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

Conclusion

167 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexican workers have been inextricably linked to the development of the Southwest. The mining, ranching, farming, timber, and manufacturing industries of this region all profited by the abundance of inexpensive labor from Mexico. Railroads served as the conduit for the recruitment and transportation of Mexican workers to these industries not only in the Southwest but in virtually every section of the country as well. For Mexican workers, more than any other immigrant workers, the railroad linking Mexico with the United States represented the first and the largest industrial employment on either side of the border. As America’s “first big business,” railroads themselves became huge consumers of steel, coal, lumber, timber, and other raw materials , thereby stimulating the economy and creating new jobs. Indeed, the railroad was also Mexico’s “first big business.”1 The connection between American railroads and Mexican development underlay the social displacement and migration of Mexican workers within Mexico and into the United States. In 1880, with the permission of the Mexican government, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad organized the Ferrocarril Central de Mexico and the Ferrocarril de Sonora. And, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad organized the railroad which eventually became the Ferrocarril Nacional de Mexico. By the turn of the century, these two American railroads controlled eighty percent of all investments in Mexican railroads.2 Although American railroads organized their first crews in the United States, they eventually hired Mexicans for track work and other unskilled Conclusion Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo 168 and semi-skilled jobs in Mexico. Soon after, American labor recruiters promised better pay and lured many of these workers north of the border to take jobs on American railroads, often for half the wages paid to white native-born workers. Mexican labor on America’s railroads is only part of the larger process of the great waves of immigrant labor from Europe and Asia. Like Chinese, Irish, Italian, Greek, and eastern European immigrants, Mexican immigrants helped to build the transportation infrastructure for America’s growth. But, unlike European immigrants whose flow from Europe was curtailed by the 1917 Immigration Act, the federal government exempted Mexican immigrants from these restrictions. Thus Mexican immigration continued into the 1920s even though the major trunk lines were completed and the technological advances in track maintenance required fewer track workers. Additionally, transportation by automobile and trucking began to cut into shipments by railroad thus reducing tonnage, which led to less track maintenance and fewer traqueros. Nonetheless, railroads continued to complain about the seasonal labor shortage for maintenance-of-way work.3 Mexican employment on the railroads began prior to the first transcontinental linkage between the United States and Mexico in 1881. In 1871, native-born Mexicans (Hispanos) of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico found employment on the grade and the railhead of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad mostly as track hands. Then, as the Santa Fe Railroad and the Southern Pacific Railroad linked Mexico with the United States in the spring of 1881, Mexican immigrant workers slowly ventured into the southwestern United States and beyond. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which coincided with the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railway link to Mexico, curtailed Chinese immigration. Immediately, a few Mexican workers ventured north into the Central Plains, the West, the Pacific Northeast, Midwest, and even parts of the South. However, the great cyclical flow of migrant Tejano laborers north and Mexican immigrants into the United States accelerated after the turn of the century. Nonetheless, Mexican origin workers sought gainful employment in virtually every state in the union. The demand for Mexican labor continued throughout the 1920s, dropping toward the end of the decade as a result of President Hoover’s anti-Mexican repatriation campaign. With the onset of World War II, the United States again looked to Mexico to help supply its demand for labor. The Railroad Bracero program was 169 Conclusion one branch of the wartime bi-national agreement to supply American industries with “helping arms” from Mexico.4 Among the many advantages to hiring Mexican labor, the railroads appreciated Mexican workers most for their willingness to accept wages and working conditions that white native-born workers would not. However, for mexicanos, their high geographical mobility was the most striking feature of their lives in the United States. Not only did they move with great frequency from one job site to another, for the most part...