Religion, Rhetoric and Political Activism:
Remembering the Farah Strike in El Paso, Texas (1972-1974)
Between 1920 and 1971, Farah Incorporated, a garment factory founded by Mansour and Hana (Abihider) Farah, grew from a having a small production line in an undersized vicinity on San Francisco Street to earning profits up to 164 million with seven production plants across El Paso, San Antonio, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. According to labor historians, the success of the factory created intense pressure on workers to meet a production quota while under strict managerial control, which by the late 1960s, had created tensions between Farah workers and supervisors. After participating in unionization efforts with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union, Farah management fired 500 San Antonio Farah workers. In protest, more than 4,000 workers went on strike and created a national boycott on May 9, 1972, which according to historian Emily Honig “divided the city politically, destroyed long standing friendships, and created near-warfare in many households” (425). Despite these seemingly “negative” factors, Honig and other scholars have argued that the strike actually empowered women, specifically Chicanas, who made up 85 percent of the labor force, and Mexican male workers, whose voices were continually being silenced by Farah management, specifically the Farah family, who used the history of the factory’s rise to success as a means to defend itself against supposed efforts by Farah strikers to destroy Farah’s “American dream”.
Research Questions:
What exigence created the Farah Strike of 1972?
What rhetoric emerged as a result of the Farah Strike of 1972?
What role did religion play in the strike?
What is the nature of rhetoric as produced by labor activsism?
What were women's roles in the strike and how did they empower the role of gender in the history of labor activism in El Paso?
How did the role of religion affect Farah women strikers/activists?
Importance of study:
This particular event in the history of El Paso, and important chapter in Chicana/o history, is valuable as an object of study because labor rights, already a primary concern for many Chicana/o workers during the late 1960s, became part of public discourse in El Paso. Also, this moment proves critical because, through speeches, letters, flyers, local newsletters and union meetings, Chicana/o strikers used persuasion as a means to encourage all of the El Paso community to give rise to the challenge against an employer that they believed exploited workers via low pay, strict production quotas, and age discrimination. This political effort, on behalf of El Paso Farah strikers, not only marked a moment when Chicana women developed politicized voices, as demonstrated by historians Laurie Coyle and Emily Honig, but also it marked a moment when religious rhetoric was used to aid the strikers’ efforts, which was met with resistance by a largely Catholic El Paso community who believed that mixing religion with politics was inappropriate and futile.
The history of the Farah Strike is important to the study of the History of Rhetoric because it adds to the knowledge gained from interrogating how labor activism creates and changes the nature of rhetoric, as well as how rhetoric is used within a public context where an exigence of labor injustice becomes the central factor that motivates workers to use language as “symbolic action” as a form of resistance, while finding themselves in a place of struggle when their own political beliefs are compromised by the use of religious rhetoric. This point in time further adds to our understanding of the intersection of political and religious rhetoric, as shown by Logan in her discussion of Maria Stewart and Ida B. Wells as orators who addressed injustice on two politicized levels. Also, the history of labor activism, specifically in the United States, has much to add to the rhetorical tradition, in terms of addressing how issues of class affect the way in which language is used to effect change.
Links:
To engage in labor activism through the use of rhetoric is to engage in a class struggle that needs to be further pronounced, or articulated, by historiographers who might defer the question of how class is added as a critical factor alongside race and gender. Also, this study is important when addressing issues of voice and silence, especially considering how Cheryl Glenn’s argument about silence illuminates the way in which silence shaped the lives of Chicana Farah strikers whose views on religion underwent transformation during the strike and then twenty years after the strike.
Hana Farah and sons Jimmy and Willie ran the family company after the loss of
Mansour Farah in 1937. Photo courtesy of the El Paso Times and
Special Collections, UT at El Paso Library.
Farah Strike from The Handbook of Texas Online
History of Farah, Inc from The Handbook of Texas Online
History of El Paso from The Handbook of Texas Online
Mexican Americans and Religion from The Handbook of Texas Online
Farah Manufacturing Now Just a Memory from the Borderlands: An El Paso Community College Local History Project
Brief History of Farah from Perry Ellis Europe Limited
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