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

2. Labor Recruitment

35 “ There was much work to do for the railroad,”former traquero Jesús Ramírez recalled.1 Ramírez was born in Silao, Guanajuato, in 1900, and left at the age of fifteen with his father to lay tracks in Kansas, working ten hours a day at ten cents an hour. Because of the lack of work in Mexico, and the unsettled conditions resulting from the Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Mexican men and women decided to leave Mexico, at least temporarily in order to find work, peace, and to raise families in the United States. Ramírez eventually remained with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad in Emporia, Kansas, until he retired. When Ramírez arrived in 1916, annual Mexican immigration hovered around 18,000. By 1920 that figure had jumped to 54,000.2 This chapter examines the origins, growth, and diaspora of Mexican railroad workers in the United States, especially on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Within the constraints presented by the growth of the railroad in the Southwest, Mexican track workers and their families made important decisions about the conditions of their employment, where they worked, where they lived, and how they determined the quality of their daily lives within the confines of a burgeoning extractive economy. Mexican immigration to the United States during this fiftyyear period was a complex web of relationships between Mexican workers and American railroads. On the one hand, the economic transformation of the Southwest from a pre-capitalist economy to a full-blown industrial one created an insatiable demand for cheap labor. On the other hand, socioeconomic and political upheaval in Chapter 2 Labor Recruitment Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo 36 Mexico gave rise to the displacement of tens of thousands of Mexican men and women from cities, towns, villages, haciendas and ejidos. Approximately one-eighth to one-tenth of Mexico’s population, or one million people, shifted north of the border during the period 1900 to 1930. Railroad construction into the West transformed the region’s economy and created a seemingly insatiable demand for labor. Combined with the growth of the mining and agricultural industries, the railroads found themselves in stiff competition with other industries for the same pool of laborers; however, railroads also had a vested interest in supplying other industries with Mexican labor. The railroad’s primary purpose, after all, involved the shipment of raw materials and goods out of and into the West and Southwest. And they profited handsomely. This demand for track labor accounted for the majority of “common labor” jobs in the West.3 In the 1870s and 1880s, railroads, mining, and agriculture made use of the available resident pool of labor in the Southwest: Hispanos, Indians and European immigrants. During this period, Mexican immigrant workers occasionally sought work on the north side of the border. As the demand for labor expanded, American railroads actively recruited mexicanos to work north of the border. This demand for labor, on the one hand, and the need for work, on the other, created a circular migration into and out of the United States, but authorities paid little attention to this phenomenon until well into the 1900s.4 Indeed, it appears that the migration trail of most Mexican railroad workers to the United States originated in the densely populated central region of Mexico, and from there to the industrialized northern states of Chihuahua and Sonora from where transnational migration continued. Mexican immigrant labor joined, replaced, and eventually outnumbered domestic Hispanos and all other immigrant track workers (including Black workers) in the Midwest and Central Plains.5 The demand for track workers multiplied with every new mile of track laid, and the demand grew exponentially once completed. Branch lines, interurban lines, double-tracking, and maintenance kept tens of thousands of traqueros employed almost year-round. Mexicans sought jobs that paid the best in order to improve their living conditions. And like Hispanos before them, they sought railroad work because it allowed for seasonal transnational migration that allowed them to earn a modest income and return to their 37 Labor Recruitment homes. Of course, these same features frustrated others who sought long-term and more secure employment. Track work in Mexico paid comparatively less, roughly twenty-five cents a day, while the same work paid one dollar a day north of the border throughout the period from 1880 to 1910. This wage must also be understood in comparison to the wages the...