“It’s the women who have led. I just have a feeling, a very strong feeling, that if ever this world is civilized, it would be more the work of women.”
— Emma Tenayuca, interview with Jerry Poyo, February 21, 1987, Oral History Program, Institute of Texan Culture
Social justice, labor and education activist
Emma Beatrice Tenayuca, “La Pasionaria,” was born in San Antonio on December 21, 1916, the oldest daughter of Sam Tenayuca and Benita Hernández Zepeda. Her activism for labor and civil rights was influenced by the moral lessons she learned from her grandfather, the fiery speakers on San Antonio’s Plaza del Zacate, and Catholic social justice principles. She was a vital part of the labor movement in Texas during the 1930s and a leading member of the Workers Alliance of America and Communist Party of Texas. She is best remembered for her role in organizing the largest strike in San Antonio history, the Pecan Shellers Strike of 1938. She was called “La Pasionaria” for all of her work on behalf of the San Antonio’s working poor.
Tenayuca was born into a large, blue-collar family on San Antonio’s south side, but moved to the Westside as a child to live with her grandparents. Her family had Spanish and indigenous roots in Mexico and Texas that could be traced back to the eighteenth century settlement at Los Adaes, which had served as the official capital of the Spanish province of Tejas in the mid-eighteenth century. She learned about Mexican politics from her grandfather, Francisco Zepeda. They went to hear speakers who gathered at the local Plaza del Zacate on Sundays. Walking around the plaza one could watch labor contractors seeking workers for the beet fields. On another corner someone was preaching, and on another part of the plaza you could hear a person reading from La Prensa aloud, with the latest news from Mexico. This was where Tenayuca first heard la cancion de los Magonistas, people who shared the ideas of the Flores Magón brothers, those who inspired the Mexican Revolution.
Tenayuca attended Brackenridge High School where she excelled in debate, baseball and basketball. She joined a ladies’ auxiliary of the League of United Latin American Citizens, but left the organization in 1933 because it excluded foreign-born Mexicans and did not yet allow women to participate as full members. Her labor activism also began that year, when she joined a group of women striking against the H.W. Finck Cigar Company of San Antonio. Her subsequent arrest and the mistreatment of workers she witnessed at the hands of local law enforcement strengthened her resolve to work in the labor movement.
After graduating from high school in 1934, Tenayuca worked as an elevator operator at the Gunter Hotel, where she began organizing workers alongside Mrs. W. H. Ernst, the leader of the Finck Cigar strike. From 1934 to 1935 Tenayuca played a prominent role in the formation of two locals for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). However, she felt that ILGWU leadership did not understand the needs of the Mexican American community. As a result, Tenayuca began working with the Unemployed Council, which later merged with other leftist organizations to form the Workers Alliance of America.
Union activity, Party affiliation and later life
Between 1935 and 1937 Tenayuca led several marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins to protest discrimination against ethnic Mexicans by the Works Progress Adminstration and local law enforcement. This included illegal deportations of U.S. citizens by the U.S. Border Patrol. She also traveled to Mexico City in 1936 to study briefly at the Workers’ University of Mexico.
Upon her return to San Antonio, she joined with W. H. Ernst to organize the Confederation of Mexican and Mexican American Workers, a local offshoot of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM). In 1937 Tenayuca was an extremely effective organizer. With her leadership, the Workers Alliance grew to fifteen branches with over three thousand members by 1937. She became openly affiliated with the Communist Party, because she believed that it was the only party that advocated for civil rights and better working conditions for mexicanos. She married Homer Brooks, the chairman of the Communist Party of Texas. The couple’s historic essay, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” was one of the first political treatises written by a Mexican American in English that argued for the rights and status of the Mexican community in the United States.
Tenayuca is best known, though, for her role in the 1938 pecan-shellers’ strike. The majority of the approximately 12,000 pecan shelling workforce were Mexican women, who experienced some of the lowest wages (often less than three dollars a week) and worst working conditions in the city. On January 31, 1938, the women walked off en masse after the Southern Pecan Shelling Company announced that it was going to cut wages by roughly twenty percent. They elected Tenayuca as their leader. The strike was one of largest in the country, lasting three months and growing to more than 10,000 workers. The CIO and UCAPAWA leaders decided to remove Tenayuca as strike leader for fear that her political beliefs would damage the movement. However, she remained an unofficial leader and continued to organize pickets, distribute flyers, and coordinate soup kitchens. Eventually, the producers agreed to pay the minimum wage established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, the company soon mechanized their factory, effectively eliminating 10,000 shelling jobs over the next two years.
Tenayuca received a lot of negative press both during and long after the strike. In August 1939 when the Communist Party met at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, a crowd of 5,000 angry protestors gathered and stormed the building. Tenayuca and other party leaders had to be escorted to safety by police via an underground tunnel. Tenayuca would continue to receive death threats and eventually was forced to leave San Antonio and work under a different name. Tenayuca eventually divorced her husband in 1946. She moved to California, obtained a teaching degree from San Francisco State College, and gave birth to a son named Francisco Tenayuca Adams in 1952.
Tenayuca returned to San Antonio in the late 1960s and earned a master’s degree in education from Our Lady of the Lake University. She then taught bilingual education in the Harlandale Independent School District until her retirement in 1982. Beginning in the 1970s, Tenayuca’s achievements were rediscovered and recognized by the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (“Women Active in Letters and Social Change”). San Antonio, the city that once forced her into exile, now embraced her as a local heroine, and she was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1991. Her life was also celebrated in public murals, portraits, documentaries, corridos, biographical plays, and a children’s book. Tenayuca died on July 23, 1999, after developing Alzheimer’s disease, and was buried at Mission Burial Park in San Antonio.
Article from the Museo del Westside, San Antonio Texas
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