Scribd
Upload
227 views2 pages

Emma Tenayuca: Pecan Strike Leader

Emma Tenayuca was a Mexican-American community organizer and orator born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas who fought for workers' rights and social justice. As a teenager, she became involved in organizing the poor and spoke out against injustices, gaining a reputation as a brilliant organizer. In 1938, at age 21, she led a successful strike of 12,000 pecan shellers that resulted in higher wages. However, due to the conservative climate and as a woman of Mexican descent, she faced threats and was replaced by the Workers Alliance by age 22. She continued her activism but later left Texas due to blacklisting and threats. She eventually returned to San Antonio in the 1960s to teach migrant children to read

Uploaded by

elsimon2010
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
227 views2 pages

Emma Tenayuca: Pecan Strike Leader

Emma Tenayuca was a Mexican-American community organizer and orator born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas who fought for workers' rights and social justice. As a teenager, she became involved in organizing the poor and spoke out against injustices, gaining a reputation as a brilliant organizer. In 1938, at age 21, she led a successful strike of 12,000 pecan shellers that resulted in higher wages. However, due to the conservative climate and as a woman of Mexican descent, she faced threats and was replaced by the Workers Alliance by age 22. She continued her activism but later left Texas due to blacklisting and threats. She eventually returned to San Antonio in the 1960s to teach migrant children to read

Uploaded by

elsimon2010
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Americans Who Tell the Truth

Emma Tenayuca
The Portraits Next Portrait
Previous Portrait
Search Portraits

Order Cards

Order Prints/Posters

The Traveling Exhibit

Artist's Statement/Bio

Artist's Journal

Exhibit Itinerary

Curriculum/Education

Viewer Comments

Contact

Home

Tell A Friend

Emma Tenayuca Biography


1916-1999

"I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms
of justice."

Born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca witnessed a time period when
Mexican-Americans were allowed few freedoms and fewer privileges. Her close
relationship with a grandfather who read the newspapers with her and took her to
rallies focused on the rights of the poor fed the young girl’s profound hunger for both
learning and social justice.

At age 16, already determined to change the injustices against the poor, she became
involved in community organizing and was jailed and threatened numerous times. In a
time when neither Mexican-Americans nor women were expected to speak out, she
spoke out fearlessly, and was soon known as a fiery orator and a brilliant organizer.
By age 21, Emma was considered by the National Workers’ Alliance to be its most
effective organizer. That same year, 1938, when the wages of the city’s poorest
workers were cut almost in half, the workers decided to strike. Emma was elected by
the city’s more than 12,000 pecan-shellers, most of them women, to lead their strike.
In less than two months, the pecan-shellers successfully forced the owners to raise
their pay. The Pecan-Shellers’ Strike is considered by many historians to be the first
significant victory in the Mexican-American struggle for political and economic
equality in this nation.

Emma was so articulate and outspoken, during a conservative and sometimes


hysterically frightened era, that by age 22, the Workers Alliance replaced her. There
was no space in that time period for a woman - and worse, a “Mexican” woman - to
be an intellectual and a champion for justice. In 1939, an enraged mob attacked the
city’s Municipal Auditorium where Emma was speaking. Emma was escorted out
through a secret passageway, for fear of lynching by a mob involved in what is still on
record as the city’s largest riot. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped
out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the
city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. Black-listed,
Emma left the state for many years, suffering poverty, unemployment, and personal
threats against her own safety. A voracious reader, she put herself through college, and
never stopped searching for an answer to the injustices she saw around her.

In the 1960s, Emma returned to San Antonio and began a different phase of her life-
long community service - as a teacher of reading to migrant students. Emma always
focused on empowering people in the most basic and humane ways: the ability to
work, to eat, to feed one’s family, to read, to vote. The things she fought to achieve in
our society -- social security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, equal access to
education, disability benefits -- were in her days called communist. Today, they are
called social justice.

Yet among the people for whom she fought and spoke and went to jail, her name was
whispered with a respect reserved for no other leader. They called her ... La
Pasionaria. And they kept alive her story, even when so many others tried to erase it
from history.

You might also like