“Little Mexico”: how Mexican railroad laborers built a community at Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon's buildings and railway were built by many hands. Indigenous communities, mostly Hopi, did much of the building work on the structures designed by Mary Colter, drawing on traditional Hopi forms. As the canyon turned into a tourist destination, the Fred Harvey Company and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) needed a railroad and hotels. Black Americans cut much of the lumber from Northern Arizona forests, and immigrants from Mexico built much of the park's infrastructure. They also built communities of their own.

Men standing in front of the Grand Canyon Railway. NPS.

The railway workforce

The AT&SF finished the line from Williams, Arizona to the Grand Canyon in 1901. Hispanic workers made up much of the labor force that built tracks across the West, many of them immigrants from Mexico, and Indigenous workers, especially Navajo Nation members, worked on tracks in New Mexico, northern Arizona and parts of California. The jobs were reliable, but wages were low and living conditions were inhumane.

A Navajo man works on the railroad, about 1944. Library of Congress.

No housing, no food

From 1919 to 1929 the AT&SF needed more infrastructure inside the park to handle the tourists its trains were bringing. It contracted Robert E. McKee, General Contractor, Inc. to oversee the work, and both relied on immigrant labor from Mexico without providing sufficient benefits.

Housing and food were normally provided on rural projects like this, but neither company did. Laborers on the South Rim had to build a livelihood on their own. The National Park Service issued temporary shelter permits, and the workers made basic shelters in camps. Abandoned boxcars and tents often housed many laborers and their families. The community formed just south of Grand Canyon Village and was called "Little Mexico" by some.

The Bright Angel Hotel lunch counter, about 1915. NPS.

Nor did the companies feed their workers. The Bright Angel Hotel had a lunch counter, but most Mexican laborers did not eat there. A park ranger at the time assumed that they found it too expensive or felt out of place. The superintendent of the time wrote that it would not be pleasant for tourists to be forced to mix with Mexican laborers just off the job, an attitude that deepened the inequality in access to housing and food.

Park staff push back

Park staff noticed the poor conditions and tried to put things right. In 1926 the park's acting superintendent, George Bolton, wrote to the railway's chief engineer, W.K. Etter, that a contractor bidding on a job in an isolated place should plan for the care of his labor gang and provide food or shelter for everyone who works for the company.

Where it was

No photographs or maps of the original Little Mexico survive, so its exact location is hard to know. The superintendent described it as on the southern edge of the railroad wye, near where the Backcountry Information Center is today. In 1927 and 1928 the AT&SF began building residences for employees, including a dormitory, and ran a waterline to the boxcar housing. A utilities map shows the approximate location of the boxcar houses, called "carbodies."

A 1928 utilities map showing the new waterline to the Mexican immigrant housing at Grand Canyon. NPS.

A community anyway

Despite the hardships, many laborers formed strong bonds and created their own space at the canyon. Once the South Rim's infrastructure was finished, the Mexican American workers likely dispersed to other jobs. Immigrants from Latin America continued to be pushed into poor labor communities across the country, and many fought for labor rights through the early 1900s and since. The infrastructure these workers completed is much of what visitors value at Grand Canyon today.

Sources

• National Park Service, Grand Canyon National Park, "“Little Mexico” and Creating Community" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-little-mexico-and-creating-community.htm), part of the series Whose Story is History? The Diverse History of Grand Canyon, drawing on Michael F. Anderson's administrative history of the park and other works; rewritten in hubnx's own words.