Marker to honor labor leader
Celebration is today at Milam Park.
By Elaine Ayala, EXPRESS-NEWS STAFF
Updated 01:35 a.m., Wednesday, December 21, 2011
- Emma Tenayuca led a strike by pecan shellers in 1938, when she was 21. The strike lasted three months, and the number of strikers and supporters reached 12,000.Photo: Institute Of Texan Cultures
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What: A Texas historic marker honoring San Antonio labor leader Emma Tenayuca will be dedicated.
When: Father Eddie Bernal will celebrate a Mass at 11:15 a.m., followed at noon by the dedication, hosted by the Bexar County Historical Commission and Tenayuca's relatives.
Where: Milam Park, 500 W. Houston St.
San Antonio activist Emma Tenayuca, who endured death threats and blacklisting for her central role in the city's largest-ever strike, will be honored with a Texas historic marker at Milam Park today.
The celebration, beginning at 11:15 a.m. with an open-air Mass, falls on what would have been Tenayuca's 95th birthday and almost 74 years since the historic pecan shellers strike of 1938.
Tenayuca died in 1999.
“We're very proud of the courage she had and that there is now recognition of the personal stands she took at such a young age,” said Sharyll Teneyuca, a San Antonio attorney and niece of the labor leader. She spells her surname differently than her aunt's. “She was 21 when she led the pecan shellers strike, and she was organizing long before that.”
State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte will take part in the dedication of the 23- by 42-inch cast-aluminum marker, the state's largest size. It's in the southwestern section of the park facing Christus Santa Rosa Hospital.
It's one of more than 15,000 Texas historic markers commemorating lasting contributions to state history and is among 250 to 300 erected this year, said Bob Brinkman, coordinator of the Texas Historical Commission's Historical Markers Program.
Tenayuca's marker credits her with leading “a movement that fought deplorable working conditions, discrimination and unfair wages on behalf of the city's working poor.”
It does not note that the number of strikers and their supporters reached 12,000 and lasted for three months.
It also doesn't note that while the strike helped lead to passage of a minimum wage law, it ultimately was unsuccessful because the Southern Pecan Shelling Co. mechanized its operations, leading to thousands of layoffs.
“The strike was one of the first successful actions in the Mexican American struggle for political and social justice,” the marker says.
Most of the strikers were Mexican American women.
Tenayuca, unable to find work after the strike, left San Antonio and rebuilt her life in California, where she earned an undergraduate degree.
Her departure followed a 1939 riot against a Texas Communist Party meeting at Municipal Auditorium that she attended.
According to accounts, angry protesters — among them leaders and members of the Ku Klux Klan, veterans groups and the Catholic Church — rioted after hearing those inside sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Tenayuca returned to San Antonio in the 1960s, earned a master's degree and taught in the Harlandale Independent School District until retiring in 1982.
Brinkman credited a staff historian who read an entry in the Handbook of Texas Online for suggesting a tribute to Tenayuca as part of the commission's Undertold Markers Program, an effort that identifies subjects “that aren't well represented in the marker program,” he said.
Brinkman said the commission already had designated as “undertold” the rise of the Texas labor movement in early-20th-century Texas.
So far, more than 70 subjects have been recognized in the Undertold Markers Program, he said.
The site of Tenayuca's marker at Milam Park bears significance to her life and work.
Historian Felix Almaraz of the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Bexar County Historical Commission said that during Tenayuca's early life, the park was known as La Plaza del Zacate.
“That was the original ‘West Side' of the city,” he said. As travelers made their way into town along Buena Vista Street with their horses and livestock, they'd tether and feed them there, he said.
Zacate is the Spanish word for grass or hay.
Over time, the plaza grew into a marketplace of both products and ideas and blossomed during the Mexican Revolution, when refugees poured into the city. Speeches were made there, stories from La Prensa were read aloud, and discussion and debate ensued, Almaraz said.
The seeds of Tenayuca's political activism were sown there, too. In 1933, at just 16, she was arrested as part of a strike against the Finck Cigar Co. in San Antonio.
Her life has been the subject of articles, tributes, portraits, murals and a play. Sharyll Teneyuca and San Antonio writer Carmen Tafolla wrote a children's book, “That's Not Fair: Emma Tenayuca's Struggle for Justice/ No Es Justo: La Lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la Justicia,” in 2008.
Teneyuca said she and Tafolla are working on a biography and screenplay of the labor leader's life.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Marker-to-honor-labor-leader-2416153.php#ixzz1hBf36C3W
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