Workers' hero: Emma Tenayuca
By
Teresa Gutierrez
In Texas and around the country, people are paying tribute
to Emma Tenayuca, the great San Antonio workers' leader who
died July 23 at age 82. Known as "La Pasionaria de Texas,"
Tenayuca was a fiery fighter against the bosses in
Depression-era San Antonio.
She started fighting early. At age 16, in 1932, she became a
union organizer. By 1934 she had helped form locals of the
Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and joined a strike by Mexican
women workers at the Finck Cigar factory.
Tenayuca threw herself into all the struggles of the
Workers' Alliance, a group of unemployed workers led by
socialists and communists. She fought for a minimum wage, for
the right to strike, for equal rights for immigrant workers and
against deportations.
San Antonio was the pecan capital of the United States. The
industry bosses made big profits.
When they could find jobs at all, Mexicano/Chicano workers
were forced to do the worst work at the lowest pay. Men dug
ditches, tearing the broad leaves off pecan trees to shade
their heads.
Most of the workers who shelled and processed the nuts were
women. They made five cents a day for toiling in horrible,
unsafe conditions.
On Jan. 31, 1938, Tenayuca led 12,000 of these Mexicana
pecan shellers out on strike.
The San Antonio pecan-shellers' strike was a virtual
uprising by the most downtrodden workers. It shook the city and
the state--and thrilled the working class.
Police threw 1,000 strikers, including Tenayuca, into jail.
But they could not hold back the struggle.
Tenayuca later said, "What started out as a movement for
organization for equal wages turned into a mass movement
against starvation, for civil rights, for a minimum-wage law,
and it changed the character of West Side San Antonio."
In 1939, she became head of the Texas Communist Party. The
bosses hounded, harassed, and threatened her with death.
Eventually, to stay alive, she had to flee. It was many
years before Tenayuca could safely return to San Antonio.
But she was never forgotten--especially in the working-class
neighborhoods of San Antonio's West Side. There, 30 years
later, a new generation of Chicano activists was inspired to
struggle by the story of Tenayuca and the 1938 pecan shellers'
strike.
That strike shook Texas. And Emma Tenayuca's call to action
still echoes in San Antonio.
Her image--striding in front of a line of marchers or
standing at a microphone shaking her fist as she stirred the
strikers to struggle on--inspires the oppressed workers of San
Antonio to this day.
Emma Tenayuca presente!
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