CHAPTER 16
As long as people had been in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, they had lived with the awareness that the river would, at least every few years, suddenly rise in a flash flood that could dislocate or even destroy life. Repeatedly, people of the Valley had had to bury dead, live with injury, rebuild homes, and re-create fields and irrigation ditches, all as a result of a torrent of water and debris hitting with little forewarning: smashing through homes; ripping out bridges, levees, and dams; burying fields in sand and mud; drowning people, livestock, and wildlife.
The coming of the railroad to New Mexico in 1880 brought a human flood that, with the suddenness of the rampaging river, permanently upended life both in the Valley and far beyond it. There had been hints, analogous to blackening skies and the rumble of thunder, stretching over the previous years, that a powerful force was aimed at the Valley. Beginning even before the laying of the final rails to the vicinity of the small, overwhelmingly Hispanic farming and freighting community of Albuquerque and its neighboring Pueblo villages, the New Mexico & Southern Pacific Railroad (NM&SP, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) produced the first in a long succession of seismic transformations in the economic, social, and political lives of the people of the Middle Rio Grande Valley and New Mexico as a whole.
After years of rumors and visits by survey teams and self-proclaimed advance men, the railhead of the NM&SP was poised at Raton Pass in December 1878. At Albuquerque “new faces appeared at every turn as travelers came and went with greater frequency. Rents and property values were rising and real estate owners were starting costly improvements.”1
Nevertheless, it was not at all clear then that Albuquerque would become an important point on the railroad line or, indeed, whether that would be a desirable turn of events. In fact, both the town of Bernalillo to the north and the Indian pueblo of Isleta to the south had been eyed by some railroad planners for years as a potential division point. Much of that dreaming and planning, much of the preparatory fieldwork, even months of the initial grading of roadbeds and laying of track remained beyond the notice and attention of farmers of the Middle Rio Grande Valley.
There were some residents of Albuquerque though, predominantly newcomers from the eastern United States, who were anxious to bring a railroad division point to their town. Adding weight to that possibility, during 1879, a major landowner at Bernalillo, negotiating to sell a considerable block of property to the railroad, asked a price far higher than NM&SP was prepared to pay. As a result, the railroad representatives rejected that town’s proposal and moved downriver to Albuquerque.
From early 1879 until April 1880, a trio of Albuquerque speculatorsdevelopers with access to cash and credit, Franz Huning, William Hazeldine, and Elias Stover, were aggressively urging small, mostly Hispanic, farmers to sell land to them in the general vicinity of Barelas, a cluster of houses and fields southeast of the village of Albuquerque proper. Their hope was to put together a tract of land large enough to accommodate passenger and freight depots and, most important, locomotive and car repair shops, as well as an area where the future shopmen and their families could have homes.
To what extent the developers offered incentives or applied pressure to the farmers is unknown, but it strains credulity to imagine that the farmers all uniformly jumped at the chance to sell. More recent incidents in New Mexico suggest the likelihood of generalized resistance to abandoning traditional agricultural pursuits in favor of touted, but uncertain, future economic advantages. Within a few months, though, many of the Barelas area families did sell. Momentum begot momentum, and the developers assembled what became known as the Original Albuquerque Town Site.
Selling farmland was relatively easy to rationalize, freighted though it was with potential conflict; another thing entirely was accommodating the wave of new people who came to work and live on what was recently agricultural land. That presented challenges of a far greater magnitude. The numbers of railroad workers and adjunct professionals alone shocked most Albuquerque area natives. These associates of the railroad were already prepared and expecting to handle the hundreds of jobs necessary for running a railroad division point and supplying materials to be shipped on down the line as the laying of track continued toward two junctions with the Southern Pacific Railroad, one at Deming, New Mexico, and the other at Needles, California.
They came in dormitory cars and tent encampments, ready to do the work of the railroad as soon as their feet touched the soil of the wide Rio Grande floodplain. They amounted to a swarm that descended in the blink of an eye, putting up temporary buildings, laying out windrows of steel rail, mounds of ties, rafts of barrels of spikes and steel plates, tools of all sorts, banks of coal, tanks of oil, and the makings of laundries, lunchrooms, barber shops, and saloons. The cooks, dishwashers, laundry workers, cobblers, tailors, seamstresses, blacksmiths, apothecaries, preachers, prostitutes, and more materialized like wild mustard plants in spring.
This horde of “railroad people” came on horse- and muleback, in wagons, and on foot, ahead of the actual railroad, to prepare the way: to lay out and erect a temporary depot; to dig pits for the daily dumping of ash and clinkers from locomotives, and other pits to permit inspection and repair of the undercarriages and running gear of locomotives and rail cars, and to dig yet more pits for human waste and garbage; to clear routes to the bank of the Rio Grande so that working livestock could be watered easily every day; to dig wells, install associated pumps, and build elevated water tanks that would resupply locomotive tenders reliably day in and day out beginning in just a matter of days. And that was the barest beginning. Cooking tents had to be set up, and firewood had to be gathered, cut, and stacked. A switching yard and a supply yard had to be designated, cleared, and roughly leveled. A telegraph line had to be strung. It must have seemed to the longtime residents of Albuquerque that “railroad people” were everywhere, altering their familiar world.
To do all this, the lead crew spread out, denuding a wide swath of terrain roundabout in order to cut and gather many hundreds of posts for fences and corrals; diverting the Barelas irrigation ditch so that its flow would be useful to the railroad; hauling rock and sand from nearby arroyos for use in footings and foundations. Even with all this accomplished, more materials and labor were needed, so a recruiter rode repeatedly to Albuquerque village (Old Town) to hire temporary laborers, draft animals, and vehicles. The effect of just weeks of whirlwind labor was to transform utterly and permanently the physical, economic, and social environments of Albuquerque and its environs so that by the time the first train reached the hastily set up depot on April 22, 1880, the largely agricultural community had already been pulled and pushed into the grasp of an industrial world hitherto known only by rumor, travelers stories, and occasional fabulous printed reports. There was resistance, but no turning back.
Albuquerque’s new neighbors were human beings, to be sure, but humans of very different sorts from those who were natives by long inheritance of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. They spoke multiple different languages: English, German, Italian, French, Yiddish, Chinese, and others. Many were recent immigrants to the United States and former African slaves. Almost none spoke Spanish, as the citizens of Albuquerque overwhelmingly did. The “railroad people” included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and those who adhered to other faiths or none at all. Even those who had come from agricultural backgrounds, though, were habituated to an industrial life. Their days were governed by clocks and steam whistles. For them distance had already been compressed by steam locomotion to a fraction of what it had been just days earlier for Albuquerqueans. Henceforward, the pace of life would be faster and more uniform than before. And the measure of value would be hard currency, almost without rival.
These differences and the commanding weight of industry and the wage economy would quickly impel alteration of routines and habits of long standing. It is no wonder that many Albuquerqueans felt invaded and violated. Despite the ingrained ethnic and racial bias of railroad management, they found it necessary to hire a significant number of local Hispanic laborers, for a long while almost entirely laborers. Earthmoving and the hauling of construction materials were readily assigned to local crews, who, besides, worked for minimum wages. Even low pay, though, permitted purchase of manufactured goods that began streaming into the Valley as rails were still being spiked down. The railroad thus stimulated and financed, in significant part, the very commercial trade that it brought.
Although access to modern manufactured goods was generally welcome, it immediately became obvious that disparity in pay—and therefore in material wellbeing and social status—between locals and “railroad people” would be an enduring condition. Initially, there was a justification for distinction in hiring, pay, and advancement between trained and experienced railroad workers and unskilled locals, involving decided advantages for employees with roots in the eastern United States and Europe. Those advantages persisted long after locals had demonstrated or acquired the technical skills necessary for the highest levels of shopwork.2
As pointed out previously, the 1922 Shopmen’s Strike substantially altered that situation. By laying off a large number of journeyman machinists and boilermakers at the Shops because they were union members and replacing them with nonunion workers, the railroad’s management made room for more local Hispanos among the skilled ranks of the Shops’ workforce. That in turn increased the average incomes of Hispanic employees of the Albuquerque Shops, which meant greater opportunities for the children and grandchildren of those increasingly middle-class Hispanic shopmen. The remainder of the 1920s and the twenty-year period from about 1935 until 1955 were times of prosperity and stability for many employees at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops and their families.
That set the stage for a surge of upward financial and social mobility among those families and their offspring. Increasingly, children of Albuquerque’s Hispanic and Native American shopmen completed high school, went to college, and joined professions. Descendants of AT&SF employees whom we interviewed for this book, for instance, include two judges—including a chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court—several lawyers, an engineer, teachers, a sportscaster, a whole family of dentists, a vineyard owner, and a physical therapist. We don’t want to imply that children of AT&SF machinists and boilermakers invariably entered white-collar professions. But, as has been shown for other children and grandchildren of solidly middle-class, skilled industrial workers, an extraordinary number of them did, in fact, do just that.
That particular pathway into the professions, though, disappeared when skilled industrial jobs were eliminated with the drastic reduction in staff at the Albuquerque Repair Shops in the middle 1950s. That same downsizing closed the pipeline for family succession into those skilled industrial positions. Gone were the days when a machinist father could put in a good word with a supervisor at the Shops and launch a son or daughter on a skilled career right in the neighborhood. As the workforce at the Shops shrank, local businesses that depended on spending by shopmen began to suffer. It wasn’t long before retail businesses in the Barelas and South Broadway neighborhoods were closing or moving to more advantageous locations.
The laid-off shopmen themselves sought other skilled mechanical work at Sandia Laboratories and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the service and repair shops at the Albuquerque Airport, automobile dealerships, the shops of the Albuquerque bus line, the State Highway Department, and light manufacturing companies that for several decades had been sprouting up along the railroad tracks (especially north of the rail yards). Naturally, though, such industrial employers within Albuquerque were already generally staffed up and could not absorb anywhere near all of the suddenly out-of-work shopmen.
Some of them were able to find comparable work at other repair facilities within the AT&SF system or the shops of rival railroads, although they were also shrinking their shop staffs. Especially attractive to Albuquerque shopmen were AT&SF’s diesel locomotive and car repair shops in San Bernardino, California, and Cleburne, Texas. But many had to seek work in related businesses outside the railroad industry. Two major employers that offered prospects to former shopmen were oilfield service companies in southeast and northwest New Mexico and elsewhere and the aerospace industry, especially in Southern California. One of the consequences of the drastic down-sizing of the Albuquerque Repair Shops in the mid-1950s, therefore, was a significant out-migration of skilled workers from Albuquerque and New Mexico.
Many are the New Mexico families who now have relatives in Southern California precisely because of the diaspora of shopmen in the 1950s. Andrés Vigil, who worked briefly at the Albuquerque Shops, left to open a grocery store in Barelas. Business at the grocery collapsed, though, with the en masse departure from the neighborhood of hundreds of shopmen and their families. Andrés’ son Orlando remembered that the shrinking and subsequent closure of the Shops marked the “beginning of the fall of the neighborhood.” He also recalled that many families of former shopmen moved to Albuquerque’s South Valley, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and to California.3
In summary, the effects of the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops on the growth and character of the city and its residents can appear as generally positive or mostly negative. Which view dominates depends heavily on what precise slice of time is taken into account, as well as which subgroup of the population is one’s focus. On the one hand, without the Shops, Albuquerque would almost certainly be a much smaller community than it is today. Its role in industrial activity; in transportation, warehousing, and distribution of consumer goods; and broadly in the economic life of the state would certainly be much less dominant than it now is. On the other hand, stratification along cultural and ethnic lines within the Shop payroll in terms of income and economic opportunity was probably intensified and rendered more rigid by the institutionalized bias that was part of the baggage that came with the railroad. Hispanic, African American, and Native railroad employees consistently earned less than their counterparts with Northern European pedigrees, reinforcing an already prevalent situation in the US money-based economy. That, in turn, exacerbated social and cultural tensions that flared into open hostility from time to time. Also, the transfer of railroad profits to external financiers and stockholders helped to hold the territory and then state in a perpetual state of near impoverishment, even when its natural resources and the labor of its people helped drive national prosperity. For the railroad, New Mexico was typically considered as a place that had to be passed through on the way to somewhere else, east or west. After World War II, that situation was tempered somewhat by the explosion of tourist visitation, facilitated at first by the railroad.
Exploitation of New Mexico’s abundant natural resources and work in a variety of government agencies at the local, state, and national levels fueled a generally rising prosperity for Albuquerqueans and for migrants from smaller communities within the state and from Mexico. That migrant stream has been augmented more recently by people from Vietnam and the Middle East, as well as by internal US migration of retirees and those looking for relief from the rigors of northern winters. Most recently, employment in new technologies and the world of entertainment are drawing further population growth. In one way or another, though, all such change and development rests on a base established by the arrival of the railroad in 1880, the proud labor of shopmen and shopwomen at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops, and the prosperity enjoyed by them and their families.