The origin story of Mexicans in Chicago too often goes untold and unexplored in school history books, mainstream media, and the local narrative. While about a fifth of Chicagoans are descendants of Mexicans, this group is still frequently perceived as new immigrants—or perpetual foreigners, perhaps due to their association with manual labor, as well as their general invisibilization in academia, politics, and other institutions.
But as an exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art demonstrates, the presence and contributions of Mexican descendants in the United States extend well beyond the U.S. Southwest, and in Chicago and the Midwest this community goes back not a couple of decades, but at least a hundred years.
“Rieles y Raíces: Traqueros in Chicago and the Midwest” places Mexicans in Chicago in the early 1900s as laborers who helped to build the railroad and industrial hub that would develop into a world-class city.
The exhibit, which runs until April 26, relies on archival material that co-curators Ismael Cuevas and Dr. Alejandro Benavides gathered through a combination of their own research, Census records, and community-sourced photos, documents, and artifacts from local residents in the city and suburbs.
When people think about who built the railroads, we often think about Chinese and Black American workers—much of their work in the form of slave labor. In the northeast, people recall the labor of Irish, Italian, Polish, and Eastern European workers. “I wanted to make sure that we included the Mexican history as well,” said Cuevas in an interview with South Side Weekly.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first time that the federal government barred a group of immigrants on the basis of race or nationality—and later, the Immigration Act of 1924, which instituted quotas on European migrants, railroad companies set their sights on Mexico.
According to the exhibit, from the 1910s to the 1930s, American companies went to the border and deeper into Mexico to offer well-paying railroad jobs that welcomed workers’ families and promised them housing in Chicago.
But there was a catch. “You’re thinking you’re going to be in a house… you’re not in a house. They were literally giving folks these abandoned boxcars. Imagine one of these train boxcars, they took off the wheels, and they just [parked] them adjacent to the railroad tracks,” Cuevas said.
The makeshift housing subjected traquero families to extreme temperatures, pollution, accidents, and unsafe conditions.
In 1928, a University of Chicago researcher, Anita Edgar Jones, identified about two dozen boxcar communities in Chicagoland. The museum curators took her thesis and mapped out all the locations, illustrating that more than twenty of those boxcar communities were on the South Side of Chicago, and they reached the western suburbs as far as Elgin and Aurora.
Cuevas pointed to the boxcar icons on the map, each one representing a community. “So you have here 19th and Rockwell [in Little Village]. You have, for example, this one right here on 66th and Martin Luther King Drive, a.k.a. O Block. Right behind O Block there is a railroad yard: there was a boxcar community there.”
He pointed to the boxcar community at 102nd Street in East Side, another one in Hegewisch, and three camps in the Broadview and Bridgeview areas. “This is Midway; remember I was telling you about the railroad yard south of Midway? We found the Census record on 59th and Cicero; basically, where the [CTA] Orange Line ends there was a boxcar camp in the forties and the fifties.”
Mexican Boxcar Locations across Chicagoland from 1928 – 1950. Courtesy of the National Museum of Mexican Art. 
Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Credit: Jackie Serrato 
Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Credit: Jackie Serrato 
Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Credit: Jackie Serrato 
Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Credit: Jackie Serrato 
Exhibit co-curator Ismael Cuevas discusses the exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art.
The railroad companies that employed Mexican immigrants varied by time period, but the New York Central Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Illinois Central Railroad, the Burlington, and the Northern Santa Fe Railroad were prominent recruiters.
Visitors to the exhibit are first met with a model railroad set built by artist Derrick James depicting a boxcar community right off Lake Michigan. A panel in the middle of the exhibit room shows more recent immigrants in the industry, such as the Carabas family from Pilsen. Artifacts displayed include a forest-green welding mask that once belonged to traquero José Ordáz, a mandolin belonging to Julia Pérez, and, most prominently, a 1930 framed image of Our Lady of Guadalupe from a chapel in an Aurora camp.
Cuevas is fascinated by the parallels between this era and the attitudes and policies toward Mexican workers today. Once the war effort of World War II was over and in the midst of the Bracero program that attracted thousands of Mexicans to work in agriculture, meatpacking, and the steel mills, immigration authorities launched Operation Wetback in 1954, “right around the Mexican Independence Day on September 16… which is the same [day] as when Operation Midwest Blitz started here in Chicago,” he pointed out.
The curators found a picture in Mike Amezcua’s book Making Mexican Chicago that shows the Illinois Central Railroad train deporting mexicanos. “The Illinois Central Railroad train is the same train that, for example, this gentleman [shown in an exhibit photo] Emilio Aguirre works for. The same railroad that we worked building is the same railroad that deported us a decade later,” Cuevas said.
The exhibit shows that laborer Miguel Nara bought a house in Chinatown in the 1960s, making him one of the first Mexicans in Chinatown, and displays the paperwork of the sale. Another gentleman’s grandkids submitted old documents to the museum, which showed that he had bought a house in the Fuller Park neighborhood in 1948, but in 1954 “self-deported” as a deportado voluntario.
“Railroad workers were buying and purchasing homes, literally pursuing the American dream,” Cuevas said. “And a few years later, they’re literally being—the same way that our people are now—are being deported.”
Rieles y Raíces: Traqueros in Chicago and the Midwest. National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Through April 26. Tuesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm; Wednesday, April 1, 10am–8pm. Free. (312) 738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org
Jacqueline Serrato is editor emeritus and the former editor-in-chief of the Weekly. She’s also the editor of La Voz, the Spanish-language publication of the Sun-Times.