On the evening of January 31, 1938, hundreds of workers crowded into a San Antonio, Texas factory meeting room. Management had just announced a wage cut of up to 30%, a devastating blow to workers who were already among the lowest-paid in the United States. The atmosphere was tense and uncertain. Then a young Chicana organizer, Manuela Solis Sagar, climbed onto a table and cut through the hesitation: “Well, what are we going to do? Are you going to sit there, or are we going to strike?”

The answer came back in a roar, “Vamos a la huelga!” Within hours the decision was made. By the next morning, thousands of pecan shellers across San Antonio had walked off the job. The barrios of the city's West Side erupted into mass demonstrations as workers took to the streets in a militant display of workers’ power. What followed was nearly two months of struggle against the bosses, against the police, and against the city's corrupt political machine that would shake San Antonio to its foundations.

A city built on exploitation

To understand the eruption of 1938, it is necessary to understand what life was like on San Antonio's West Side. Between 1910 and 1930, the Mexican population in Texas more than tripled, driven north by the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and the displacement of peasants and small landholders by large-scale commercial agriculture on both sides of the border. These workers arrived in San Antonio systematically excluded from most trades and industries, funneled into the most grueling and lowest-paid work available, including pecan shelling.

By the late 1930s, the West Side resembled one of the most impoverished urban districts in the country. Families of eight or ten were crowded into two-room shacks without running water or electricity, renting for as little as one dollar a week. The pecan shelling plants themselves were overcrowded and unventilated; state health inspectors described filthy floors, broken containers, and no soap or towels. Workers were paid by the pound, just five or six cents per pound shelled, with a WPA survey finding average weekly wages of $2.73.

Julius Seligsman, the “Pecan King” whose operations supplied half the country's pecans and who reportedly paid himself a salary of $1000 a week, testified before a federal hearing that “The Mexican pecan shellers eat a good many pecans, and five cents a day is enough to support them in addition to what they eat while they work.” Respiratory illnesses, particularly tuberculosis spread by the ever-present pecan dust was rampant. Many workers brought shelling home with them in the evenings, enlisting their children to try to earn a few extra cents.

La Pasionaria: Emma Tenayuca and the Workers Alliance

“I was arrested a number of times; I never thought in terms of fear, I thought in terms of justice.” – Emma Tenayuca

The 1938 strike was the culmination of years of labor struggle and militant organizing amongst San Antonio's working class. At the center of that organizing was a young Chicana communist organizer named Emma Tenayuca.

Tenayuca had first emerged as an organizer in 1934, while still in high school, participating in strike support activities at the Fink Cigar Company, one of the low-wage, labor-intensive industries that relied heavily on young Chicana women. She was arrested at 16, the first of many times. She soon became an organizer with the Communist Party-led Unemployed Council, and helped to lead a series of struggles, supporting striking garment workers, demanding public relief for unemployed families, and defending immigrant workers threatened with deportation and repatriation. She built a reputation as an uncompromising advocate for the West Side's working class, earning her the moniker of “La Pasionaria.”

The organizational vehicle for this work was the Workers Alliance. The Workers Alliance was a national mass organization of the Communist Party. In San Antonio, the CPUSA and the Workers Alliance organized for WPA jobs and federal relief, and crucially, fought the systemic discrimination that locked Mexican Americans out of national relief programs.

As early as 1930, the local Communist Party and the Unemployed Council had organized a march of the unemployed drawing over 1000 participants, the majority of whom were of Mexican origin. Under Tenayuca's leadership, the San Antonio chapter became one of the most active in the country, staging sit-ins at City Hall, organizing mass demonstrations, confronting immigration repression, and building a network of chapters rooted in the barrios of the West Side. Through this work, the Workers Alliance elevated Tenayuca to its national executive committee, placing the young Chicana communist in the leadership of a national mass organization

In addition to her labor work, Tenayuca also made significant theoretical contributions in applying the National Question to Chicanos in the Southwest. In her 1939 article titled “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” she advanced the idea that Mexicans in the United States represented an oppressed nationality, stating that “the status of the Mexican people as an oppressed national group may be compared in a number of respects with that of the Negro today.” While she stopped short of calling for self-determination of the Chicano Nation, her analysis of Chicanos as an oppressed nationality earned her a place as one of the earliest revolutionary theoreticians of the Chicano National question.

The strike: Class war in the open

The walkout on January 31 was spontaneous. The local union leadership vacillated and opposed launching such a large-scale strike. But the workers moved anyway, and they moved toward their most trusted militant leaders. Tenayuca, alongside fellow communist organizers like Manuela Solis Sagar, helped transform the spontaneous walkout into coordinated action. Over 10,000 workers ultimately joined the strike, affiliated with Pecan Workers Local 172 of the CIO affiliated UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America). What had begun as a response to a wage cut became a social rebellion of the Chicano working class.

The city’s ruling class responded with force. Within a day of the walkout, police arrested several strike leaders, including Tenayuca and her husband Homer Brooks, both known Communist Party members. San Antonio Police Chief Owen Kilday openly justified the crackdown, declaring to the press that he “would not permit the reds to take part in the strike.” San Antonio elites maintained that the strike was an attempt to place the entire west side of San Antonio “under the red banner.”

The workers' response was equally forceful. Hundreds marched on the police station demanding Tenayuca's release. When she emerged from jail the next day, the workers elected San Antonio's most prominent communist organizer honorary strike captain by acclamation.

What followed was weeks of intensifying repression. Chief Kilday deployed over 250 police officers and firemen into the West Side, using tear gas, beatings, and mass arrest against picketers. Workers were charged with blocking sidewalks, loitering and disturbing the peace. The city jail, which critics took to calling the “black hole” of Texas, held over 1000 strikers over the course of the strike, some as young as 14. Inside the cells, workers were hosed down with cold water to break their spirits.

Organizers adapted. When picket lines were broken up for loitering, they devised rolling pickets, coordinated groups moving from plant to plant. When police targeted public property, they picketed from private lots adjacent to the factories, with the permission of homeowners.

All the forces of reaction in San Antonio united in an effort to crush the threat of the strike. The city's corrupt health department shut down CIO soup kitchens on spurious sanitary grounds. The archdiocese issued a statement defending the police beatings and condemning the strike leadership as communist. The Mexican Chamber of Commerce and the local LULAC chapter—representatives of the Mexican American aspiring petty bourgeoisie also joined in the smear campaign against the workers' movement.

Under pressure from the national CIO leadership, Tenayuca stepped back from the public face of the strike; the constant red-baiting had become a strategic liability. But in reality, she continued to run the operation: writing circulars and coordinating picket lines.

Victory, reversal, and legacy

Hearings sought by UCAPAWA president Donald Henderson before the Texas Industrial Commission gave workers a platform to testify publicly to the abuse they had endured. 14-year-old Dora Enriquez testified that she had been arrested and threatened if she returned to the picket line. 45-year-old Refugia Garcia testified that Chief Kilday had personally threatened to “split my head wide open.” The commission ultimately found that the civil rights of the striking workers had been fundamentally violated, though with no enforcement mechanism, Kilday and the bosses continued their campaign of terror.

Texas Governor James Allred eventually pushed both sides toward arbitration. On March 8, after nearly six weeks on strike, the pecan shellers returned to work pending a formal settlement. The arbitration board awarded formal union recognition and a wage increase to five-and-a-half cents per pound for pieces and six cents for halves. It was a real, if partial, victory: workers had forced the state and the bosses to respond to their demands and won.

The victory would be short-lived. The pecan operators mechanized their operations. Julius Seligsman shuttered his plants and reopened with a fraction of the workforce. Many of the workers who had fought so hard found themselves unemployed once more.

But the strike still left an enduring legacy in San Antonio and beyond. For nearly two months, over 10,000 of the most exploited workers in the country, overwhelmingly Chicana women, earning less than three dollars a week, had organized, resisted and fought back. They demonstrated that even under conditions of national oppression, violent repression and economic exploitation, the working class could fight their employers and win. That capacity had not developed spontaneously, but had been carefully built, year by year, through the patient organizing of the Workers Alliance and the militant minority of communists and labor leaders like Emma Tenayuca who led the workers in the struggle.

Today, the San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike remains a powerful reminder that the working class has never won anything without militant struggle. Faced with starvation wages, racist repression, police violence, and red-baiting, thousands of Chicano workers still organized and fought back. Their struggle shows us that militant organization, class solidarity, and communist leadership can transform workers economic grievances into collective power. At a time when workers across the country continue to face exploitation, union busting, and attacks on immigrants, the legacy of Emma Tenayuca and the pecan shellers remains not just a piece of history, but an example to follow.

#EmmaTenayuca #Labor #LaborHistory #SanAntonioTX #TX #N

Denver, CO – On June 22, eight Teamsters from Local 455 in Denver drove 200 miles south to attend the Ludlow Massacre Memorial near Trinidad, Colorado. For some, it was their first exposure to this type of history. Working class history is seldom taught in schools, and when it is, it is often taught from the perspective of the bosses.

Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), spoke on this at the memorial, saying “You can open up any textbook and find the name of the murderer, Rockefeller, but you will never find the names of the workers that bravely stood up for all working people!”

The Ludlow Massacre Memorial is held annually to serve as a reminder for working-class people of the struggles that took place to advance the labor movement. Coal miners at Ludlow were demanding better wages, an eight-hour day, less company control, a safer workplace, and the right to organize. When the miners went on strike over these issues, they were evicted from the company towns and forced to set up a colony of tents outside the mines. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who owned Colorado Fuel and Iron, hired private guards and worked with the Colorado National Guard to bring an end to the strike. The result was a massacre; tents were burned down, miners were shot, and many suffocated from the smoke of the fires. In all, 21 deaths were recorded, 11 of which were miners’ children.

The Teamsters who visited Ludlow had their own experiences of fighting the bosses. Just the day before, management called the police on the rank-and-file Teamsters for their distributing information about contractual and legal rights outside of their UPS hub. Their bosses saw workers fighting for better working conditions and tried to use force to remove them by alerting the police. The attempt did not work.

Bob Butero, the regional director of the UMWA, spoke to the crowd of people attending the memorial, stating, “You need to take this back with you, we cannot let this history die. It is up to us to keep it alive.” Teamsters Local 455 seeks to keep the history alive by returning to the Ludlow Massacre Memorial every year.

#DenverCO #CO #Labor #Teamsters #UMWA #LudlowMassacre #LaborHistory

Denver, CO – On Sunday, June 23, a group of Teamsters from Denver attended the Ludlow, Colorado memorial service in Las Animas County, almost 200 miles south of Denver. Ludlow is the site of the Ludlow Massacre, a horrific 1914 attack by the National Guard and a mine owners’ militia that resulted in approximately 21 deaths. Victims included wives and children of striking miners.

The Ludlow Massacre was the height of action of the 1913-14 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) strike in Colorado, and, as historian Howard Zinn describes, it was “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history.” Tensions were building far before the day of the massacre, however, and these tensions were rooted deeply in the struggle of the coal miners against John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colorado Fuel and Iron company.

Miners at the time were demanding better wages, an eight-hour day, less company control, and the right to organize. They also demanded a safer workplace – coal mines at the time were up to ten times as dangerous as other workplaces in the country and Colorado’s fatality rate for miners was double the national average.

Many of the families at Ludlow were European immigrants or local Chicano workers, and there were at least 24 languages spoken at the site. This diverse group was able to maintain solidarity throughout the entirety of the strike. At the memorial service, UMWA President Cecil Roberts spoke on this, noting that in the coal mines, “we are all the same.”

The strike came after a series of mining accidents where dozens of miners were killed. When their basic demands were not met, and they went on strike. At the time, miners were living in company towns outside the mine, but strikers were evicted after the strike was announced. Approximately 200 tents, housing about 1200 miners and their families, were built outside the town in response, and this became the site of the massacre. There were several incidents of violence throughout the strike leading up to the massacre, mostly perpetrated by the company and National Guard.

Mother Jones, notably, was present through the strike and was arrested at least twice in Colorado, serving prison time there. Throughout the strike, according to UMWA President Roberts, machine guns were placed along the camp and occasionally shot into the camp seemingly at random. At times, tents were destroyed through such actions, and injuries and fatalities followed.

The tensions became untenable the day after Orthodox Easter on April 19, 1914. That Sunday was spent in celebration among the miners, and a baseball game was held where even National Guardsmen participated. The day after, however, was bloody and brutal; shots rang out from both sides and company men set part of the camp on fire. Gunfire was exchanged throughout the morning. In an act of solidarity, a train conductor in a passing train stopped on the tracks separating the machine guns from the miners, blocking the bullets. By the end, however, 21 had been killed, many of whom were suffocated by smoke from the fire. After the massacre, miners engaged in armed resistance during the “Ten Days War,” where at least 50 more people died. The strike continued until December and was eventually lost by the miners.

Those who died for justice in the massacre are remembered at the memorial, while the National Guardsmen and company men who murdered them are forgotten. Of the 21 on the plaque at the memorial, 11 were children, ranging from three months old to 11 years. Many who died as a result of the brutal repression from Rockefeller’s men are nameless, forgotten to the history books, yet their example and their determination to fight for their fellow workers needs to be remembered.

The memorial service was not somber; Roberts and UMWA International District 22 Vice President Michael Dalpiaz gave rousing speeches full of righteous anger and statements of solidarity. Dalpiaz states, “We didn’t do it for any reason other than justice for coal miners and working class people.” Roberts notes that Ludlow is not in the history books in schools, but you open any book and “Rockefeller’s name is in there.”

An estimated 15 to 20 unions were represented at the memorial service, and several attendees were descendants of miners who worked at Ludlow. All were there in solidarity with the honorable fight that the Ludlow miners put up that continues to this day. As we are reminded by Mother Jones, “Above all, you must fight!” While many workers today are not living in company towns or tent colonies, all workers share so much with the brave fighters at Ludlow, and to not carry on their struggle is a betrayal of their memory. As one plaque at the memorial says, “We remember the Ludlow martyrs for the courageous stand they took so many years ago on our behalf. We forget their struggle and sacrifice at our peril.”

Ludlow may remain outside the realm of popular history books, but their fight was done for us. Let us continue the struggle, and fight on the behalf of those living 100 and more years from now, just as the Ludlow miners did. Forward with the struggle!

#DenverCO #CO #Labor #Teamsters #UWMA #LaborHistory

Milwaukee, WI – On Sunday, May 7, 150 people gathered for the annual commemoration of the Bay View Massacre. 137 years ago, in May 1886, over 14,000 union workers gathered outside the Milwaukee Iron Company Rolling Mill in demand of an eight-hour workday. These unionists had shut down every single business in the city of Milwaukee except the rolling mills in Bay View. As they were marching towards the mills, Governor Jeremiah Rusk ordered 250 national guard members be posted outside to prevent any striker from entering – these orders included shooting the marchers on sight and resulted in the death of seven people and many others injured.

This year’s commemoration saw new faces in leading roles as the Wisconsin Labor History Society sought to bring in young union leaders of Milwaukee. Piper Hogan, a militant member of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals and active within the Young Workers Committee of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, was the host for the event and stressed the importance of honoring labor history events in our community as a reminder that workers’ rights are still under attack today. There was a powerful balance between Piper’s speaking and the theatrics of the reenactment of the tragedy, which included 20-foot tall puppets.

The event concluded with a speech by Alan Chavoya, a member of American Federation of Teachers Local 212 and the outreach chair for the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which represented the Coalition to Save Saint Francis Hospital and their struggle to reopen the labor and delivery unit there. He connected the struggles of the past to the struggles of the present.

“Thousands marched, and what did the Rolling Mill do? They deployed the local militia, killing seven people. Rolling Mill’s legacy is one that is aligned with violent repression of workers in our city. Whether it was in the 1920s and 30s when the police would be deployed against the workers on strike, or the police killing working-class Black and Latino people in Milwaukee. That’s their history,” Chavoya said.

He continued, “Our history is the history of the thousands of brave workers who led the struggle 137 years ago. Of the seven martyrs. This is the history that the Coalition to Save Saint Francis Hospital is carrying forward.”

Chavoya spoke on how the health care company Ascension has already created unsafe working conditions by severely understaffing its hospitals, which in turn creates an unsafe hospital for the community. Ascension has a history of closing down departments in an effort to cut costs – with labor and delivery units being the first department to shut down at other facilities before the company shuts down the entire hospital. Alan said the coalition demands Ascension reopen the labor and delivery unit at Saint Francis and will refuse to allow the company to shut down access to any other services at the hospital.

“So, as we continue with today’s commemoration of the people killed in the Bay View Massacre, we must recognize,” Chavoya said, “that the major victories in our city to advance the interest of our people come from organized workers and community organizations forging an alliance capable of fighting back!”

#MilwaukeeWI #laborHistory