In 1938, San Antonio was the center of the pecan shelling industry and one man, known as the Pecan King, controlled 50% of pecan production. The shellers were mostly Hispanic women and children. When the Pecan King slashed their pay, they took to the streets to strike against the injustice.
Producer Avery Thompson takes us to San Antonio, Texas to tell the story of the 1938 Pecan Shellers’ Strike.
The Hustle is a podcast series about the ways immigrants navigate a changing economy — today and throughout history.
How immigrant workers took on the Pecan King of Texas — and won
Texas has long envisioned itself as a land of rugged individualism — the home of cowboys, ranchers, and wildcatters. But a closer look at modern-day Texas reveals an economy that favors corporations and tycoons over everyday working people.
As of 2023, Texas’s GDP was $2.6 trillion dollars, making it the eighth-largest economy in the entire world. But its minimum wage — $7.25 an hour — has remained stagnant for over a decade and a half, leaving many Texans struggling to make ends meet.
And those struggling the most in the Lone Star State tend to be Hispanic, women, and recent immigrants.
As the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to expand, many look to the future with worry, wondering how they can find the collective strength to make the Lone Star State more equitable for all Texans.
But perhaps Texans can find inspiration to tackle tomorrow’s challenges by looking back at the state’s surprising past — particularly to San Antonio in the 1930s.
At the time, San Antonio was at the heart of the nation’s pecan industry, producing about 50% of the country’s total supply. One man controlled the majority of San Antonio’s shelling industry: Julius Seligmann. The descendant of German-Jewish immigrants became known around town as “The Pecan King,” as his company, Southern Pecan Shelling Company, gained increasing market share. He did this not by investing in the latest shelling technologies but by utilizing the cheap, abundant labor of the city’s majority-Hispanic Westside.
“When people talk about the Westside, they really mean, okay, that’s like the Mexican side of San Antonio,” said Dr. Priscilla Martinez, a local historian and sociology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “Actually, the most Mexican side might be the better way to put it.”
At its peak, pecan shelling employed upwards of 20,000 workers — mostly women of the Westside — who were tasked with removing the pecan nut from its hard outer shell. The work was grueling, monotonous, and often painful.
The workhouses — or more accurately, sheds — where workers toiled were dimly lit and lacked sufficient ventilation. Because of this, workers breathed in fine dust and particulates emitted from the shelling process, which contributed to San Antonio’s exceptionally high tuberculosis rates.
But not all the work was done in company facilities. Seligmann favored a contractor-type system, in which he sold whole pecans to workers, then repurchased them at only a slightly higher rate once shelled. This led to much of the shelling work being done in homes across the Westside, where it was often spread among family members — including children. In some households, it wasn’t uncommon to have three generations cracking pecans from morning to night.
And even with a whole family working, the pay was abysmal. The average pay for a pecan sheller was less than three dollars a week — about $66 today — far below other manual jobs of the day.
On January 31, 1938, things got even worse when word spread around the Westside that Julius Seligmann had slashed the pay for shelled pecans by nearly 20%. Soon after, nearly 12,000 shellers announced they were on strike and took to the streets.
At their center was a twenty-one year old local labor activist named Emma Tenayuca.
Though not a sheller herself, Emma Tenayuca emerged as the shellers’ leading voice. And that voice was a fiery one, earning her the nickname La Pasionaria de Texas — the Passionate One of Texas. In photos from this time, Tenayuca radiates confidence and youthful charm. But behind her winning smile was a fierce determination to secure justice for the workers of her native Westside.
“San Antonio did not respond well to having a citywide general strike led by Tejanas, especially with demonstrations at historic landmarks like the Alamo,” says Dr. McKiernan-Gonzalez, Director, Center for the Study of the Southwest at Texas State University.
Wielding billy clubs and baseball bats, police officers attacked the peaceful protestors, who were mostly women. The officers deployed tear gas, and they arrested over a thousand strikers on dubious charges.
Emma Tenayuca herself was arrested and charged with assaulting an officer and lacking a permit for the demonstration.
When questioned about the heavy-handed tactics, San Antonio’s Police Chief Owen Kilday defended the violence, claiming that the protest was the beginning of a Communist revolution, which had to be squashed. This view was shared by other local powers, including the Catholic Church, which feared the rise of radical anticlerical sentiment among Mexican workers.
Despite the violent repression, the strikers found solace and strength in a song that would become their anthem: “No Nos Moverán.”
Dr. David Spener, a sociologist who has studied the song’s history, explains how the song, which began as a spiritual hymn in the American South, found popularity in Protestant churches — and then as a labor movement song used by coal miners in Appalachia. But it was in San Antonio that the song found a whole new audience after being translated into Spanish in the crowded jails. Translating on the spot, one of the strikers, Santos Vasquez, turned the English version of “We Shall Not Be Moved” into “No Nos Moverán.”
Emboldened by the song, the strikers refused to back down. And as days turned to weeks, their peaceful resistance gained national and international attention.
Amid the growing scrutiny, the Governor of Texas, James Allred, launched an investigation into the events in San Antonio. While the commission concluded that the police had overstepped, little tangible change followed.
Meanwhile, pressure was building for Emma Tenayuca to step back from the limelight due to her Communist ties. She did this, albeit reluctantly, but continued to support the effort from behind the scenes.
After more than five weeks of nearly citywide strikes, Julius Seligmann finally agreed to arbitration. The board ruled in favor of the shellers, awarding them higher wages and formally recognizing the International Shellers Union.
The shellers had won.
But the shellers’ victory was bittersweet. Because soon after returning to work, the federal government passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, raising the federal minimum wage to 25 cents an hour — much higher than the wage agreed upon by Southern Pecan and the shellers.
Rather than raise wages to meet the new minimum, Seligmann opted to mechanize his operation. Across the Westside, the sound of workers chattering and cracking pecans by hand was replaced by the whir and crunch of Seligmann’s machines. By 1941, machines replaced more than 10,000 shellers in San Antonio.
Though victory was fleeting, the strike had a profound effect on San Antonio. A year later, a mayoral candidate campaigned heavily on the Westside — a first for the city — demonstrating the rise of the Hispanic community as a powerful voting bloc.
The shellers’ victory also laid the groundwork for subsequent movements across the country, including the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
As for Tenayuca, while she contributed greatly to the strike’s success, her involvement came at a personal cost. Essentially blacklisted in San Antonio and under FBI scrutiny due to her Communist connections, she moved to California, where she lived quietly for many years. Eventually, though, she returned to San Antonio, where she found work as a schoolteacher. Yet for most of her life she rarely talked of the strike, and when she did, she remained modest. In a 1987 interview, she remarked, “I’m happy I’m given credit if they want to give me credit, and if they don’t, I’ll stay home and read. It doesn’t matter to me; I didn’t keep one piece of paper or anything because I never gave it any importance.”
Perhaps due in part to her reluctance to speak publicly, Emma Tenayuca’s name nearly faded from public consciousness. But in recent years, her bravery and tenacity are once again being celebrated. In 1991, Tenayuca was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 2009, a plaque was placed in her honor at Milam Park.
Credits
Hosted by Shaka Tafari
Produced by Avery Thompson
Edited by Fi2W Editing Fellow Lushik Lotus-Lee
Additional editing by Mia Warren and Quincy Surasmith
Fact Checking by Julie Schwietert Collazo
Engineering by Sharon Bardales and Jocelyn Gonzales
Original theme music by Gautam Srikishan
Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions
“The Hustle” show logo by Daniel Robles
Feet in 2 Worlds is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Fernandez Pave the Way Foundation, an anonymous donor, and contributors to our annual NewsMatch campaign.