Anne Lewis: As a rebellious 18-year-old, I fled to México, where I first recognized — in a very different part of the continent — the vitality of rural communities. Later, I was living in rural Appalachia, where, in the early ’90s, Mexican workers began showing up in large numbers to work on corporate farms and in small factories.

These Mexican workers suffered attacks from white workers — a Head Start center for preschool migrant children was burned to the ground — and I saw how the global economy pitted workers against each other. I wanted to explore what’s possible in terms of international solidarity. That resulted in the film Morristown: in the air and sun, a working-class critique of globalization that ended with a union victory at a chicken-processing plant in east Tennessee.

When I moved to Texas, I wanted to document oral histories. A friend clued me in to the pecan workers’ strike. The workers in this historic labor event had been ignored and shamed because they were brown and the organizers were communists.

Photo: lisc.org

Other shelling worksites had mechanized, but the Southern Pecan company found it cheaper to de-industrialize, They gave pecans to contractors who farmed the work out to Mexican and Mexican-American workers, who labored in shelling shacks or at home at all hours of the day and night. The workers made 6 cents a pound. But then the company slashed the wage to 4 cents with no warning. The workers’ indignation boiled over. At least 10,000 people went out on strike.

Their struggle became more than a strike. It was an uprising, coming from community outrage at the discrimination and super exploitation these workers were facing.

Was Emma Tenayuca a pecan worker?

No. Her grandfather had taken her to hear speeches by veterans of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, including communists and anarchists. The spark caught fire in her. She joined striking women cigar workers at the age of 16, and the violent repression of those strikers, including her own arrest, solidified her resolve to stand with workers. She joined LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, but quit because they didn’t allow in immigrants. Emma’s family had been in the US for many generations, but she saw Mexicanos as Mexicanos, regardless of which side of the border they came from.

Emma joined the Communist Party in 1937 and found her calling: organizing Mexican workers into Unemployed Councils, a Communist Party strategy to radicalize and mobilize the unemployed. She became well-known, beloved even, for her fiery speeches and uncompromising defense of working people. Based on that reputation, the pecan workers elected her to lead their strike. She was all of 21!

                                                                                                                           Photo: The Zinn Education Project

Striking workers would go on to be beaten, harassed, and tear-gassed. Emma herself was jailed several times. Later, people would ask her if she had been afraid. Her answer: “I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

Emma had three strikes against her: a woman, a Mexicana, and a Communist. How did those identifications affect her?

During the Depression years of the 1930s, Mexicanos took much of the blame for US unemployment. Deportations soared. It was a particularly hard time to win any white allies. In that political moment and with women becoming directly involved in struggle, the white patriarchs of industry and San Antonio’s officials united against Emma.

Workers also faced merciless red-baiting that stirred up priests, politicians, the police, and common thugs against them. Emma’s Communist Party affiliation would finally lead to her getting run out of San Antonio. Blacklisted, physically and spiritually exhausted, she left Texas for San Francisco, where she became a teacher. She didn’t return to Texas for more than 20 years.

When she returned, people expected her to take her position again as a radical firebrand — but she didn’t.

On one hand, some put Emma on a pedestal as a labor saint. On the other, some criticize her for ending her political activism after leaving San Antonio. But Emma was a woman, a real human being. She had a right to live her own life, rather than fulfilling the expectations of others. Isn’t that what it means to be liberated and in control of your own life?

What impact did Emma have on other women?

Today, Emma is being re-claimed by women, particularly the women of San Antonio. Her image appears all over murals, second only to the Virgen de Guadalupe! When I made the film, mostly only veterans of the strikes of the 1930s remembered her fondly. But Emma has now become an inspiration once again to an entire new generation of women activists. And Texas needs Emmas more than ever!