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---
title: 2 Latinas Who Fought for Workers' Rights in U.S. History
description: Latinas were active in the labor movement nearly three decades earlier, and that work is not taught as often in schools.
canonical: https://time.com/5909191/these-latinas-were-pioneers-for-workers-rights-in-the-u-s-here-are-2-you-should-have-learned-about-in-school/
author: Olivia B. Waxman
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article:published_time: 2020-12-01T11:00:34.000Z
article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:08:32.924Z
article:section: History
og:title: These Latinas were pioneers for workers' rights in the United States.
og:description: Latinas were active in the labor movement nearly three decades earlier, and that work is not taught as often in schools
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og:image:alt: Emma-Tenayuca
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twitter:title: These Latinas were pioneers for workers' rights in the United States.
twitter:description: Latinas were active in the labor movement nearly three decades earlier, and that work is not taught as often in schools
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![](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt91c1a6c72bfb2bcd/698a14c3e76ad2b52c6385d4/Emma-Tenayuca.jpg?branch=production&width=1035&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9)


# These Latinas Were Pioneers for Workers' Rights in the U.S. Here Are 2 You Should Have Learned About in School

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Y0oOfDDS.m3u8" -->
## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement

[Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Y0oOfDDS.m3u8) (8:35)

![The History You Didn't Learn: Latinas in the Labor Movement](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Y0oOfDDS/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2020-11-30. The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school._


by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/) and [Video by Arpita Aneja](https://time.com/author/arpita-aneja/)

Dec 1, 2020 11:00 AM UTC

The History You Didn't Learn is a series that sheds light on past events that may have been omitted, misleading, or just downright wrong in our history education in school. 

by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/) and [Video by Arpita Aneja](https://time.com/author/arpita-aneja/)

Dec 1, 2020 11:00 AM UTC

When news outlets projected Joe Biden would win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes in the 2020 Presidential election, people were quick to thank Cindy McCain, the widow of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, [who endorsed the former Vice President](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/517737-cindy-mccain-trump-allegedly-calling-war-dead-losers-was-pretty-much-last).

However, activists [quickly pointed out](https://twitter.com/PadmaLakshmi/status/1325322086026522625) that Latina grassroots organizers deserve credit for Biden’s win. They knocked on doors [overlooked by party officials](https://time.com/5907525/latino-vote-2020-election/), helped Latino households register to vote and hosted community meetings. Led in part by Alejandra Gomez, they were continuing a decade-long effort that, in partnership with labor movement organizers like Neidi Dominguez, ousted Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2016 after a 24-year tenure [known for raiding neighborhoods and workplaces for illegal immigrants. ](https://theintercept.com/2020/11/02/arizona-latino-voters-joe-arpaio/)


And yet, the history of Latina organizers mobilizing their communities is even longer. American history education [tends to describe the Latino population as a monolith](https://time.com/5907525/latino-vote-2020-election/), but they have long played a key role in advancing the causes of fairer wages and humane working conditions that has benefited people from all racial and ethnic groups.

Discussion of the labor movement in textbooks has historically focused on the white union leaders and white immigrants. If any Latino individuals are spotlighted, the farm worker organizers of the 1960s like [Cesar Chavez](http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19690704,00.html) are the ones most often acknowledged. Other than a brief mention of [Dolores Huerta](https://time.com/5211356/dolores-huerta-pbs-documentary/), textbooks historically haven’t spotlighted the roles of other Latina women in the U.S. labor movement. For example, less attention is paid to Cesar’s wife Helen Chavez, whose critical work behind the scenes helped pave a way for Mexican American economic upward mobility.


But Latinas were active in the labor movement nearly three decades earlier, and that work is not taught as often in schools. In the above video, historians Sandra I. Enríquez, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Lindsey Passenger Wieck, an Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, spotlight two Latina activists to know about.

For example, Emma Tenayuca, an organizer in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s and 1940s, had her political awakening in high school during the Great Depression. Back then, many Mexican and Mexican American workers, who had fled to San Antonio after the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, were [excluded from the New Deal’s jobs and housing programs.](https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/the-american-franchise) A reduced need for agricultural workers during the Great Depression, combined with fears that they were stealing U.S. jobs, led to[ a massive deportation of Mexican and Mexican-American workers](https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/the-american-franchise). Tenayuca organized protests against the abuses that Mexican immigrants were facing at the hands of the border patrol. Her demonstrations landed her in jail countless times, earning the nickname[ “La Pasionaria de Texas”](https://time.com/vault/issue/1938-02-28/page/19/) or “The Passionate One.” 

On January 31, 1938, nearly 12,000 pecan shellers in San Antonio walked off the job to protest inhumane working conditions and wage cuts. They unanimously elected Tenayuca as the leader of what became one of the biggest labor strikes in U.S. history. In San Antonio, a center for pecan shelling, workers at around 150 factories were known for shelling 21 million pounds of pecans a year, but only earned between 30 cents and $1.50 a day. Strikers withstood tear gas and billy clubs for about six weeks, and TIME ran [a photo](https://time.com/vault/issue/1938-02-28/page/19/) of 21-year-old Tenayuca, describing her as at “the forefront of most of its civil commotions.” The workers got a wage increase after the strike, but mechanization of the process ended up eliminating many laborers’ jobs.

Historians say Tenayuca’s resilience and the impact she had at such a young age, provide a teachable moment for young people looking to find a way to make a difference in their communities. Often students of color “never see themselves reflected in history books,” says Enríquez. “Learning the history of Emma Tenayuca provides a window to see this is what the power of the youth can do.”


The same year that Emma Tenayuca was organizing pecan shellers in 1938, Luisa Moreno helped found the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples, which fought for fair treatment of Latino laborers and against segregation in public places, schools and housing. Moreno, a journalist and activist who went advocating for women to be admitted to the country’s universities in her native Guatemala, to criss-crossing the U.S. organizing all kinds of workers, such as garment district workers in New York City, cane workers in New Orleans, tuna packing workers in San Diego, and cigar rollers in Florida. In each city, she built multiracial coalitions to build solidarity among workers, informed them of their rights and how to call out injustices. She became an international representative of the United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America, [the first CIO local where Mexican women made up a majority of membership](https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-and-education-magazines/moreno-luisa), and she was one of the first Latina American Federation of Labor organizers. Her 1940 speech, known as the [Caravans of Sorrow speech](http://amwest.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/58579372/Luisa%20Moreno.pdf), is still relevant today. 


“[These people are not aliens,”](https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/vicki-l-ruiz) Moreno said in the speech. “They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth, and labor to the Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialized agriculture, the sugar beet companies and the large cotton interests that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers.”

As Wieck explains Moreno’s significance, “We think of the Latino labor movement as really starting to catalyze \[later in the 20th Century\] with the United Farmworkers, but she’s out there doing this work twenty years earlier, which helped pave the way for these movements that came later.”

One reason Latina labor organizers haven’t been widely mentioned in history textbooks is because of mid-20th century red-baiting, a national effort to label minority groups as Communist and therefore anti-American. In that 1938 TIME article, the magazine called Tenayuca, “a slim, vivacious labor organizer with black eyes and a Red philosophy.” Moreno faced [deportation](https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner%5Fparty/heritage%5Ffloor/luisa%5Fmoreno) in the 1940s because she had been a member of the Communist party at one point. But as she said at a Naturalization Services hearing, “They can talk about deporting me…but they can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers.” She left the country voluntarily in 1950.


The ideas and values that Moreno and Tenayuca championed are being carried on by today’s labor organizers fighting for [farmworkers](https://time.com/5900804/farmers-climate-change-covid-19/)‘ rights, immigration rights, a higher minimum wage and the rights of the predominantly [Latino workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic](https://time.com/5818871/spanish-national-anthem/). As awareness grows of Latinas in labor movement history, the more all Americans will be able to better understand where the growing Latino political power is coming from in the U.S. It’s especially important at a time when Latino voters were already [projected](https://theintercept.com/2020/11/02/arizona-latino-voters-joe-arpaio/) to make-up the largest nonwhite voting bloc[ in the 2020 presidential election](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/31/where-latinos-have-the-most-eligible-voters-in-the-2020-election/). The Hispanic population hit a record 60.6 million in the U.S. in 2019, and Latinos are the second-largest racial group in the U.S. after white non-Hispanics.More than ever, it’s important to learn the history of their contributions to America.


## Transcript

[00:00] I knew that there was a family secret about my aunt Emma.
[00:04] The way that I found out was to read it in the newspaper. And I saw
[00:09] this picture of a 21-year-old standing on the steps of City Hall
[00:14] with her fist in the air. And it described her as Emma
[00:20] Tenayuca-Brooks, the charismatic leader of a movement.
[00:43] So, I was looking at a 2007 U.S. history textbook and scanning to
[00:49] see all of the times that it talked about the labor movement,
[00:51] and it seems there's very little mention of anybody who's not a
[00:55] white or a white immigrant in these big labor history moments.
[01:01] And so, a lot of times Latina and Latino activists are left
[01:05] out of this. The one mention there was of Latino activism was
[01:10] with the United Farmworkers. And Cesar Chavez is the only person
[01:14] mentioned in there.
[01:15] When history books mentioned the legacy of Cesar Chavez and the
[01:18] United Farmworkers, they often leave out the Latinas who also
[01:22] made great strides in the movement, and a nation that
[01:25] regularly fails to recognize the contributions of minority
[01:28] groups. It's not a big surprise that women like Dolores Huerta
[01:31] and Helen Chavez are left out of the story. But even before the
[01:35] still powerful UFW came onto the scene, Latinas were shaping the
[01:39] labor landscape across the US.
[01:42] I think one of the most incredible and important figures
[01:46] in Latino civil rights and labor activism is a Guatemalan woman
[01:52] by the name of Luisa Moreno. She is born in Guatemala, in like,
[01:57] 1907. She comes from a very privileged family. She's
[02:01] educated. She is a writer and a thinker. She's very
[02:05] intellectual, and then she decides to kind of forego her
[02:09] wealth and move to the United States. She moves to New York,
[02:14] and settles in Harlem. Begets work as a seamstress, and she
[02:19] then starts organizing local Puerto Rican women who are
[02:23] working in the garment industry.
[02:25] Moreno's work in labor activism only grew from there.
[02:29] In 1935, the American Federation of Labor recruited Marino as a
[02:33] professional organizer.
[02:35] She's probably one of the first women and like one of the first
[02:38] Latinas to cross the boundaries into the American Federation of Labor.
[02:45] I think one of the things that's most exciting about Moreno,
[02:48] Luisa Moreno, is that she was this excellent coalition builder.
[02:52] And she travels all around the country doing this
[02:55] kind of organizing. Traveling to organize cane workers in New Orleans,
[03:00] tuna packing workers in San Diego, and women in cigar
[03:05] factories of Florida. We think of the Latino labor movement as
[03:09] really starting to catalyze with the United Farmworkers. But
[03:13] she's out there doing this work 20 years earlier, which helped
[03:17] pave the way for these movements that came later.
[03:20] In 1950, Moreno faced deportation proceedings for her connection
[03:24] to the Communist Party. But before she left voluntarily, sh
[03:28] said this at our hearing, "They talk about deporting me,
[03:31] but they can never deport the people that I've worked with and with,
[03:34] and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of thousands
[03:37] of workers. Things that can never be destroyed."
[03:40] At the end of the day. You can't deport the ideas and the support that
[03:45] she provided within the labor movement and Latino history.
[03:48] Luisa Moreno's work spanned several states, but a young
[03:52] Mexican-American woman named Emma Tenayuca made history right
[03:55] in her hometown.
[03:56] I wanted to tell you a story, because you're with TIME.
[04:02] One of the things we came across was this little article in TIME.
[04:06] The interviewer asked her some questions like she was kind of a
[04:11] newlywed, and they said, you know, "How is it working in your
[04:15] household?" You know, "You're going out doing all these
[04:17] organizing," while her husband, Homer Brooks was, he was an
[04:20] organizer too. And so she answers pertly,
[04:24] "I love my husband and I'm a good cook."
[04:29] Emma Tenayuca was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas.
[04:33] During her high school years, she is aware of the inequality
[04:39] that Mexican Americans face in San Antonio. She looks at the
[04:44] neighborhood conditions that her and her family and her community
[04:48] are living in, right. They're segregated, they're very working
[04:52] class. You know, they're living in substandard housing
[04:57] conditions. She also you know, goes around her
[05:01] neighborhood and her community to ask people, what are the
[05:06] issues that affect you and your family?
[05:09] I think, you know, people think of her in terms of being very
[05:13] strong and very courageous. But, I think people don't
[05:18] realize that she was so sensitive, she was so tender
[05:21] hearted, compassionate that she just could not stand to see
[05:25] human suffering.
[05:27] In 1938, Emma Tenayuca kind of gets her big moment. 12,000
[05:33] pecan shellers, who were mostly Mexican American women in San
[05:37] Antonio, marched out of factories in San Antonio and
[05:40] went on strike. Something like 20% of the nation's pecans were
[05:46] shelled in San Antonio in the 1930s. And the conditions in the
[05:50] factories were awful. They were poorly ventilated. So, a lot of
[05:54] women were getting tuberculosis or other health issues. They
[05:58] were crowded, they didn't have a lot of bathrooms or other
[06:01] facilities that people needed. And they were paid really low
[06:04] wages. Something like, less than $2 a week.
[06:08] So, they went on strike and they elected Emma Tenayuca unanimously as the
[06:13] leader of the strike. She was incredibly fierce. She was known
[06:19] as "La Capitana" or the captain of the strike. So, this labor
[06:23] dispute goes on for about six weeks, she organized
[06:26] demonstrations, lots of people were jailed during the strike.
[06:32] The strike ends and pecan shellers earn a wage increase.
[06:37] But then the companies begin buying more machines that
[06:42] eliminate the laborers. But, I think this movement kind of grew
[06:46] from there as they started thinking bigger about civil
[06:50] rights and minimum wages and things bigger than just the
[06:54] pecan shelling strike.
[06:57] I think that learning about Emma Tenayuca, not only, again,
[07:01] pushes our understandings of Latino history and labor history
[07:06] to an earlier period, but she can serve as a model for
[07:10] inspiration for our young kids.
[07:14] There was really no space for the Latinx activists within the
[07:20] context of these movements, they had to create space for
[07:23] themselves. And that's something that I really aspire to do as well.
[07:27] Faith Florez was only 15 when she started making an app called Calor
[07:31] to help prevent heatstroke among farmworkers.
[07:34] The app sends alerts to workers during dangerous heat conditions
[07:38] and connects them to emergency services when needed. I have
[07:41] roots in the Central Valley. I was raised there for the first
[07:44] 10 years of my life, and a lot of my family members were
[07:47] farmworkers. So, I felt a strong sense of kind of responsibility
[07:52] and obligation to go back home and to, you know, serve my
[07:56] community in the best way that I could. I definitely think Latinx
[08:02] people are underrepresented in our education system. I mean,
[08:06] our history classes really only cover like our founding fathers
[08:11] Declaration of Independence, just a lot of white history.
[08:15] Oftentimes, Black and other students of color never see
[08:19] themselves reflected in history books. Learning the history of
[08:22] Emma Tenayuca provides a window to see like this is what the
[08:26] power of the youth can do.

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