In the 1860s, crews of the railroad from California east to Utah that would stitch the United States into one massive country, sea-to-shiny-sea, enjoyed mild California days and nights until freezing came with winter.
The colder a day was, the smaller the workforce. Sometimes, too few workers meant no work was done.
Librarians directed me to American history. It was in one of their books I read how railroad workers in California’s Sierra Nevada calculated the minute when Spring began after a killer winter.
During freezing cold days, some construction workers tossed cans of frozen normally liquid nitroglycerin to others without thinking about it, it saved steps and frozen “nitro” was safe. Only as liquid was it dangerous; it could explode by accident. American workers never threw cans of the frozen explosive around. American workers didn’t like it anyway, they preferred dynamite.
Blasting was the only method of cutting/tunneling through the high and solid Sierra Nevada mountains.
Winter slowed construction because workers quit rather than suffer. A solution was needed. China!
As California Gov. Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad company, said when questioned if he was serious about bringing Chinese workers to build the railroad, “They built the Great Wall of China, they could easily lay railroad tracks,” or words to that effect.
Stuffed into ocean-going ships, 13,000-15,000 Chinese came. Winter didn’t bother them. Zero temperatures that froze nitroglycerin made work easier. “White Anglo” supervisors would watch and appreciate a long line of Chinese tossing frozen cans of nitro, man to man, up the side of a mountain because that saved time and time was money.
Winter in the Sierra Nevada always ends. How did people know? A day would come without a blizzard, without clouds, with a clear beautiful day disturbed only by a huge explosion. Everyone, including the Chinese, knew what that meant – one can of nitro, one too many was tossed from one Chinese worker to another on a day when the nitro started to thaw.
Meet the thousands of Chinese immigrants brought to the US to work because native Americans refused to do the work that was considered too dangerous on bitterly cold, icy California mountains.
Most of the railroad construction workers from the east were Irish Americans, hired off of boats in New York or Baltimore. Their flatland jobs weren’t as difficult as the Sierra Nevada job. Americans wanted more money than the Irish who walked off of boats. Thus, an Irish workforce.
Once Stanford’s railroad was finished, more railroads were started but there weren’t enough construction workers. Mexicans were recruited. A map of United States railroads with overlapping lines on where Mexicans live and one can see who filled the railroad construction employment gap.
In 1979 I stood outside San Diego City Hall with the mayor watching Mexican American construction workers laying track for the San Diego Light Rail system. Little had changed in a hundred years. The 1880 Census of San Diego counted 1500 “Americans,” 3,000 Mexicans and 5,000 Chinese. Mexicans worked on farms and the new railroad, the Chinese worked on the railroad and on farms. The Southern Pacific Railroad connected San Diego with the rest of America.
Mexican farmworkers have dominated the western US agricultural workforce for over a hundred and fifty years.
Congress, including US Sen. Leland Stanford, R-California, basically ended immigration from China in 1882. Mexicans were untouched until 1924 when the all-white (one Black) Congress imposed visa requirements on Mexicans. It cut off immigration from Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. By design Congress limited Roman Catholic and Jewish immigration by imposing tiny quotas.
The quotas were based on the number of people from the affected countries that were in the US in 1890 when almost all previous immigrants were from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland.
It was extreme ethnic discrimination. Those quotas lasted until the end of WWII in 1945 and in the 1950s and 60s.
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What didn’t change, however, was immigrant desire to work at jobs Americans refused. Half of our farm workers today are working illegally. These 400,000 mostly Mexican men feed us.
Then, there is the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore.
Six dead or missing: Dorlian Cabrera, 26, Guatemala; Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 25, Mexico; Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, 38, Honduras; Jose Mynor Lopez, 35, Guatemala; Miguel Luna, El Salvador; the sixth man, unidentified from Mexico.
“One of the reasons Latinos were involved in this accident is because Latinos do the work that others don’t want to do,” says Lucia Islas, president of the Baltimore Latino Committee, a nonprofit group.
This statement is as true today as it was when made about Chinese, Irish, Italians, Polish, Russians and Mexicans in the 1800s.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a U.S. Marine veteran, political campaign consultant, author and editorialist for newspapers and magazines and hosts the Contreras Report on YouTube.
