Browsing by Subject "Railroads"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Health on the Line: The Politics of Citizenship and the Railroad Bracero Program of World War II(2013-07) Rodríguez, Chantel ReneeDuring World War II the railroad bracero program generated a series of transnational legal debates centered on the regulation of guest worker health rights. Between 1943 and 1945, an estimated 135,000 Mexican men were recruited to participate in the railroad bracero program, a guest worker program co-sponsored by the U.S. and Mexican governments, as temporary track maintenance workers to assuage the labor shortage and support war transportation. These Mexican guest workers, known as braceros, moved back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and labored on an expansive network of tracks across the United States. When railroad braceros experienced injury, illness or unsafe working conditions, they engaged in a process of claim-making in which they requested railroad employers cover medical costs and/or rectify workplace safety and health issues. This study examines how four sets of historical actors--the U.S. state, the Mexican state, U.S. railroad employers, and railroad braceros--relied on the relationship between work, health and citizenship to define, negotiate and contest guest worker health. In doing so, it seeks to understand the forces that culminated in the railroad bracero program to cause workplace health discrimination against guest workers. I argue that the legal framework regulating bracero health preserved the functionality of the program as a cost-effective labor recruitment program by simultaneously guaranteeing health rights and creating a loophole to deny them. The U.S. state's capacity to extend health rights to guest workers allowed the program to fulfill in its primary goal--to secure Mexican guest workers through diplomatic agreements with Mexico. While the U.S. state had the capacity to extend health rights, it was the railroad employer that retained the power to distribute guest worker health benefits. The railroad industry's well-developed legal system for minimizing costs paid in injury compensation (injury culture) and protecting corporate autonomy made it difficult for guest workers and the Mexican state to navigate the bracero contracts and succeed in the process of claiming health rights. Railroad braceros were vulnerable in the American workplace not only because of their deportability, but also because they were unfamiliar with railroad injury culture.Item The impact of access to rail transportation on agricultural improvement: The American Midwest as a test case, 1850–1860(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2011) Atack, Jeremy; Margo, RobertDuring the 1850s, the amount of farmland in the United States increased by 40 million hectares (100 million acres), or more than one-third. Moreover, almost 20 million hectares, an area almost equal to that of the states of Indiana and Ohio combined, were converted from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive agricultural resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states, which constituted somewhat less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census data, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase in cultivable land can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the Midwest. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge, which raised agricultural revenue productivity, by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove an increase in farm and land values.Item Transportation Cost Evaluation of Southeastern Minnesota Carbonates(University of Minnesota Duluth, 1997) Zanko, Lawrence M