History of Mexican Americans - Immigration and Diffusion of Mexican-American Communities Throughout The U.S.

Immigration and Diffusion of Mexican-American Communities Throughout The U.S.

Hispanic Americans made up a significant number of workers in a number of industries, particularly the railroad and mining industries in the southwestern U.S., that led to the growth of communities throughout the region. The employment needs of the railroad industry in the late 19th century brought Mexican immigrants from more remote regions of Mexico, while the new systems integrated the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The railroad also led to the economic development of those parts of the US, drawing Mexican immigrants in large numbers into agriculture in the early 20th century, establishing a pattern that continued thereafter.

These largely male Mexican immigrants also established colonias in the early 20th century in places such as Chicago, Kansas City and Salt Lake City, Utah as railroad employment took them further within the United States. Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants also moved in large numbers to Denver, the San Francisco Bay area, and to a lesser extent to Detroit, Minneapolis and the Monongahela Valley, Pennsylvania, during World War I to work in the steel and automobile manufacturing industry. Others began migrating from South Texas to work in cotton fields elsewhere in Texas and Oklahoma, and from Southern California went to work in summer harvests of groves and orchards in Oregon and the Yakima Valley, Washington.

More recently, beginning in significant numbers in the 1970s, Mexican immigrants have moved in large numbers to the Midwest U.S., attracted by jobs in the packinghouse industry, and to the southeastern U.S., where they have displaced many African-Americans and contract workers from the Caribbean in agriculture and related industries. This large wave of Mexican immigration are attracted to low-paid labor jobs and an equally high number moved to low-income communities, such as industrial suburbs of Los Angeles in ethnic neighborhoods known as barrios and the agricultural sector of Imperial Valley, California.