EMIGRATION

Although it was only a trickle compared to a century later, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw sustained Mexican emigration to the United States. Before the completion of rail links across the border, Texas was the principal destination of Mexican emigrants. By 1880, there were 43,161 Mexican-born residents of Texas. In 1855, while visiting Texas, traveler Frederick Olmsted commented: “The Mexicans appear to have almost no other business than that of carting goods. Almost the entire transportation of the country is carried on by them, with oxen and two-wheeled carts.” As late as 1900, almost three-quarters of all Mexican-born residents of the United States— some 71,062 individuals—lived in Texas.58

By the 1880s, rail links to the U. S. southwest increased the number of Mexicans emigrating to the United States. The railroad not only facilitated passage across the northern Mexican desert but it also permitted easy access to New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Labor recruiters in Mexico, known as enganchadores, aggressively recruited workers for the rail companies and other U. S. enterprises that they represented. The railroad also permitted the shipment of minerals and produce from the southwest to the eastern United States, causing the demand for labor to soar.59

Opposition to this migration largely came from south of the border, where the loss of low-cost labor was viewed with concern by landowners. In 1906, El Correo de Chihuahua reported with alarm that 22,000 Mexicans had entered Texas through Ciudad Juarez. As would be the case well into the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of these emigrants came from rural areas.

Between 1900 and 1910, the number of Mexican-born residents living in the United States increased from 103,393 to 221,915. By 1912, Mexicans had become the main source of labor on railroads west of Kansas City. In addition to those Mexicans who established permanent residency in the United States, by the early twentieth century roughly 60,000 to 100,000 would cross the border each year to work on a seasonal basis. Employers came to depend on seasonal Mexican labor for certain tasks, such as clipping sheep. Some of the suggested reasons for Mexican emigration include: 1) political repression; 2) the high birth rate in Mexico; 3) easy access to the United States by rail; 4) higher wage levels in the United States; and 5) escaping the rigors of hacienda life.60

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the U. S. government adopted a neutral policy to immigration from Mexico, trying neither to stimulate it nor to limit it. American employers welcomed Mexican workers since they assumed them to be temporary sojourners who would not aggressively demand better wages and working conditions.61

The wave of Mexican immigrants, most of whom remained in the U. S. southwest, upset the modus vivendi reached there after 1848. The abuse of Mexican citizens increased, and English literacy requirements were established to disenfranchise Mexicans. Mexicans were often forced to trade their dignity for higher pay, since, as a U. S. government study reported, they claimed “the treatment they got in Texas sometimes was very humiliating to them, and they were called ‘niggers’ and ‘greasers,’ but nevertheless they got good pay.” In Arizona, the racism of U. S. miners and their unions and Arizona’s own version of the dual wage scale confronted Mexicans.62