A Community Narrative: The First Mexican Community in Aurora, Illinois

Book Overview

The origins of Mexican boxcar communities and Mexican and Mexican Americans workers’ settlement emerge from tradition of track work in Mexico and the United States.  Railroad companies typically located boxcar camps on or near railyards, such as places where this community narrative chronicles from the expansion of the railways in Mexico and the United States.  The connection of a bi-national railroad system was the catalyst for emigration from Mexico to the United States.

The Mexican Revolution and Cristero Rebellion caused upwards of more than a million people to immigrate to the United States.  For Mexican workers, more than any other immigrant workers, the railroad linking Mexico with the United States represents the first and largest industrial employment on either side of the border.  However, the Mexican and Mexican-America workers have remained unacknowledged. Yet, at the dawn of the twentieth century they laid more than fifty percent of the tracks for the western lines.

Boxcar camp communities symbolize the most significant visible evidence of Mexican immigration ties to the American railroad industry.  Equally important—in the process of helping and maintaining railways America’s railroads in time of national emergencies, such as World War II, Mexican and Mexican-American people establish communities such as the one in the Midwest city of Aurora, Illinois, between 1923 and 1934.  This is their story through a community narrative consists of personal stories and experiences faced by the first people from Mexico to settle in Aurora.