Mexican American Archives

The Weight Around My Neck

Pick up the camera. Aim, kneel, shoot. He hides behind a pair of rough hands. Inscribed in the knuckles: “Lupita.” Another shot followed by instant regret. Somehow, taking that photograph reminded you of the power dynamics—the violence—immersed in the asymmetrical act of representing others. Let the camera hang around your neck again. It never felt heavier. Engage. You are told only half of the story, maybe because of fear, or maybe you don’t deserve it yet. He walks away just as you take one last picture. The scar on his back might know the other side of the story.

The scar is a large tattoo of Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk saint of death. Canonized by no one yet a saint still, Santa Muerte pulls together a wide range of devotees across Mexico and among Mexican immigrants in Queens, New York. They ask her to help them with legal troubles, protection from the police, health issues, and love affairs. Arely, a transgender woman from Tlapa, Guerrero, is the leader of the movement in New York. She introduced me to many devotees who generously shared their stories with me.

M took off his shirt to show me his Santa Muerte tattoo. — *M took off his shirt to show me his Santa Muerte tattoo (Queens, New York).*

The results of those conversations turned into my first book, El pasado que me espera: bosquejo de etnografía cinemática,[The Past that Awaits Me: A Sketch toward Cinematic Ethnography] where I try to tell these stories without bending them, to avoid privileging the frame over the content. More than showing what I learned, the book reads like a constant struggle about what to do with these stories, who they are serving, and how to write them. Investigating the politics of representing the asymmetry between researcher and researched, between writer and believer, became the book’s core and of all my subsequent work.

The book explores the politics and poetics of ethnographic representation and the troubles of writing about others and picturing them. And it offers a possible escape: to incorporate my photographic practice into the research and bend the writing as much as the ethnographic experience demands it, to use the conventions of cinematic discourse (moving the camera, montage, cuts, close-ups) that diminish the “effect of the real” without discarding its narrative power. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on Santa Muerte—a Mexican folk saint usually described as the patron saint of the Drug Wars in Mexico—I essay across genres to avoid the exoticizing, one-sided descriptions that frame its devotees as criminals, sicarios, or deviants. It exploits the diversity of this devotion and the violence inherent in reducing it to a narco-saint.

El pasado que me espera is divided into three parts. Part I, the book’s core, is an experiment in ethnographic writing that borrows techniques from cinematic discourse, photography, and archives to offer a portrait of the diverse devotion to Santa Muerte: a polyphonic, multi-sited ethnography. Yet, written as a pastiche or collage, it sometimes reads like a novel based on extensive fieldwork, challenging many of the conventions of more traditional ethnographic narratives.

Parts II and III can be considered appendices separated from the empirical text. Part II offers an essay explaining how religious practices and beliefs are represented in Santa Muerte studies and other works on popular religions. It traces how “religion” and its “persistence” came to be conceived as research problems in the social sciences, which makes the appearance of functionalist arguments almost inescapable: devotees believe because they are poor, ignorant, or because they live in violent worlds. Anchoring the text in my fieldwork on Santa Muerte in the context of the rise of the New Atheism movements and social anxieties of modernity, the chapter takes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s method seriously to give agency and meaning back to religious beliefs: to describe, instead of explaining.

Santa Muerte giant statue that watches over Templo Mayor (Tultitlán, Estado de México) — *Santa Muerte’s giant statue that watches over Templo Mayor (Tultitlán, Estado de México).*

Part III delves into the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing and representation. Using the history of photography and its ambiguous connections to cinematography as a parallel, it unveils the violence and mediation inherent to any form of representing otherness. By showing how academic writing borrows conventions of photography—frame, focus, first and second plane, depth, presence—it then proposes to keep borrowing, but from cinematography—montage, lending the camera, “subjective shots,” cutting—to give ethnographic writing the experience of the real while at the same time underscoring its fictitious foundations.

How the text came to be at all warrants an explanation. It all started as a traditional project in ethnography: to embark on a qualitative study to examine and transcribe the life of people who had something in common: believing in Santa Muerte. To understand their beliefs and try to articulate them, I attended baptisms, weddings, Sunday mass, and occasional parties. But this approach soon fell apart and turned into something else: a hybrid, polyphonic text, with the argument lying somewhere between the content and the form. Without a clear path, a pastiche of essays, book reviews, urban reportage, history, auto-ethnography, and loose ends escaped my fingertips. Something got in the way, but what exactly that thing was remained unclear. On the one hand, the text reflects my inability to reduce what I witnessed in the field into a linear ethnographic report, an unwillingness to betray the stories so they could fit a frame. On the other, it reveals the weight I was carrying around my neck. Literally, the weight of the camera.

*J borrows my camera and shoots back (Zumpango, Estado de México)*

Fieldworkers generally carry their cameras without giving them too much thought.[1] As an innocuous recording device, the camera serves as a backup memory and to assert presence: an evidence-making machine. Some even echo Margaret Mead, one of the most prominent and controversial anthropologists of the twentieth century, who thought that the perfect ethnographic record would be something close to a film camera standing on a tripod in the corner of a room: infallible, unaltered, scientific.^[2] Others follow the methods of Bronislaw Malinowski, another very prominent and complicated anthropologist, who used the camera with foresight and care to build an archive of fieldwork itself to assert his presence in the field. He appears constantly in his clearly posed field photographs to convey the hardships, loneliness, and remoteness that serious anthropological work entails. Ethnographic photography seeks to strike a delicate balance to convince its viewers the anthropologist was there without altering the scene to create ghosts.[3]

Yet photographs usually exceed their maker’s intentions. As James Clifford noted in his essay “On Ethnographic Authority,” one of the subjects in Malinowski’s photograph “A Ceremonial Act of the Kula” is looking back at the camera. At first, the picture works as a metaphor for presence but soon begins to diminish its own authority. The illusion of the photograph’s “subjective view” asserts the presence in the scene and brings the viewer to the field: You are there because I was there.^[4] But the illusion is broken by that inconvenient stare. When anthropological subjects look back at the camera, they break the spell. They destabilize the infallibility of the camera, and the illusion fades—which may explain why portraits fit so uncomfortably into the ethnographic look.

Doña Petra and her grandchildren holding tiny Santa Muerte statuettes (Zumpango,
Estado de México).

I took the camera everywhere while doing fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 in Mexico City, Boston, and Queens. A 1984 Olympics Edition Canon AE-1 film camera loaded with 100 ISO color 35mm film. Each film had 36 exposures, which makes photographers on a budget think twice before pressing the shutter every time. After 4 or five rolls, my disappointment with the pictures was only matched by my disappointment with the writing. They mirrored each other: impersonal, distant, disengaged. Vague descriptions of religious rituals in my notebooks matched photographs of devotees from behind perfectly. Shy students, it turned out, make bad ethnographers. That became crystal clear. Were bad photographs another sign? Can the camera speak? Overcoming this crisis entailed weaving photographs and words, writing and picturing—a process that became central to my eventual book.

*A commercial for the 1984 Olympics Edition Canon AE-1 film camera.*

Changing my photographic practice derailed my writing completely. To improve the images, I had to come closer, move differently, make the quotidian strange, and explain the presence of the camera. Photography exacts constant engagement and attention to detail. The images looked different because my body was moving differently. To make a portrait, the operator needs to build a relationship with the subject, articulate the reasons behind the documentary impulse, and accept the trade-off it implies: to reveal their intentions. A portrait is the snapshot of a conversation; it is always the trace of an encounter, a visual dialogue where no side can remain silent. And my first distanced, impersonal photographs of devotees did not lie: I was too afraid to talk.

Conversations triggered by the camera yielded better ethnographic insights. The excuse of a picture gave me an easy entry to casual small talk, tattoo stories, and revealing insecurities. Encounters that would grow into more delicate dialogues. The Canon became my badge and amulet. I wore the strap like a uniform. But it also became a threatening presence. Some people refused to be photographed, and others dismissed camera-bearers as untrustworthy outsiders and remained silent. Portraits rarely come without strings attached: Where will you publish these? Will you send me a copy? How do I look? What do you want it for? It soon became clear: the politics of ethnography and photography overlapped, and that intersection was what the project became about.

Maritza, the owner of a chicken store in Zumpango, poses with her personal statuette. A
Virgen de Guadalupe guards a door that leads to her private Santa Muerte altar. — *Maritza, the owner of a chicken store in Zumpango,*
*poses with her personal statuette.*
*A Virgen de Guadalupe guards a door that leads to her private Santa Muerte altar.*

El pasado que me espera navigates the intersection, embracing complexity and incompleteness. Its fragmented narrative seeks to evoke the tension immersed in visual methods: exposure time, focus, frame, close-ups, composition, and cuts. Moving the camera, lending it, making it stay still, allowing it to think—and letting the portraits speak for themselves. Yet against my best intentions, the writing never relieved the weight of the camera. It feels as heavy and intrusive as the first day, but the neck pain remains instructive. I still carry it as an amulet, a marker of how indebted I am to these stories, and as a reminder that not only does getting closer yield sharper images and more intimate portraits: it is a responsibility.

*All the photos in this piece are by the author.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. In 2023 he was awarded the Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship in Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum, where he will be working on his research project: “Covarrubias’ Crossings: Art, Science, and the Global Politics of Ethnographic Image-Making.” Rodrigo’s work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. He traces the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing.

[1] I use the term “fieldworkers,” widely used in anthropology, to include ethnographers, artists, photographers, and other disciplines that go “to the field” without being scholars or trained anthropologists.

^[2] “For God’s Sake, Margaret, Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead,” The CoEvolution Quarterly 10 (1976).

[3] See Terence Wright, “The Fieldwork Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the Beginnings of Modern Anthropology,” JASO 22 (1991), pp. 41-58; Michael W. Young, Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography, 1915-1918 Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998.

^[4] James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983.

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Remembering Carlos E. Castañeda: A Mexican Historian in Texas

UT Austin students know the name Castañeda as one-half of the namesake of the Perry-Castañeda Library. Perhaps fewer appreciate the profound impact that the eminent historian, librarian, and social reformer Carlos E. Castañeda exerted upon their University, the field of Texas history, and the Mexican American civil rights struggle in Texas. A two-day symposium to take place at UT Austin this fall offers a chance to reexamine the life, work, and scholarly and social impact of this pivotal figure.

2023 is an appropriate time to reassess Castañeda’s legacy. This year marks the centenary year of the founding of the Texas Historical Commission in 1923, a body sponsored by the Knights of Columbus that also published Castañeda’s seven-volume Our Catholic Heritage in Texas (1936-1958). This work stands as a veritable monument in Texas historiography.

In commemoration of this centenary, UT Austin’s Matthew Butler and History Department alumnus Brian Stauffer (PhD, 2015) have organized “Castañeda’s Catholic Texas?” to reappraise Castañeda’s historiographical legacy as Texas’s preeminent Mexican American historian. The event will also contextualize this intellectual work within his Catholic faith and a lifetime of labor and political activism.

Castañeda was,both, a Catholic and a papal knight whose commitment to human dignity and spiritual militancy led him to campaign against discrimination in Texas employment practices as a field officer in FDR’s Fair Employment Commission and in favor of Mexican Americans’ educational and civic rights as a school superintendent and member of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens). To this end, the organizers have assembled a diverse group of scholars whose work will collectively reevaluate Castañeda’s contribution to the lived history and historiography of twentieth-century Texas and his Catholic ideas, while taking Castañeda’s work as an inspiration for new Catholic and labor histories of Texas and the Border.

A photograph of Dr. Castañeda, ca. the 1930s. — *A photograph of Dr. Castañeda, ca. the 1930s, from the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin. Image courtesy of the Benson Collection.*

Despite his reputation as a confessional historian and Boltonian—an admirer of Herbert E. Bolton’s theory of the Borderland as an interactive imperial space[1]—Castañeda was a multifaceted, politically engaged, and paradoxical figure. Though his writing lauded the presence of Spanish missionaries in Texas and sometimes adopted their view of Indigenous people as backward and childlike, Castañeda himself faced discrimination at the hands of an ethnocratic power structure convinced of Mexican inferiority.

A Catholic who collaborated with exiled Mexican priests, such as Jesuit Mariano Cuevas, Castañeda nonetheless supported the Mexican Revolution’s educational project and was an interlocutor of the most anticlerical regime in hemispheric history. Best known as a historian-archivist (in correspondence he enjoyed describing himself as “the Historiographer”), Castañeda’s activism as Del Río school superintendent, on the U.S. Committee on Fair Employment Practice, or in pro-Hispanic organizations such as LULAC, perhaps outlasts his intellectual achievements.

Why is it that a historian of colonial, Catholic Texas should loom so large as a labor activist and defender of Mexican American rights in the twentieth century? In what overlooked, unheralded ways did Castañeda’s Catholicism and intellectual work lead him to espouse what were then radical political views and activist roles? “Castañeda’s Catholic Texas?” will explore these tensions between Castañeda’s historical imagination and activist life. It will also feature new contributions to the historiography of Catholicism in Texas that build upon Castañeda’s monumental work, taking it as a starting point for new, critical discussions of the interactions between faith, politics, and identity. Other contributions, such as that of UT Austin’s Emilio Zamora, will recontextualize Castañeda’s struggle on behalf of Mexican American workers.

Symposium participants will address three major themes in as many sessions: Castañeda’s intellectual work as a Catholic and Mexican historian in Texas; histories of Texas that carry his historiographical ideas forwards; and histories of Castañeda’s labor and political activism. Panelists include UT Austin faculty members Matthew Butler, John Moran González, and Emilio Zamora, along with Juliana Barr (Duke), Fr. Robert E. Wright, OMI (Oblate School of Theology), Deborah E. Kanter (Emeritus, Albion College), Gerald Poyo (St. Mary’s), Roberto R. Treviño (Emeritus, UT-Arlington), Jesús F. de la Teja (Emeritus, Texas State), Ricardo Álvarez-Pimentel (Baylor), Timothy Matovina (Notre Dame), Cynthia E. Orozco (Eastern New Mexico University), Matthew Gritter (Angelo State), Maggie Elmore (Sam Houston State), and Aaron E. Sánchez (Texas Tech). The symposium is sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies in the History Department, the Texas Catholic Historical Society, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, UT Libraries, and the Summerlee Foundation.

The symposium will be held in the Second Floor Conference Room of the Benson Collection’s on-campus home in Sid Richardson Hall (SRH.1) on September 20-21, 2023. Additional updates and registration details will be released in August. Further inquiries about the event can be directed to tchs@txcatholic.org.

[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bolton-herbert-eugene

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza (2019)

By Micaela Valadez

One of the most challenging projects for historians of the twentieth century is producing biographical accounts of the heroes and heroines of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Historical biographies have been attacked because they muddy our positive view of popular leaders in movements that remain salient in the twenty-first century. Some historians, however, write narratives that are powerful and controversial simply because the historical subject was nowhere near perfect, even crossing boundaries that we consider violent and abusive. This is the case for one of the most influential figures in the history of the Chicano Movement, Reies López Tijerina. Evangelical preacher and prophet turned leader of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance], Tijerina’s life is chock-full of both violent and inspiring actions and decisions. Lorena Oropeza’s new book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, skillfully exposes the contradictions of a significant historical character as historians of the Chicano Movement seem to lose sight of his monumental importance in the fight for land rights in the U.S. Southwest.

The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement by Lorena Oropeza

Taking readers from Tijerina’s early childhood in Texas to the last years of his life, Oropeza creates a fascinating biographical account of a man with controversial and radical ideas. She considers Tijerina’s evangelical approach to religion and preaching, misogynistic view of gender, sexuality, and the family, and anti-imperialist view of the U.S. government. Oropeza comes to terms with the messiness of his past and even questions his mental health and sanity, brilliantly exposing some of Tijerina’s most unpopular characteristics and actions while balancing the importance of his work in the Chicano Movement.

Photograph of Reies Tijerina around the time of the “Courthouse Raid” incident in Tierra Amarilla, NM, in June of 1967 via University of New Mexico Digital Collections

Some of the most compelling parts of this book lie in the oral histories gathered by the people that knew Tijerina intimately, including his first wife and his daughters. Understanding their tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship with Tijerina helps the reader understand how hard it was for Chicano Movement activists, especially women, to work in a context his family describes as patriarchal. Oropeza brilliantly compares Tijerina’s past as a prophet to his role as the leader of Alianza. His motivations as a prophet in the 1950s propelled him and his religious followers to build their own underground dwellings in New Mexico in hopes that they might be free from the secular world that he blamed for the oppression of his people. Only a few years later, his new followers in Alianza were determined to liberate land taken from Mexicans by the U.S. after 1848 and live free from the U.S. settler state. His connection to land and his resistance to oppression were hard lines that ran throughout his various leadership roles.

“Tierra O Muerte” Poster, 1967 (via Smithsonian)

This book also highlights an essential moment in the United States when the discourse of non-violent resistance and protest prevailed over violent militancy. Two years before the Alcatraz Occupation by Red Power activists and five years before the armed opposition at the Second Battle of Wounded Knee, Tijerina’s occupation and raid in 1967 of a courthouse in New Mexico lead to the first instance of armed militancy towards federal and state authorities during the 1960s. However, it also ended up placing him among the most venerable leaders of the Chicano Movement. The Alianza’s militant action garnered national attention for the land-grant cause in the Southwest that Tijerina and the activists in his ranks championed for so long. The 1967 raid also led to his participation in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and to conversations with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. However, his national popularity never stopped Tijerina from continuously using the Bible to justify his place in the broader social movements of the time, nor did he ever truly stop believing that he was divinely blessed, a savior to his people.

Headquarters of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants) via University of New Mexico Digital Collections

The King of Adobe shows how to responsibly tell the history of people that historians have ignored or never fully explored. In the case of Tijerina, Oropeza challenges his designation as one of the “Four Horseman of the Chicano Movement,” and his eventual erasure in the history of the Chicano Movement. Oropeza brings Tijerina back to prominence. She takes no shortcuts confronting the ironies in his life. She commends his bravery in a moment when national leaders of social movements were murdered for their ideas while revealing his sexist tendencies and the hardships people around him suffered. Much like Matt Garcia’s pathbreaking book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez, Oropeza’s book challenges historians who help create simplistic narratives of historical figures for fear of being challenged by academia. Oropeza recognizes that the Alianza’s militant action around New Mexican land-grant disputes and the history of U.S. conquest inspired scholars during that period to investigate U.S. land acquisition further, leading activist scholars and others to critique U.S. imperialism and the creation of the U.S. border. She argues that these early scholarly investigations contributed to the emerging fields of Chicano/a history, the history of the American West, and the history of U.S. settler colonialism. Anyone with interests in the Chicano Movement, the movement for land rights in the Southwest, twentieth-century social movements, Mexican American religion, and oral history should read this book.

You might also like:
Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas
City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)
The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project

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.

The Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas

By Samuel Ginsburg

Marfa, a West Texas town of less than 2,000 permanent residents, attracts a lot of visitors. Known as the backdrop to 1959 James Dean film Giant, the town’s main attractions include two main streets lined with galleries, the mysterious Marfa lights that only seem to come out when nobody is looking, and the Chinati Foundation, an epic former military base-turned-art museum. While the scene is now speckled with luxury airstreams and Instagram models dressed in pristine cowboy gear, the bohemian vibe brought over in the 1970s by artists trying to escape New York still resonates, and the sprawling desert backdrop adds to the effect that makes “Marfa” (the idea) feel bigger than Marfa (the place).

Just a few blocks from the main drag is the Blackwell School, a plain, white building that might have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for its Texas Historic Landmark sign. The museum inside the old schoolhouse tells the story of de facto segregation in Marfa since 1889, as special schools were set up for Mexican-descendent children until integration was achieved in 1965. Old desks and books line the open rooms, along with photos and articles about the scholarly and extracurricular activities of the students. More than a look at the evils of segregation and inequality, the museum highlights the special moments in the lives of the people that passed through the school. Photographs show smiling children decorating pumpkins, playing basketball, and proudly posing in marching band uniforms. While meandering through the exhibits, one gets the feeling that great things happened in this place, despite problematic history that led to the school’s founding.

Photograph of the main street of Marfa, Texas — Marfa, Texas (via Wikipedia)

As not to cover up the issues surrounding the school, there are parts of the museum that show the instances of institutional discrimination, such as the board of former teachers that features very few Spanish last names. The museum’s most striking exhibit is titled “Burying Mr. Spanish” and tells the story of a mock funeral that was held in 1954 to officially kill off the use of Spanish at the school. As English was the only language allowed on campus, 7^th-grade teacher Evelyn Davis organized an event in which students wrote Spanish words on small pieces of paper, put them in a coffin, and then buried them next to the school’s flagpole. The museum has photos of the event, along with the coffin and a wooden cross that says “Spanish” and “R.I.P.” In “The Last Rights of Spanish Speaking,” Davis calls hearing the language her greatest “pet peeve,” and recounted the ceremony that had been going well (for her) until the very end: “Everything was perfect up to this moment until two pall bearers, who had not rehearsed, were to lower the casket with dignity. They started pulling against each other in disagreement, which was followed by anger, and then a volley Spanish curse words # % @ * $ * ? The solemnity turned to titters, then giggles followed by hilarious laughter as the bearers threw dirt at each other. What a GREAT FIASCO!” As heartbreaking as it is to read about a school-sanctioned ceremony aimed at cutting off the students’ cultural heritage, it’s hard not to laugh at the ensuing bout of rebellious chaos. As a moment of both forced assimilation and student resistance, this scene recognizes the complicated nature of this space and the need to preserve its stories.

The earlier known photograph of the Blackwell School in Marfa, Texas — The Earliest Known Photo of the Blackwell School (via Marfa Public Radio)

The Blackwell School Alliance was founded in 2007 by former students as the abandoned building was being threatened with demolition. Since then, efforts have been made to seek state and federal protection of the site. The alliance has also looked for ways to reincorporate the school’s history back into the public memory of Marfa. These efforts included the Blackwell Block Party and the commission of a mural by artist Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado. The mural features a poem by Luis Valdez about Chicano pride, an image of current Marfa students building rockets, and the West Texas desert in the background. Most importantly, the mural positions the Blackwell School in the very center, right between Marfa’s iconic water tower and Presidio Country Courthouse. The goal is to reshape how Marfa is seen by both tourists and residents, to create a space for this history within the conceptual landscape of artists and cowboys. For those people fighting to keep the museum open and running, this is a part of Marfa that more people should be visiting.

For more information on the museum and for ways to support the Blackwell School Alliance, visit //www.theblackwellschool.org/.

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