Biography
Emma Beatrice Tenayuca was a Mexican-American labor leader, union organizer, and Communist activist in San Antonio, Texas. Born on December 21, 1916 in San Antonio, she was drawn into the labor movement as a teenager and was first arrested at sixteen on the picket line of the 1933 Finck Cigar Company strike. She organized with the Workers Alliance of America — leading unemployed and relief demonstrations during the Depression — and joined the Communist Party USA. In 1938 she became the public leader of the pecan shellers' strike, in which as many as 12,000 mostly Mexican-American workers walked out against wage cuts; the roughly two-month strike met with police clubbing, tear gas, and mass arrests, with about a thousand strikers jailed, Tenayuca among them. By her own account she was "arrested a number of times." In 1939, a Communist Party meeting she helped organize at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium was besieged by a mob of thousands; she was accused of inciting a riot and disturbing the peace, though the charges were dropped. Blacklisted and unable to find work, she left San Antonio, later earned degrees in California and at Our Lady of the Lake University, and taught in the Harlandale school district until her 1982 retirement. She died in San Antonio on July 23, 1999.
