Emma Tenayuca was still a teenager when she started organizing for equality in her native San Antonio, Texas. Only a few years later, at the age of twenty-one, she led 12,000 pecan shellers — mostly Mexican American women — out on strike, exhibiting a passion that would eventually make her a target of the Ku Klux Klan and cement her in radical labor history forever.
Today Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), acting under the belligerent and discriminatory designs of the Trump administration’s Stephen Miller, boasts of over two hundred apprehensions in San Antonio since the nationwide kidnapping program “Operation At Large” began. These state-backed abductions and the renewal of hate-filled nativism are an occasion to remember Tenayuca’s brave militancy.
Tenayuca was born in San Antonio in 1916 against the backdrop of the globally reverberant Mexican Revolution. Her childhood was molded by the extreme poverty of the Great Depression and the mass expulsion of millions of Mexicans — a process given the name “repatriation” — from the United States back to Mexico. The nationalism of the era reached a fever pitch, with qualities that are familiar today, such as the portrayal of foreigners as seditious traitors and social contaminants.
The radical milieu of early twentieth-century San Antonio, which included Tenayuca’s parents and grandparents, congregated in what is today called Market Square. There they took these world-historic events and made meaning of them in ideological debates, active street chatter, and heated discussions. It was here that a young Emma was exposed to a militant ferment of organized laborers engaged in coeducation through newspapers and collective study. It was not uncommon for socialists, anarchists, and Mexican revolutionaries to make speeches to rapt crowds.
Tenayuca’s first foray into organizational politics came in high school with her membership in the League of United Latin American…
Auteur: Alex Birnel
