Mexicanos in Oregon: Their Stories, Their Lives

Conclusion

242 Mexicanos in Oregon Conclusion In the early 2000s the statistical trends that described Oregon’s population growth confirmed the clearly visible presence of Mexican workers and their families in workplaces, at the shopping malls, in the public schools, and around the playgrounds in the city parks. Those statistics moved the state to the top fifteen among states that have become “new immigrant destinations.” Oregon had been a favored destination for tejano and mexicano farmworkers for much of the twentieth century—a receiving area for Mexican-origin sojourners and settlers that in some sense resembled a Southwestern state. Current population numbers show that during the 1990s Mexican migration became mainly an urban phenomenon. Portland, Salem-Keizer, and EugeneSpringfield metropolitan areas exerted a pull on immigrants with high human capital and also on workers with less education and training (Hardwick 2008; Singer 2008). In the first chapters of this book we have underscored the deep roots of mexicano settlement in the state, beginning with the pioneers and sojourners in the mid-1800s. These were mule packers who entered Oregon’s territory across the Siskiyou Mountains and reached the Rogue Valley, and also vaqueros who worked in the ranches of Eastern Oregon’s high desert. Many other mexicanos have been employed on farms and ranches since then. By the 1930s, more than fifteen hundred farm laborers were sending money orders from Oregon to their families in Mexico. Those laborers were scattered around the state, but most resided in Malheur County, in Hood River, and across the Willamette Valley. The early settlers remained out of sight and out of mind of local reporters and historians—their presence was only occasionally mentioned in newspapers and contemporary accounts. The Bracero Program was to bring a good deal of publicity to migrant workers during World War II. In the post-bracero era, agricultural workers continued arriving in Oregon with their well-adjusted system of circular migration to the Pacific Northwest until it was interrupted by IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. But even after IRCA, much of the seasonal migration flow remained in place, as recorded in the data of the Mexican Immigration Project analyzed by Fairchild and Simpson (2004). Since the late 1980s, there has been a continuous “spill over” of mexicano laborers to jobs in production, construction, and service industries in adjacent urban areas, while other workers and families moved directly to Oregon’s cities 243 THEIR STORIES, THEIR LIVES Conclusion in search of employment opportunities that were unavailable in already saturated traditional immigrant gateways. The economic boom that produced Oregon’s Silicon Forest created labor shortages in industrial and service occupations. First- and secondgeneration mexicanos moved promptly to fill many of those low-wage entry-level jobs. In applying for and obtaining such positions, these workers benefited from the co-occurrence of two factors: (a) employers in these “new economy” firms that relocated or opened subsidiaries in Oregon were by then accustomed to hiring ethnic workers for low-wage positions, something many employers were doing in traditional inner-city locations such as Los Angeles, Houston, New York, or Chicago; and (b) a number of Mexican Americans were already employed in the secondary sector of Oregon’s urban labor markets. These employees provided referrals to both employers and job seekers. The process was also facilitated by the very efficient local networks that agricultural laborers had developed to fulfill the growers’ demand for a seasonal workforce. According to network theory,1 during the 1990s high rent and low wages in traditional immigrant gateways saturated the capacity of social networks to support new arrivals—who typically have low English proficiency and limited formal education—and redirected migrants to places considered new destinations. This theory explains why people originating from one migrant-sending place, such as the Mexican states of Michoacán or Oaxaca, continue to select the same destinations over time, and why migratory streams sometimes carry on after the initial push and pull may have ended; this impulse to migrate from Mexico to the same destinations in the United States is known as cumulative causation. Thus our discussion in this book emphasizes historicization of the settlement of mexicanos in Oregon without neglecting the transnational phenomena and social networks that explain their migration (Waldinger 2008). At the time of widespread economic distress in Mexico—called a “crisis” by Mexican nationals—Oregon’s networks supplied information, helped finance trips, provided temporary housing, and assisted newcomers in obtaining jobs not only in agriculture and forestry...