The Hidden 100-Year Legacy of Latina Labor Activism in Texas

On June 19th, 1911, fourteen-year-old Mexican American Antonio Gómez was lynched in Thorndale, Texas. There were up to 100 witnesses, and no one was ever convicted. While lynchings were common during this time, the tragedy involving a young boy was widely reported in national and local press, including Black and Spanish-language press, like the Laredo newspaper La Crónica, where teacher and education activist Jovita Idar worked as a writer. Months later, Idar would found La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (La Liga), one of the first recorded organizations of Mexican American women formed for civic and political action.

Idar is just one in a long line of Tejana activists throughout the 20th century. Women like Emma Tenayuca and Cecilia Rodríguez, who led community-based organizations and labor movements that fought for the promise of liberty and justice for all. Yet, until recently, many women’s contributions to the Chicano Civil Rights movement have been overshadowed by male figureheads.

While their names were forgotten for decades, their activism—which recognized that race, gender, and class were interconnected systems of oppression—has stood the test of time. Their collective-action strategies, which emphasized education and leadership training for women, offer important lessons for today’s nonprofit and social movements working to combat authoritarianism, discrimination, violence, and economic inequality.

Jovita Idar: Teacher, Journalist, Activist

Under the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, the early 1900s Texas borderlands saw rapidly increasing racial tensions between existing Mexican American communities and White Anglo settlers, eager to claim land. The government responded with increased militarization, deploying greater numbers of US Border Patrol officers and Texas Rangers along the border. Mexican immigrants and US citizens were deported, lynchings of Black and Mexican American citizens were common, and schools were segregated for both groups.

Raised by an activist newspaper publisher father, young teacher Jovita Idar saw the poor conditions in schools firsthand and committed herself to raising funds to establish free schools for poor Mexican American children. By 1911, she had left teaching to work as a journalist at La Crónica, owned by her father, and later El Progreso, using the papers as a platform to raise awareness about the racial, economic, and literacy issues facing the Mexican American community and La Liga’s educational campaign efforts.

Mutual aid and civic action groups, like the mutualistas and La Liga, have always been the underlying social support structures for marginalized communities that were denied the American Dream.

While sociedades mutualistas (mutual aid societies) formed by Mexican American communities were common along the border region by the late 1800’s, women were usually excluded from full membership or relegated to ladies auxiliaries. La Liga was unique in that it also organized women around political causes.

While La Liga’s efforts centered on education and fundraising publicly, Idar recognized that race, gender, and class were intersectional issues and weapons used to divide marginalized communities from within. La Crónica’s and El Progreso’s reporting explicitly named the connection between the lack of educational opportunities for Tejano children and the social and economic inequalities and racist violence facing Mexican Americans, with Antonio Gómez as just one example.

Spanish language reporting on discrimination, state violence, and economic inequality quickly gained the attention of the Texas government and the Texas Rangers, demonstrating that using journalism as a tool to organize communities around shared struggles was a clear threat to the status quo. In 1914, the Texas Rangers repeatedly showed up at the newspaper office where Idar worked, intent on shutting the paper down. Her brother, who also worked at the paper, once spoke about Idar using her body to prevent Texas Rangers from entering the building in an interview: “My sister was standing at the door when Hicks, Charlie Ramsey, and another Ranger went to El Progeso, and she stood at the door . . . [and she said] ‘No. You have come to this door and I am standing here and you cannot come in here because it’s against the law.’”

Today, Idar is considered an early pioneer of Chicana feminism and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Mutual aid and civic action groups like the mutualistas and La Liga have always been the underlying social support structures for marginalized communities that were denied the American Dream.

While Idar recognized that race, class, and gender were tools used to divide marginalized communities, divisions between Black and Latine communities of this era along the border were stark, despite shared struggles. Further, there have always been Afro-Latine people who lived within both communities. Since then, intersectionality has evolved to confront racial bias between and within communities, even as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts are being suppressed. Nonprofits cannot abandon DEI, intersectional frameworks, and solidarity across racial, gender, and class lines when activists and organizers have proven time and again that mutual aid and civic action are the infrastructure upholding democracy.

Idar’s work proves that collective organizing and solidarity are powerful forces against systemic oppression. She remained an activist until her death. Her brothers, Eduardo and Clemente, would go on to play important roles in early years of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, to combat racial discrimination, segregation and political disenfranchisement.

Although young activists like Emma Tenayuca of San Antonio, were still excluded from full membership based on their gender.

Emma Tenayuca: The Passionate One

Growing up in San Antonio before the Great Depression, Tenayuca’s grandfather would take her to the local plaza to listen to soapbox speakers on Sundays and encourage her to take interest in politics. As a student, Tenayuca joined LULAC’s ladies auxiliaries; however, she left the organization because women were not allowed to be elected to leadership roles and because of their discriminatory practices and pro-assimilationist stance.

By 1933, she was an active labor activist and played a role in forming the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which she left because she felt that the other union leaders didn’t understand the needs of the Mexican American community.

Tenayuca, like Jovita Idar, recognized that gender- and race-based divisions hindered collective power and that workplace abuse of and poor working conditions for women were symptoms of the larger systems of oppression. While Tenayuca is most well-known for advocating for better wages and working conditions for Mexican American women, she also led marches and demonstrations protesting police harassment and illegal deportations of US citizens by the Border Patrol.

If she were still alive today, Tenayuca’s message to unions and labor organizations would be that race, gender, and wage discrimination are inter-connected issues and that marginalized communities are stronger together.

She became famous for her role leading the 1938 Pecan-Shellers Strike, one of the first large-scale strikes led by Mexican American women. As an organizer for the Workers Alliance of America, Tenayuca met San Antonio’s pecan shelling workers, who were among the lowest wage workers in the city and worked in sweatshop-like conditions. The workers walked off the job following the Southern Pecan Shelling Company’s announcement that they intended to cut wages from six cents a pound to five cents a pound. Police responded to the peaceful protests with violence and arrests. Tenayuca was however blacklisted and ousted from the labor movement due to her affiliation to the Communist Party, which forced her to relocate to Houston and, eventually, San Francisco. However, the workers won a wage increase and recognition of their union a few months before the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. “The work that was done here in San Antonio, as it was so many other times, had a national impact for people well beyond the borders of this city, and yet I don’t think over the years we’ve taken time to recognize folks enough,” said Congressman Joaquin Castro, as quoted by Texas Public Radio, during a gathering in 2023 to remember the pecan strikers.

Today, Tenayuca is considered a local hero in San Antonio and icon of the labor movement. The 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike is a reminder to unions and labor activists, nearly 90 years later, that short-term wins can have along-term impacts. Workers are still fighting for living wages, and the current attacks on unions only further demonstrate the collective power of strikes as threats to the status quo. If she were still alive today, Tenayuca’s message to unions and labor organizations would be that race, gender, and wage discrimination are interconnected issues and that marginalized communities are stronger together.

Cecilia Rodríguez and La Mujer Obrera

Unfortunately, internal fractures and discrimination persisted within the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. As a student in El Paso, TX, Cecilia Rodríguez joined La Raza Unida Party in the late 1970s, but she encountered the same types of racial and gender-based discrimination within the local party leadership.

At this time, El Paso was a growing hub for the garment industry, as companies moved in to exploit the large numbers of Mexican Americans workers for low wage jobs. The factories were sweatshops and women endured stolen wages, sexual harassment, and physical violence as punishment for infractions. In 1972, women workers at Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) went on a two-year strike against Farah Manufacturing Company. National media characterized the strike as “a clash between the White elite establishment of El Paso against the Mexican American majority of the city.”

As a labor activist, Rodríguez met women from the ACWA who believed that the union wasn’t representing their interests fairly. Like Idar and Tenayuca before her, Rodríguez recognized that the intersection between race, gender, class are tools of division and that women needed access to education and leadership training to harness their own power.

In 1981, Rodríguez played a key role in founding La Mujer Obrera, a nonprofit whose mission was to empower working-class Mexican American women through education, leadership development, and economic justice, particularly as the garment factories relocated to Mexico to exploit even lower wages. La Mujer Obrera’s approach to worker advocacy was holistic and built on seven principles: employment, education, health, housing, nourishment, peace, and political liberty.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994 and the garment industry completely abandoned the city, the organization shifted its mission to broader economic empowerment for women and community development in El Paso. La Mujer Obrera persists today, and in 2007 led the charge against the City of El Paso’s plan to redevelop the historically Mexican American Segundo Barrio neighborhood, which would have gentrified working class residents and local businesses. After several years of struggle, the city finally abandoned the revitalization plan.

These women fought battles on two fronts: as Mexican-Americans and as women. Their legacies demonstrate that intersectionality, solidarity, and collective power are the backbone of strong and lasting social movements.

Today, nonprofit organizations and social movements face dramatic shifts in funding, rising inequality, and escalating attacks on workers, marginalized communities, and immigrants. Nonprofits, like La Mujer Obrera, are more important than ever in meeting community needs when government fails to do so. We can learn from La Mujer Obrera’s adaptability—pivoting from training workers in one sector to economic empowerment for all women and fighting gentrification—as a model for how organization can evolve to address new threats, while staying rooted in community leadership and holistic approaches.

Lessons for the 21st Century Nonprofit Landscape

From Jovita Idar’s journalism as a tool for organizing collective action, to Emma Tenayuca’s labor organizing, and Cecilia Rodríguez’s holistic and adaptable approach to economic empowerment, there is a clear thread of Tejana activism throughout the 20th century that has historically been overshadowed. These women fought battles on two fronts: as Mexican Americans and as women.

Their legacies demonstrate that intersectionality, solidarity, and collective power are the backbone of strong and lasting social movements. When Tejana activists were denied access to leadership within civic and political organizations, they formed their own organizations and empowered the next generation of leaders. When the government and corporations shifted their strategies in response to strikes, women led labor organizations and nonprofits, evolving to meet the changing needs of their communities.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there are daily news reports of illegal deportations, abusive conditions in detention camps, attacks on unions, and rising economic inequalities. Nonprofits and civic groups today are more important than ever in filling the gaps in educational, health, and economic infrastructure. They cannot afford to be destabilized due to in-fighting or internal divisions across race, gender, and class lines. It is not enough for nonprofits and social movements to continue they have for decades. Confronting and addressing sector failures, such as upholding corrupt and abusive leaders as figureheads and failing to practice anti-racism within their own organizations, is necessary for nonprofits and movements to evolve over the next 250 years.