Midnight Train to Kansas

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Mexicans came to eastern Kansas shortly after the turn of the twentieth century for a variety of reasons. The Mexican Revolution, lasting from 1910 to 1920, drove many to flee central Mexico. Around the same time, the Santa Fe Railroad, Rock Island Railroad, and the Union Pacific Railroad needed unskilled labor, which resulted in the hiring of Mexican immigrants. Mexican workers were appealing because the United States did not restrict migration from Mexico as it did from other places, such as China, Japan, and European countries.[1] Many came to Topeka and the surrounding areas of Kansas, such as Lawrence, Garden City, Wichita, Emporia, and Kansas City. Mexican American scholar Valerie Mendoza explained that the initial Mexican settlement in Kansas consisted of predominantly men who migrated by themselves to provide for their families in Mexico. The Mexican immigrant men typically lived in boarding houses, rather than single-family dwellings.[2] However, solo Mexican men desired a more established community in eastern Kansas. Eventually, Mexican men settled along the railroads in eastern Kansas and their families joined them. Vicki Ruiz explains that “whether living in a labor camp, a boxcar settlement, or an urban barrio, Mexican women nurtured families, worked for wages, built fictive kin networks and participated in formal and informal community associations.”[1]

[1] Ruiz, 7.

[1] Valerie M. Mendoza, 217. [2] Valerie M. Mendoza, “Kansas City’s Guadalupe Center and the Mexican Immigrant Community,” in Wide-Open Town, ed. Diane Mutti Burke, Jason Roe, and John Herron, Kansas City in the Pendergast Era (University Press of Kansas, 2018), 216.