Welcome to Sanctimonious Sunday, a collaborative series published by members of the following groups: The Amateur Left, Team DFH and Frustrati. Feel free to get your sanctimonious on. It's welcome here.
Friends, today's host, angel d, thanks you for joining us this Sanctimonious Sunday. I had a whole 'nother idea in mind for today's diary, but it was a topic too broad, too wide, the depth and breadth of which scared me out of posting it without more intensive study and reflection. So instead, I bring you this hastily written, but nonetheless very compelling story of Emma Tenayuca. Various of her biographies can be found throughout the net, and at the end of this diary, I leave you some links if you wish to learn more about this amazing Latina.
"I was arrested a number of times, I never thought in terms of fear, I thought in terms of justice." - Emma Tenayuca, 1916-1999.
In 1999 at the time of Emma's death, I had never heard of Emma Tenayuca. I was a new mom, my son was a year and a half old, and I was still reeling from the culture shock I experienced from my recent few months spent in Pakistan the year before. I was struggling with this new life and in my precious spare moments, I read "The New Yorker" and watched "Millennium" and "Seinfeld" reruns on the television. I really didn't have the emotional energy to engage in much else beside my son. Nevertheless, 1999 was the year the world lost a tenacious, bodacious, audacious, sanctimonious Latina of epic stature. I regret that I had not known of her before, I regret that I could not celebrate her accomplishments during her lifetime, and I regret that over a decade passed before I even knew who she was.
But now I do know who she was, and if you follow me past the squiggle, let me share with you. So gather 'round, brothers and sisters, hop that orange squiggle with me, sit down, make a circle, draw near and hear the tale of "La Pasionaria."
"As a student, Tenayuca realized her life of poverty as a Latina differed greatly from the living conditions of Americans described in her schoolbooks. As a labor organizer, she worked to improve the opportunities of poor people, especially Latinos. She worked to end unfair child labor practices. She is best known for her fiery speeches and union organizing work which began in a successful 1934 strike on behalf of pecan shellers in a Texas food processing plant. " (From The National Women's History Project – Honored Latinas.)
She was known as "La Pasionaria de Texas" "because of her passionate eyes, her brave and passionate leadership and her fiery passionate speeches in defense of Mexican workers in depression-era Texas." She was a true revolutionary and advocate for justice and equality not only for her own but for all people and also, in her time, an strong advocate for children when child labor was still the norm.
By the time Emma was 18, she had already organized local chapters of the Ladies Garment Unions. In 1934, she was arrested for organizing a workers' strike at a cigar factory (see this article for more information.
Also from that link:
The great suffering of Mexican workers during the depression and the deportation of thousands through repatriation compelled Emma Tenayuca to join the Communist Party in 1937. Through the party, Emma met Homer Brooks, the Chairman of the Texas Communist Party and they married in 1938. In 1939 Emma Tenayuca replaced her husband as the Chairperson of the Texas Communist Party.
Another thing of note that strikes me about this courageous and outrageous, bodacious, audacious, sanctimonious Latina is how she rejected the idea that Mexican-American's should sell their souls and sell out their lesser-classed Mexican bretheren, and their African American bretheren, for the pie-in-the-sky label of "whiteness."
We Hispanics do have an unfortunate time in our history, in the 30's and 40's, when we strove to overcome the racist Jim Crow treatment we received by attempting to distinguish ourselves from African Americans, by basically throwing the AA community under the bus, along with our lesser-classed Mexican immigrant counterparts. So basically, middle-class acclimatized Mexican Americans lobbied to have themselves distinguished from darker brown people which resulted in our newly "white" category on the Census Bureau Forms.
That is not to say that all Hispanics agreed with that or felt that way. In later years, in the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Americans would re-embrace their roots and reject the notions of "white privilege" and assert what was to become known as CHICANO POWER. That is the culture from which I sprang and I grew up blissfully unaware of my predecessors' attempts to legitimize their legal "whiteness" at the expense of my lesser-classed brothers and sisters. Now I know better.
But that was a long time ago and years before that, Emma was militating against "white" acceptance and instead chose to focus on labor, children, etc. I would really urge you to read some of the links below because I don't want to reinvent the wheel here.
Sources:
Wikepedia: Emma Tenayuca
Houston Institute for Culture special feature: The Hispanic Experience, Civil Rights Movement, Events in the Life of Emma Tenayuca
La Voz de Aztlan – Heroes and Heronies of La Raza Series
White privilege: essential readings on the other side of racism