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  • Working on the Railroad, Walking in BeautyThe Voices of Navajo Railroad Workers
  • Jay Youngdahl (bio)

Those who drive along Interstate 40 from Albuquerque, New Mexico through northern Arizona and into the Southern California desert are treated to a rainbow of colors in the mesas and through the mountains. They encounter the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, a stunning descent into the canyon of the Colorado River, and the subtle variations of a cactused landscape. While the beauty delights travelers, this natural view is often interrupted by the consistent stream of trains—owned by Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad—rolling over the double-tracked rails that parallel much of the highway. If you drive past these rails, you’ll often see large gangs of men—some working with hand tools, others operating machinery—maintaining the rails so the tracks can absorb the constant pounding that the trains dish out. Travelers in the Southwest often don’t know that many, if not most, of these [End Page 77] men are Navajos. The Navajo Nation, occupying a landmass north of these tracks that’s nearly the size of the state of West Virginia, has been their home for roughly seven hundred years. Nearly a quarter million Navajos live here.

Railroad work has been one of the only forms of continuous wage labor available to Navajo men since their return to this reservation after the infamous U.S. government-enforced “Long Walk” of the 1860s. While Navajos and the Western railroads have a constant connection, an upsurge in Navajo railroad employment began after World War II, when companies were forced to send Mexican “bracero” workers home. In order to supply labor to the railroads a paternalistic triangle was formed. It was comprised of the U.S. government, mainly represented by the Railroad Retirement Board, an obscure federal agency based in Chicago; the Western railroad companies; and the owners of the trading posts that dotted the reservation. The Navajos had no say in the arrangement. Leroy Yazzie Sr., a pleasant sixty-year-old man with a sparkling Navajo sense of humor, found work on the railroads through his trading post. He got his job on the Rock Island Railroad after talking to a trader at the local trading post who told him to “round up some Navajos.” Leroy found some men willing to go work at the railroad. All of the Navajo men got in the back of a pick-up truck and the trader drove them to the embarkation site.

Railroad work is generally dangerous and, with few exceptions, Navajos are offered only the most difficult work on the major Western railways—track maintenance. Injuries are commonplace, as track work is still performed much as it was well over one hundred years ago. So, to this day, after the snow begins to melt in the spring, Navajo men leave their reservation and travel between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi River, in gangs of up to one hundred, maintaining and replacing aging railroad tracks.

Jerry Sandoval, the brother of a traditional medicine man, lives in a family compound at the end of a road on a beautiful small mesa overlooking a small settlement in the “checkerboard” area of the Navajo Nation. Jerry, a pleasant stocky man in his fifties, went to work for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1978, traveling throughout the Southwest and the southern Midwest off and on for the next eight years, rising at one point to the position of assistant foreman. He is a family man, and his house is festooned with artwork made by his kids. One of them now serves in the U.S. military.

Jerry thought it was “pretty nice to see a lot of places” during his railroad work and to meet a lot of different people. Most of his work was as a trackman on a steel gang laying rails. He worked on some gangs that had Navajos, Anglos, blacks, and Mexicans. But usually he worked on steel gangs that were all Navajo, consisting of more than one hundred men, mostly from the Arizona side of the reservation, living in railroad cars and often working twenty days without a day off...

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