Railroad Question during the Great Depression: Structural Obstacles to Mexican Labor Organizing

Michael Calderon-Zaks, University of California, San Diego

This paper examines the question of Mexican laborers on the railroad maintenance of way during the Great Depression. This was an era in which workers in occupations that were previously unorganized joined unions, went on strike, with some of them winning and becoming part of the American middle class. The experiences of Mexican labor struggles in those and other sectors have been well chronicled. Noticeably absent, however, is the experience of Mexicans on railroads in this period. Why were Mexican laborers in agriculture, food processing, and mining easier to organize into labor militancy than on railroads? Moreover, why was it easier for Mexicans to participate in the labor movement in those industries but not railroads? This paper examines the structural differences between the occupations, from the different levels of corporate surveillance to white supremacist practices of established unions, especially the Railroad Brotherhoods that prevented their participation. The Communist Party USA sought to organize all workers across race and division of labor, including on the railroads in 1930, through its Trade Union Unity League (which included the Railroad Workers Industrial League), but, despite evidence of Mexican railroad workers’ agency that could be applied to unionization, abdicated the project in favor of a Popular Front agenda by 1935. Finally, the Bracero Program pertaining to railroads that began in 1942, ironically, was not a response to railroad union organization, but to the agency of the laborers on their own.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 163. Labor Action, Labor Organizing