Worker Representation
The San Antonio ILGWU could have represented its workers and given some of them leadership positions to represent themselves. Workers often became leaders in locals, but this didn’t happen for the Mexican American women in San Antonio because ILGWU leadership refused to appoint them. ILGWU Southwest Regional Director Meyer Perlstein oversaw the San Antonio local in the 1930s. Perlstein had chosen two Spanish-speaking white women - Myrle Zappone and Elizabeth Taylor - to lead the San Antonio ILGWU, but he was critical of women organizers and flat out refused to appoint a “Mexican girl” (McCaffery 147, 173).
Some Mexican American women became labor leaders despite ILGWU censure, including organizer Emma Tenayuca. Tenayuca is one of the most-discussed labor leaders in 1930s San Antonio because she was charismatic, driven, and led multiple strikes by Mexican-American workers like cigar rollers and the pecan shellers (Vargas 555). The ILGWU was one of the first unions that she was involved in in 1935, but by 1936, both Taylor and Zappone adamantly told an interviewer that she could not be associated with the ILGWU because she was associated with the Communist Party (Interview with Miss Rebecca Taylor, October 6, 1936). Tenayuca worked with Communist party organizations like the Workers’ Alliance and the Unemployed Council for years before she officially joined the Communist party in 1937 (Hise, 35-36). The fact that Taylor and Zappone wouldn’t work with her was not unusual. Anti-communism was normal across the ILGWU, like in this pamphlet from the ILGWU Press and Publicity Department. In 1938, Tenayuca was also removed from the Pecan Shellers’ strike that she helped organize because she was a Communist (Vargas 572). Mexican American women could be in the San Antonio local, but they could not represent themselves in a leadership role, and they could only stay if their views appealed to leadership and the public.