By 1938 San Antonio was the center of Texas pecan shelling. About 400 shops cracked and picked the nuts, mostly by the hands of Mexican American women from the West Side. Pay ran $2 to $3 a week. Julius Seligmann's Southern Pecan Shelling Company, which handled a quarter to a third of the national crop, had replaced its cracking machines with hand shelling. The shops had poor light, no indoor toilets and a fine brown dust in the air, blamed in part for a San Antonio tuberculosis rate of 148 deaths per 100,000 people, against 54 nationally.
The walkout
On January 31, 1938, pay was cut: halves from 7 cents a pound to 6, pieces from 6 cents to 5, and crackers from 50 cents to 40 per 100 pounds. About 12,000 shellers walked out. At a park they chanted "Emma, Emma" and chose Emma Tenayuca, twenty-one years old and already a Workers Alliance organizer, as their leader. They formed Pecan Shellers Union No. 172 and applied to the CIO's cannery and agricultural workers' union for a charter. Its leaders soon took over, worried that her Communist Party ties would hurt public opinion. She stayed the strikers' own choice, organizing pickets, flyers and soup kitchens.
Chief Kilday
Police Chief Owen Kilday said there was no strike. He put riot squads with tear gas and riot guns on the picket lines, and said: "It is my duty to interfere with revolution, and communism is revolution." Police used clubs and tear gas on pickets and fire hoses on crowds. More than 700 people were arrested, Tenayuca among them. In one week in February, 90 male shellers went into a county jail built for 60, and accounts of the crowd run from 250 to nearly 300. The Mexican consul protested the jailing of 63 Mexican nationals, and the city closed the strikers' soup kitchens. Kilday testified that the strike was a "Red plot" to seize the West Side. At Governor James Allred's urging, a state inquiry found that the police interference with peaceful assembly was not justified.
The arbitration and the machines
After 37 days the strikers agreed to arbitration and went back on March 8 at the reduced rates. A three-man board ruled on April 13 and recognized Local 172 as the shellers' sole agent. Accounts of the rate it set differ. Then Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, and a minimum of 25 cents an hour took effect on October 24, 1938. The union and the employers' association asked together for an exemption for pecan workers, fearing the wage would drive the shops to machines. The Department of Labor refused in January 1939. Southern Pecan had 1,800 shellers at 25 cents an hour that March, about 800 by June and about 600 by 1941. Cracking machines took more than 10,000 jobs, and Local 172 was gone by 1948.
Tenayuca faced death threats and left San Antonio for Houston, where she worked under another name. She came back in the late 1960s, taught bilingual classes in the Harlandale district until 1982 and died in 1999. Her life is told at the Emma Tenayuca marker in San Antonio.