Shell Game
On January 31, 1938, a wildcat walkout by thousands of Latino work ers, mostly women, rocked the West Side of San Antonio, Texas. In that barrio, where many families depended on seasonal work shelling pecans to get through the winter, shellers set down their rudimentary tools at hundreds of shabby, overcrowded factories and took to the streets. The action came in response to an immediate and unilateral 20 percent cut in shellers’ already skeletal wages by the region’s dominant pecan distributor. The ensuing confrontation, which establishment San Antonio blamed on communist-inspired outside agitators, actually had arisen from local frustration with wages, working conditions, and harsh bias that characterized treatment of Latinos in that region and era. The strike came at a hinge moment for the pecan industry and workers’ gains proved fleeting, but for Mexican-Americans living in San Antonio and vicinity the action has continued to resound.
The mention of Depression-era American labor strife usually summons images of skilled craftsmen in northern cities unionizing to force industrial behemoths to raise wages and improve working conditions, not of unskilled, marginalized minorities and residents of Southern states organizing successfully to improve their lot. That 1938 strike in San Antonio by just such workers evolved into one of the most important labor events in Texas and American history.
The strikers were poor, mostly illiterate Spanish speakers without skills. At least half were female. The impact of their action—the largest walkout in Texas during the Depression and the first major successful strike by Mexican and Mexican-American, or Tejano, workers—resonated profoundly. “What began as a spontaneous walkout over slashed pay rates soon morphed into a full-fledged social movement…with repercussions that went far beyond considerations of wage levels in a single industry,” writes historian John Weber in his 2015 book, From South Texas to the Nation.
San Antonio was the historic center of the Texas pecan market, which was the centerpiece of the American market for the nuts. Based on harvests from native trees along the rivers of Central and South Texas,
