Carmen Tafolla and Sharyll Teneyuca, illustrated by Terry Ybáñez,
That's Not Fair! / ¡No Es Justo!: Emma Tenayuca's Struggle for Justice/La lucha de Emma Tenayuca por la justicia
Wings Press, 2008.

Ages 7-12

As a young girl living comfortably with her grandparents in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca noticed the inequities that so many people seemed to ignore: a mother in a doorless shack trying to warm her crying baby with a thin shawl and her thin arms, a hungry four-year-old boy shelling a few pecans to share with his little brothers, a classmate who never learned to read because her migrant farm-worker family had had to leave to follow the harvest.

Emma’s sense of justice is outraged.  Even as a young girl, she cannot sit by while others suffer around her.  Emma starts small, by offering the little boys an apple from her lunch, giving her sweater to the mother with the baby, and teaching her classmate, Maria, to read.  By the time she is a teenager, Emma has realized that an entire group of people in her town, the pecan shellers who work in the local processing plants, are living on starvation wages.  Emma begins to speak to others about the injustice.  She speaks in parks, at the market, and on the steps of City Hall.  People begin to pay attention and in 1938, when the bosses at the pecan plants decide to drop the shellers’ wages even lower, the pecan shellers come to Emma for help.

“You must all stop working until the owners listen to you,” Emma says.  “We will make a soup kitchen to feed your families.  If we all help each other, we can win.”  12,000 pecan shellers walked away from their jobs for two months, and the businesses made no money.  Emma was threatened and jailed repeatedly, but she did not relent.  The factory owners finally agreed to raise the workers’ wages.

That’s Not Fair! is the first book about the first Mexican-American labor leader in the United States, a young woman barely out of her teens at the time she helped exact justice for poor and oppressed people from the wealthy factory owners who exploited them.  With evocative illustrations inspired by historical photographs from San Antonio artist Terry Ybáñez, this bilingual picture book also includes a biographical note (in English only) that summarizes other important aspects of Teneyuca’s long life (she died in 1999) and features several black and white photographs of the young Emma.  Authored by Emma Tenayuca’s friend Carmen Tafolla and her niece, Sharyll Teneyuca, That’s Not Fair!  brings readers the inspiring story of a leader whose life and work deserve to be remembered.

Abigail Sawyer
February 2010