| Transcript |
pecan
shelters
strike
A recently published essay booklet,
Women in the Texas Workforce:
Yesterday and Today is the product
of two and a half years of research
and oral history interviews by
members of People's History in
Texas, a group founded in 1976 to
produce non-sexist and non-racist
educational materials. The group's
first project was the 1976 Women
in Texas History Calendar. Glenn
Scott, project coordinator, describes their research problems:
"The only histories that were
relatively accessible were those
of women who had been elected
to office, or born to affluence or
were married to someone important
in traditional terms. However, there
was a vast number of women whose
history was hidden—those who
cleaned, sewed, cooked, picked
vegetables, kept house, reared
children, shelled, ironed, milled,
rolled cigars, served food. In fact,
their very absence brings the
message to students of Texas history that these women's lives were
really not part of history.
"We began to shape a project
to research and produce a history
of working women in Texas. To
do the research, it quickly became
apparent that interviews or oral
histories of working women would
be essential because traditional
historical resources provided so
little. Unions are one of the few
non-elite organizations which leave
written records. We selected the
period 1930-1950 because it marked
the entry of women into Texas
labor history."
One essay in Women in the Texas
Workforce: Yesterday and Today
documents the 1938 San Antonio
pecan shelter's strike. Here is an
excerpt from Croxdale's account
of that strike. . .
by Richard Croxdale
In San Antonio in the spring of 1938,
12,000 pecan shellers, mostly Chicanas
working in one of the lowest paid
industries in America, conducted a three-
month long strike, defeating both the
owners of the factories and the San Antonio political machine. They not only
gained significantly higher wages, but
many claim they laid the foundation for
Chicano civil rights activity in San Antonio 30 years later.
Texas pecans accounted for 40% of
the nation's production in the 1930's.
With pecan trees growing rampant along
Texas rivers and creeks, local promoters
often grew mystical over the possibilities
of the pecan. Seeing no possibility of
overproduction, they claimed that
marketing potential had not yet begun to
be exploited. The Governor of Texas,
James T. Hogg, was one such enthusiast:
"I want no monument of stone or marble
but plant at my head a pecan tree . . . and
let the pecans be given out among the
plain people that they may plant them
and make Texas a land of trees."
As Hogg desired, the pecans were given
out to the plain people, not to plant but
to shell at a wage of $3-5 a week. Primarily Mexican women and Chicanas,
12,000 workers were employed at shelling pecans in San Antonio in as many as
400 small shops. San Antonio was the
Texas shelling center because half the
Texas pecan crop grew within a radius of
250 miles from that city.
The Industry
Conditions in the shelling factories
resembled those existing in late 19th
century sweatshops. Whereas other industries had increasingly become more
mechanized during the 20th century,
there had been a reversal of this trend in
the pecan shelling industry. When the
Southern Pecan Shelling Company began
operations in 1926, hand shelling, cracking and shaking replaced all machines in
San Antonio.
Using to full advantage a large and
low-paid Spanish-speaking population,
Julius Seligmann, owner of the Southern
Pecan Shelling Company, introduced the
contracting system. Contractors were essentially employees of the large pecan
dealers who controlled the supply of nuts
as well as the prices for shelling. According to Senora Perez, a small contractor,
"They would give you the whole pecan
on credit for about 10 cents a pound, and
they would buy the nuts back for 30 or
36 cents . . . You could furnish the building, the electricity, the water, and a clean
place to work in and have some left over
for profit." The contracting system permitted Seligmann to eliminate expenditures of fixed costs during slack times and
to reduce responsibility for management.
Women constituted 70-80% of the
pecan-shelling work force. As the Depression progressed, however, men had to
enter the shelling factories. Alberta Snid's
father was one of these: "As a last resort,
my father had to go in and shell pecans.
There was nothing else." According to a
federal study, the average annual family
income of shellers was $251, and the
average individual weekly income was
$2.73.
Alberta Snid remembers that people
were paid not in money but in staples
such as beans, potatoes, rice, coffee.
"And I don't mean there was a bunch of
it, [it was] a pound of this, a pound of
that, whatever they felt like giving you.
My mother never allowed that, though,
she fought for her money."
The working conditions in the small
plants were abysmal. "As many as 100
pickers sat at stalls around long tables in
a room perhaps 25 by 40 feet long, wielding picking knives with quick deft move-
i
Workers in pecan shelling shed, San Antonio, early 1930's. Conditions in the shelling factories resembled those existing in 19th century sweatshops. Photo courtesy of Anita Perez.
ments." Illumination was poor, inside
toilets and washbowls non-existent, and
ventilation inadequate. A normal workday was 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. every weekday.
Pecan-shelling was seasonal, the peak
coming from October or November to
May, with the summer months being
generally slack. Workers often joined the
agricultural migratory stream in these
off-months, picking cotton and beet-sugar
in Texas, and sometimes followed the
harvest all the way to Minnesota.
The market for pecans was national
arid was dominated by a few large firms.
Southern Pecan Shelling Company,
owned by Julius Seligman, shelled 1/4 to
1/3 of the nation's entire crop of pecans.
R. E. Funsten of St. Louis also shelled
1/4 of the total crop. Between the two,
a high degree of monopoly control of the
market was firmly established. Using this
market position, Seligmann bought a
huge surplus in 1935 and when a shortage
occurred in 1936, Seligmann reaped a
windfall profit of $500,000. In federal
testimony, however, Seligmann claimed
that he could not make a cent on pecans
and hence couldn't pay higher wages.
Labor Organization
Organization among agricultural
workers and packing shed workers has
always been difficult due to the seasonal
and transitory nature of the work. [But]
formal union organization among the
pecan shellers began in 1933 with the
Pecan Shelling Worker's Union of San
Antonio, led by Magdeleno Rodriquez.
Rodriquez was supported financially by
Seligmann who believed that a union
would prevent small operators from
undercutting the scale paid by the larger
companies. According to Latane Lambert, he [Rodriquez] was also connected
to Chief of Police Owen Kilday's political
machine. While he might not have had an
overt connection, he was one of the
people upon whom the machine depended. Rodriquez had a large following and
Alberta Snid's impression of the union
was good: "He really organized the
people and he was almost as good as
Emma Tenayuca. Unfortunately, he was
gone from one day to the next, and we
never heard from him any more." Latane
Lambert, however, characterized Rodriquez as a representative of caudillismo
and was glad "that the action of people
participating in the pecan strike blasted
once and forever whatever political machine there was on the West Side."
On the national scene, a group of
unions calling themselves the Congress of
Industrial Organizations became disgruntled with the conservative policies of
the American Federation of Labor. They
split with the AFL in 1936, and began
actively encouraging the organization of
the unorganized.
The Worker's Alliance, a national
organization [was] formed by the
Communist Party during the Depression
for the purpose of advancing the interests
of the unemployed; the dominant force
in the San Antonio chapter was Emma
Tenayuca. A well-known figure in San
Antonio politics, Tenayuca had led sit-
downs in the City Hall and had battled
pay cuts in the WPA. In addition, her
husband, Homer Brooks, had run for the
governorship of Texas under the Communist Party banner.
According to Latane Lambert, Tenayuca was in the front because "... as in
any movement, you would take the ones
who were the most articulate, who appealed to the crowd, and she was a good
speaker. It was right she would be
[called] La Passionara because in her
shrill little voice she would make your
spine tingle."
During the '30's, Emma Tenayuca
was probably San Antonio's most dedicated and persistent organizer and advocate of the unorganized. Her background
"The struggle to improve wages and
working conditions by the women
working in the pecan factories . . .constitutes an episode in labor history equally
as dramatic as any of the better known
C/O struggles of the northern-mass production industries, " points out Croxdale.
"The fact that the conflict goes un-
mentioned in labor annals is one more
instance of women's history being ignored. With the help of a number of oral
interviews, we are prepared to tell that
story."
HOUSTON BREAKTHROUGH
14
JULY/AUGUST 1979
HOUSTON BREAKTHROUGH
15
JULY/AUGUST 1979 |
