The mainstay of San Antonio's Mexicans used to be the pecan-shelling industry. As many as twelve thousand were employed at the peak of the season. The pecans were picked and doled out to the shellers, who took them home and plucked the meat out by hand. Whole families, including children, toiled over rattling piles of pecans. They were paid by the shell, and averaged a little over $1.50 apiece for a fifty-four-hour week.
Then, about the same time Mayor Quin's men were running the chili queens off the plazas, a city ordinance prohibited pecan shelling at home. The Wage-and-Hour Law decreed that pecan shellers should be paid a minimum of twenty-five cents an hour. So the pecan companies put in machines to do the work. The shellers who remain now make a good deal more money. But there are eight thousand fewer shellers.
There were some bitter strikes—among the pecan shellers in the years between 1932 and 1939, when these difficult readjustments were being made. Their leader was a fiery little Mexican virago scarcely out of her teens: Emma Tenayuca. Emma was no bigger than a minute. She stood 5 feet 1½ inches in her stockinged feet, weighed 108 pounds. At her hour of greatest glory in 1939 she had just turned twenty-three. She was a self-confessed Communist, and a flashing, jet-eyed, rapturous orator. Her followers called her La Pasionaria, after the Communist Passion Flower of the Spanish Civil War.
Emma grew up in a comparatively comfortable home on the Mexican side of the Creek. She was a student at big Brackenridge High School. At fourteen she read Darwin's Origin of Species and was an enthusiastic convert to the doctrine of materialism. Then one of her liberal teachers gave her Tom Paine's passionate essays on human freedom. Emma was romantic, intense, and inflammable. By the time she left high school she had abandoned her Catholic faith and proclaimed herself a Communist. She set to work organizing the poorer Mexicans around her own neighborhood.
Now, the South has never been a very fertile field for Communism. The Southern States—and especially Texas—constitute a last-ditch stronghold of defiant individualism. Even the Negroes, marked by the Third International as the spearhead of Communism in the South, never paid much mind to it. They are individualists too. If there's anything a Negro doesn't care for, it's discipline of the severe kind that emanates from Moscow. It is largely because of Southern people's strong distaste for anything tinged with Red that the CIO never made much headway in the South.
Of all the improbable spots you might have picked, San Antonio is the only city in the South where Communism once looked—for a while—like a going concern. San Antonio has virtually no industry and only a smattering of Negroes. But it has a tremendous bloc of ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-understood Mexicans. They too are individualists. They take no more readily to the stern regimentation of the Kremlin's workers than do Negroes or Anglo-Saxons. But there is an age-old tradition of communal living among the Indians of Mexico that bears a strong surface resemblance to Communism.
At the time when Emma Tenayuca was recruiting her followers among San Antonio's Mexicans, Lázaro Cárdenas was President of Mexico. He was no Communist either. Cárdenas was rather more like a mystical combination of Franklin Roosevelt and the Holy Father. He had an almost super-natural faith in the old ways of the Aztecs. The left wing of his Party of the Mexican Revolution was led by a slender, agile labor organizer, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, head of the powerful Federation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM had tendrils reaching into Texas and a vague affiliation with the CIO. Lombardo had paid a visit to Moscow, and his ideology had a definite Soviet bias.
It was in this hopeful atmosphere of international solidarity for the laboring class that Emma Tenayuca did her missionary work among the pecan shellers. Her success was extraordinary. She soon took over the San Antonio chapter of the Workers' Alliance. At her musty hall—formerly a funeral parlor—on West Travis Street, a pebble's toss from Santa Rosa Hospital, Emma made inflammatory speeches, crying: "They can stand me up against a wall and fill my body with bullets, but my blood will still protect the people!"
Heavy-handed policemen several times raided the hall and did a thorough job of wrecking it. (After one raid, Emma sued the city for thirty-seven thousand dollars.) They arrested Emma regularly, twice kept her overnight in jail. But Emma Tenayuca went right on agitating. Most San Antonio citizens maintained a state of benevolent neutrality in the midst of these goings-on. Emma was pretty, and her revolutionary activities entertained them. They didn't take Emma and her agitating very seriously.
Neither did the CIO, for that matter. They were trying to organize the pecan shellers, not inaugurate the world revolution in San Antonio. Their most effective missionary was Father Juan Hernandez Lopez, a handsome, raven-locked Redemptorist priest who did his own proselytizing for labor from the obscure little Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in the Mexican Quarter. But Emma's methods were more exciting. Her disciples stormed the San Antonio Office of the Public Works Administration, staged a sit-down strike at Police Headquarters, once took over City Hall for a couple of hours.
In the fall of 1937 Emma married a thirty-one-year-old Houston Communist with fair hair and bug eyes, Homer Brooks. He had once run for governor of Texas on a Communist ticket. Emma went on calling herself Emma Tenayuca, in accordance with the best taste in Communist circles, and kept on with her work in San Antonio. Every week or two she would run over to Houston and spend a couple of nights discussing Karl Marx with her husband. After a year of that stern regimen Emma had a nervous breakdown. She went off to New York to rest and study Communist Party methods. When she came back to San Antonio her mind was filled with big things. She wanted to organize a demonstration so impressive that it would earn her a place in the Party's national councils.
One fine, sultry day in August 1939, Emma Tenayuca went around to the office of Maury Maverick. (He was Mayor of San Antonio at that time.) She wanted a permit to use the Municipal Auditorium for a Communist rally. Maury's assistant gave it to her, charging the usual fee of ten dollars. Emma put up inflammatory posters advertising the rally. She sent for Husband Brooks to make a speech, imported several professional Communist organizers for the occasion. A gigantic picture of Joseph Stalin was put up in the Auditorium, and Emma Tenayuca rounded up her faithful band of Mexican followers.
But the atmosphere for Communism in San Antonio had undergone an unexpected change. On August 19, a week before the meeting, Russia had signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Even the most provincial Texan knew that World War II was scheduled to begin at any minute. The Municipal Auditorium was dedicated to San Antonio's World War I dead. Patriotic societies like the American Legion decided that Emma Tenayuca had gone far enough. They protested to Mayor Maverick. Maury said—not unreasonably—that Emma had hired the hall and that he had no right to interfere with the rally. Just as a precaution, he decided to throw a stout cordon of police around the Auditorium. Reserves armed with nightsticks, guns, and lengths of rubber hose were stationed inside the hall.
At sundown, hours before the meeting was to begin, ominous crowds began to gather in the plaza outside the massive, Moorish Auditorium building. Police locked and barred all but one door, and formed a solid phalanx in front of it. By eight o'clock the milling crowd had grown to six or seven thousand ranchers, veterans, housewives, pig-tailed schoolgirls, skinny boys in high-heel boots. They were singing: "Hang Maury Maverick to a sour apple tree." (Maury had sensibly decided to stay at home.) Inside the hall were eight somber Negroes, thirty-eight assorted Anglo-Americans, and sixty-two frightened Mexicans.
Promptly at eight-ten, Emma was whisked into the hall by a side door, holding her husband tightly by the hand. She was scared too. They joined the comrades on the platform. The chairman started to speak. Word filtered to the crowd outside that the meeting had begun, and all hell broke loose. There were shouts of "Kill the dirty Reds!" and "Down with Hitler!" Bricks and rocks began to fly. People poured in through the windows, battling with policemen in the hall. The Communists inside melted away, Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks were spirited downstairs to a basement exit in the rear and hustled out in the center of a police guard.
But the riot had just started. A squad of husky veterans broke through the police lines at the door and were turned back by a fireman wielding a hose. Somebody cut the hose. Policemen on the roof tossed tear-gas grenades down into the crowd, but the brisk breeze blew the gas away. Stones hurled with deadly aim knocked policemen over like ten-pins. Chief Ray Ashworth shouted over the loudspeaker: "The meeting's over! Please go home." A tall priest, Father Valente, yelled from the Auditorium steps: "Go home! The meeting is over, the Reds are on their way to Russia, and Maury Maverick is out of town!" But the crowd surged forward.
When the doors began to give, the police abandoned the struggle. They let the rioters stream into the hall. Legionnaires turned the meeting into a "victory rally" of their own, sent a parade of speakers up on the platform to denounce Mayor Maverick, the Communists, and all "alien isms." At midnight the celebration was still going on in San Antonio's downtown streets. Even Negroes and Mexicans were huzzaing lustily for Americanism. That was the last anybody ever heard of Emma Tenayuca or Communism in San Antonio.
You might think from this episode that the Mexicans are a rowdy, subversive lot. Well, they are not. It just happened that these Mexicans were hungry and ignorant and confused by all the big talk of revolution in the world. San Antonio has a good deal better than its share of casual crime, and most of the crimes are committed by Mexicans. But you never see Mexicans working up a turbulent hullaballoo like the riot at the Auditorium. The crimes they commit are simple, personal, and usually among themselves. They are the same outbursts of individual violence that you would find in any Mexican city—Puebla, for instance.
In a dark alley somewhere, for reasons of his own, Enrique Gonzalez puts a knife between the ribs of Francisco Zamora, or Margarita Valdez takes a pot shot at her lover, Angel Solís. These are the petty crimes of a nervous, destitute people. They are no more desperate—though somewhat more common—than the sudden assassinations among Anglo-American gamblers, ranchers, and policemen. San Antonio is scarcely a law-abiding city, any way you look at it. On the whole, its Mexicans are as rational and gentle as any group of San Antonio citizens—maybe a little more so.
A potent force for good, in a more worldly way than Father Carmelo Tranchese's, is Ignacio Lozano, who owns and edits the Spanish-language daily, La Prensa. Lozano is a gray-haired, scholarly gentleman who studied journalism at the University of Missouri. Besides La Prensa, he owns La Opinion in Los Angeles. Both are good papers from any point of view. La Prensa is unquestionably the best newspaper in San Antonio—better than Hearst's Light or the Express and Evening News of the Huntress family. But of course nobody reads it except Mexicans. And it's hard to see how Lozano finds enough advertising among his Mexican readers to keep going at all.
Lozano's papers have been barred in Mexico on three or four occasions. He used to have a big circulation in northern Mexico, and when he lost it he was in imminent danger of going broke. But he has somehow managed to keep both papers on their feet. Lozano is a moderate, eminently reasonable editor with a wider international outlook than most Texas newspapermen. He crusades for the United States against Mexican prejudice, for Mexico against Anglo-American prejudice, for his Tejanos against prejudices on both sides of the border. Lozano is the spokesman of the Texas Mexicans.
It would be logical to assume that Lozano and his 130,000 fellow Mexicans wield tremendous political power in San Antonio. They do not, for a variety of reasons. One is that the Mexicans are generally too poor or ignorant or indifferent to care how the city is run. Another is that they can rarely afford to pay the poll tax which is the first qualification for voting in San Antonio. (If they are "reliable," though, the bosses pay it for them.) But the main reason is that they have long ago learned through grim experience that the Anglo-Americans intend to run San Antonio anyhow, and that the safe and sensible thing is to let them run it.
By playing politics with the machine that rules the city, a Tex-Mexican can garner a few scraps of cheap patronage and protection for his people. If he tries to gain some more substantial benefits by making his voice heard at the polls, the Anglo-Saxons rise up in a body, and the Mexicans get nothing. So the Mexicans keep quiet and let their Caucasian brothers rule the city.
Green Peyton, San Antonio, City in the Sun, 1946
Then, about the same time Mayor Quin's men were running the chili queens off the plazas, a city ordinance prohibited pecan shelling at home. The Wage-and-Hour Law decreed that pecan shellers should be paid a minimum of twenty-five cents an hour. So the pecan companies put in machines to do the work. The shellers who remain now make a good deal more money. But there are eight thousand fewer shellers.
There were some bitter strikes—among the pecan shellers in the years between 1932 and 1939, when these difficult readjustments were being made. Their leader was a fiery little Mexican virago scarcely out of her teens: Emma Tenayuca. Emma was no bigger than a minute. She stood 5 feet 1½ inches in her stockinged feet, weighed 108 pounds. At her hour of greatest glory in 1939 she had just turned twenty-three. She was a self-confessed Communist, and a flashing, jet-eyed, rapturous orator. Her followers called her La Pasionaria, after the Communist Passion Flower of the Spanish Civil War.
Emma grew up in a comparatively comfortable home on the Mexican side of the Creek. She was a student at big Brackenridge High School. At fourteen she read Darwin's Origin of Species and was an enthusiastic convert to the doctrine of materialism. Then one of her liberal teachers gave her Tom Paine's passionate essays on human freedom. Emma was romantic, intense, and inflammable. By the time she left high school she had abandoned her Catholic faith and proclaimed herself a Communist. She set to work organizing the poorer Mexicans around her own neighborhood.
Now, the South has never been a very fertile field for Communism. The Southern States—and especially Texas—constitute a last-ditch stronghold of defiant individualism. Even the Negroes, marked by the Third International as the spearhead of Communism in the South, never paid much mind to it. They are individualists too. If there's anything a Negro doesn't care for, it's discipline of the severe kind that emanates from Moscow. It is largely because of Southern people's strong distaste for anything tinged with Red that the CIO never made much headway in the South.
Of all the improbable spots you might have picked, San Antonio is the only city in the South where Communism once looked—for a while—like a going concern. San Antonio has virtually no industry and only a smattering of Negroes. But it has a tremendous bloc of ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-understood Mexicans. They too are individualists. They take no more readily to the stern regimentation of the Kremlin's workers than do Negroes or Anglo-Saxons. But there is an age-old tradition of communal living among the Indians of Mexico that bears a strong surface resemblance to Communism.
At the time when Emma Tenayuca was recruiting her followers among San Antonio's Mexicans, Lázaro Cárdenas was President of Mexico. He was no Communist either. Cárdenas was rather more like a mystical combination of Franklin Roosevelt and the Holy Father. He had an almost super-natural faith in the old ways of the Aztecs. The left wing of his Party of the Mexican Revolution was led by a slender, agile labor organizer, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, head of the powerful Federation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM had tendrils reaching into Texas and a vague affiliation with the CIO. Lombardo had paid a visit to Moscow, and his ideology had a definite Soviet bias.
It was in this hopeful atmosphere of international solidarity for the laboring class that Emma Tenayuca did her missionary work among the pecan shellers. Her success was extraordinary. She soon took over the San Antonio chapter of the Workers' Alliance. At her musty hall—formerly a funeral parlor—on West Travis Street, a pebble's toss from Santa Rosa Hospital, Emma made inflammatory speeches, crying: "They can stand me up against a wall and fill my body with bullets, but my blood will still protect the people!"
Heavy-handed policemen several times raided the hall and did a thorough job of wrecking it. (After one raid, Emma sued the city for thirty-seven thousand dollars.) They arrested Emma regularly, twice kept her overnight in jail. But Emma Tenayuca went right on agitating. Most San Antonio citizens maintained a state of benevolent neutrality in the midst of these goings-on. Emma was pretty, and her revolutionary activities entertained them. They didn't take Emma and her agitating very seriously.
Neither did the CIO, for that matter. They were trying to organize the pecan shellers, not inaugurate the world revolution in San Antonio. Their most effective missionary was Father Juan Hernandez Lopez, a handsome, raven-locked Redemptorist priest who did his own proselytizing for labor from the obscure little Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in the Mexican Quarter. But Emma's methods were more exciting. Her disciples stormed the San Antonio Office of the Public Works Administration, staged a sit-down strike at Police Headquarters, once took over City Hall for a couple of hours.
In the fall of 1937 Emma married a thirty-one-year-old Houston Communist with fair hair and bug eyes, Homer Brooks. He had once run for governor of Texas on a Communist ticket. Emma went on calling herself Emma Tenayuca, in accordance with the best taste in Communist circles, and kept on with her work in San Antonio. Every week or two she would run over to Houston and spend a couple of nights discussing Karl Marx with her husband. After a year of that stern regimen Emma had a nervous breakdown. She went off to New York to rest and study Communist Party methods. When she came back to San Antonio her mind was filled with big things. She wanted to organize a demonstration so impressive that it would earn her a place in the Party's national councils.
One fine, sultry day in August 1939, Emma Tenayuca went around to the office of Maury Maverick. (He was Mayor of San Antonio at that time.) She wanted a permit to use the Municipal Auditorium for a Communist rally. Maury's assistant gave it to her, charging the usual fee of ten dollars. Emma put up inflammatory posters advertising the rally. She sent for Husband Brooks to make a speech, imported several professional Communist organizers for the occasion. A gigantic picture of Joseph Stalin was put up in the Auditorium, and Emma Tenayuca rounded up her faithful band of Mexican followers.
But the atmosphere for Communism in San Antonio had undergone an unexpected change. On August 19, a week before the meeting, Russia had signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Even the most provincial Texan knew that World War II was scheduled to begin at any minute. The Municipal Auditorium was dedicated to San Antonio's World War I dead. Patriotic societies like the American Legion decided that Emma Tenayuca had gone far enough. They protested to Mayor Maverick. Maury said—not unreasonably—that Emma had hired the hall and that he had no right to interfere with the rally. Just as a precaution, he decided to throw a stout cordon of police around the Auditorium. Reserves armed with nightsticks, guns, and lengths of rubber hose were stationed inside the hall.
At sundown, hours before the meeting was to begin, ominous crowds began to gather in the plaza outside the massive, Moorish Auditorium building. Police locked and barred all but one door, and formed a solid phalanx in front of it. By eight o'clock the milling crowd had grown to six or seven thousand ranchers, veterans, housewives, pig-tailed schoolgirls, skinny boys in high-heel boots. They were singing: "Hang Maury Maverick to a sour apple tree." (Maury had sensibly decided to stay at home.) Inside the hall were eight somber Negroes, thirty-eight assorted Anglo-Americans, and sixty-two frightened Mexicans.
Promptly at eight-ten, Emma was whisked into the hall by a side door, holding her husband tightly by the hand. She was scared too. They joined the comrades on the platform. The chairman started to speak. Word filtered to the crowd outside that the meeting had begun, and all hell broke loose. There were shouts of "Kill the dirty Reds!" and "Down with Hitler!" Bricks and rocks began to fly. People poured in through the windows, battling with policemen in the hall. The Communists inside melted away, Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks were spirited downstairs to a basement exit in the rear and hustled out in the center of a police guard.
But the riot had just started. A squad of husky veterans broke through the police lines at the door and were turned back by a fireman wielding a hose. Somebody cut the hose. Policemen on the roof tossed tear-gas grenades down into the crowd, but the brisk breeze blew the gas away. Stones hurled with deadly aim knocked policemen over like ten-pins. Chief Ray Ashworth shouted over the loudspeaker: "The meeting's over! Please go home." A tall priest, Father Valente, yelled from the Auditorium steps: "Go home! The meeting is over, the Reds are on their way to Russia, and Maury Maverick is out of town!" But the crowd surged forward.
When the doors began to give, the police abandoned the struggle. They let the rioters stream into the hall. Legionnaires turned the meeting into a "victory rally" of their own, sent a parade of speakers up on the platform to denounce Mayor Maverick, the Communists, and all "alien isms." At midnight the celebration was still going on in San Antonio's downtown streets. Even Negroes and Mexicans were huzzaing lustily for Americanism. That was the last anybody ever heard of Emma Tenayuca or Communism in San Antonio.
You might think from this episode that the Mexicans are a rowdy, subversive lot. Well, they are not. It just happened that these Mexicans were hungry and ignorant and confused by all the big talk of revolution in the world. San Antonio has a good deal better than its share of casual crime, and most of the crimes are committed by Mexicans. But you never see Mexicans working up a turbulent hullaballoo like the riot at the Auditorium. The crimes they commit are simple, personal, and usually among themselves. They are the same outbursts of individual violence that you would find in any Mexican city—Puebla, for instance.
In a dark alley somewhere, for reasons of his own, Enrique Gonzalez puts a knife between the ribs of Francisco Zamora, or Margarita Valdez takes a pot shot at her lover, Angel Solís. These are the petty crimes of a nervous, destitute people. They are no more desperate—though somewhat more common—than the sudden assassinations among Anglo-American gamblers, ranchers, and policemen. San Antonio is scarcely a law-abiding city, any way you look at it. On the whole, its Mexicans are as rational and gentle as any group of San Antonio citizens—maybe a little more so.
A potent force for good, in a more worldly way than Father Carmelo Tranchese's, is Ignacio Lozano, who owns and edits the Spanish-language daily, La Prensa. Lozano is a gray-haired, scholarly gentleman who studied journalism at the University of Missouri. Besides La Prensa, he owns La Opinion in Los Angeles. Both are good papers from any point of view. La Prensa is unquestionably the best newspaper in San Antonio—better than Hearst's Light or the Express and Evening News of the Huntress family. But of course nobody reads it except Mexicans. And it's hard to see how Lozano finds enough advertising among his Mexican readers to keep going at all.
Lozano's papers have been barred in Mexico on three or four occasions. He used to have a big circulation in northern Mexico, and when he lost it he was in imminent danger of going broke. But he has somehow managed to keep both papers on their feet. Lozano is a moderate, eminently reasonable editor with a wider international outlook than most Texas newspapermen. He crusades for the United States against Mexican prejudice, for Mexico against Anglo-American prejudice, for his Tejanos against prejudices on both sides of the border. Lozano is the spokesman of the Texas Mexicans.
It would be logical to assume that Lozano and his 130,000 fellow Mexicans wield tremendous political power in San Antonio. They do not, for a variety of reasons. One is that the Mexicans are generally too poor or ignorant or indifferent to care how the city is run. Another is that they can rarely afford to pay the poll tax which is the first qualification for voting in San Antonio. (If they are "reliable," though, the bosses pay it for them.) But the main reason is that they have long ago learned through grim experience that the Anglo-Americans intend to run San Antonio anyhow, and that the safe and sensible thing is to let them run it.
By playing politics with the machine that rules the city, a Tex-Mexican can garner a few scraps of cheap patronage and protection for his people. If he tries to gain some more substantial benefits by making his voice heard at the polls, the Anglo-Saxons rise up in a body, and the Mexicans get nothing. So the Mexicans keep quiet and let their Caucasian brothers rule the city.
Green Peyton, San Antonio, City in the Sun, 1946
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