La Pasionaria: Emma Tenayuca and the Pecan Shellers Strike
Near San Antonio, Texas
On January thirty-first, nineteen thirty-eight, roughly twelve thousand pecan shellers walked out of the factories on San Antonio's West Side. They were mostly Mexican American women. The work they had been doing, cracking and sorting pecans by hand in unventilated rooms, paid wages that most accounts estimate at two to three dollars a week, and the contractor for the Southern Pecan Shelling Company had just announced a cut. The fine brown dust from the shells, when inhaled over years, caused tuberculosis.
The workers elected Emma Tenayuca to lead them the same day they walked out. She was twenty-one years old. She had grown up on the West Side, the daughter and granddaughter of San Antonio Tejanos, and she had been organizing since she was a teenager. By nineteen thirty-eight she was already known in labor circles across the city. Her speeches drew large crowds and earned her the name La Pasionaria, a reference to the Spanish phrase for the passion flower.
The city's response was swift and harsh. Police made more than seven hundred arrests over the course of the strike. San Antonio's mayor and police chief accused the strike of being a communist conspiracy and named Tenayuca, who had joined the Communist Party of America, as the instigator of a political plot rather than a labor dispute. The red-baiting eroded some public support. It did not end the strike.
On March eighth, after more than five weeks, the pecan companies and the union agreed to arbitration. The shellers returned to work.
Labor historians cite the nineteen thirty-eight pecan shellers strike as one of the first large-scale organized actions in the Mexican American civil rights struggle in the United States. The exact wage figures differ slightly across sources; the essential facts of the walkout, the arrests, and the arbitration settlement are well documented. By nineteen forty-one, mechanization had eliminated most of the shelling jobs anyway.
Emma Tenayuca spent the rest of her life largely out of public view, working eventually as a schoolteacher. She returned to San Antonio in her later years and was recognized, before her death in nineteen ninety-nine, as a foundational figure in the city's labor history.
