During the 1990s, I served as Chairman of the Oral History Committee for the Bexar County Historical Commission. and I personally interviewed Doña Emma Tenayuca among many other notable people from San Antonio. The purpose of our committee was to interview people whose recollection added a human dimension, and a certain richness and flavor to our knowledge of important events. Otherwise, this valuable information would have been lost forever.
My interview with Emma Tenayuca, who was seventy-five-years old, took place on Wednesday, February 27, 1991, at her home on 555 East Congress, which was off Roosevelt Avenue and very close to Mission San José. Her telephone number was 924-9098. I vividly remember the interview because she still had the passion and the drive that inspired her many years ago to fight for social and economic injustices being committed against Mexican Americans in her beloved San Antonio’s West Side. Sadly, she passed away eight years later on Friday, July 23, 1999, at the age of 82. As per our agreement, I submitted the tapes and the signed release form to the San Antonio Public Library for use by scholars, students, and the general public for future historical research. They are kept as part of the Texana Collection, located on the sixth floor.
Before I proceed with the other accolades that have been bestowed upon Emma Tenayuca, I would like to share with you her biography that was written by R. Matt Abigail and Jazmin León and published by the Handbook of Texas.
“Tenayuca, Emma Beatrice (1916–1999). Emma Beatrice Tenayuca, Mexican American labor organizer, civil rights activist, and educator, oldest daughter of Sam Tenayuca and Benita Hernandez Zepeda, was born in San Antonio, Texas, on December 21, 1916. Tenayuca was a central figure in the radical labor movement in Texas during the 1930s and a leading member of the Workers Alliance of America and Communist Party of Texas. She is perhaps best remembered for her role in organizing the largest strike in San Antonio history, the Pecan-Shellers’ Strike of 1938. Her efforts on behalf of the working poor of San Antonio later earned her the nickname “La Pasionaria” (“The Passionate One”).
Tenayuca was raised in a large, blue-collar, devoutly Catholic family on San Antonio’s racially-mixed south side. The family had Spanish and Native American roots in Mexico and Texas that, according to oral tradition, could be traced back to the eighteenth century settlement at Los Adaes. Due to financial difficulties, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in San Antonio’s impoverished, mostly Mexican American west side barrio. This turned out to be a significant development in young Tenayuca’s life. Her grandfather, Francisco Zepeda, a carpenter and avid follower of Mexican politics on both sides of the border, instilled in her a strong interest in the hardships that fellow Mexicans faced in San Antonio and in the organized political activity that addressed those conditions. She was especially drawn to the soap box speakers who gathered at the local Plaza del Zacate (now Milam Park) on Sundays. They included veteran socialist agitators who spoke about their first-hand experiences during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the anarcho-syndicalist ideas associated with the Magonista movement.
Tenayuca attended Brackenridge High School where she excelled in her studies, especially on the school’s debate team, and was a star player in both baseball and basketball. She joined a ladies’ auxiliary of the League of United Latin American Citizens, but left the organization in 1933 because it denied admission to foreign-born Mexicans and did not yet allow women to participate as full members. Tenayuca also participated in an after-school reading club, where she read enthusiastically about the works of Thomas Paine, Charles A. Beard, Karl Marx, and the Industrial Workers of the World, an international radical labor union. Her first foray into labor activism came in 1933, when she was inspired to join 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. The complacency she perceived on the part of the Catholic Church during the strike also deeply affected her faith.
After graduating from high school in 1934, Tenayuca found employment as an elevator operator at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio and began organizing workers alongside Mrs. W. H. Ernst, the radical 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 often found herself at odds with ILGWU leadership, especially with local union representative Rebecca Taylor, who she felt 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.
Between 1935 and 1937 Tenayuca gained increasing notoriety as the leader of several highly visible marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins. These actions were coordinated to protest a number of issues that acutely affected the ethnic Mexican community, including the unequal distribution of Work Projects Administration (WPA) jobs, the discriminatory removal of Mexican American families from WPA relief roles, and the abuse of ethnic Mexican workers by local law enforcement officials. This included illegal deportations of U. S. citizens by the United States Border Patrol (see MEXICAN AMERICANS AND REPATRIATION). Additionally, Tenayuca called for new minimum wage guidelines and petitioned WPA officials in Washington, D.C., to investigate the discriminatory practices of the Texas Relief Commission and other local agencies. 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).
By the spring of 1937 Tenayuca was the general secretary of at least ten Workers Alliance chapters representing thousands of unemployed and underemployed workers in San Antonio. Soon thereafter, she attended the Workers Alliance national convention in Milwaukee and was elected to the national executive board. During this time Tenayuca also became openly affiliated with the Communist Party. She believed the party offered the best avenue for San Antonio’s under-represented Mexican American workers, who were underemployed, underpaid, excluded from membership in most traditional unions, and received inadequate relief from government agencies.
Tenayuca married Homer Brooks, the chairman of the Communist Party of Texas, in October 1937. Eighteen months later, The Communist published the couple’s historic essay, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” the party’s official declaration on the Mexican community as a segment of the working class and national minority. Already a well-known leader in San Antonio, Tenayuca later replaced Brooks as chair of the Communist Party of Texas in 1939 and was also the Communist nominee for the United States Congress in 1938 and 1940. The pecan-shellers’ strike that began spontaneously in January 1938, however, catapulted Tenayuca to even greater heights of local, regional, and national renown.
While organizing for the Workers Alliance, Tenayuca made contact with San Antonio’s pecan shelling workers. The work force of approximately 12,000, the majority of whom were Mexican women, faced some of the harshest exploitation in the city, including sweatshop-like working conditions and extremely low wages (often less than three dollars a week). 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. When the strikers gathered at a local park they chanted “Emma, Emma,” and elected Tenayuca their official leader. The strike quickly grew to more than 10,000 workers, and the organization applied for a charter from the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a national union affiliated with the left-leaning Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The strike, one of the largest in the country, lasted for three months. Strikers were subjected to mass arrests and tear gas, and Tenayuca’s Communist Party membership was criticized by the national press. Afraid that her political ties would damage public opinion, CIO and UCAPAWA leaders decided to remove Tenayuca as strike leader. However, she remained on as the popularly-elected “unofficial” leader and continued to organize pickets, distribute flyers, and coordinate soup kitchens. Eventually, the Texas Industrial Commission agreed to investigate the strikers’ grievances, and producers agreed to pay the minimum wage established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, company owners responded by mechanizing their factory, effectively eliminating 10,000 shelling jobs over the next two years.
The negative press surrounding Tenayuca continued after the strike and reached its peak in August 1939 when San Antonio mayor and former New Deal Congressman Maury Maverick granted Tenayuca permission to hold a large Communist Party meeting at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium. On the night of the rally, a crowd of 5,000 gathered outside the auditorium to protest. When angry protesters stormed the building, Tenayuca and others were escorted to safety by police via an underground tunnel. The violent reaction, including death threats, eventually forced Tenayuca to leave San Antonio. She first went to Houston, where she worked various office jobs under the alias “Beatrice Giraud,” and attended night classes at the University of Houston. During World War II, Tenayuca attempted to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Corps but was rejected, most likely because of her Communist ties. She remained active in the party at the local level but became gradually disillusioned, especially after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. Tenayuca ultimately separated from her husband, and she formally left the Communist Party about 1946. Around that time, she moved to California, where she 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 life became a topic of intense study within the Chicano Movement, and her achievements as a pioneering female civil rights leader were recognized by scholarly organizations like the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (“Women Active in Letters and Social Change”). The once controversial figure was later embraced by the city of San Antonio 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.”
The reason that I wanted to interview Emma Tenayuca was because I had come across her name in the late 1960s when I was doing the research for my M.A. thesis on Father Carmelo A. Tranchese, S.J., who was the pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the deep West Side of San Antonio. Emma Tenayuca was a devout Catholic and lived in the West Side. She was a well-known labor organizer and a civil rights activist during the 1930s through the 1950s. She started her crusade for social justice when she was sixteen years old, and after joining a picket line strike against the Finck Cigar Company, she was arrested. Moreover, she was a fiery orator and a superb organizer and is best known for her active role in the pecan shellers’ strike of 1938. Emma Tenayuca held a Communist rally in the Municipal Auditorium in 1939 that turned into a full-blown riot. In the 1960s, she became an educator, having received an M.A. degree in Education from Our Lady of the Lake University. And, in 1982, she retired from teaching in the Bilingual Program from the Harlandale Independent School District.
Emma Tenayuca is shown in this iconic photograph in front of City Hall with a raised clenched fist.
Nonetheless, it will be thirty-four years ago this coming February 2025 that I did the interview with Emma Tenayuca, and I will never forget that wonderful and educational experience.
