"Por la raza y para la raza": A Look at Tejana Activists, 1900-1998

Yolanda Chávez Leyva

September 16, 1998

presented at

UT San Antonio Hispanic Heritage Month

 
 
Introduction

 I am very pleased to be here today on el diez y seis de septiembre, Mexican independence day,  to share some stories with you about five Tejana activists: Jovita Idar of Laredo, Emma Tenayuca of San Antonio, Graciela Sánchez and Petra Mata also of San Antonio, and Cecilia Rodriguez of El Paso. Each woman crossed borders in her activism, crossing borders literally as in the case of Jovita Idar who in the 1910s organized on both sides of the border or in the 1990s in the case of Cecilia Rodriguez who both organizes clothing manufacturing workers on the US. side and acts as the U.S. representative of the EZNL,  or the Zapatistas, in Mexico.

Tejana activists, like other women of color, live and work both constrained and challenged by the interplay of gender, ethnicity, and class.  Tejanas live literally on multiple borders-- in the regions where two things come together.  They live in the geographic region where two nations meet, not always comfortably nor easily.  And they live in the social space where gender and ethnicity converge, again not always comfortably nor easily.  Tejanas live both on the  periphery  and in the center, amidst both conflict and cooperation.  It is precisely this understanding of the  border that has challenged Tejanas to act throughout the twentieth century.

 

(Jovita Idar)

 

It is particularly meaningful to me to be standing here today because exactly eighty-seven years ago today a group of women and men met in Laredo, Texas to discuss the future of Tejanos and their struggle for equality.  Among those meeting that day at el Primer Congreso Mexicanista was Jovita Idar, an educator, writer, activist who at the same convention was elected the first president of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, the League of Mexican Women. It is fitting, I think, that we remember her today as well as the other women who have risked so much for their communities in their struggle for equality and justice.

There are many, many women I could write about.  For example, Sara Estela Ramirez, an important literary and political figure in South Texas in the early years of this century or  Leonor Villegas de Magnón, writer and founder of La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross), a nursing corps recruited on the U.S.-side of the border who served in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution of 1910.   I could write about the Mexican American women who went on strike for better working conditions in El  Paso’s laundries in 1919, against incredible obstacles, or  Manuela Solis Sanger who worked with San Antonio’s pecan shellers in the 1930s.   Then there is Marta Cotera who recorded Chicana and Tejana history beginning in the 1960s and worked with the Raza Unida Party. Or María Jimenez of the Friends Service committee, living in Houston,  who works nationally and internationally for immigrant rights.  The numbers of Tejana activists who have dedicated themselves to bringing about a more just society is inspiring.

As we consider the context in which Tejana activists have worked, the theme of "por la raza y para la raza" becomes significant. "By the people and for the people" is representative of several important ideas that Tejana activism incorporates.  Time and time again, Tejana activism has been centered around the concept  of community.  And although we see a range of political views among the women, from Jovita Idar and her work with the Democratic Party to Emma Tenayuca and her links with the Communist Party to Graciela Sanchez’s work with a variety of progressive groups centered around issues of peace and justice, the women do not simply speak for themselves as individuals but as voices for their  people and  for their communities.

Jovita Idar

 Jovita Idar was born to Nicasio Idar and  Jovita Vivero de Idar in Laredo, Texas in 1885. Her family was enmeshed in a variety of activisms-- as journalists, educators, and labor organizers.  Her family newspapers, including la Crónica, documented and reported the terrible discrimination occurring in South Texas in the early twentieth century.   In 1910 and 1911, the Idar newspapers reported on the exclusion and segregation of Tejano children in public schools.  They recounted the on-going violence against Tejanos including the burning alive of a  Mexican youth in Thorndale, Texas in 1911. Calling on both the U.S. and Mexican governments for assistance, the Idar newspapers demanded that Tejano children receive equal treatment in the schools and that Tejanos receive equal treatment in the justice system.

In 1911 Idar helped organize  el Primer Congreso Mexicanista.  Among the goals of the Gran Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección which emerged from the conference  were the "development of the principles of morality, culture, instruction, and fraternity among its members; to protect them should they be unjustly charged or sentence, to create an insurance program for members, and to ensure that Tejano children would not be excluded from equal educations. As its motto, the group adopted the phrase "por la raza y para la raza."

To make such demands in early twentieth century Texas was dangerous for any Mexican Texan.  The state, at the turn of the century, was undergoing an economic transformation was commercial agriculture moved into areas such as south Texas.  As Tejanos continued to lose their land base, a loss which was evident by the time of the Texas Revolution, the new agricultural employers imposed a variety of controls to keep Mexicans in "their place."  This included segregated schools, a dual wage system whereby Mexican Texans and Mexican immigrants were paid lower wages than their Anglo American counter-parts, and the widespread use of violence.  Among the  most effective perpetrators of this violence were the Texas Rangers, the hated rinches.  The Texas Rangers committed countless atrocities against Tejanos in the early twentieth century.   When the State Senate and the House conducted an investigation into the activities of the Texas Rangers in 1919, they uncovered evidence of deeply ingrained anti-Mexican sentiments and, more importantly, actions.  The Joint Committee concluded that the Rangers had been responsible for the killing of over 5,000 Tejanos between 1914 and 1919.

When the Rangers tried to close down la Crónica during the same time period,  Jovita Idar stood in the doorway, protecting both her family’s newspaper but as importantly protecting the right of her community to a voice.  Her action was both courageous and extremely dangerous.

When Idar moved to San Antonio in  the 1920s she founded a free bilingual kindergarten and began working with el Club Demócrata.  She continued her work, as a writer and educator, until her death in San Antonio in 1946.

Emma Tenayuca

 In 1916 Jovita Idar founded her newspaper, Evolución, in Laredo.  The same year, in San Antonio, Emma Tenayuca was born.  Tenayuca remembered that she had been aware of injustice since her childhood. "On my father’s side, we never claimed anything but Indian blood, and so throughout my life I didn’t have a fashionable Spanish name like García or Sánchez, I carried an Indian name.  And I was very, very conscious of that.  It was this historical background and my grandparents' attitude which formed my ideas and actually gave me the courage later to undertake the type of work I did in San Antonio.  I had wonderful parents and wonderful grandparents."

                          (Emma Tenayuca Brooks)

She was exposed to political discussion early on as she accompanied her father to political rallies.  Events in Mexico such as the Revolution and the later Cristero Rebellion politicized the population on both sides of the border.  Although a young girl, the political debates caught Tenayuca’s attention and helped shape her consciousness.

The San Antonio in which Tenayuca came of age was a place of limited opportunities for Mexicanos.  The Mexican population, representing almost half of the city, was very poor.  There was limited opportunity. Tenayuca recalled,  "what it meant to be a Mexican in San Antonio."  She remembered that  "There were no bus drivers that were Mexicans when I was growing up.  The only Mexican workers employed by the City Public Service and the Water Board were laborers, ditch diggers.  I remember they used to take the leaves from the pecan tress and they would put them on their heads in order to go out and dig ditches. I came into contact with many, many families who had grievances, who had not been paid.  I was perhaps eight or nine years old at the time."

As she entered young womanhood, her anger at the injustices she saw turned into action and she became involved with the Finck Cigar strikes.  The Texas Women’s Bureau had cited the cigar factory as being the least sanitary and lowest paying employer in the city, right along with pecan shelling. Workers had initially gone on strike against factory policies instituted in 1932—rollers, 90% or more who were Mexican women and girls,  could roll only 500 cigars (at the wage of 21 cents per 100 cigar rolled).  The workers were not allowed to roll any more cigars nor were they allowed to leave the factory either.
 
Tenayuca’s participation in the strike, beginning in 1934, personified her politics.  The way for workers to achieve the American ideal of equality was to organize.  By 1938, Tenayuca had become a leader of the pecan shellers strike. Like the cigar rolling industry, the majority of workers in the pecan shelling plants were Mexican women.  Over 20,000 women were employed in San Antonio alone and Texas, producing half of the nation’s pecan crop, was the "pecan capital" of the United States.  The working conditions were horrendous.  The work was all manual—the industry had been mechanized years earlier but employers found it cheaper to hire laborers than to keep the machines running.  The wages were extremely low (about  $2.25 week for a 40-48 hour week) and the shellers constantly breathed in the fine pecan dust.
 
The San Antonio police department responded to the strike with increased harassment of the strikers. Of the 6,000 to 8,000 on strike, 1000 strikers were jailed for charges as ludicrous as obstructing the sidewalk where there was no sidewalk).   When the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1 938 and pecan shelling companies had to pay 25 cents per hour (up from about 5 cents), the companies closed down rather than pay the higher rates.

Emma Tenayuca eventually had to leave Texas, unable to obtain employment and facing continual threats.  Decades later, she returned to San Antonio where she taught before retiring.
"I think it was the combination of being a Texan, being a Mexican, and being more Indian than Spanish that propelled me to take action.  I don’t think I ever thought in terms of fear.  If I had, I think I would have stayed home."
 

Petra Mata, Fuerz Unida

In the same era that pecan shelling companies were leaving San Antonio in order to avoid paying higher wages, other labor intensive industries were moving in to take advantage of the low paid workforce, especially Mexican and Mexican American women.  After  in-home piece work was made illegal, Juvenile Manufacturing opened a factory on Pecan Street here in San Antonio.  In the 1930s they began manufacturing boy’s and men’s clothing and changed their name to Santone Industries.  In the 1960s, Santone opened a factory on south Zarzamora Street and in the 1970s, Levi’s Strauss & Company contracted with them to manufacture jackets.  By 1981, Levi’s had purchased the  Santone plant.  In the early 1980s, Levi’s employed over 5,000 workers in San Antonio alone. San Antonio boasted the largest Levi Strauss workforce in the United States and the South Zarzamora plant was called "the miracle" plant for his high production and profits.

When in 1989 the plant switched production to Docker’s pants, the workers were put under increasing pressure to produce more in order to reduce the production cost for each pair of pants to $6.39. (It was at $6.70)  In the 1980s Levi’s shifted half of its operations overseas to 50 countries where the $6/ hour wage they paid the women at the Zarzamora plant would be enough to pay a worker in a developing country for a whole day.  The globalization of labor, illustrated by the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, meant that workers in the United States would be increasingly vulnerable.
 
In  January 1990 Levi’s decided to close the S. Zarzamora plant and soon 1150 workers were laid off.  Of these workers, 92% were Latina.  Some were given only 24 hours notice.  Some had worked at the plant for decades.  In February of 1990, Fuerza Unida was born.
 Petra Mata, who came to the United States in 1973 from Mexico, was one of the Fuerza Unida organizers.  She recalled, "I worked for Levi’s for almost 14 years.  I began with Levi’s sewing at a machine, and before the plant closed I’d been a supervisor for eight years.  The plant closure was very difficult.  It’s a wound that still has not healed.  It’s as if it happened yesterday.  That’s why we still feel that we must continue struggling, until we don’t have the strength to struggle any longer."

The plant closure devastated the women working there.  "We felt that they had betrayed us.  I was there for 14 years, but here were people who worked at that plant for 20, 25 years—their whole lives! We feel the way Levi’s closed down was a betrayal on their part.  We have suffered economically—many of us lost our homes, our furniture… People lost their children, their marriages, there were divorces because of the plant closure… So we feel this anger, that there should be some recompense, because there has been so much sacrifice, we’ve given so much energy to the struggle, we believe God will give us what we deserve."
 Workers were further distressed by the lack of benefits available to them after the layoffs.  Re-training programs failed.  Meanwhile Levi Strauss continued to move its production overseas.

"Many women come to FU who have never known that they have a vote, that they can raise their voices to say this is what I want, this is what I would like to have, this is what I would like to achieve.  FU addresses this.  FU has served us to develop us emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.  Before, we could have drowned in a glass of water.  Now, no matter how big the problem, we can endure, we can survive. We have grown in our thoughts and in our emotions and we have the will to one day realize our goals.  Our goal is to empower our people, to help them develop strategies, to enable them to talk clearly and honestly with any other person.  We want to help people learn to not be afraid.. We can do it, with a will and sacrifice." Today Petra Mata  continues to work as an organizer for La Fuerza.

Cecilia Rodriguez, EZNL/ La Mujer Obrera

 Cecilia Rodriguez grew up on the border, in El Paso.   Through much of the twentieth century, El Paso has acted as the "Ellis Island" for Mexicans and the city’s relationship with Mexicans has been complex. As a child Cecilia remembered being punished for speaking Spanish.  When Mexican American parents took the El Paso Independent School District to court in the 1970s, at the time Cecilia attended Austin High School, the district judge ruled that EPISD had historically segregated Mexican American students and that vestiges of that segregation remained.  Aware of injustice since a teenager, her political education continued when she entered college (UTEP) and became involved with MEChA.
 

(Cecilia Rodriguez and Zapatista)

 

 In the 1970s, Mexican American women began organizing in the garment industry in El Paso, bringing some successes but ultimately failing because companies became to move across the border to avoid paying higher wages, much as the pecan shelling plants had left San Antonio four decades earlier.  The flight of garment factories from the U.S. side to the Mexican side continued and in the 1980s,  Rodriguez helped organize la Mujer Obrera.  The advocacy organization works on several fronts, educating workers about their rights, providing leadership training.
The conditions that Rodriguez saw in the garment plants were reminiscent of an earlier era.  Work conditions were poor, workers were often not paid the wages they were due. When Rodriguez participated in two hunger strikes, the actions "prompted an investigation of the garment industry by the Department of Labor.  This mobilization finally prompted the Texas Senate to pass a bill making failure to pay wages a crime."

In 1994, the year that NAFTA was implemented,  la Mujer Obrera demanded two things:  respect for workers’ right to a decent stable job and respect for immigrants human rights.  The same year, Rodriguez was named Representative of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico. The commission, according to Rodriguez, "is to struggle for peace and democracy; to give people in the United States an independent peaceful option for information and coordinated action."

Like other women, other Tejanas, who have paid a high price for speaking out,  Rodriguez too, had to pay.  In 1995 Cecilia was raped while on a visit to Chiapas by a group of armed, masked men.  Rape has been used historically to control women and to silence them.  Rape is being used today in Chiapas to undermine the fight for democracy.  When Cecilia Rodriguez was raped, it was an effort to silence her and all other women who would speak out.  When she chose to publicly talk about the attack in 1996, it was also a victory for all women.

In 1996, Rodriguez called on all people to act.. "Do whatever you can to help and believe that every small action is amplified when it is added to many small actions."

Graciela I.  Sánchez, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center

 Like the other activists, San Antonio’s Graciela Sánchez began with both anger at the injustices she saw but also a vision of building a better place for all people.  In 1993, she recalled,  "Before I went off to college, I knew I would return to live and work in San Antonio unlike other ‘educated Chicanos’ who didn’t return because they found this a city a hard place to work in, to survive in , and to grow in.  As a kid, I didn’t fully understand the political conservatism, the subtle but glaring racism or the poverty suffered by the people in this town.  What I did understand as a child growing up in San Antonio’s west side, was that on some level, there were differences between myself and people who lived in the ‘northside.’…Moving ‘north’ was about climbing the social ladder.  It was about forgetting our language, our culture, our abuelitas, and las tienditas."

Sánchez did not forget and in 1985 she and Susan Guerra began talking about opening a center that would give progressive groups a place to meet.  A network of peace and justice groups, the Interchange, already existed in San Antonio but there was no real meeting place. The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, of which Sánchez is executive director, opened in January 1987.  According to Sánchez, "The idea was to bring diverse groups together to talk to one another, to share resources and ideas, to argue and work over difference or accept those differences, to grow stronger together as a united front of asocial activists, artists, educators, laborers, children, and dreamers."

 Like the other Tejanas who crossed and continue to cross borders of all kinds, Sanchez’s work also moves beyond the boundaries which so often try to limit us.  Moving beyond these boundaries is a necessity, according to Sánchez.

 "In this world, we do not have the luxury to decide which oppression is more important.  I can never separate a part of my whole self at different times of the day to satisfy the needs of an individual, group, corporation or nation.  Being honest and true to myself is of utmost importance.  Speaking out against injustices is what I will always do under the ethical and moral values instilled by my parents… I will challenge the current economic system of this nation/world which keeps the majority of its people ignorant, poor, homeless, and with disease.  I will work to challenge the system which demands that women work hundreds of hours per week for little or no pay, that keeps children out on the streets, that makes people flee from their war torn countries, that hates queers who end up killing themselves or hating themselves, that get mothers and daughters raped and battered—all in the name of family and love."

 Tejana and Mexicana activists like Jovita Idar, Emma Tenayuca, Petra Mata, Cecilia Rodriguez, and Graciela Sánchez—along with all the women whose names we do not yet know—have crossed borders, creating new spaces and new visions in their work to bring about justice.  In their words and in their actions they speak for their communities and their voices uplift us.

**********

For more information on Mexican American women and Tejana activism, see Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows:  Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America;  Roberto R. Calderon and Emilio Zamora, Jr., "Manuela Solis Sager and Emma Tenayuca:  A Tribute,"  Chicana Voices;   Clara Lomas, "Mexican Precursors of Chicana Feminist Writing," Estudios Chicanos and the Politics of Community; Geoffrey Rips and Emma Tenayuca, "Living History: Emma Tenayuca Tells Her Story," Texas Observer, October 28, 1983;  Emilio Zamora, Jr. "Sara Estela Ramirez:  Una Rosa Roja en el Movimiento," in Mexican Women in the United States:  Struggles Past and Present; Irene Ledesma, "Unlikely Strikers:  Mexican-American Women in Strike Activity in Texas, 1919-1974," (Dissertation,  Ohio State University, 1992); issues of La Voz (Esperanza Peace and Justice Center) and Hilo de Justicia/ Thread of Justice (Fuerza Unida).