Communist Party (Calderon and Zamora 1986 p. 34). Despite pressure from the American Legion to revoke the permit, San Antonio mayor Maury Maverick refused to back down, citing the right to free speech. During the rally, a mob broke windows, stormed the auditorium, and damaged the building's interior, but Tenayuca and all the other approximately 150 attendees escaped without injury (Blackwelder 1984 p. 150) (McDonald 1990 p. 63). According to Blackwelder, “the Workers Alliance never recovered from the riot,” and the events of that night were a major reason for both Maverick’s defeat in the next mayoral election and Tenayuca’s retirement from a public political role (Blackwelder 1984 p. 150). Due to both the riot and the Soviet Union’s signing of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939, which was deeply disappointing and disillusioning to communists in the United States and elsewhere, Tenayuca left the Communist Party (McDonald 1990 p. 64).

Tenayuca continued supporting labor organizations and striking workers during the 1940s. Later that decade, she moved to San Francisco to attend San Francisco State University, from which she graduated in 1952. She worked and raised a son in San Francisco before returning to San Antonio in 1963 (McDonald 1990 p. 64). In San Antonio, she worked as a teacher until her retirement in the early 1980s (McDonald 1990 p. 65). McDonald considers Tenayuca's legacy to include her being “a precursor of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s” (McDonald 1990 p. 55).

This blog post is the second part in a two-part series on Emma Tenayuca. The first part, Emma Tenayuca, Latina labor leader in San Antonio, was published last Thursday, March 11.

Bell, Tom. 1986. “The Pecan Strike.” Current, May 22, 1986.

Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. 1984. Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929-1939. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press.

Calderon, Roberto, and Emilio Zamora. 1986. “Manuela Solis Sager and Emma Tenayuca: A Tribute.” Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender, 30–41.

Cantor, Esther. 1938. “21-Year-Old Girl Leads Texas Pecan Workers.” Daily Worker, June 28, 1938.

McDonald, Dedra S. 1990. “Chicanas at the Forefront of Labor Organization: A Look at Emma Tenayuca’s Role as an Activist.” The Wittenberg Review, 55–67.

Tenayuca, Emma. 1983. “Living History: Emma Tenayuca Tells Her Story.” The Texas Observer, October 1983, 1, 7–15.