Mexicans in Nebraska
By Dr. Ralph F. Grajeda
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The history of the Mexican people in the United States is unique among the various peoples who have immigrated to this country. In a sense it can be said that the first Mexicans did not come to this country, but that this country came to them. The United States, through its war with Mexico, extended its boundaries in 1848 to include a territory almost the size of present-day Mexico, in which lived approximately 100,000 Spanish-speaking people-most of them in the five southwestern states: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Colorado.
The majority of Mexican Americans living today in the Midwest, however, are descendants of parents and grandparents who were part of two massive migration waves occurring since 1900: the first from 1900 to 1920, and the second from 1920 to 1930. One scholar estimates that between 1900 and 1920, the number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States equaled one tenth of the total population of Mexico.1
Victoria de Ortiz came to Nebraska with her family around 1915, having been driven from their home by political turmoil. This photograph, showing her with her year-old son, Carlos, was featured in an article about her in the Lincoln Star, dated September 26, 1920. [Nebraska State Historical Society RG3357PH]
Very few Mexicans lived in the Central Plains states prior to 1900. According to an early study of Mexican immigration to the United States, there were only seventy-one Mexicans living in Kansas in 1900, and twenty-seven in Nebraska. By 1910 the Mexican immigrant population had increased enormously to 9,429 in Kansas, and 3,611 in Nebraska.2
This growth in population can be understood in light of far-reaching and complementary changes occurring in both Mexico and the United States. In one country these changes "pushed" people out; in the other the changes "pulled" them in.
The powerful event in Mexico that pushed people to the north was, of course, the Mexican Revolution, which during the period of 1910 to 1920 caused an extraordinary amount of suffering, upheaval, and confusion. Causes of revolution are always multiple and complex. As these causes are distilled to the daily life conditions of common people, however, they reduce themselves to simple and pronounced suffering.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, but its root causes had existed in the country for decades. The Porfirio Diaz dictatorship in Mexico (a period that lasted thirty-one years, twenty-seven of them consecutive) brought about peace, prosperity, and opportunity, but only for a select few-and that at the expense of the peasants, the workers, and the poor. At the end of the Diaz regime in 1910, probably less than three percent of the total rural population owned any land at all. There were 834 hacendados (land owners) and approximately nine million landless peasants living under a miserable debt peonage. Of the 834 hacendados, fifteen owned more than 100,000 acres each; the hacienda of San Blas in the state of Coahuila, for example, contained almost a million acres. Despite higher prices of basic necessities, the income of the peon in 1910 was about the same as a hundred years earlier.
That revolution is often described as a peasant civil uprising, in protest of the existing economic and social conditions pressing, for the most part, on the working classes, the poor, the campesinos. With the actual beginning of the armed conflict, living conditions for many became intolerable. Many became participants in the conflict. Many-lacking for work, for food, for medical services-responded as people always have under desperate living conditions: they fled their place of birth in search of those most basic needs without which life cannot be sustained, let alone be designated as human.
The major attracting force that "pulled" the Mexican immigrant to the north was the economic development in the southwestern part of the United States at this same time, and its corresponding need for cheap labor. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw the dramatic growth of agricultural enterprises and railroad construction in the Southwest. Demands of New England cotton mills, New York garment manufacturers, and the export market stimulated cotton growing in Texas in this period. The Reclamation Act of 1902 and the construction in 1904 of the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexican Railways encouraged ranchers in the lower Rio Grande Valley to create huge irrigation projects to grow table vegetable crops that could be shipped to large metropolitan areas on the new railroads' refrigerator cars.3
Also, in 1897 the U.S. Congress imposed a 75 percent tax on the importation of foreign sugar, thus encouraging the development of the U.S. sugar beet industry. Hence, by 1906, sugar beet acreage in the U.S. had more than tripled from the 135,000 acres planted in 1900. By 1920 that acreage had increased to 872,000, with the Great Plains region (which includes the North Platte Valley in Wyoming and western Nebraska) producing 64 percent of the total crop grown in the U.S. From 1923 to 1932 Nebraska ranked second in the U.S., behind Colorado, in annual sugar beet acreage (74,000 acres), and first in the nation in yield per acre (12.7 tons).4 The increased need for beet laborers, which these developments required, were met by the regular and methodical recruiting of Mexican agricultural workers. Additionally, many Mexicans, on their own initiative, entered the U.S. during this period, legally and otherwise.
The first of the Mexican railroad section-hands responded to railroad recruiters and crossed the border at El Paso in 1900. Living in boxcars, they began to establish small boxcar and tent communities that since have become the community barrios throughout the Southwest and the Midwest. By 1906 several carloads of workers a week were moving into southern California, establishing colonias, and then reloading for movement to locations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska. In 1908, 16,000 Mexicans were recruited in El Paso alone for railroad work. By 1910, 2,000 every month were crossing the border for railroad work.5
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http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/whadoin/mexampub/mexicans.htm
. I hope that the worst is over, Edgar, and that, if you had treatment, it was effective. Like many people, I look up to you very much, and A2K wouldn't be the same without your contributions.