My Journey in Faith

Amen.

Chapter 1

"Mamá, I asked one day, does God have a plan for us?"

"Sí, mi niña, she told me. He has a plan."

Well, if that is the case, then how can I know the plan?

She put her arm around me. We have to pray to Him and be patient. He will find you when it is time.

He will find me when it is time. Hmmm.

I was a little girl when my mother used to tell me that. Today, I am still the same girl, but much older and wiser. I tell you, it took God an eternity to find me. As the course of my life played out, I wasn’t convinced that He had found me until I was well into my fourth decade. Coincidentally, it was not until then that I found myself, too.

All during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, it seemed that God was looking elsewhere. Nevertheless, since mother had told me that He had a plan for each of us, and since the Bible promised it, too, I believed it.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Supported by such comforting words, I tried to pretend that I didn’t mind His not noticing me.

Fortunately, I have now lived long enough to have felt His presence in my life—but it did take a long time, and all of my pretending beforehand was hard. If things had been peachy-keen early on, I probably wouldn’t have noticed God’s absence. Yet life was as tough as nails sometimes, and from the very start He never informed me that it would be like that.

You see, I was the plump daughter of Mexican immigrants growing up in a segregated barrio of Kansas City, Kansas. And I didn’t know which part of that was the hardest—the fact that I was a female in a man’s world… or that I was short and heavy in a world that idolized the tall and thin…or that I was a dark-skinned Hispanic in a world that preferred white Anglo-Saxons... or that I lived in an insular neighborhood, purposely isolated, rather than inter-connected with the rest of the world.

Isn’t the absurdity hilarious? Today, now that I’m older, it makes me laugh aloud. Sometimes when I’m alone sitting at my table, I laugh until my eyes water and my stomach hurts! God really does have a marvelous sense of humor. Despite my current propensity to see His humor, there was a time when life just didn’t tickle my funny bone.

The man down at the Santa Fe ice house knew that about me. He called me the sad girl. My older sister and I, along with our friends, would go down to the rail yard in the summertime for snow cones.

Niñas, buenas tardes! he always called out as soon as he saw us. I promise you the snow cones we make here are the best you’ll find anywhere in the continental United States.

Elvira, my sister, was skeptical. How can you say that, mister? How do you know?

Because nobody makes them with more care, I guarantee it!

Then he made a special deluxe snow cone and announced, And this one I give to the girl with the sad eyes. The first couple of times he said that, I was unsure whether he meant me; nonetheless, I felt an inner compulsion to approach him.

He smiled and gave me the snow cone every time. He seemed to know me without knowing me—or maybe he saw that I was the pudgy one and guessed I’d appreciate a deluxe cone. Either way, he was right!

If you smile, it will make my day, he told me, looking straight into my eyes. I felt the corners of my mouth reaching upward, but I can’t say whether my eyes showed the same smile.

Before the advent of refrigerated freezers and air-conditioning, ice was big business in my hometown. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad had invested in its own ice house down at the yard. Big chunks of ice from northern rivers and lakes were brought down and stored there. Papá said the ice was used to ice down the railroad cars. Many people assumed the cold cars were for fresh fruits and vegetables, but papá said most of the ice was reserved for shipping fresh-cut beef.

Nationwide, the demand for fresh beef was far greater than the demand for fresh produce— which was good for all the meatpacking houses in Kansas City. The Santa Fe, where papá worked, was positioned perfectly to take advantage of the growing market for fresh beef. The rail yard was located in Kansas City’s West Bottoms, a stone’s throw from the stockyards and meatpackers like Armour, Swift, Morris, St. Joe Packing, and Fowler Packing, to name a few.

Throughout my childhood, the ice house at the rail yard was among my favorite places to go and is among my dearest memories of home. How I loved eating those snow cones, and they were even better with enchiladas!

****

My father, Benito Campos, was a traquero—just one in tens of thousands of Mexican workers whom the railroads contracted in the early twentieth century to repair and maintain the tracks.

In one of the oldest of my photos, Elvira (right) and I are standing next to our childhood home.

Recruiters with the Santa Fe (and their Mexican labor brokers, los enganchistas) had encouraged him to make the move to the United States. The year was 1923, when President Harding died in office and when white parents of children in the Kansas City, Kansas school district approved the construction of separate schools for the growing numbers of Hispanic children.

The recruiters in Juárez told him he could make several times more money doing the same job in Kansas City than in Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, or Monterrey. They said there was plenty of work to last. Santa Fe officials encouraged him to take my mother along with him, which reflected the railroad’s changing attitude with regard to migrant workers.

By welcoming workers with families, and by paying travel expenses and sponsoring proper visas for all, the Santa Fe and other railroad companies were investing to stabilize the migrant workforce. It would be better for business. Hiring only single men had proved too risky and expensive. Such is how big business has helped shape society in America.

Papá consulted with my mother, Guadalupe, before making his final decision. "Lupe, mi amor, he said, this is something we must decide together. It seems the right thing to do, but I want your honest opinion. Our country is in a shambles. We can either work for the hacendado for the rest of our lives, afraid of our future, afraid of the rurales, or we can try to make it on our own in the United States.

Your parents are no longer here, and my mother has been gone a long time already. My brothers and sisters are scattering, too. We can take my father with us. What is your opinion?

We are married, Benito, she answered. No matter what, we stick together. If this is your time to leave, then it is my time to leave, too. I am with you to the end and will support you always.

Against that backdrop my father accepted the job offer, and my parents boldly crossed the infamous ribbon of water separating the two countries. Contrary to what might be assumed in this modern age, they did not have to surreptitiously swim across the Rio Grande. They rode the electric street car over the bridge with dignity, and railroad officials in El Paso held the door wide open for them. They were quickly processed through customs and sent on their way to Kansas City, more than nine hundred miles to the northeast, into the interior of a new country and a new culture.

Even though the job was only for contractual, seasonal labor, my parents courageously took a chance and stepped into a strange world, unaware of everything they would soon be facing.

A post card of the street car my parents took to the United States. Original publisher unknown.

There were a number of push and pull factors that played into papá’s ultimate decision to leave Mexico. The terribly violent revolution (a civil war) occurring there was one of the biggest push factors. The war had become more like a slow and painful process, drawn out over time, rather than a quickly passing event. The related bloodshed lasted for nearly twenty years.

The situation compelled many innocent people caught in the violence to head north, seeking refuge in the United States. Throughout that time, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans immigrated. Even after the ratification of a new constitution in 1917, which was a big improvement, it didn’t end the war. Mexican nationals continued to pour across the border.

Simultaneously, there was a national labor shortage in the United States. It had been caused by the American involvement in the Great War. Additionally, Congress had passed a string of restricting immigration acts aimed to stop Eastern European and Asian immigration.

The circumstances led to favorable conditions for the hiring of Mexican migrant workers in several industries. The worker shortage was one of the greatest of pull factors, and it underscores how Uncle Sam himself has shaped the social fabric of this country.

In the railroad industry, six major lines during the 1920s employed as many as forty-two thousand Mexican traqueros, depending on the season. Those men comprised seventy-five percent of the track personnel of those companies.

By the time my parents moved to Kansas City, the Santa Fe rail yard had a terminal, transfer sheds, round houses, machine shops, repair shops and a coaling depot on one-hundred and thirty acres of flatlands adjacent the Kansas (Kaw) River. The yard comprised nearly twenty-eight miles of track and employed some five hundred people, making it one of the Santa Fe’s largest yards in the nation.

It was there where my father was sent to work, and near there where I was born a few years later, and just across from there—long before the railroad existed—where the old Shawnee Prophet finally died.

The work of the traqueros was grueling. As the trains passed over the tracks, inevitably some of the rails or ties broke and some of the underlying ballast gravel shifted, causing undulations or gaps. Especially on the curves, the heat and constant pressure of the passing trains pushed the outer rails out just a bit farther each time.

It was the responsibility of the traqueros to manually correct all of those problems and maintain the tracks in tip-top shape. Before the Great War, the labor unions had monopolized those jobs so that only white men could get them. But in the wake of the ensuing labor shortage, Congress and the railroads pressured the unions and forced the hiring of non-unionized labor.

That allowed workers of Mexican and African heritage to get hired on. They made up songs to sing to the rhythm of the work. While the brown men called themselves traqueros, the black men called themselves gandy-dancers. They may have chosen that name since they sure could nearly dance with those big, heavy tools. Papá told me that those gandy-dancers were quite a catch for ladies, whether it be for the money or for the smooth moves on the dance floor.

Papá’s starting wage was $1.86 per eight-hour day, and he and my mother were grateful for the opportunity. It was an opportunity for them to make their home in a retired Santa Fe boxcar on the grounds of the rail yard—just as thousands of other Mexican compatriots were doing in various cities across the country.

It was an opportunity to be paid much below the prevailing wage of the labor unions and live without basic utilities. It offered them the chance to catch a death cold or severe pneumonia during the bitterly cold winter months, when harsh winds blew across the rail yard by day and into the un-insulated boxcars by night.

Boxcar communities, company towns, sprouted up all along the Santa Fe line, from El Paso to Chicago. It was cheaper to live in a boxcar free of rent than to have a housing subsidy taken out from the paycheck. From the company’s viewpoint, housing the migrant workers on railroad property adeptly avoided a potential large-scale social issue from erupting—at least in the beginning.

Forgive me if I sound somewhat jaded, it’s just me. My father’s attitude was entirely different. The rampant discrimination we lived with, and the frosty feelings that sometimes emanated toward Hispanics never really bothered him. It bothered me much more than it did him.

A 4-6-2 steam locomotive—very common during the 1920s. (See cover art description, page 1)

Ninth Street viaduct into Kansas City, Kansas, circa 1910. Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library.

****

I was born in the seventh ward during the 1930s. The seventh ward was a neighborhood called Argentine, largely a blue-collar neighborhood of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans. Society at large remembers the 1930s because of the Great Depression, but I recall the 1930s mostly for the Jim Crow era.

Segregation was not only enforced upon African-Americans, but also upon Hispanics.