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Reviewed by:
  • Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930 by Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo, and: Railroad Radicals: Gender, Class, and Memory in Cold War Mexico by Robert F. Alegre
  • Michael Snodgrass
Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930
Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo
Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012
235pp., $49.59 (cloth)
Railroad Radicals: Gender, Class, and Memory in Cold War Mexico
Robert F. Alegre
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013
xviii + 275 pp., $40.00 (paper)

These two histories—one about struggling immigrants in America, the other about union struggles in Mexico—follow the divergent paths taken by two generations of railroad workers whose stories intersect at a common hub: the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo’s protagonists are a pioneering generation of migrants who departed the Mexican heartland, traveled the rails north, and then laid and maintained lines from California to Kansas. As their occupational moniker implies, the traqueros worked on and lived along the tracks. Their numbers escalated dramatically after 1910, when revolutionary violence, hunger, and unemployment led tens of thousands of Mexican men to migrate north and hire on [End Page 115] with the railways even as “track labor became synonymous with racial subordination” (12). Some brought their families and built new lives in segregated boxcar settlements. Those who went back, as many did in the 1930s, returned to a Mexico undergoing radical reform.

The revolution had bequeathed far-reaching constitutional rights to Mexican workers, and none capitalized on them sooner than Robert F. Alegre’s protagonists, the “railroad radicals” who organized Mexico’s first industrial union. For the first half of the twentieth century, railway workers were the country’s labor aristocracy, as reflected in their pay, levels of skill, social prestige, and political activism. As the vanguard of Latin America’s most influential union movement, the rieleros’ status—as workers and citizens—contrasted mightily with that of the hard-worked, poorly paid and nonunion traqueros who had migrated North. The outcomes of their stories—and these insightful histories—diverge as well. For all their hardships, Garcilazo’s protagonists built cohesive communities that “constituted the beginnings of many Mexican immigrant communities in the United States” (111). Alegre, on the other hand, carries the railroaders’ story into a Cold War era where union radicalism—as in Mexico’s legendary strikes of 1958–59—elicited military repression, mass firings, and the long-term imprisonment of revered union leaders. While the strikes came to symbolize working resistance to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), this ostensibly “mighty blow to postwar PRI hegemony” (140) in fact produced a knockout punch to a once powerful union.

An excellent map in Traqueros illustrates how deeply integrated the “Mexican and Western U.S. Railroad Network” (19) was by 1920, when Mexico’s revolutionary war concluded and northward migration reached unprecedented levels. The integration reflected the history of Mexico’s railroads, built by American capital to export Mexican commodities to US markets. The railways’ strategic role in Mexico’s export-oriented economy would haunt its workers up to the 1958–59 strikes. Meanwhile, their late nineteenth-century construction brought unintended consequences. The railroads initiated the mass recruitment of Mexican labor by American employers. Track work then dispersed immigrants from California to Chicago and became a gateway into more permanent occupations in meat-packing or steel. Meanwhile, prior to the 1910 revolution, railway jobs were also luring American immigrant workers down to Mexico. As they did in mining and oil, the skilled gringo workers organized Mexico’s earliest craft unions so as to monopolize the best jobs. The indignity caused by this workplace discrimination helped to inspire Mexico’s own nascent labor movement, which first took root among railway workers. Garcilazo reminds us of another transnational twist to the history of Mexican unionism: migrants returning from rail jobs in Texas were among the founding members of the Unión de Mecánicos Mexicanos, the labor organization that evolved into the Mexican Railroad Workers Union (STFRM), the subject of Alegre’s study.

We encounter relatively few return migrants in this brief but provocative book by the late Professor Garcilazo (1956–2001). Published posthumously, thanks to the efforts of his colleagues...

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