MEXICAN LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES.

BY VICTOR S. CLARK, PH. D.

INTRODUCTION.

Within less than a decade there has been a large increase in the amount of Mexican labor employed in the United States; but more marked than the growth of numbers has been the increasing range of its distribution. As recently as 1900 immigrant Mexicans were seldom found more than a hundred miles from the border. Now they are working as unskilled laborers and as section hands as far east as Chicago and as far north as Iowa, Wyoming, and San Francisco. The number of different industries dependent upon Mexican labor is increasing. In some occupations Mexicans are rapidly displacing Japanese, Greeks, and even Italians. Lack of education and initiative confines most of these immigrants to the simpler forms of unskilled labor. They compete little, if at all, with what is called" white labor " in the Southwest. They work well and are contented in the desert, where Europeans and Orientals either become dissatisfied or prove unable to withstand the climate. Except in Texas and in California, few Mexicans become permanent residents, and even in those two States a majority are transient laborers who seldom remain more than six months at a time in this country. The volume of Mexican immigration, compared with that of Italians or Slavs upon the Atlantic coast, is still small, in spite of a recent increase. Complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not kept, but the number does not exceed 100,000 per annum, and probably is not over 60,000. These people, however, are entering a sparsely settled territory with a great demand for labor. Their migration is having important economic effects in Mexico as well as in the United States. And it is becoming an agency of something approaching a social revolution among the Mexican laboring classes.

THE IMMIGRANT.

The Mexican who comes to the United States as a laborer is from the peon or from the tramp labor class of Mexico. The term pelado," by which those migrating into Texas are known, signifies literally the man who has been stripped, a sort of intensified

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"sans culottes," and indicates that the Mexicans crossing the lower Rio Grande come largely from the migratory laboring class of their own country. In California the Mexican laborers are known as cholos," a word borrowed from Peru, where it applies to a certain type of Indian. It indicates nothing as to the original status of the immigrant. Probably most of the laborers entering the United States from El Paso or westward, with the exception of a few miners from Sonora and from Chihuahua, were originally in peonage, though they may have escaped from this relation some time before migrating to the north.

Mexicans of either of these classes are Indians, with a slight infusion of white blood. They are Indians in physique, temperament, character, and mentality. A person familiar with Mexico can tell the State or district a laborer hails from by the old tribal peculiarities of his underlying Indian stock. It is said that Mexicans have been unwittingly admitted to Indian schools in the United States without their nationality being known. And yet in almost any large group of Mexican laborers individuals are encountered who, in different surroundings, would easily pass for Europeans. By contact here and there with the upper classes of Mexico and with the older European culture that has given them their language and religion, these laborers have acquired a certain vivacity of expression and demeanor, and probably at least superficial habits of thought, that are largely foreign to the American Indian. Still, this Spanish manner varies in degree with different individuals, and with the immigrants as a body is less in evidence than the dull, docile patience of the Mexican Indian

race.

The Mexicans who cross the border to work are either making their first trip to the United States or are making a second or third seasonal visit from the interior of Mexico or are of that big class of AmericanMexican frontier residents who reside intermittently in either country. These last are less apt to travel widely or to work regularly, except during cotton-picking time in Texas and in Oklahoma; their migratory habits are not of recent origin, and they are not vacating old industries in Mexico to enter new occupations in the United States. The immigrant of interest is the one who has recently appeared in the field, coming from the central part of the Republic, leaving his ancestral home and callings, and ready to venture almost anywhere in search of work.

These immigrants appear at the border in sombrero, serape, and sandals, which, before crossing the river, they usually exchange for a suit of "American" clothing, shoes, and a less conspicuous hat. In fact, at Juarez and at El Paso a thriving trade of old clothes has sprung up to meet this demand.

SOURCE OF IMMIGRATION.

The source of most of this immigration is the group of States lying just north of the Valley of Mexico, and chiefly on the western and better-watered slope of the central plateau. This is the most fertile and densely populated portion of the Republic. These States are Jalisco (which is reputed to have the best laborers), Michoacan, Guanajuato, Aguas Calientes, and Zacatecas. Some labor moves northward along the National Railroad of Mexico to Laredo and to Eagle Pass from Queretaro and San Luis Potosi, which are adjoining States; but the chief migration at present is along the Mexican Central Railway, from the district mentioned to El Paso. South of this region the relatively high wages paid tropical plantation labor in Mexico, the greater distance and less direct communication to the north, and the attractions of the capital combine, with other inducements, to keep the laborers from emigrating in any considerable numbers to the United States.

Agriculture and mining are the main industries of this central district. Land is held mostly, though not exclusively, in large estates, and its chief value depends upon resident labor. Subordinate to the rights of the great proprietor are secondary forms of tenure, so well established by custom that the cultivator seems about as well protected by them as a holder in fee simple. When the railroads buy rights of way in Mexico, in many instances they have to acquire two practically independent titles to the same land, one from the "hacendado," the other from the Indian cultivator. The latter, in connection with his right to a specific tract of irrigated land, owns common rights—such as the privilege of pasturing a certain number of head of stock in the open fields. These cultivators are usually settled in villages along water courses. Whether these tenure customs are aboriginal or European in origin, they are now part of the life of the people, and ordinarily give permanence to the agricultural population in the parts of the Republic where they prevail. They explain such contradictory statements of the immigrant as that he belongs on such and such an "hacienda," and Señor So-and-so is his “patron; " and at the same time that he owns a piece of land and expects to return home in time to plant or harvest his crop.

These customary tenant rights probably modify and mitigate the institution of peonage in many parts of Mexico. What is sometimes called the "peon country (the group of States just mentioned) appears to be precisely where these little villages of feudal tenants are most common, and one of the most interesting secondary effects of the tide of emigration starting northward from this section to the United States is its probable influence in breaking up the patriarchal organization of agriculture and landholding in Mexico.

Peonage is a debt relation between the employee or tenant and his employer, in which the former is to serve the latter until the debt is extinguished, receiving in the meantime subsistence and certain customary perquisites. The debt is seldom paid in full, because, as a rule, neither party seriously desires it to be paid. If the employee discovered that his account with his employer was about even, he would, in many instances, make this an excuse for obtaining a liberal cash loan from his "patron " to celebrate the next "fiesta," and the "patron" would probably encourage this extravagance on the part of the employee. In Mexico peonage rests solely upon custom and has no specific legal sanction.

The mines of central Mexico were originally worked by slaves or by peons, but for a long time free Mexican labor has been used. Until recently this labor has received a very low wage, rendered still lower in many cases by dependence upon a company store for supplies. It may be doubted whether the wage-earning mine workers of some interior camps have been really more independent, until recently, than the professed peons on the large estates. Like the estates, the central Mexico mining camps have contributed a considerable quota to the emigration northward.

METHOD OF MIGRATION.

In Mexico railways have given the opportunity and the inducement to emigration. Needing unskilled labor for their construction and maintenance, they drew upon the agricultural population along their lines, at first for a few days or weeks of temporary service between crops and later for more extended periods. At first the true peon was extremely averse to leaving his home, and would not work where he could not sleep under his own roof, but gradually he became bolder and more worldly-wise and could be prevailed upon to work for a month or so a hundred miles or more up and down the line. He became accustomed to having silver in his pocket occasionally and found it would exchange for things he had not heretofore thought of having for his personal use. He became attached to cash wages in about the same degree that he became detached from his home surroundings. Employers in the more primitive parts of Mexico say that at present the people will not work for money so long as they have food in their cabins. When they first leave home they will work only long enough to provide themselves with food and shelter for a few days in advance. But the railways, bringing a greater variety of wares at lower prices, have made possible the attractive shop of the railway town, and this market for money has made the latter a more desirable commodity in the eyes of the peon. He has become more of a spender and so a more persistent earner. Even at desert sidings, with

nothing but an adobe hut in sight, laborers come aboard the train in numbers to buy candy and other trifles from the train peddler. The railways thus have attracted labor and have held it more and more permanently from a constantly widening area along their lines.

The railroads that enter Mexico from the United States run for several hundred miles from the border through a desert and very sparsely settled country, but all of them ultimately tap more populous and fertile regions. Along the northern portion of their routes resident labor is so scarce that workers are brought from the south as section hands and for new construction. This has carried the central Mexican villager a thousand miles from his home and to within a few miles of the border, and American employers, with a gold wage, have had little difficulty in attracting him across that not very formidable dividing line. A general officer of the National Railroad of Mexico stated that his company had brought north about 1,500 laborers to work on the upper section of the road within a year, and that practically all of them had ultimately crossed over into Texas. In September, 1907, 400 were employed in a single gang, principally at ballasting. In October 290 of these were dismissed and, because only 30 applied for their (free) return transportation south, their foreman assumed the others had crossed the border. Wages north of the Rio Grande, in Texas, are $1 to $1.25 gold, as compared with the same rate in silver south of the river. And it must be borne in mind that prices, except for labor, are no lower in this part of Mexico than in the United States.

Officials of the Mexican Central Railway stated that their laborers in the vicinity of the city of Chihuahua, brought from Aguas Calientes and farther south, were constantly leaving them for the United States, so that a considerable part of their force was really labor in transit. Wages here were as high as $1.50 and $1.75 (for extra gangs) in silver; but north of this section of the border the gold wages are higher than in southeastern Texas.

Mines were worked in northern Mexico before railways entered the country, but the development has been so marked since that event as to cause an entire transformation of the industry. Like the railways, the mines have had to import labor from the south; and they also have as steadily lost labor to the United States. The representative of one group of mining properties in the State of Chihuahua said that within a year he had brought to that vicinity approximately 8,000 mine laborers from Zacatecas and the older mining districts of central Mexico, and that not far from 80 per cent of these had left, a part going to New Mexico and the remainder to Arizona.

Thus there is a constant movement of labor northward inside of Mexico itself to supply the growing demands of the less-developed