Twelve Thousand Women, Three Months, One Machine: San Antonio, 1938

On January 31, 1938, the women of San Antonio's West Side shell houses put down their pecans and walked out.

There were roughly 12,000 of them, nearly all Mexican-American, nearly all women. They worked for the Southern Pecan Shelling Company and a cluster of smaller operators, stripping pecan meat from shells by hand in rooms with no ventilation. Tuberculosis rates in that workforce were among the highest of any industrial workforce in the country. Wages had been cut in 1934 to five or six cents per pound. Some workers took home less than two dollars a week.

Emma Tenayuca was 21 years old. She had been organizing in San Antonio since she was 16, when she was arrested at the Finck Cigar strike in 1933. By 1938 she was a leader of the Workers Alliance, which organized unemployed and WPA workers throughout the city, and a member of the Communist Party. She could speak to the pecan workers in Spanish and in English, and she had already learned what it costs to stand in front of a boss.

The workers elected her strike chair. She led the picket lines.

Three months on the line

The strike held from the end of January through late March into early April. Police used tear gas on picketers. More than a thousand strikers were arrested. The city's shell houses tried to bring in replacement workers and failed.

The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) came in as the CIO affiliate to organize the workers formally. Its national president, Donald Henderson, then maneuvered Tenayuca out of the leadership. The reason was her Communist Party membership, which the CIO judged a political liability. The workers had chosen her; the international removed her. That is the record.

Workers won an arbitrated wage increase, restoring rates to roughly what they had been before the 1934 cuts. They went back to work. The strike was over. They had held for three months against a company with far more resources and a city government that sent police with gas canisters rather than inspectors to the unventilated rooms.

Then Congress passed a wage law

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. For a hand sheller earning five cents per pound, even at the restored rate, that minimum was nearly unreachable in the shell houses without a radical restructuring of the work.

The Southern Pecan Shelling Company chose not to restructure. It mechanized. Shelling machines existed; the only reason to keep 12,000 women at the benches had been that human hands were cheaper. Once Congress set a floor under the price of human hands, the calculation changed. By 1940 roughly 10,000 of the 12,000 jobs had been eliminated.

The workers won the fight against the boss. The boss used the law the workers thought was theirs to hand their jobs to machines.

What Tenayuca cost

After the strike, Emma Tenayuca organized a Communist Party rally at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium on August 25, 1939. A mob estimated at 5,000 people stormed the building. Police were present. They escorted Tenayuca out through a back exit and let the mob have the rest. She could not find housing or employment in San Antonio after that night. She left. She later earned a graduate degree and taught school in San Francisco for decades.

She came back to San Antonio in her later years and received some measure of public recognition before her death in 1999. The shell houses are long gone.

The women who held the line for three months in 1938 won something real on the floor of a business that was killing them slowly. They were then displaced, underpaid on the way to the door, and largely left out of the labor history that gets told about the New Deal era. Their strike chair was hounded out of the city she had organized since she was a teenager.

The pecans still grow in Texas. Nobody shells them by hand.

Sources

• Emma Tenayuca (Texas State Historical Association Handbook of Texas)
• Pecan Shellers Strike (Texas State Historical Association Handbook of Texas)
• Emma Tenayuca, AFL-CIO America's Unions
• Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 106-116