PECANS & PROTEST

Anne Lewis comes out of a movement to make media that create opportunities for social change. Documenting the lives and struggles of working people, particularly in Appalachia, her award-winning films illuminate their grit, courage, and creativity. Lewis brings to the foreground the stories of those usually in the background. Descriptions of her many films appear on her annelewis.org website.

Your film, A Strike and an Uprising! (in Texas), explores the 1938 Mexicana pecan workers strike and its leader, the 22-year-old Emma Tenayuca. What sparked your interest in this story?

Anne Lewis: As a rebellious 18-year-old, I fled to Mexico, 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.

At the same time, factory work was shifting to the maquiladora area of Mexico. People from the Highlander Center and the labor community, including me, were concerned about the potential for violence. We organized trips of US workers to Mexico to see what had happened to their jobs. We 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 factory at a chicken-processing plant in East Tennessee.

When I moved to Texas, a union sister told me about the pecan workers’ strike in 1938 which involved 10,000 workers, many undocumented. My work partner Laura Varela and I went to Senior Centers to find workers who had been part of the strike.

What situation did the pecan workers face?

As one of the former pecan workers told me, “Pecans are good to eat but, they are hard to shell.” Other shelling companies had mechanized, but the Southern Pecan Company found that people were cheaper than machines.

The struggle was centered on the west side of San Antonio where Mexican and Mexican American women, elderly men and children as young as ten 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. At least 10,000 workers went out on strike. They were organized by the CIO cannery workers union, UCAPAWA, one of the few unions to organize black and brown women in the country.

Their struggle became more than a strike. It was an uprising of a people, coming from community outrage at the discrimination and super exploitation these workers were facing. The Chief of Police said that he was trying to stop a “revolution.”

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 excluded immigrants. Emma’s family had been in the US for many generations, but she saw Mexicans and Mexican Americans all as Mexicanos/as, regardless of which side of the border they came from.

Emma joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was part of the united front, organizing Mexican workers into Unemployed Councils. 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 be the spokesperson for their strike. She was all of 22!

Striking workers were 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.”

After more than a month of violence, Texas Governor Allred pressured the companies and the union to enter arbitration, which finally produced a pay increase for the workers. The strike became a landmark case for both the rights of women and Mexican workers. Along with similar labor strikes, it influenced the passing of the Fair Labor Relations Act of 1938 and the first minimum wage laws.

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, Mexican workers took much of the blame for US unemployment. Deportations soared.

In that political moment and with women becoming directly involved in struggle, the white patriarchs of industry, the Catholic Church, the police and most of San Antonio’s political officials united against Emma.

Tenayuca’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 the 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 reclaimed by women, particularly the women of San Antonio. Her image appears on murals, fist in the air. When we made the film, mostly only veterans of the strikes of the 1930s remembered her fondly. But Emma has become an inspiration once again to an entire new generation of women activists.