Interview Transcript

Errol Jones

Q: When did significant Mexican immigration begin?

A: We can trace evidence of Spanish-speaking people back clear into the early part of the 19th century, but the numbers don't become significant until the California Gold Rush. At that time lots of Mexicans came up into California from Sonora and apparently, once the law was passed in California to put a head tax on people who were not of Anglo background, then many of them moved out of those mining camps and started to gravitate towards Nevada and Idaho and other places where gold and silver was found. But we see them here as early as the 1860's and very, very evident in the mining operations--the kind of mining operations people who had been in the region of Mexico have been doing ever since the Spanish Conquest back in the early part of the 16th century.

Q: How about Nevada and Wyoming and that part of the West?

A: Nevada to be sure, earlier than Idaho, because they were in the Sierras and then moved across into the region of Nevada. In terms of Wyoming, when they began to move into Wyoming, more of that would have been along the lines of being involved with animal husbandry, with cowboy kinds of things. As a matter fact, the terms, they certainly infuse the English language with all kinds of Spanish terms that were then anglicized like "buckeroo" comes from vaquero which is a cowboy and "lariat" of course is a Spanish word for rodeo and so on. And we found evidence of the word "rodear" being used in Oregon and in this area for bringing cattle and sheep together and then performing various kinds of market-related activities with the livestock. So yeah, they were here as early as 1860's in this region for the mining, and they became quite prominent in transportation. One of the more important muleteers, or a person who conducted transport in Idaho, is a chap by the name of Jesus Orquidez and Jesus Orquidez came to be a prominent citizen of Idaho. We have evidence that he got here as early as 1863, and he lived in Idaho until his death in 1928 and was instrumental in setting up a very important packing and transport operation based on mules into the mining camps. Not just the Idaho Basin, but all over the southern part of the state. So he is probably one of the most prominent of those individuals but we don't have large numbers. For example, in 1870, the census counted about 60 and this is always iffy because you don't know if they were just counting individuals that say that they were born in Mexico or is it related to people whose surnames are Hispanic or just what have you, so the census figures are really hard to go on.

Q: But Hispanics have been a part of Western history?

A: Yes, always.

Q: Not just as farm labor?

A: No. They have been involved in the transport muleteering and when you talk about farm labor, yeah, they were involved as cowboys. For the most part, they went into those kinds of things, miners, transport and cowboys, those kinds of operations that they knew so well and that's where the money was. Then later on, some of them began to settle out and became farmers, not nearly as many of them as Anglo people did, but they were involved in those kinds of operations. We don't an awful lot of evidence of them going into commercial ventures like shopkeepers. Naturally, we don't have a lot of them going into professions, because the professions in the early territorial history were pretty rudimentary and limited. So, their numbers are confined pretty much to those kinds of activities that everyone was involved in at that time. It isn't until later on, after the Mexican Revolution and the growth, especially in this region, southeastern Idaho and southwestern Idaho, that you see large numbers of Mexicans coming in two areas: in the railroads working as railroad labor, or as migrant labor to work at sugar beet operations and potato operations and things of that nature.

Q: I take it that with that population growth, they also started expanding into more mid-level career opportunities, they started to become upwardly mobile in a social economy?

A: The things I am going to say now are speculative, because especially for Idaho, the information that we have is very, very rudimentary. In those early periods of time, beginning in the first part of the 20th century, the numbers 1) were quite limited that we have evidence of and 2) when Mexicans began to move into this area, they bore with them a stigma that Mexicans bore with them wherever they went anywhere in the United States, and that was of a conquered people. They had been conquered by the US in the Mexican-American War, and after that war, the United States government and Anglo-American or other non-Mexican citizens of the United States treated them very poorly. They lost their lands despite the fact that they was a treaty at Guadalupe Hidalgo that guaranteed those lands to them, they lost their lands by all kinds of shenanigans and legal maneuverings and so on. And they always carried with them, because so many of them were of Mestizo physiogeny and racial background characteristics, they were considered brown people in a highly racial atmosphere as the United States was after the Civil War. They were a people who for the most part were regarded by Anglos as folks to be exploited and treated as second-class citizens. So it was very difficult for them to compete in that kind of an economy, to be able to become owners of land. Again, that took a long period of time even though we had evidence or a little bit of evidence of some of them becoming landowners but for the most part they were relegated to the service kinds of activities. Besides that, they were discriminated against in the schools, their language, especially in places like Texas, they were outlawed. They couldn't speak their language publicly and as a result of that, many of them dropped out of the schools and were not incorporated into the mainstream society. So by the time all of that has gone on, before these people began to move into this region as it grows economically. Bear in mind, Idaho doesn't go through any kind of economic growth other than mining until the beginning of the 20th century when the federal government incorporates agricultural renewal programs by harnessing the Snake River, doing huge irrigation projects, financing the railroad to come in. Along with that of course, then you begin to see the need for labor because the Anglo-farming community that was established in that area, they couldn't manage it on their own, so they imported labors. So the history of Idaho, in terms of Hispanics, becomes overwhelmingly a history of transient laborers who come in whenever the demands of the economy force them in as contract migrant laborers and that is some of things we are working on right now, that relationship between the companies that operated various agricultural activities, the farmers who collaborated with those companies, and the labor contractors that brought Mexicans in from Mexico, or from other states where they had a surplus labor force.

Q: So at what point did we start seeing Spanish-American moving into the middle-class in Idaho?

A: You don't see that very rudimentarily, until about the 1950's. It is at that point where many of the Mexicans who continued to follow a migrant path, primarily out of south Texas, out of the Rio Grande Valley, following the migrant stream up through the Midwest and over into the West for beet thinning, and potato hoeing, and weeding, and moving up into pea-picking; coming in from California also from different kinds of agricultural activities, going into Washington following a path into the fall for apple-picking or potato-harvesting and beet-harvesting and so on, and then migrating back to Texas in the winter time. People got tired of that. 1) It was a brutal existence, their children were uprooted constantly, they weren't in the schools and Mexican people wanted something better for their children than that kind of a life. So many of them said, we can settle out here in Idaho and other places, wherever, generally speaking, agricultural-related industries were established. Like for example, processing plants to move from beets into sugar-refining, or transform potatoes into French fries, or things of that nature. You needed large numbers of individuals who were stable, a stable workforce who would do that kind of work. And through education, then, their children came to move to other kinds of activities besides agriculture. They moved into every single activity that exists in Idaho, all the way from, I think everybody is aware, we now have judges and lawyers and doctors and teachers and people in business enterprises and so on. But basically we didn't start seeing that happen until the 60's and the 70's and then of course large numbers of Mexicans began, people of Mexican heritage, because most of these people are American citizens, the people of Mexican heritage have joined the middle class and some of them are doing very well.

Q: How has the growth changed Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada? How has that move into the middle-class and upper-class and increased education, how has that changed our society?

A: I think as a historian, we are still not able to measure that because the historian needs a long period of time to sit and analyze things and see if there is really a change, but I can tell you one thing right now. In 1961, a lot of Mexicans and Japanese and a lot of Blacks and others in Idaho, were really getting tired of the kinds of discrimination that they saw in public establishments, in jobs within the Treasure Valley, within all of Idaho. Signs that were in windows of restaurants and bars that said, "No Mexicans, No Indians, No Niggers, No Jews, No dogs Allowed" and so one prominent citizen of Nampa, a chap by the name of Antonio Rodriguez got together with a number of other individuals and went to the State Legislature and pressured to have Idaho's first Civil Rights Act put on the books, that was in 1961. Out of that, then we move into an era when other minority groups, especially Blacks, say we need something stronger than [an organization] like a Human Rights Commission. And a Human Rights Commission rudimentary and flawed as it was, was finally established in Idaho in 1968, but it didn't really get powered up until the early 70's. An Idaho Migrant Council was established to be an advocate for farm workers and their rights. All of these things now begin to put pressure on the dominant community to change the way in which they had treated these people in the past, which was as second-class citizens or as invisible people to come and do your labor and then disappear when they don't want you there any longer. I think that the thought process that they have been able to establish and to propagate in the state has been extraordinarily beneficial to enlightening people and raising their level of consciousness about other people and the way other people think and feel and behave and act. So it's had a tremendous impact as time has gone on in that regard. And of course, people in the Mexican community will also tell you, well we've influenced the kinds of foods that you eat, the kinds of entertainment you are involved in, and so on. But fundamentally, when you look at it from a social scientist point of view, the changing in the way in which people think and treat individuals as human beings and know that they can't get away with that kind of discrimination that existed in the past or hardly even think about it, as something that's a viable way to behave is gone. Certainly, there are elements still out there, people that will never change no matter what, but the overwhelming majority of people don't think that way anymore. I think that is a tremendous impact that these people have had and they have persisted. They have pecked away at the old order and said "we were here also." A person that I admire very much, Maria Salazar wrote a little piece that says "We were here, too, in the beginning" and she of course has been a strong advocate for farm workers and for Mexican-heritaged people and has tried to point that out that we just have as much right to being here as anyone else does.

A: I think that the reason why is that anytime a community excludes a significant element, or anybody, from the opportunities that community makes possible, through education, through social services, through inclusion, anytime that that happens, the community suffers as a result of that. People of Hispanic background, and I am a little uncomfortable with that word because it seems kind of an artificial term, while an overwhelming majority of people that are of Hispanic background and in the state of Idaho and this is probably true for Nevada and for Wyoming, is they come from Mexican families, or they are of Mexican descent. But of course we cannot exclude Central Americans and people from South America and even from the Caribbean, because we have some folks from those areas too. So we use that term, Hispanic, to lump them all together. They really bring to the community, one, different ways of doing things that enrich us. They have different perspectives on what's important and what's not. They have different cultural values and these cultural values, one of the things that is always important, is that their family units and their extended families are very strong and they look after one another and those are values that I think most people find would contribute greatly to our society as a whole. And if they are being excluded and not given the opportunity that everybody else enjoys, then you begin to see that you continue to maintain an under-class, and an under-class that isn't given educational opportunities and social involvement and inclusion and so on, that comes to be a class that rather than trying to build the society as a whole would rather tear it down and destroy it than actually work along with it. So, it's essential that these people be included and all people be included, regardless of their backgrounds. So I think that that is a real plus. Let me give you an example of one of the problems we have historically, back in the 1940's there was an article that was written by Deworth Clark, who was an Idaho senator from the Clark family for a National Geographic. It was published in 1944. In 1944, [the United States] was inundated with braseros, Mexican laborers, who had been contracted by the US government, to come here and work in the agricultural sector and they were contract laborers. They were to be paid a certain wage and after the work was done, they were to be shipped to certain other locals where work was needed, and that was to borne by the cost of agriculture and the United States government. Despite the fact that there were around 15,000 of these people working in the agricultural areas in Idaho, the article that was published in National Geographic included photographs of Anglo farmers out picking their fruits, some of them, women who were in high heels dressed hardly appropriately for this kind of labor, and it was really a picture that went out to the rest of the nation that said Idaho and its agricultural economy was built by Anglo people. And in reality, the workers were wholly Mexican in a lot of respects, especially at that period of time. So of course then, you juxtapose what the Farm Security Administration, those photographs they were taking of who was actually working in the fields, and they were overwhelmingly Mexican. And so basically, we are doing a disservice not only to ourselves but also to the nation saying that these people didn't exist, that they were invisible and that they didn't make any contribution, they did. And so it is important to us to recognize that that contribution was significant and that they were builders of Idaho as much as the land developers, the professional people and so on who came in and did other kinds of activities in Idaho, and that is important to know.

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