Chicana Archives - Not Even Past

The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project

Since 2017, undergraduate students in my postwar women’s history seminars have had the unique opportunity to engage in intergenerational dialogues with women who were student activists at the University of Texas and the surrounding community during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the Austin Women Activists Oral History Project, they have conducted professional-quality oral histories with roughly 30 white, Mexican American, and African American women who helped transform the UT campus into one of the largest and most significant hubs of student activism in the U.S., and helped invigorate a range of off-campus movements. These women activists agreed to donate their interviews to the Briscoe Center for American History, one of our many partners in the project. For Women’s History Month this year, the Briscoe is launching the Austin Women Activists Oral History Collection, a permanent digital collection that includes audio files, transcriptions, photographs, and additional documents that women have donated.

An extraordinary aspect of this project has been end-of-semester public gatherings at which students have presented their work to the women they interviewed, along with other students, faculty, and staff members from units on campus with which we have partnered. On December 14, 2017, for example, 18 students and most of the 21 women they interviewed came together for a dinner of enchiladas and history. The students’ presentations inspired a remarkable dialogue – not so much a walk down memory lane as an engaged discussion about how to interpret the activists’ own history. Based on footage from that event, Life & Letters media specialists Rachel White and Allen Quigley, at the College of Liberal Arts, produced Fight Like a Girl: How Women’s Activism Shapes History, a documentary film that Ms. Magazine also picked up for its online site.

As rewarding as this experience was, the public event held on May 17, 2019, “Pecha Kuchas and Pastries,” broke away from the format of conference-style research presentations. Students still had to develop their own interpretations of the history discussed by their interviewees, but instead of writing long research papers they created Pecha Kuchas. What’s a Pecha Kucha? It’s a PowerPoint-like presentation comprised of 20 slides (which advance automatically) and 20 seconds of narrative per slide [see links below]. The results might look simple, but they’re challenging for a historian. You have to distill your argument down to its essentials, keyed to images that enrich but don’t distract from your point on each slide. The “Pecha Kuchas and Pastries” public event drew about 40 people, some of whom were already veterans, either interviewees or interviewers from 2017.

This format, which combined visuals and commentary, also provoked remarkable responses, captured on film by History Department videographer Courtney Meador. A Pecha Kucha about struggles by African American women students prompted 2019 interviewee C.T. (Carolyn) Tyler to describe her first semester at Kinsolving, just after the dorm was “integrated,” when she was the sole Black female in the dorm and assigned to what she described as a kind of lean-to shelter in the lobby. For a Black female student to room with a white female, the latter’s parents had to give their permission. Her story prompted 2017 interviewee Linda Jann Lewis to share her own experience as a first-year student in 1965, when she lived in Kirby Hall, a women’s dormitory at 29th St. and Whitis owned by the Methodist Women of Texas. The brochure described Kirby Hall as integrated Lewis remembers, yet the 250 residents included only six Black women, two roommates per floor. Lewis lived in the basement.

Two Pecha Kuchas addressed the origins of “women’s gay rights” and the Austin lesbian community, based on interviews with women who, in turn, brought a few other friends from the 1970s to the event. These two presentations pieced together a history of activism and the creation of the Austin Lesbian Organization, Women’s Liberation, and women’s institutions such as Bookwoman bookstore (still in existence), the Safe Place shelter, women’s music venues, bands, and a recording studio. “I’m proud of my generation,” one woman declared. Emma Lou Linn, a 2017 interviewee, described getting some of the first gay and lesbian protective ordinances in the country passed when she served on the city council. This history was previously unfamiliar to any of the students.

Cynthia Perez, co-owner with her sister of La Peña, a downtown Latino cultural gallery and a 2017 interviewee, initiated another unexpected conversation after watching a Pecha Kucha that delved into Chicano/Black relations at UT. She recounted the inspiration she and other Chicana/os found in Black Power student activism at a time when she was a student at University of Houston before transferring to UT. “We rode the coattails of the Black students,” Perez declared. That perspective persisted when she arrived in Austin and, in 1975, participated in an occupation of the Tower to demand Chicano and African American student and faculty recruitment, as part of United Students Against Racism at Texas (USARAT). Another participant asserted that the antiwar movement at UT brought everyone together. Others vividly recalled a quite different shared experience: the Charles Whitman shooting from the Tower in 1966.

It did not take arm-twisting to convince these women to tell their stories; many emailed back the same day saying they wanted to participate in the project. Collectively, they believe that the history of this activism is crucial for the current generation of students to understand, and are disturbed that it has remained nearly invisible in national narratives of women’s liberation, civil rights, campus antiwar struggles, Black Power, Chicano liberation, gay and lesbian activism, and other movements. For the students, it’s fair to say that these interviews have challenged every preconception they brought to the table based on previous reading. None was aware that in 1956 UT became one of the very first public universities in the South to desegregate its undergraduate student body, but refused to allow Black women students to live in the regular dormitories until 1965, and only after years of protest. Likewise, they did not anticipate learning that the real beginning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade case was not in Chicago or New York, but among students on the UT campus, the flagship university of a conservative state.

The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project – set to become a history capstone course in Spring 2021 – reflects approaches to “experiential learning” encouraged by the UT Faculty Innovation Center (FIC). The FIC, along with proponents elsewhere, delineates several components of experiential learning, including preparation, autonomy, reflection, bridges, and a public face. As a history professor, I understand experiential learning as a form of pedagogy aimed at helping students value their own minds by working both independently and in collaboration with other students to rethink assumptions about history and to create lasting public products with the capacity to influence others. In developing the Pecha Kucha project students had the advantage of both working in pairs on their interviews and Pecha Kuchas, and working independently on papers that focused on the broader historical context of their interviews, and articulated research “problematics” – i.e., what one is arguing, how it destabilizes previous understandings, and why their project matters.

Besides the teamwork in the classroom, the creation of the Austin Women Activists’ Oral History Project represents collaboration with community activists and alumnae off campus, and many units on campus: the History Department, the Briscoe Center for American History, the Nettie L. Benson Latin America Collection, the Perry-Casteñada Library, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Faculty Innovation Center, University of Texas Captioning and Transcription Services, Life & Letters and the College of Liberal Arts.

A key component, suggested by Anne Braseby at the FIC and Margaret Schlankey at the Briscoe Center for American History, was reflection. In their papers, students wrote about both difficulties and breakthroughs they experienced. Several felt nervous going into their interviews, because they had never conducted an oral history before. One student said she felt frustrated at the lack of scholarship on “black women’s histories at Southern universities, which shows the project’s importance but made the context harder to find.” A graduating senior wrote that he “expected the interview and my research just to be littered with dates and facts, but the reality was that this assignment was full of life and felt important.” At the same time, it “made [him] feel as if [he] had done nothing in my time here as far as activism.” A Mexican American student wrote that her interviewee’s “point of view was very interesting, when she told me that she did not care that the only reason why she was accepted into the university was due to her race and the university’s quota for minority students.” This was “very different to the views that many students have today.” And one of the students who interviewed Erna Smith, who currently teaches in UT’s School of Communications, wrote that “learning about her time at the University of Texas, allowed me to see the campus I walk every day in a new light. Opening myself up to learning this was challenging, as I am often going into projects searching for the answer I want. However, my research and the interview created new questions that allowed me to dive deeper into topics I never realized I ignored in the past.” [Underlining in originals]

For more on this project, including tapes and transcripts of of the interviews, see the dedicated page for THE AUSTIN WOMEN ACTIVISTS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT on the website of the Briscoe Center for American History.

PECHA KUCHAS

Serena Bear and Zoë Marshall
“NAP, AABL, and Black Power at UT”

Shianne Forth and Amber Dey
“Setting the Record Straight: Gay Liberation was More Than Just Stonewall”

Sara Greenman-Spear and Wilson Petty
“The Glo Dean Baker Gardner Experience: How Black Women Transformed Social Organizations into Political Ones”

Michelle Lopez and Carson Wright
“Hello to All This: How Invisibility Uncovered the Austin Lesbian Feminist Movement”

Sasha Davy and Brittney Garza
Justice Warriors: How African-American Women Fought for Equality at UT.”

Taylor Walls and Elizabeth Zaragoza-Benitez
“Chicana Revolutionaries: A Rising Voice for Social Change at UT, 1960s-1970s”
(COMING VERY SOON!)

Photo Credits:
Pecha Kuchas reproduced with permission. Photos are frame captures from “Fight Like a Girl,” College of Liberal Arts, UT Austin. Historical images in that film come from The Texas Archive of the Moving Image and the Briscoe Center for American History.

Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas

By Micaela Valadez

The year 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, a major labor battle waged in San Antonio, Texas from 1959 to 1963 by mostly Mexican, Mexican-American, and some Anglo women all of whom were active members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 180. This strike is important for the history of Mexican Americans, women, and labor organization because it bridged the two other major moments for Mexican and Mexican American labor activism: the Pecan Shellers strike in San Antonio during the 1930s and the other Farah strike of the 1970s in El Paso. Little is known about labor activism strategies of marginalized women in the Southwest during the period in between these two infamous labor organizing efforts. The Tex-Son strike unveils what working women did to advocate for their needs on the garment factory floor during the Cold War period, especially in a historically anti-labor, anti-union state.

Black and white image of two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son "On Strike" for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 — Two women carrying picket signs, Tex-Son “On Strike” for Local 180, ILGWU, San Antonio, 1963 (via UTA Libraries)

The Tex-Son strike was organized by the ILGWU, affiliated for most of its existence with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and then the AFL-CIO when the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955. By the mid-1930s, most of the garment industry moved to the Southwest as the region offered a low-cost labor pool of Black and Latinx workers. This industry transition proved to be complicated for the ILGWU as the union sent Anglo men with little experience in Spanish-speaking communities to represent workers in the Southwest. Eventually, the ILGWU maintained a presence in large cities in Texas, including San Antonio.

San Antonio was home to one of the largest populations of ethnically Mexican people in the United States, which the garment industry exploited for some of the lowest wages in the country. Many working-class ethnically Mexican women in San Antonio were able to obtain positions in the defense industry during WWII, but afterwards were left with slim options besides factory jobs. Tex-Son, owned by brothers Harold and Emanuel Franzel, employed both Anglo and Mexican American women, but were actively outsourcing work to Tupelo, Mississippi where Black women made up a lucrative labor force. In response to an uptick in union membership among Tex-Son workers by the ILGWU, the Franzels produced anti-union literature and warned their workers against signing any union agreements in the fall of 1958, before the strike began. In response, the ILGWU Negotiating Committee sent demands to the Franzels which included better wages and benefits among others.

The work of Gregoria Montalbo was essential to building momentum for the strike. An organizer from Chicago, her main job was to explain to hopeful recruits about the benefits and necessity of a strike against Tex-Son. Montalbo’s role as the president of Local 180 was focused on recruitment prior to the strike as well as working to gain support from San Antonio’s clergy during the strike, appealing to the many workers who were members of Catholic congregations in the city. One of the most committed clergy supporters was Father Sherrill Smith who agreed with Local 180 that San Antonio needed unions in order to create a more equitable work environment for everyone. He played a key role on the picket line and going door to door to recruit more people to join the strike.

The Tex-Son strike was the first to use an ILGWU Chicana lead organizer, Sophie Gonzalez, who became the face of the Tex-Son strike. Gonzalez began union organizing in 1949 after her brother, a union organizer for the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchers of America Union, encouraged her to accept a position in the ILGWU. Her presence in local newspapers and on the picket line was an integral piece of the ILGWU’s strategy. She maintained a certain physical appearance that portrayed her respectability as a woman but remained fierce in her communication of worker’s demands to the media and locals.

The very first week of the strike was the most tumultuous in terms of physical altercations between the women and allies on strike, the women who continued to work throughout the strike, and the police. On February 26^th and 27^th, the women on strike, angered by scab workers being escorted in and out of the factory, began throwing eggs and rocks at strike breakers and getting in physical altercations. The police charged the strikers with rioting and drunkenness, however there was not sufficient evidence to prove that any of the strikers were inebriated while on the picket lines.

Black and white image of Helen Martinez and her four children in San Antonio, Texas — Helen Martinez and her four children, San Antonio (via UTA Libraries)

The ILGWU also engaged in a propaganda campaign to accompany the strike and boycott of Tex-Son goods. This campaign exploited the dominant ideology of the time about motherhood instead of on the women’s role as economic providers. In doing so, they produced materials such as reproducing checks given to Tex-Son employees next to pictures of their children, effectively communicating the inability to care for a family on such dismal paychecks. Even children participated by handing out balloons to other children entering surrounding department stores with “Don’t Buy Tex-Son Children’s Clothes,” imprinted on them. These tactics, however, were detrimental to the image of strikers as workers, not just mothers.

In the first year of the strike, the ILGWU women gained support from other local unions, such as the International Union of Brewery Workers, and other male supporters who assisted in picket line activities. However, the daily hardships that came along with picketing wore down many of the women who originally joined the strike. Many were forced to seek out other kinds of employment, especially after being blacklisted by Tex-Son, barring them from working at other garment factories. By September 1960, ILGWU strikers began to fear that their leadership was giving up on them, which eventually came to fruition when two months later, the small benefit checks from ILGWU stopped entirely and Gonzalez and other union leaders pulled out of the strike entirely. After appeals from people like County Commissioner Albert Peña Jr., the AFL-CIO office in Washington, D.C. agreed to continue to fund the remaining 80 women on the picket line. However, morale was already low and a few women complained that Gonzalez’s absence hurt the propaganda strategy. Others, however, complained that her leadership style and charges of opportunism hurt the strike from the very beginning. Ultimately, the strike lost its fervor due to continued violence perpetrated on the women and general distrust and lack of enthusiasm and financial support. By the end of 1962 the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio altogether. On January 24, 1963, only eleven women were left on the last day at the picket line.

Black and white image of brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes — Brewer workers supporting Tex-Son strikes (via UTA Libraries)

The consequences of an unsuccessful strike were clearly visible; after the ILGWU pulled out of San Antonio, unionism in the city remained practically absent. Many factories began to mock Tex-Son’s strategy of outsourcing work to the Deep South and across the U.S.-Mexico border. However, the Tex-Son strike is an important episode in the history of ethnically Mexican women’s Cold War era strategies to gaining labor rights for themselves. Blending public and private spheres by challenging the public to support their fight as mothers making ends meet for their families, the women presented locals with a new idea of women’s roles in the realm of labor. The Tex-Son strike also served as a primer of sorts for Texas Chicano Movement activism in the late 60s and early 70s that began to appeal to Chicanas’ racial and ethnic identity and oppression, rather than solely on gender identity and motherhood.

In addition to the historical importance, the strike also connects with current issues such as the recent Mississippi ICE raids at a poultry processing plant. Many observers suggest that the workers were targeted specifically because they successfully unionized and won a law suit against Koch Foods for $3.75 million over sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latinx workers. Although there are obvious differences between these two events, there are some salient congruencies. Both involved gendered discrimination and discrimination based on race and ethnicity. More obvious though, is the constant threats of violence that Latinx workers face then and today and their vulnerable position in exploitative labor relations. The Tex-Son strike and the unionization of the Mississippi poultry plant both ended in victory and defeat causing families to be uprooted and the loss of important sources of income. The immigrants detained by ICE are facing some of the most horrid conditions in detention and the women of the Tex-Son strike were beaten and chastised on the picket line. As different as the consequences of each are, the women involved share unsatisfactory and even dangerous work conditions alongside gender, ethnic, and national origin discrimination.

Sixty years after the beginning of the Tex-Son strike, Latinx people in the U.S. are still a major source of cheap labor and a punching bag for anti-union and anti-immigrant sentiments. Fortunately, strong labor activist roots for Latinx peoples of all nationalities and races still remain at the core of obtaining equitable working conditions. The Tex-Son strike of 1959, among others throughout the hemisphere, should be remembered as a foundation and lesson for labor activists today as anti-immigrant rhetoric is spewed from the highest bodies of government here and abroad.

This article draws on the following sources:

Lori Flores, “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959-1963. Pacific Historical Review. 78, no. 3 (August 2009), 367-402.

Irene Ledesma, “Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism, 1919-1974. Western Historical Quarterly, 27, no. 3 (1995), 309-331

Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. 10^th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

La Mujer Unidad: Cynthia Orozco (UT History Honors Graduate ‘80)

By Nikki Lopez

“I think I drew it in my apartment, I drew a lot of posters for organizations from Austin to San Marcos,” Cynthia Orozco answered when I asked about the origins of the poster. Orozco further explained to me that feminist consciousness groups like this one were popular in the late 1970s. “It was just a place where we talked about sexism on campus with around ten Chicanas. It was a group where we felt safe.” Cynthia Orozco’s life was filled with many such posters, little moments of struggle that combined to make a difference in her life and the lives of the Chicanas who followed her at UT.

I interviewed Dr. Cynthia Orozco about her upbringing and her time at UT. Orozco grew up in Cuero, Texas, in a low-income, working-class family. Her mother, Aurora, passionately advocated for educational access for minorities and had been involved with the Mexican American civil rights movement since the 1950s. “My mother attended a segregated school. ‘Mexicans are stupid people’ was a phrase she heard frequently.” Aurora’s primary motivation behind her advocacy work was racial discrimination in Cuero schools that directly affected her own children. Later all seven of her children, including Aurora, would go on to attend The University of Texas at Austin. Orozco would continue to pursue her family tradition of activism. During her high school graduation speech, Orozco called for the school system to stop ignoring women and minorities and forcing boys to cut their hair. In retaliation, the school fired her from her student council position. “We knew that it was possibly illegal what they did, but at that time we really couldn’t do anything.”

Orozco found new opportunities and challenges at UT. Following a two-year stint at Southwest Texas University (now Texas State), Orozco enrolled at UT in 1978. During her time at UT, Orozco was able to experience first-hand how sexism and racism intertwined and left her out of place in the Chicano organizations. The underlying sexism in the movement was perpetuated by the idea of La Familia, which reinforced traditional, paternalistic patterns, and marginalized women and women’s issues in the Chicano movement. “I have learned that the Chicano movement is just that, a ChicanO movement which uses women as workers, sucks our life blood and does not return our due benefits,” Orozco wrote in an editorial for La Gente in 1981. For many in the Chicano movement, the needs of Chicanas were not important and sexism was normalized subconsciously. Discussions at group meetings focused on addressing racism and not sexism.

Letter from Cynthia Orozco

Throughout her life Cynthia Orozco spoke out against institutions that tried to suppress her and held firm to her beliefs. Orozco was constantly silenced and seen as a burden due to her vocalizing the need for Chicana representation during student-led meetings and conferences. Orozco recalled in her editorial for La Gente that during an organizing meeting for an event in 1979, she “was told by an activist that one woman was already included in the schedule” and there was no need for any more. The rationalization behind excluding women-centered sessions was that issues pertaining to police brutality and farmworkers’ rights were more important. Students in the group (including women) voted against the crucial inclusion of Chicana voices. Angry with Chicano groups, Orozco wrote an article called “On Chicana Unity” for The Daily Texan. She criticized her “brothers” for their lack of flexibility when considering the role Chicanas in the movement and prefered that their “sisters” remain home as mothers. Once while she was studying, Orozco received multiple calls from the UT Chicano Community leader screaming at her that she was causing the movement to be divisive and continuing to invalidate her Chicana identity. In a letter to a fellow feminist, Orozco wrote that “while I am still basically a feminist and believe in helping all people, my main area of concern is Women of Color.” Following in the tradition of radical feminists who came before her, Orozco established a feminist collective called the Chicana Consciousness Group. The collective met every Monday and became a home for many students on campus. Members were able to breathe and share their thoughts that they felt scared to share in other organizations.

Despite the struggles she faced, Orozco felt that UT was “one of the most academically, enriching universities out there.” UT helped her think outside the box and pushed her to take on an active role in writing and research. Beyond the Chicana Consciousness Group, Orozco used her position in student leadership roles to help other students learn from scholars. Orozco was Chair of the Chicano Culture Committee to invite women to share their research. “There was always something going on campus! I attended workshops and enjoyed the ones I planned as well.”

Despite our separation in time and space, I can see myself in Cynthia’s poster. During our interview Orozco mentioned that she began to have an identity crisis at UT. The feeling of not being Mexican or American enough is a struggle that I shared. Unlike Orozco I’ve had the privilege to take classes that are Chicana-centered. These classes were designed for people like Orozco and me.. They taught me that my feelings were valid and that my identity was seen. Orozco had to do this on her own with the resources she had. She advocated and created a space even though the work was exhausting. Thanks to her advocacy students like me have been able to navigate UT better.

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century

Recent Posts