New book spotlights San Antonio pecan shellers strike
Why it matters: Author Lupe Ruiz-Flores aims to humanize the Latinas who helped spur a landmark law setting federal minimum wage and overtime pay standards — especially when such stories are threatened by book bans in Texas and across the nation.
State of play: " The Pecan Sheller," released by Lerner Publishing Group this month, features a fictional teenage girl in San Antonio who wants to become a writer, but has to drop out of school to shell pecans to help her family. She eventually joins the real-life strike for better wages and safer working conditions.
The latest: Ruiz-Flores will present the book, aimed at kids in the fifth through eighth grades, at 1:30pm on Saturday at the San Antonio Book Festival.
Flashback: In January 1938, around 12,000 pecan shellers — mostly Hispanic women — began a strike in San Antonio that lasted three months.
Employees often worked more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week for $2 to $3 weekly pay.
When companies decreased wages, Emma Tenayuca of the Texas Workers Alliance led a strike.
The workers eventually won higher pay, clearing the way for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — a bedrock labor law that established a minimum wage.
Zoom in: Ruiz-Flores grew up in San Antonio knowing her mom shelled pecans as a teenager and didn't get to finish high school. But it wasn't something they discussed, and Ruiz-Flores never learned about the strike in school.
In 1999, when she read that Tenayuca had died, she thought of her mom. Ruiz-Flores interviewed her mother and used bits of her personal history in the new fictionalized book.
Unlike the main character in her book, Ruiz-Flores' mother did not actually join the strike.
What they're saying: Hispanic history is often "put aside, and people don't know about it," Ruiz-Flores tells Axios. "I just want (children) to know what happened."
It's important that students learn about local history through personal stories, not just in a textbook, she adds.
"Especially Latinos, Mexican American children, we need to let them know that we had a part in the history of the United States," Ruiz-Flores says.
Yes, but: Ruiz-Flores, who says she hopes kids read her book in school, worries it could be banned.
The big picture: Texas is one of the top states in the country for the number of book titles it has challenged in public schools and libraries, according to the American Library Association.
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