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

B R A C E R OR A I L R O A D E R S

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University of Washington Press

Seattle • London

B R A C E R O

T H E F O R G O T T E N W O R L D W A R I I S T O R Y O F

M E X I C A N W O R K E R S I N T H E U . S . W E S T

R A I L R O A D E R S

Erasmo Gamboa


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© 2016 by the University of Washington PressPrinted and bound in the United States of America

Design: Dustin KilgoreTypeset in Cassia, designed by Dietrich Hofrichter

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Presswww.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Gamboa, Erasmo, author.Title: Bracero railroaders : the forgotten World War II story of Mexican

workers in the U.S. West / Erasmo Gamboa.Other titles: Forgotten World War II story of Mexican workers in the U.S. WestDescription: 1st edition. | Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2016] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016007087 | ISBN 9780295998329 (hardcover : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers, Mexican—United States—History—20th

century. | Railroads—United States—Employees—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Manpower—United States. | World War, 1939–1945—War work—United States. | Railroads—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—History—20th century. | Mexico—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Participation, Mexican American. | World War, 1939–1945—Economic aspects—United States. | Railroads—West (U.S.)—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC HD8039.R12 U634 2016 | DDC 331.6/2687207809044—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007087


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For Adriana Cristina, Andrea Elena, and Carole


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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �3

1� Labor and the Railroad Industry before World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

2� The Great Depression, Deportations, and Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

3� We Will Need the Mexicans Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

4� Railroad Track Workers Needed; Where Are the Domestic Laborers? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

5� Bracero Railroaders, “Soldiers of Democracy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

6� Contractual Promises to Keep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

7� The Perils of Being a Bracero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

8� The Deception Further Exposed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

9� Split Families: Repercussions at Home and Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

10� Victory and Going Home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

11� Forgotten Railroad Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

Notes 201

Bibliography 225

Index 231

Illustrations follow page 94


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ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

When the final story of the American railroads has been written, a chapter of interest and significance will record the substantial part that Mexicans played in helping to maintain thousands of

miles of war-burdened tracks at a time when, without this labor, these tracks would surely have been seriously weakened, with unquestionably adverse effect upon the war effort. It was a fortunate day back in May 1943 when the state departments of the two countries, in conjunction with the War Man-power Commission and immigration officers, negotiated agreements per-mitting the entry of six thousand Mexican citizens into the United States for unskilled labor on the railroads, a number that was increased to twenty thousand in June of that year, to forty thousand in March 1944, to fifty thou-sand the following July, and, early March 1945, to a new ceiling of seventy-five thousand.1

A C k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Several early influences inspired this book on the World War II bracero rail-road workers. I grew up in rural Washington State, where trains and railroad tracks intersected with everyone’s daily lives. My father, Gumecindo Gam-boa, shared his memories with me about working on the railroad during the 1920s. The railroad had taken him and his friends far away from Edin-burg, Texas, to Ohio and West Virginia. The omnipresent trains of my youth, coupled with my father’s railroad history, led to a personal interest in learn-ing more about Mexican track laborers. As a hisflorian, I had written about bracero agricultural workers in the Pacific Northwest during World War II. I realized that I had overlooked the important experiences of the wartime bracero railroad workers. This omission motivated me to write the forgotten story of more than one hundred thousand Mexican braceros employed in the U.S., maintaining the all-important network of railroad tracks during World War II.

Later, in 2000, I worked on a lawsuit to recover decades-old unpaid wage deductions owed to the wartime generation of agricultural and railroad bra-


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x Preface and Acknowledgments

ceros. My association with the lawsuit provided an opportunity to gather much archival information and to develop a deep awareness and empa-thy for braceros’ wide-range of harsh experiences. I collected rich and de-tailed first-person narratives from former bracero and Mexican American railroaders. Workers’ reflections were also found in historical documents or shared by their spouses and descendants. To be sure, I would not be as informed had I not worked on this lawsuit. I owe a great debt of thanks to Enrique Martínez for his confidence in asking me to work on the lawsuit and help bring redress to this generation of Mexican workers.

Numerous other people have made equally important contributions to this book. I am particularly indebted to Andrea E. Gamboa, who shares my passion for social history. She became an active and encouraging partici-pant in the research by helping to uncover records of the bracero railroad workers in archival collections in México and the United States. Felipe M. Méndez carefully read and edited early drafts of the manuscript, offered helpful feedback, and asked questions that greatly enhanced the story. Ana Davenport and Ellen Palms offered valuable help preparing the manuscript.

The pursuit of knowledge about the railroad braceros took me in many directions and brought me in contact with people whom I would never have met otherwise. Vicky Sierra, Eulalio Partida, Mike Rivera, and Fernando Barba González are among the many women and men who graciously welcomed me into their homes and responded to my inquiries about their experiences. Now elderly, much time has passed since working on the rail-roads; recalling some of their experiences brought back unpleasant memo-ries. Still, they shared my desire to tell their stories, and I am very appre-ciative. Of course, the braceros and their families whom I never met (but whose names and voices of distress appear in the archival records) are just as indispensable to the book.

I wish to acknowledge Ranjit D. Arab, at the University of Washington Press, for his enthusiasm and stress-free way of facilitating publication of the book. I am grateful for his exuberant commitment to the project. I am also indebted to Deborah Barker at the Franklin County, Kansas, Histori-cal Society; and Cara J. Randall at the California State Railroad Museum for assisting with the illustrations. The indispensable support and encourage-ment of all these and other unnamed persons made this a most rewarding endeavor.


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xi

Abbreviations

AAR Association of American Railroads

AFL American Federation of Labor

ATSF Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad

BMWE Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees

BN Burlington Northern Railroad

CBQ Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad

CMSTP&P Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul, and Pacific Railroad

CNW Chicago and North Western Railway Company

CTM Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers, CMW)

FEPC Fair Employment Practices Commission

GN Great Northern Railroad

LULAC League of United Latin American Citizens

MCPR Milwaukee, Chicago, and Pacific Railroad

NP Northern Pacific Railroad

OPA Office of Price Management

PFE Pacific Fruit Express

RRB Railroad Retirement Board

SP Southern Pacific Railroad

UP Union Pacific Railroad

USES U.S. Employment Service

WARE Western Association of Railroad Executives

WMC War Manpower Commission

WP Western Pacific


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B R A C E R OR A I L R O A D E R S


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3

Introduction

Several interconnected interests and questions led to the writing of this book. My roots are in a small farming community in eastern Washington’s Yakima Valley. Framed by two ranges of low hills, this

area of the Pacific Northwest is nothing short of a farmer’s paradise. With sufficient irrigation, agricultural production is limited only by the relatively short six-month growing season. Even so, the valley supplies the nation and global markets with an abundance of fruits, vegetables, and other agricul-tural products. Since the early twentieth century, industrial agriculture, the mainspring of life in the valley, has relied on a plentiful supply of laborers to work the land. Over time, commercial agriculture has extracted the human energy of generations of Native American, Asian and Asian American, and white as well as Mexican and Mexican American laborers.

A cost-effective and efficient railroad system to transport the valley’s ex-traordinary volume of farm produce to market has been just as essential to the area’s economy. This industry, too, required an ample supply of workers, at least until the 1960s, when many of the railroad depots and loading plat-forms began to close in the face of competition from the trucking industry. Thereafter, the railroad required fewer and fewer workers, and today, the distinctive and once-constant sound of moving freight and passenger trains along the floor of the Yakima Valley has faded. The trains have given way to convoys of long-haul diesel trucks that now carry most of the freight to and from the area. There is little question that the railroad is still key to the val-ley’s economy, but the golden age of trains is clearly in the past.

There is another, more personal, side to my interest in the intersection of agriculture and the railroads. Like so many others before him, my father worked the soil of Yakima farms until old age impaired his physical ability. Over the course of many conversations after he ceased agricultural labor, I gradually began to learn more about his life experiences. Born in México at the turn of the twentieth century, he immigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. He spent much of his life as a seasonal farmworker in Yakima,


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4 Introduction

but before that he had been a track worker with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, one of the nation’s oldest railroads. In the 1920s, in the company of other Mexican track workers, my father repaired rail lines and flagged trains in Ohio and farther east into Maryland and West Virginia, close to the nation’s capital. His generation delineated the beginning of what became a sustained passage of railroad labor from México to the United States.

Some years ago, at a signing event for my book Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947, a woman approached to say that although she appreciated this book on the region’s history of Mexi-can agricultural labor, I had omitted a key component of wartime bracero labor. Her husband had been a bracero during World War II, but not as a farmworker. The U.S. government had contracted him to work on the na-tion’s railroads. My book, she told me, said nothing about the braceros who came from México to help keep the war trains moving. She was correct: I had overlooked the Mexican railroad workers of that period. Not a criticism, but pointing me to another facet of the bracero program.

I set out to correct this oversight and write the history of Mexican rail-road workers like those of my father’s generation and, more to the point, like this woman’s husband. In the process, I learned that the agricultural and railroad industries of the West were inextricably linked. At different times they were closely interdependent on each other to develop and thrive. Farmers relied on trains to transport produce and bring supplies, and the railroads needed farm produce to load their cars. Just as important, begin-ning in the early 1900s, both industries grew increasingly reliant on, and developed an identical interest in, an endless supply of Mexican laborers to take on the most physically demanding and lowest-paid tasks. Beginning with the Immigration Act of 1924, and except for the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit the railroads hard, Mexican immigrants gradually replaced other ethnic and racial communities of railroad workers to become the pre-ferred choice of labor on most western tracks.

The advent of World War II brought an unprecedented and robust full-employment economy, until railroads and farms with low-wage jobs found themselves unable to compete with other industries for workers. In re-sponse, the U.S. government turned to México to ensure that the economy’s privately owned railroad and agricultural sectors had sufficient supplies of labor. For the duration of the war, U.S. and Mexican federal officials man-aged the movement of transnational agricultural and railroad workers un-der the terms of a binational administrative agreement.1 This book centers


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Introduction 5

on the history of Mexican railroad workers who participated in that war-time labor compact between México and the United States. Although the labor agreement, officially called the Temporary Migration of Mexican Non-agricultural Workers, is generally understood as an expedient transborder transfer of human social capital in times of a national emergency, it repre-sents much more. That is, by World War II the racial inferiority of Mexicans had been firmly established among railroad companies and the general public. The wartime labor agreement simply built on existing fixed racially constructed labor practices to transport braceros to perform low-paid, dan-gerous railroad jobs. In the face of serious wartime worker shortages in low-wage occupations, it is not difficult to understand why Mexican contract workers were necessary to U.S. farm production. However, the importation of industrial railroad labor raises other issues.

Dating back to the early 1900s, railroad employees, including track work-ers, successfully organized trade unions to safeguard their jobs from competi-tion particularly among immigrant labor. So how did the railroad industry manage to win approval from the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Em-ployees (BMWE) to import low-wage Mexican workers during World War II? What do the experiences of these temporary, nonunion contracted laborers reveal about the work culture of the railroads, the braceros themselves, and U.S.–México relations? In addition, if the blueprint for the World War II bra-cero railroad program developed well before 1941, how does the experience of my father’s generation with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad help frame our understanding of the generation of Mexican industrial workers who came north to keep the trains running and help the nation win the Great War?

As a result of extensively researching this topic, I have learned to appre-ciate the enormous human and technological energy expended to generate and transport record levels of farm, forest, and factory production during World War II. Because the wartime generation of Mexican railroaders en-tered the United States at a most critical period, where do the experiences of these men fit in the historical record of the global war? Where does México itself fit into this discussion? Relations between México and the U.S. were gravely strained in the years leading to World War II. Clearly, México was also conscious of the racism experienced by U.S. residents of Mexican de-scent, yet the government agreed to permit more than three hundred thou-sand of its citizens to enter the U.S. as contract workers during the war years. What did México expect to gain, and were these goals realized? This book attempts to answer these questions and generate other important inquiries.


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6 Introduction

Finally, and purely for intellectual reasons, this book draws particular at-tention to Pacific Northwest social and labor history. From the viewpoint of Mexican American and Chicano history, the Pacific Northwest remains one of the least studied regions of the United States.

Just how and under what circumstances thousands of Mexicans immi-grated to the U.S., and subsequently to the Pacific Northwest, is only now beginning to be understood. In most cases, the recurrent interpretation of Mexican American migration to and settlement in the Pacific Northwest be-gins with the postwar arrival of migratory farmworkers of Mexican descent. This interpretation is so ubiquitous that the term “Mexican” has nearly be-come synonymous with “migrant worker.”

Despite mass worker immigration in the twentieth century from México and transregional migration to the Pacific Northwest, the history of industrial workers to the region is largely absent. This failure to visual-ize the historical importance of nonfarm Mexican labor in facilitating the development and sustaining the growth of the Pacific Northwest (and the larger American West) economy has worked to obscure and marginalize Mexican Americans. This may have been the precise concern raised by the woman at my book signing years ago. Although it has taken several years to address her criticism, this volume is a partial response. In the first chap-ters of the book I examine the development of the railroad industry and the employment of Mexican labor in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the twentieth century. This focus is instructive because it serves as a useful contrast to other regions where the railroads also relied on a simi-lar ethnic Mexican workforce. Moreover, the Pacific Northwest occupies a particular space that is peripheral and distant from the Southwest—the customary points of entry and observation for Mexican immigrant labor.

Until the unprecedented economic collapse of the 1930s hit the railroad industry, a handful of companies had expanded to monopolize America’s transportation capacity. These years of contraction serve to lay out some of the immediate problems railroads faced when the nation entered war. The industry faced having to retool equipment and rebuild infrastructure rap-idly. But that was the least of the concerns. Restarting the flow of Mexican labor that had been cut off by the Depression surfaced as well. Across the railroad industry, the want of track workers threatened the railroad’s ca-pacity to the point that the crisis drew the attention of government officials. The government’s emergency war plan to contract Mexican railroaders in México and transport them to the United States went into effect.


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Introduction 7

The second half of the book covers the day-to-day administration and the failures of the bracero railroad program as well as the experiences of the men themselves. At times, straightforward problems, such as the re-cruitment of labor, are often the most difficult to sort out. As clear-cut as it seemed, a coalition of railroad executives and government officials could not simply enlist Mexican laborers for employment in the United States. Labor shortages notwithstanding, any suggestion to authorize the federal government to contract workers in México also had to address highly sen-sitive immigration issues, the concerns of the BMWE, opposition from an ingrained race-sensitive railroad work culture, as well as political opposi-tion. I examine these and other issues from different perspectives in the U.S. and México. Consider, for example, how Mexican Americans and Mexi-cans greeted the news about the bracero program. As Ana Elizabeth Rosas has written, many of the repatriates held vivid memories of the lingering anti-Mexican sentiment that underscored the Depression-era deportation of more than six hundred thousand.2 Now the United States was asking México to send its citizen workers back to the U.S.?

No sooner did the Mexican braceros arrive at the work sites when U.S. officials, in their role as administrators and employers, began to lose sight of the guarantees and rights that had been promised the laborers. Looking at the harsh daily reality of these workers exposes the folly of obligating non-English-speaking Mexican laborers to a contract in an alien social and work environment. The conditions were outlined in individual work contracts, but the braceros had no voice in the negotiations of the agreement. Build-ing on Kitty Calavita’s analysis of the function of the state in labor procure-ment, this book explores the contradictory role played by Mexican and U.S. government agencies that determined the difficult experiences many men endured working the railroads.3 Mexican officials were equally if not more complicit in the hardships of the braceros; their pattern of general unre-sponsiveness to their own citizens cannot be exaggerated.

Despite the unintended results of the labor program, the overall experi-ence of the Mexican railroaders offers some instructive lessons. The men, regardless of their limitations, did not always despair; nor did they resign themselves to the unfortunate circumstances that came at the hands of their employers and the indifference of U.S. and Mexican governments. In the United States, some braceros retaliated by walking away from their employ-ers in protest; others were even more defiant and organized effective local work strikes to seek relief. In this manner, they shattered the employers’ ex-


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8 Introduction

pectation that fixing workers to a legal instrument would result in an ac-quiescent labor force. The Mexican women closely related to these braceros were not passive either. Where other studies on bracero families state that women “did not bring up the continued deterioration of their quality and standard of living,” this book finds otherwise.4 In fact, wives, mothers, and other relatives tried to intercede on behalf of the bracero men by appealing directly to México’s president, Manuel Ávila Camacho. Of course, the depar-ture of the workers also served to disrupt families and burden the women with added responsibilities back in México.

The allied victory in the fall of 1945 signaled the beginning of the final stages of the bracero railroad program. By the following year, the govern-ment had officially repatriated most of the railroaders to México. However, some of the men deserted from their railroad employers and chose to re-main in the United States, an unintended consequence of the program. In other cases, no sooner did repatriated men arrive home than they began preparing to return to the U.S. as free wage earners or by reenlisting in the ongoing U.S.-México bracero farmworker program. After the war, undocu-mented immigrant labor flows escalated tremendously alongside an in-creasing number of braceros contracted to work on U.S. farms. This imme-diate post–World War II spike in immigration underscores a demographic phenomenon started by the wartime bracero programs that continued largely unaffected by numerous deterrence measures until the end of the twentieth century.

Several other issues remained unresolved after the end of World War II. One issue that continues to occupy the minds of many surviving braceros and implicates both México and the United States, is the return of all wages that had been deducted from the bracero workers, both railroad and agricul-tural workers. From 1942 until 1947, employers withheld a percentage of all wages earned for deposit in an obligatory “savings plan” account in México. Because the banks never paid many of the men, the deductions were a form of wage theft. Decades have gone by and despite petitions, lawsuits, and po-litical promises to pay back all of these earnings, the elderly workers and their descendants, residing in both México and the United States, are met with a circle of denials and continue to wait for their earned income.

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Introduction 9

The bracero railroad program and its counterpart in agriculture did not originate entirely from the exigencies of World War II. Its roots lay in the experiences of my father and the generations of thousands of other Mexican laborers who emigrated from México beginning in the early 1900s. Largely unrestricted from migrating north during these years, they came to occupy the vacancy left by other immigrant workers no longer permitted to immi-grate by legal means to the United States or who were fortunate to move out of low-wage railroad jobs. In the place of controlled Mexican immigration, the bracero program acted to beckon countless emigrants, legal or not, north to the United States. The government-sanctioned labor programs of World War II served as the architect for generating vast postwar transnational Mex-ican immigration. In many ways the World War II bracero programs served to engineer the racialized postwar transnational labor flows across the U.S.-Mexican border. I agree with Natalia Molina, whose work demonstrates how racial categories once constructed carry forward to function just as effec-tively in different spaces and time.5 The racial categorization of Mexican labor in the decades before World War II was just as important a factor in the harsh treatment of the men as was the empty promises of the workers’ contracts.

Despite lessons learned from the World War II bracero railroad pro-gram, the idea of another state-managed bracero-like labor program (dis-guised as H2A visas for workers or using such euphemistic terms as “guest workers”) prevails today among some employers and government officials. By stepping back to the past, this book urges caution about implementing such ideas. I tell the story of the World War II Mexican railroaders in the U.S. by grounding their experience in history, in a straightforward manner, from the bottom up. My intent is to give the Mexican men and women their voice. They were, after all, no different from other ordinary individuals who walked across the stage of history, except their voices are absent in most World War II narratives. Throughout this book, in certain places, I left their names and accounts as they themselves wrote them; the braceros’ limited written-language skills discloses much about their lives. For the most part, they were common men who answered the call to serve on the domestic front of a foreign nation at war. While historians have told the story of World War II from many perspectives, the history of the Mexican railroad braceros remains largely obscured.6 With the publication of Bracero Railroaders, this generation of men and women now find a place in the pages of history.


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Documents

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