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

1. Railroads and the Socioeconomic Development of the Southwest

11 In popular lore of the American West, only Chinese and Irish workers built the railroads, laying track, digging tunnels, and building trestles and bridges. Indeed, this picture of track work in the West is true for the transcontinental railroad of 1869, but not for the decades to follow. During the late 1800s, virtually all types of native-born and immigrant labor worked on the tracks in this region at one time or another. However, by the turn of the century, Mexican immigrant labor far outnumbered all other groups of immigrant and or native-born labor on the tracks in the Southwest. In order to understand the twentieth-century experience of Jesús Ramírez, whose words opened this study, and of the hundreds of thousands of other people of Mexican background who found work on American railroads , we must first understand the prevailing social and economic conditions under which Mexicans lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) and the annexation by the United States of Mexico’s northern borderlands shaped the socioeconomic relations between two peoples and cultures. The impact of this war tossed people of Mexican background into a similar social trajectory in the United States as other non-white peoples especially American Indians and Africans. Ultimately, this chapter also discusses the emergence and impact of the railroads on the development of the Southwest. The present study borrows from and complements other studies that deal with the relationship between core and peripheral economies. In so doing, this study aims lower. Indeed, it examines the base of this relationship: the relationship between Chapter 1 Railroads and the Socioeconomic Development of the Southwest Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo 12 non-white conquered Mexicans (and immigrants) and the larger issues of working-class and labor history in North America. Finally, this chapter explains the social transformation of ethnic track labor and why by the 1880s track labor became synonymous with racial subordination. Long before the Mexican immigrant diaspora and before the first railroad spike was driven anywhere in North America, the American Indian and mestizo people of the Mexican borderlands were the travelers and traders of the region (1492–1821). Before them, people whom some anthropologists call the Anasazi (800–1492), crisscrossed northernMexico(today’sSouthwest)andGreatPlainsregionfortrade and to hunt and sometimes battle. As a frontier region, Athapascan Indians, Spanish colonists, Tlaxcalan Indians and mestizos from central Mexico populated northern Mexico and shared the colonial legacy of mestizaje. Indeed, the Europeans and racial mixes added to the already diverse indigenous inhabitants. Speaking of the nineteenth century, Deena González argues, “Biculturalism evolved throughout Mexico’s frontiers into a complex system of communication based on more than the blending of races. Santa Fe [was] built on the legacy of racial mixing and cultural borrowing while conforming as well to another aged pattern of inter-Mexican migration.”1 The indigenous routes of trade that crisscrossed the region during the pre-colonial period are perhaps the most significant legacy of the Indian people of the Southwest. For instance the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (at&sf) Railroad built the line that connected the United States with Mexico along the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo to Mexicans), the major artery of trade originally established by indigenous peoples and later used by Spanish and Mexican travelers and traders. During the Mexican period, the Chihuahua and the Santa Fe trade expanded the pre-colonial trading patterns in this area and connected Santa Fe, New Mexico with Ciudad Chihuahua and St. Louis, Missouri. The Santa Fe Railroad also laid track roughly along the same route as the old Santa Fe Trail. Thus the extension of American railroads into the Southwest does not represent a total break with the past, but rather a form of both continuity and change.2 Historian Mario García sums up the significance best in his important book on the Mexicans of El Paso, Desert Immigrants: “Although the railroad brought modernized transportation, it did not represent a total break with the past. The railroads were built on the Spanish and Mexican trails that crisscrossed the Southwest 13 Railroads and the Socioeconomic Development of the Southwest and made El Paso a commercial stop on the Old Spanish Trail.”3 In addition, the pre-colonial indigenous trade routes preceded the Spanish and Mexican periods. El Paso historian, Owen White, possessed a different view of Mexican influence on the railroad. White wrote...