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

5. Boxcar Communities

111 Cleofas Calleros, an old-timer and retired Santa Fe depot official in El Paso, recalled the numerous Mexican track workers and section hands “whose groups of houses dot the desert from here to Los Angeles.”1 Indeed, as this chapter shows, traquero houses dotted not only the southwestern desert, but the entire line from El Paso to Chicago. These dwellings constituted the beginnings of many Mexican immigrant communities in the United States. Community and family formation is clearly tied to Mexican industrial employment on the railroad. This chapter examines the origins, variety, and social conditions of Mexican boxcar settlements and community development. It argues that while Mexicans could be found throughout most of the railroad occupational hierarchy, most worked in seasonal track work. As such they lived in a variety of company-owned housing. Boxcar communities probably represented the most common form of housing for Mexican workers and their families. It also demonstrates the linkage between this process and the rise of scientific management regarding Mexican section hands. This chapter concludes that railroad paternalism gave rise to the Mexican boxcar settlements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a means of controlling section hands. Generalizations about the life in boxcar camps are next to impossible to arrive at given the diversity of experiences across the country. Similarities in housing did not give rise to broad similarities in social experience among Mexican track worker families. And while economic hardship and social inequality were widespread, Mexican Chapter 5 Boxcar Communities Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo 112 immigrant men, women, and children interpreted and resisted the conditions they faced by drawing upon their immediate surroundings and their experiences in Mexico. In fact, what is striking about Mexican railroad housing in boxcar communities and other companyowned housing is the diversity of experiences. And while we see clear patterns emanating from boxcar settlements along the various lines, such patterns were not identical throughout the United States.2 Railroad worker communities and boxcar settlements are best described as multiple processes of “barrioization.”3 For example, by the 1910s Mexican railroad workers found housing in boarding houses or in the homes of friends and relatives in sprawling urban centers such as Chicago and Los Angeles. Moreover, in regions once settled by Indian, Spanish, and Mexican pueblos especially in New Mexico and Colorado, the pattern of pueblo and village settlements certainly preceded railroad boxcar communities. Notwithstanding the devastating social impact of the railroad and Mexican immigration into these older Hispano settlements, it must be stated that these boxcar communities were typically not inhabited by Hispanos but rather by immigrants. Hence the Mexican immigrant experience is indeed almost exclusively associated with boxcar communities. To be sure, some Hispanos lived in boxcar housing, but typically as itinerant workers and not with wives and children. More typically, boxcar communities tended to include families, while bunkcars and bunkhouses tended to house individual male track workers. There were occasions when Mexican immigrant families actually accompanied their men while working on the track, but this form of track labor housing was more similar to bunkcars that housed single men. However, the presence of women and families in boxcars or work encampments differed fundamentally from the daily life experiences of solos, as I have discussed in Chapter 3. The origins of Mexican boxcar communities and Mexican railroad worker settlements in the United States emerge from both the tradition of track work in the United States and rancherías in Mexico. North of the border, for example, the Santa Fe railroad’s policy shift regarding their retention of Mexican section men gave rise to boxcar communities in the Central Plains and the Southwest. Immediately after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, Irish and Black workers increasingly found more remunerative employment as “common laborers” in other industries. Over the fifty-year period discussed here, the ebb and flow of this labor shortage combined 113 Boxcar Communities with the fluctuations in the economy stimulated successive waves of immigration from Mexico, with the greatest increase occurring between 1910 and 1930.4 European immigrants first inhabited the earliest boxcar communities in the East and parts of the Midwest, and the same was true for African American track workers in the South.5 Hispano families in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico probably lived in the first boxcar communities in the Southwest. Towns like Las Animas and Trinidad, Colorado, preceded the arrival of the railroad, and then...