Mexican American labor leader, union organizer and educator.
She became interested in activism and was a labor activist even before graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. Tenayuca’s first arrest came at the age of 16, in 1933, when she joined a picket line of workers in strike against the Finck Cigar Company.
After high school, Tenayuca obtained a position as an elevator operator, but she made a career out of her passion for labor rights. She founded two international ladies’ garment workers unions, and was highly involved in both the Worker’s Alliance of America and Woman’s League for Peace and Freedom. She organized a protest over the beating of Mexican migrants by United States Border Patrol agents. In her early adulthood she was arrested for a second and third time: once on a charge of “disturbing the peace” during a nonviolent protest, and again for her leadership role in a labor strike in 1938.
Organizing large scale strikes against the injustices in the labor sphere was also one of Tenayuca’s vocations. Tenayuca was instrumental in one of the most famous conflicts of Texas labor history–the 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike at the Southern Pecan Shelling Company.
Because it advocated her passion for minority rights, Tenayuca joined the Communist Party in 1936. In 1938 she married organizer Homer Bartchy who used the alias “Homer Brooks.” Tenayuca went on to pursue a college degree. She divorced Brooks and left her hometown in order to attend San Francisco State College where she majored in Education. She later earned a master’s in education from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. From there Emma went on to teach in Harlandale School District until her retirement in 1982. Shortly after retirement Emma Tenayuca developed Alzheimer’s disease and died on 23 July 1999.
Link to Wikipedia biography