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ch ap ter thr ee Establishing an Urban Presence, 1880–1 910 Peo ple of Mexican her it a ge established themselves as a small but distinct part of the Houston population in the three decades prior to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Numbering around two thousand people by 1910, they took their place as one of the city’s recognizable ethnic groups. Mexican surnames and the Spanish language became permanent features of what was then called the “City of Magnolias.” Mexicans came to Houston in response to forces that transpired in Mexico , throughout the Texas Gulf Coast, and within the city itself. Worsening economic conditions south of the Rio Grande, the expanding railroad network and industry in Texas, and the emergence of Houston as a leading commercial and manufacturing center played direct roles in making Houston the destination of people of Mexican descent. These newcomers formed a population base that would later become a true urban ethnic community. In the mid-nineteenth century, before the railroad networks turned Houston into a town of regional signifi ance, Mexicans remained a negligible fraction of its population. A handful worked as cooks, housekeepers, laborers, or peddlers. By the 187 0s, several Spanish-speaking individuals plied such trades as shoemaking and tailoring. Mexicans migrated to Texas in increasing numbers during the mid-1880s to escape population pressures and worsening economic conditions in their homeland. The economic policies of President Porfi io Díaz, favoring a concentrationofwealth ,alreadyproducedhardshipforworking-classMexicans. Some young men fl d the mounting political turmoil and military impressment . The Texas-Mexico border proved permeable to immigrants coming north, each for their own reasons. They trickled into Houston because it was emerging as a dominant economic force in its region. Between 1875 and 1890, Texas railroads signifi antly increased their miles of track, with Houston at the center of this expansion. Th s web 16 ch ap ter thr ee of rail-line transportation made it possible for Houston to accelerate its commercial and manufacturing endeavors. Raw materials such as cotton, lumber, and hides from the interior of Texas passed through Houston on their way to market, and manufacturing enterprises such as textile mills and compresses, where Mexicans found employment, developed along Buff lo Bayou, Houston’s waterway to the sea. Mexican workers were involved in one of the earliest labor disputes in Houston’s commercial nexus. Labor historian Robert Zeigler found that in late 1880, seventy-five Mexican workers were transported in to break a strike of black laborers at the docks of the Direct Navigation Company and related Houston industries, including cotton compresses and railroads . Such use of Mexican labor was common in Texas at the time, but apparently eleven of the Méxicanos, after hearing the complaints of the African Americans, actually refused to work. Houston’sMexicanpopulationprobablyreachedonehundrednosooner than the late 1880s, although numbers are difficult to determine. They took their place alongside other more traditional Houston ethnic groups of the nineteenth century, including blacks, Germans, Irish, and Italians. These early Mexicans comprised a fluid, transient population that possessed a broad range of skills and occupations, including bookkeepers, railroad workers, tailors, clerks, carriage drivers, barbers, iron molders, and common laborers. A few peddled Mexican foods at Houston’s market square, while others operated neighborhood grocery stories. Vendors sold tamales on street corners and at stands. The fi st of several Mexican restaurants in Houston during the nineteenth century appeared around 1885,thus introducing Mexican cuisine to the palate of non-Hispanic Houstonians. By the late 1890s, the trickle of Hispanic immigrants to the city became a steady fl w. An adjusted computation of the 1900 federal census for Harris County suggests that the population of Mexican Houstonians stood at somewhere just below five hundred people in a city of over fortyfour thousand. The majority were recent arrivals from Mexico, but some hailed from South Texas, and a few of the more enterprising Hispanics came from different parts of the United States, such as Florida and Louisiana . Houston had numerous small businesses owned and operated by people of Mexican descent and other individuals with Spanish surnames. A large portion of the young men worked for the railroad industry in the Southern Pacific shops and as section hands on el traque (track maintenance ) in the principal railroad yards on the west, north, and east sides of town. Even a few peripatetic Mexican labor contractors came to Houston to secure such jobs in the outlying regions for their workers as cutting [3.145...

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