Bracero Railroaders

The Forgotten World War II Story of Mexican Workers in the U. S. West

Erasmo Gamboa

• Editore: University of Washington Press
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295998312
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: North American History

Desperate for laborers to keep the trains moving during World War II, the U.S. and Mexican governments created a now mostly forgotten bracero railroad program that sent a hundred thousand Mexican workers across the border to build and maintain railroad lines throughout the United States, particularly the West. Although both governments promised the workers adequate living arrangements and fair working conditions, most bracero railroaders lived in squalor, worked dangerous jobs, and were subject to harsh racial discrimination. Making matters worse, the governments held a percentage of the workers' earnings in a savings and retirement program that supposedly would await the men on their return to Mexico. However, rampant corruption within both the railroad companies and the Mexican banks meant that most workers were unable to collect what was rightfully theirs. Historian Erasmo Gamboa recounts the difficult conditions, systemic racism, and decades-long quest for justice these men faced. The result is a pathbreaking examination that deepens our understanding of Mexican American, immigration, and labor histories in the twentieth-century U.S. West.

Chapter 1

Labor and the Railroad Industry before World War II

In the early decades of the twentieth century, restrictive immigration legislation in the United States forced railroad companies long accustomed to an open source of foreign-born Asian and European laborers to gradually turn to Mexican immigrant and Mexican American workers. They were judged to be similar to other immigrants for their willingness to work for low pay, learn the necessary job skills, and accept arduous work conditions. Railroad companies reconfigured their workforces with scores of Spanish-speaking workers.

In the Pacific Northwest the railroad industry faced an added problem: a sparse population from which to draw its workforce. Consequently, railroad employers were more dependent on labor supply companies as to satisfy their labor needs. Railroad construction in the Pacific Northwest commenced after Congress authorized in 1883 a second transcontinental rail line across the northern half of the country. In similar fashion to other parts of the western United States, the railroad became the most practical way of linking the region’s resources to eastern urban and industrial centers, as well as to larger global markets. The ever expanding network of rail lines stretched across the rugged terrain of the Pacific Northwest, indiscriminately consuming generations of immigrants and migrants as it grew. Resembling a choreographed sequence of European, Asian, Mexican, and American ethnic groups, these communities mirrored the systemic migration patterns already familiar in the Southwest and the East. Often overlapping with one another, these working-class communities of track laborers were crucial to the area’s burgeoning railroad industry and larger corresponding agricultural and industrial economies.

Before the Immigration Act of 1924, which instituted quotas limiting the arrival of immigrants from particular countries, Pacific Northwest railroad companies could choose laborers freely from among a vast array of ethnic groups. Although the number of immigrants arriving in Washington State was never sufficient to match population growth in other parts of the country, the number is telling. In the first decade of the twentieth century, foreign-born immigrants from other parts of the nation increased Washington State’s population six times faster than the national rate of immigration. At the time, just two out of every ten Washington residents had been born in the state; the rest had migrated from other parts of the country.¹ Given the relatively small Native American population, railroad companies benefited immensely from the influx of newcomers in order to fill low-wage track jobs. Population gains pushed the railroads to expand to meet the increasing demand of rail service brought about by overall regional economic growth.

In the years between the dawn of the twentieth century and the beginning of World War I, the Pacific Northwest entered its second period of robust railroad expansion. New and improved stations, repair plants, and equipment characterized this phase. In addition to new yard and building construction, railroad companies upgraded existing lines and laid thousands of additional miles of new track. In so doing, the railroads connected every corner of the Pacific Northwest to one another, integrating the region’s internal economy and linking it with national markets. The railroads were particularly effective in encouraging a phenomenal expansion in the quality and quantity of agricultural production. They stimulated agriculture in ways previously unimagined by producers through faster, more direct, and therefore more efficient delivery of commodities to markets.

In Oregon the Klamath Basin, Willamette Valley, Hood River, Rogue River, and Treasure Valley areas matured into important geographic hubs for agricultural shipments of fruits and vegetables destined for the principal eastern and southern markets. Similar to Oregon, Washington’s Yakima and Skagit Valleys, along with farms in the upper Columbia Basin, shipped increasing freight car loads of high-market-value fruits and vegetables. In Idaho the state’s crop-producing areas grew into a belt of rich farming communities connected by rail lines from Nampa to Idaho Falls. By the 1920s the Pacific Northwest had a solid national reputation for good-value, high-quality agricultural production.

As railroad companies worked to link regional key farming centers, they established various service facilities to maintain and repair their freight equipment. For instance, when the Pacific Fruit Express began to transport large shipments of fruits and vegetables in ice-cooled wooden cars, the company established a complete repair shop in Nampa and a light repair facility in Pocatello, Idaho.² These plants provided scheduled maintenance and repairs essential to ensuring that heavily loaded freight cars originating in the Pacific Northwest reached their destination in the east. Similarly, the Southern Pacific (SP) maintained yards, repair shops, and roundhouses in Eugene and Portland for its operations in Oregon. The Northern Pacific and Great Northern improved their repair and shipping facilities as well. Throughout the region railroads became an essential sector in the economy of large and small farming centers.

The enlarging network of railroad lines did not converge solely at farming areas. Portland, Seattle, and Spokane—already well-established centers of rail activity by the 1900s—improved their railroad service despite the promotion and prominence of electric-powered railcars, automobiles, and trucks. Many years would pass before these new contrivances in urban transportation could challenge and disrupt the large railroad carriers’ monopoly of heavy and long-distance freight and passenger service. Track construction and maintenance alone, with its high turnover rate, required an enormous number of both permanent and temporary workers. Once the rail was set, the job of maintaining the line in good operating condition required approximately 155 maintenance-of-way workers per one thousand miles of track.³ The railroad companies also required low-skilled workers in the train yards and car repair and engine shops.

Some occupations in the railroad industry required highly skilled workers rather than ordinary laborers, so the railroad industry organized workers in a hierarchical structure based on craft, trade skills, and seniority. In this highly stratified workforce, maintenance-of-way jobs ranked lowest as a result of the elementary skill level and seasonal and transient natures of the job; as a means to ensure sufficient worker labor pools, railroad companies sought out vulnerable, newly arrived, unskilled immigrants for this kind of work. Maintenance-of-way work became associated with recent immigrants and nonwhite ethnic laborers. To avoid the stigma, many domestic workers and some European immigrant workers shunned these jobs. Consequently, maintenance-of-way track laborers, among all railroad positions, were the most challenging for railroad companies to recruit and keep on the job.

When the mainline of the Northern Pacific (NP) railroad neared the Pacific Northwest region in the 1880s, the company began to tap a large pool of Chinese immigrant labor that had entered the country ahead of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Following the pattern in California, Chinese laborers gravitated from the gold-mining districts of Oregon and Idaho to railroad jobs. They proved to be excellent workers. Following the lead of companies like the SP, which relied on Chinese labor to extend its lines from California into Oregon, the NP employed nearly fifteen thousand Chinese men in track construction.⁴ By the 1890s, however, the era of the Chinese workers in railroad construction began to wane, as fears of a mounting “yellow peril” led to immigration restrictions and increasingly violent anti-Chinese agitation.

Following the initial construction of the main lines, railroad companies were content to hire local track workers where available and supplement them with immigrants from northern and western Europe. The nationwide Pullman Strike of 1894—together with pledges of support from the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees—galvanized unskilled workers and worried the railroad officials sufficiently enough to institute changes in employment practices, such as increased wages and better working conditions. To circumvent potential union agitation and worker solidarity, the railroad companies segregated track crews along racial and ethnic lines. To discourage workers uniting against employers, railroads turned to labor contractors to obtain their workers. The railroad companies rendered union organizers ineffective by manipulating labor disputes to appear as divisive ethnic differences among workers or disagreements between contractor and laborer, rather than as legitimate issues thwarting labor organization.

A perfect example is the way Japanese immigrant labor was used by the industry to polarize its workforce, pitting workers against each other. By 1908, when the Gentleman’s Agreement placed limited restrictions on emigration from Japan, approximately 55,000 Japanese immigrants came to the U.S. mainland and another 150,000 to Hawaii.⁵ Despite limitations on migration between Hawaii and the mainland, the Japanese immigrant population grew substantially, surpassing the Chinese in the West and the Pacific Northwestern states. By 1890, 12,177 Japanese immigrants resided in Washington State, a 200 percent increase from the previous decade.⁶ This community, drawn by economic opportunities, continued to grow until 1908 and in doing so became an alternative and highly desirable source of labor for the railroads. Employers promoted Japanese immigration to the Pacific Northwest by encouraging their workers to write to friends and relatives in Japan urging them to emigrate. Moreover, labor agents traveled to Japanese port cities on behalf of the railroads to recruit potential workers. In Japan these agents readily advanced the cost of passage to the U.S. plus thirty dollars, to qualify workers under the destitute person provision of the Foran Act.

By appropriating the prevailing social attitudes that led to the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the railroads intensified racial and ethnic distinctions, creating animosities among its diverse workforce. Accordingly, supervisors with the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific railroad companies openly lauded the Japanese as extremely reliable, competent workers, and much superior to employing white immigrant ethnics for the track work. Not surprisingly, the companies’ favoritism toward Japanese workers did not transcend outside track employment. In the higher-wage positions in roundhouses, stores, and shops, the railroads and the unions brought into play an explicit whites-only policy, relegating Japanese workers almost exclusively to track maintenance.

As rail traffic intensified, a need for labor forced railroad companies to begin to contract with large recruiting firms that specialized in procuring immigrant and ethnic laborers. These highly organized contracting firms had the capacity to tailor their recruiting methods to match successive waves of immigrant railroad workers. The Oriental Trading Company stood as a giant and archetype among railroad labor supply houses. Because of the company’s efficacy in recruiting labor from Japan and Hawaii, it eventually became the exclusive supplier of immigrant labor for such major western railroads as the Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific. The Oriental Trading Company profited handsomely from its contracts with the railroads. As long as the company consigned enough workers for a flat fee, the railroads tolerated its practice of using any means necessary to extract profits from the workers. Left to its own devices, the supply company aggressively sought to procure workers. More lucrative returns came from the exclusive right to provide personal services to the immigrants, which enabled the Oriental Trading Company to operate its own boarding and supply houses. It skimmed a daily ten-cent commission from workers barely earning $1.10 per day. The workers saw other deductions from their wages, including a $1.00 monthly language-translation charge, medical fees, and a surcharge on any remittances sent back to family members in Japan.⁷

As eastern and southern immigrants arrived in the Pacific Northwest, the ethnic diversity of the railroad labor force swelled. By the turn of the twentieth century, and until the Immigration Act of 1924, increased numbers of Greek, German, Italians, Bulgarian, and Austrian workers entered the ranks of unskilled railroad employment. Different from earlier European immigrants, they were not second-step or partially assimilated immigrants who had previously lived in other parts of the nation before coming to the Pacific Northwest. Many times, labor agents recruited these immigrants directly after arriving in the United States for railroad work. Similar to Asian ethnic groups, the distinctive southern and central European nationalities and cultures made them outsiders and consequently victims to the catalog of abuses at the hands of labor contractors and railroad companies.

For the most part, labor contractors who specialized in procuring non-English-speaking European immigrants for the railroads never garnered empathy for the workers. In 1914 an inspection of immigrant work crews with the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad found “reprehensible” and “detestable” living and job conditions.⁸ Like the Japanese, these workers also paid exorbitant charges and kickbacks to labor contractors for scanty and unsanitary quarters, paltry medical services, transportation, board, and other miscellaneous services. Paid an average of $1.75 to $2.25 per day, European immigrants were hardly better off than their Asian counterparts. At work, supervisors used a “speed up” system to extract the maximum effort from the men until the work environment physically wore them down. The practice of pushing the workers to their limit worked to the advantage of the labor contractors; this system kept them busy bringing in fresh, unbroken labor.

Organized labor did little to protect the rights of European and Asian immigrant workers, as it considered immigration a threat to union solidarity. In Washington the State Federation of Labor viewed southern and eastern European workers with immense disfavor and as a “menace to the American standard of living.”⁹ The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE) openly characterized white immigrant ethnics as a reprehensible pool of “outcast groups.” European immigrants “threatened the nation’s social and economic conditions by lowering our living standards,” declared A. F. Stout, national legislative representative for the BMWE. If allowed to act, the BMWE intended to prevent further immigrants from entering the United States regardless of the claims of the railroad companies.¹⁰

Regardless of race or ethnicity, the endless supply of cheap and malleable workers constituted a bonanza for labor contractors and railroad companies alike. This lucrative arrangement ended with the labor shortages of World War I and the passage of the 1921 National Origins Act. The outbreak of the war affected the labor supply in several important ways. First, the robust war economy meant that the railroads and labor contractors faced a dwindling supply of track laborers; this forced them to adopt more efficient ways to obtain workers. Higher wages and better employment conditions pulled workers from lower-salaried railroad jobs. Some immigrants elected to return to their native countries after experiencing the double effect of the pressures to “Americanize” coupled with widespread xenophobia directed against the “unassimilable” aliens. After the war, Congress acted to severely curtail the entry of southern and eastern European emigrants to fewer than 20 percent of all immigration slots allocated to Europe. Railroad companies felt the compound effect of restrictions on Asian and European immigrants as well as the siphoning of workers as a result of the powerful postwar industrial economy.

To offset the dwindling workforce, railroad companies sought alternative sources of track men. World War I had initiated the “great migration” of unprecedented numbers of African Americans from the Southeast to northern industrial cities. Not unpredictably, vehement residential and job segregation effectively confined African American migrants to bottom-rung jobs and undesirable residential areas in Detroit and Chicago’s South Side. Faced with stiff competition from manufacturing and organized labor, the railroad companies now turned to these newly arrived African American migrants for low-skilled track and maintenance work. Unlike eastern carriers, however, the western railroad companies lacked a migratory pool of African Americans from which to draw. Railroads like the Great Northern and the Southern Pacific pressured their labor agents in Midwestern cities to sign up African Americans for railroad employment in the West.¹¹

Although some did respond to recruiters, the strategy proved largely unsatisfactory, and the numbers were insufficient to offset the huge labor losses. “They don’t stay long enough,” wrote one railroad official from Sandpoint, Idaho.¹² Not surprisingly, African American job mobility resulted from the same hard racism in many western cities that was prevalent in the South and the M...