When train travel first took off in Illinois in the 1800s, it was the lowest-ranking employees who laid the tracks, which could weigh as much as half a ton. To keep the trains running on time during the winter, they lit fires to thaw the tracks.
Called “traqueros,” a term derived from the Spanglish word traque, meaning track, these Latino workers were honored by Amtrak Wednesday at Union Station.
The ceremony is the brainchild of Ismael Cuevas, Amtrak’s director of government affairs, who began researching the workers’ history after spotting a historical marker for a Mexican village upon arriving in Dodge City, Kansas, aboard the Amtrak Southwest Chief train from Chicago.
The village was formed more than a century ago, said Cuevas, who has Mexican ancestry.
“This village was actually a temporary, cramped wagon camp for traqueros working for the Santa Fe Railroad, near the Dodge City roundhouse,” Cuevas said.
Forgetting the precise definitions of “traquero” and “wagon camp,” Cuevas Googled the terms. After refreshing his memory of what traqueros did, Cuevas learned that wagon camps were communities of mobile homes that could be moved by rail and placed on railroad tracks, near main lines, for weeks or months at a time.
The mobile homes were built from old covered wagons used to transport goods. Immigrants converted the covered wagons into homes by adding kitchens, porches and gardens, Cuevas said.
“Can you imagine living in a boxcar community here in Chicago in the winter with no heat, no proper insulation, no protection from the elements?” Cuevas said.
Cuevas, who has worked for Amtrak for about two years, said that after researching those definitions, he wondered how Mexicans and other Latinos ended up working on the railroad in the first place.
At the ceremony, Amtrak paid tribute to Latinos, who laid much of the country’s railroad tracks, with a mariachi band entertaining Amtrak customers camped on long wooden benches in the station’s concourse.
Later, in the station’s Burlington Room, a space once used as a women’s waiting room and beauty salon, an Aurora-based historian gave a lecture on railroad history and current Latino Amtrak employees spoke about ancestors who worked in the industry.
The ceremony honored traqueros of all kinds, including 19th-century Mexican and Mexican-American laborers who helped expand the railroad across the country, as well as Latino men and women who work for the railroad today.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the life of a track crew often consisted of lifting iron rails and setting them in place. A 20-foot rail could weigh more than 800 pounds, historian Alejandro Benavides said. Crews could lay 10 miles of track a day, he added.
White railroad workers supervised Latino members of the track-laying crews. Although traqueros were the lowest-ranked railroad employees, track-laying was the “most essential job” in the railroad industry, Benavides said.
In addition to laying track, railroad workers maintained existing tracks. In winter, in places like Illinois, traqueros used fire to thaw the tracks, according to Benavides.
“They were the ones who, no matter what the weather was like (rain, snow, cold, scorching heat), the traqueros were in charge of making sure the trains ran and that they were on time,” Benavides said.
According to Cuevas, the supply of Chinese immigrant labor, essential to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, declined after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Railroad companies filled the labor void by hiring Mexican workers.
Between 1880 and 1930, Mexican track workers made up nearly two-thirds of the track workforce in the Southwest, Great Plains and Midwest, according to a 2016 book on traqueros, Cuevas said.
Benavides, author of a historical fiction book set in a wagon train camp in Eola near Aurora, focused much of his talk on the camp, which opened in 1923 and housed Mexican immigrant railroad workers.
The work of the workers living at the Eola camp consisted of reducing locomotives to scrap metal for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.
Benavides showed the audience a photo of children from the camp playing near the train tracks – a dangerous place, but the only place they could play.
“This is what the camp looked like: very austere, no trees, no flowers, right next to the railroad tracks,” Benavides said.
The Eola camp closed in the mid-1930s. There were about 20 wagon camps in Illinois, Benavides said.
Eddie Pavon, a locomotive mechanic at Union Station, was one of the Latino Amtrak workers who spoke about his family’s ties to the railroad industry. Pavon said his father, a Puerto Rican, retired from Amtrak in 2019 after working on the railroad for more than 41 years.
“He taught me how to do an air brake start test before the training department even asked us to,” Pavon said. “He was eager to teach anyone who really wanted to learn, because Dad’s time was extremely important to him.”
Cuevas concluded the ceremony by reading a resolution recognizing Amtrak’s celebration of its Latino workforce, which the Chicago City Council passed Wednesday.
