Emma Tenayuca was still a teenager when she started organizing for equality in her native San Antonio, Texas. Only a few years later, at the age of twenty-one, she led 12,000 pecan shellers — mostly Mexican American women — out on strike, exhibiting a passion that would eventually make her a target of the Ku Klux Klan and cement her in radical labor history forever.

Today Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), acting under the belligerent and discriminatory designs of the Trump administration’s Stephen Miller, boasts of over two hundred apprehensions in San Antonio since the nationwide kidnapping program “Operation At Large” began. These state-backed abductions and the renewal of hate-filled nativism are an occasion to remember Tenayuca’s brave militancy.

Tenayuca was born in San Antonio in 1916 against the backdrop of the globally reverberant Mexican Revolution. Her childhood was molded by the extreme poverty of the Great Depression and the mass expulsion of millions of Mexicans — a process given the name “repatriation” — from the United States back to Mexico. The nationalism of the era reached a fever pitch, with qualities that are familiar today, such as the portrayal of foreigners as seditious traitors and social contaminants.

The radical milieu of early twentieth-century San Antonio, which included Tenayuca’s parents and grandparents, congregated in what is today called Market Square. There they took these world-historic events and made meaning of them in ideological debates, active street chatter, and heated discussions. It was here that a young Emma was exposed to a militant ferment of organized laborers engaged in coeducation through newspapers and collective study. It was not uncommon for socialists, anarchists, and Mexican revolutionaries to make speeches to rapt crowds.

Tenayuca’s first foray into organizational politics came in high school with her membership in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Her affiliation did not last, however, as the group ran afoul of her more internationalist commitments, restricting membership to Mexican Americans and rejecting Mexican nationals. Instead, in 1937 at the age of twenty, she joined the Communist Party and dedicated her energy to organizing the working class regardless of national origin. She began to give political speeches around San Antonio, inviting a fierce citywide red-baiting campaign against this young Tejana communist firebrand.

With these commitments firmly in place, she stepped forward to lead the historic pecan shellers’ strike — a revolt of some 12,000 workers, most of them Mexican American women and girls laboring in suffocating sheds for just a few cents a pound. These workers were the invisible backbone of San Antonio’s booming pecan industry, hunched over, inhaling dust, often taking home less than a dollar a week. In 1938, the bosses attempted to slash wages further, sparking the largest labor strike in Texas history.

The pecan shellers’ discontent predated Tenayuca’s involvement, but with her radical political education and sharp mind for strategy, she became its fiercest voice, as well as the leader of the strike committee. The strike lasted for three months, throughout which Tenayuca maintained her leadership role, both organizing workers behind the scenes and interfacing with the public on their behalf. “I was arrested a number of times,” she later said, “but I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

The state responded with the violence that was typical of our nation’s bloody labor history, a level of blatant repression still almost always reserved for the poor. The San Antonio Police Department unleashed a furious crackdown: raids on strike meetings, tear gas against peaceful picketers, over a thousand arrests. Tenayuca herself was targeted, arrested, and trailed by the press. The Texas Rangers were called in to back the employers — a reminder that in Texas, police and paramilitary violence have no problem joining forces in the service of capital’s interests. Through it all, the strikers held steady. After three months of bravery in the face of violence and hunger, they won a wage increase.

Later that year, Tenayuca was invited to speak at San Antonio’s Municipal Auditorium about her experiences with the strike. But local reactionaries weren’t done with her. At the auditorium, she was met by a mob of thousands of anti-communists, including hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacist vigilantes, who surrounded the building to shut her down. She had to flee through a back entrance to escape mob violence.

This wasn’t just reactionary blowback. It was state-aligned racial terror meant to destroy the life of a woman whose vision extended beyond wage negotiations and into revolutionary possibility. The federal government was already tracking Tenayuca. Her FBI file would eventually span 181 pages, part of a broader campaign to criminalize labor radicals and communists as “domestic threats.”

The surveillance, harassment, and public ostracization drove her out of San Antonio to San Francisco. When she did return two decades later, she found herself blacklisted from politics due to her Communist Party links. She struggled to find work at first, eventually becoming a schoolteacher. But despite vicious red-baiting, Tenayuca never denounced her politics. She understood the roots of oppression — how economic exploitation, racial segregation, and border militarization were all threads in the same fabric — and could not pretend otherwise. She was, in every way, ahead of her time, possessing an analysis still suited for today’s struggles. In the 1940s, she joined efforts to protest the growing power of the Border Patrol and organized with the Workers Alliance, connecting the fight for jobs with the fight against deportations.

Tenayuca has only found her way back to public notoriety since she died in 1999. For the most part, she’s been safely recanonized and memorialized with the designation of “Mexican American civil rights activist,” scrubbed clean of her political affiliations and commitments to class struggle.

The parallels to the present are not symbolic — they are structural. Today ICE does not wear white hoods, but they do wear masks and otherwise conceal their identities. They operate in the shadows, without regard for the sanctity of neighborhoods and schools, with the full support of police departments and the limited resistance of city governments, detaining fathers at gas stations and shamelessly chasing the fearful into trees as they plead for mercy. Their purpose is familiar: to instill terror, to discipline hyperexploited segments of labor, to reinforce racial and ethnic divisions, and to remind working-class families of color that this country’s elites have no problem turning the goons of the punishment bureaucracy loose on them.

But as in Tenayuca’s day, people resist. In San Antonio, groups like the San Antonio Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the San Antonio Alliance, and SA Stands are mobilizing in support of the undocumented against the prerogatives of ICE. Young people are once again organizing under harrowing conditions, coordinating ICE alerts, court watching, and condemning politicians from both parties who are complicit in this machinery of pain. They are choosing solidarity over fealty to fictitious borders. They are drawing explicit the connections between policing, border militarization, and capitalist exploitation — and even, in the spirit of Tenayuca’s internationalism, between this moment and the genocide in Gaza.

Tenayuca’s life offers something more useful than a blueprint: an example of profound moral clarity. Her story reminds us that the struggle is long, but also that it’s ours to inherit and to carry on. The question is not whether we will be met with repression. That is inevitable. The question is whether we will, in Tenayuca’s formulation, choose justice over fear.