Tenayuca’s first foray into organizational politics came in high school with her membership in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Her affiliation did not last, however, as the group ran afoul of her more internationalist commitments, restricting membership to Mexican Americans and rejecting Mexican nationals. Instead, in 1937 at the age of twenty, she joined the Communist Party and dedicated her energy to organizing the working class regardless of national origin. She began to give political speeches around San Antonio, inviting a fierce citywide red-baiting campaign against this young Tejana communist firebrand.
With these commitments firmly in place, she stepped forward to lead the historic pecan shellers’ strike — a revolt of some 12,000 workers, most of them Mexican American women and girls laboring in suffocating sheds for just a few cents a pound. These workers were the invisible backbone of San Antonio’s booming pecan industry, hunched over, inhaling dust, often taking home less than a dollar a week. In 1938, the bosses attempted to slash wages further, sparking the largest labor strike in Texas history.
The pecan shellers’ discontent predated Tenayuca’s involvement, but with her radical political education and sharp mind for strategy, she became its fiercest voice, as well as the leader of the strike committee. The strike lasted for three months, throughout which Tenayuca maintained her leadership role, both organizing workers behind the scenes and interfacing with the public on their behalf. “I was arrested a number of times,” she later said, “but I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”
The state responded with the violence that was typical of our nation’s bloody labor history, a level of blatant repression still almost always reserved for the poor. The San Antonio Police Department unleashed a furious crackdown: raids on strike meetings, tear gas against peaceful picketers, over a thousand arrests. Tenayuca herself was targeted, arrested, and trailed by the press. The Texas Rangers were called in to back the employers — a reminder that in Texas, police and paramilitary violence have no problem joining forces in the service of capital’s interests. Through it all, the strikers held steady. After three months of bravery in the face of violence and hunger, they won a wage increase.
Later that year, Tenayuca was invited to speak at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium about her experiences with the strike. But local reactionaries weren’t done with her. At the auditorium, she was met by a mob of thousands of anti-communists, including hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacist vigilantes, who surrounded the building to shut her down. She had to flee through a back entrance to escape mob violence.