Happy Labor day! repost my diary on my grandmother. Well in that my Grandma was a big part of history in the women's fight for fair wages. But things happen, national news takes notice, some characters become the flash point. People move on and do other things and the story of their part in a great battle falls away down the memory hole.
However those dynamic people don't stop being dynamic, they just pick up another cause and keep fighting.
Such is the case with Maizie!
Growing up, to me Maizie was Abuelita. She was the greatest grandma, too. She dressed great, smelled great, looked great, spoke perfect English. Maizie was a modern woman. We grew up loving grandma for who she was. But we never really questioned why she was living with "that fat man" that my Dad didn't like and why Grandpa lived with us.
But Maizie nobody questioned Maizie. She did what she wanted when she wanted and no one could tell her no.
Maize had had much bigger battle and wasn't afraid of a fight.
Maizie was the treasurer/secretary of the Pecan Shellers union in 1938.
From the Handbook of Texas Online...
http://www.tshaonline.org/...
PECAN-SHELLERS' STRIKE. On January 31, 1938, 12,000 San Antonio pecan shellers, mostly Hispanic women, walked off their jobs. A three-month strike followed, in which the pecan shellers confronted both management and San Antonio politics. In the 1930s Texas pecans accounted for approximately 50 percent of the nation's production. San Antonio was the Texas shelling center because half the commercial Texas pecans grew within a 250-mile radius of the city.
http://www.tshaonline.org/...
Google Pecan Shellers strike will get you this power point presentantion with pictures of the working conditions of the Pecan Shellers.
www.texancultures.utsa.edu/education/.../PecanShellersStrike.ppt
When I googled Maizie's name I got this obscure reference about her in this book.
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
Vicki Ruíz - 1999 -
http://books.google.com/...
.
I tried to locate the letter throught library but they couldn't find it in all the stuff.