The railroads were some of the first U.S. employers to recruit Mexicans for the physically demanding jobs of building and maintaining railroad tracks. The process started more than a century ago and led to the creation of Mexican American communities next to the railroad tracks in small towns and large cities.
The Works Project Administration–affiliated Federal Writers Project provided a glimpse into the presence of Mexicans in one such town: Fort Madison, Iowa. The small town on the banks of the Mississippi River served as the site for an Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe Railroad maintenance facility.
WPA’s Iowa Guide Book describes a “Mexican Village” located south of the Sante Fe tracks, with “stores and closely grouped houses” where the people “cling to the customs and traditions of their native county.”
(For more information on Mexican Americans in Iowa, see “Roosevelt, Wallace and Iowa’s Latinos” and “Latino Political Activism in Iowa.”)
The number of Latino workers maintaining the railroad tracks increased during World War II after the U.S. imported Mexican nationals as part of the bracero program, which is better known for importing agricultural workers during the war.
Thousands of these workers in the Southwest and Midwest found a voice on the job and in the community through the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE), which was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The national union, founded in 1887, was unique among the two dozen craft-oriented railroad unions in the number of Spanish-speaking members.
The BMWE was not the sole union representative, however. The CIO-United Railway Workers of America represented maintenance of way workers employed by the Sante Fe Railroad. The CIO won the representational election with the support of Mexican nationals, whom the National Mediation Board ruled had the right to help select their union representative.
Little is known about the BMWE’s Latino members’ engagement in the union and in electoral politics. There was at least one prominent union leader. The 1946 Who’s Who in Labor includes BMWE Grand Lodge Representative August Contreras in Detroit. Then 41, he had been born in Mexico in 1905 and had become a naturalized U.S. citizen. I found references to the BMWE in my own research into the birth of the Community Service Organization in Los Angeles and the 1949 election of Edward Roybal as the first Latino on the city council in modern era.
Readers are encouraged to share stories and photographs.
(For a related story of Mexican Americans working for the railroad in Roseville, California, see “United Railway Iceman’s Union and the PFE.”)
