An unladylike strike fashionably clothed: Mexicana and anglo women garment workers against tex-Son, 1959-1963

A conflict that rocked San Antonio from 1959 to 1963, the Tex-Son garment workers' strike was the first International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) struggle led by a Mexican American woman and the first strike in which Mexican-origin and Anglo women picketed together in Texas. Responding to the city press's focus on the violence of the strike, the women of Tex-Son strategically used Cold War-era ideologies of femininity and domesticity to revise public notions of their "unladylike" struggle. By literally refashioning themselves through their physical appearance and emphasizing their dual role as mothers and workers, the mostly Mexicana Tex-Son strikers gained tremendous support in the traditionally anti-union city of San Antonio. Situated between the end of World War II and the Chicano movement, the Tex-Son strike represents an important, transitional form of Mexican and Mexican American women's activism not yet fully explored by historians.