Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870-1930

Introduction

5 Former traquero Jesús Ramírez complained that “It is never in the books or papers that the Mexicans built the railroads. And we had no machines, only our hands.”1 It must also be stated that even Chicano historians have never included Mexican women as railroad workers, if not necessarily at work on the track, then as workers at home in boxcars and railroad yard shanties. In order to at least partially fill this gap in labor and Chicano and Chicana history, this study will show that the development and socioeconomic growth of the Southwest were directly tied to the toil and sacrifice of tens of thousands of workers of Mexican origin,2 without whom the railroads in the West and Southwest may not have been built when they were, or as quickly.3 While the books and the newspapers rarely tell the story of how Mexicans “built the railroad,” those of the Immigrant Generation possess the collective memory of how they traveled from their homes in Mexico to various destinations in the United States, the vast majority of whom either worked on the railroad or traveled on the railroads to other employment sectors. This study is an attempt to reconstruct their daily lives and breathe life into scattered pieces of historical materials and raw data that remain available. In so doing, it will first discuss the pertinent literature in railroad, labor, and Chicano history, and show how others have long recognized the important contribution of Mexican workers on the railroads, but failed to place Mexicans at center stage in the development of the railroad into the Southwest and West. Introduction Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo 6 The present study also builds upon the “political generational” framework recently articulated by Mario García.4 A political generation is not a biological generation. However, a political generation may parallel a biological generation and theoretically span more than one biological generation. The most salient feature of a political generation is a set of common life experiences, such as wars, economic depressions, and mass migrations. García has termed the generation of around one million Mexicans who sojourned north of the border between 1900 and 1930 the Immigrant Generation because of their common experience as “immigrants.” And, while the process of immigration preceded 1900 and continued after 1930, the percentage of Mexican immigrants in United States communities is unparalleled. Traqueros falls under the rubric of the “new social history” and “new labor history.” As such, it seeks to examine the intersections of race/culture, class, and gender among the Mexican railroad worker communities in the United States. Like many other labor studies that have been influenced by the works of historians such as E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, this study seeks to understand not only what workers did while at work and the associations they formed, but also what they did at home in their leisure time, and how they both accommodated and resisted cultural assimilation. Ultimately, this study like other ethnic and labor histories seeks to understand Mexican railroad worker culture, that is, how Mexican railroad workers understood themselves and how they negotiated their lives around work and leisure on a daily basis. As the title indicates, this study is largely limited to those Mexican railroad workers north of the Rio Grande. However, there are clear linkages between Mexican railroad workers’ experiences in Mexico and their search for employment on American railroads. Certainly, northern Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States can be understood as a unitary socioeconomic region, yet the differences may be far greater than the similarities. Mexican track workers, like other track workers, were unfairly and inaccurately categorized by the railroads and mining industries as “casual” or “common” labor. These terms are euphemisms for “unskilled” or “semi-skilled” workers, which when applied to immigrant workers, especially Chinese, Irish, Greeks, Italians, Indians and Mexicans, implied that their work could be performed by any strong able-bodied man. Defined this way, some historians have also 7 Introduction denied Mexican workers the dignity and recognition for having built much of the railway lines in the Southwest and Central Plains region. The exact mileage of track laid and maintained by Mexican workers compared to that of Euro-American groups is ultimately less important than the fact that each group of workers gradually replaced the previous one in successive waves as “common laborers.” It is virtually impossible to determine...