Migrant Housing

Title

Migrant Housing

Description

Most Mexican immigrants arriving in the 1920s and 1930s could not afford to rent or buy permanent housing in Santa Clara County’s Mexican colonias. Early Mexican rail crews in Santa Clara County were housed in tents and work camps, bunkhouses, or in rooms near railyards. As adjacent communities and industries grew, boxcar housing in the railyards became the nucleus of the first Mexican worker neighborhoods. When they turned to migrant farm work, many Mexicans would camp on growers’ land. By the late 1920s and 1930s, migrant families acquired used cars and brought their own tents, mattresses, and cooking equipment on the road. Migrating in a car with a family of 12 or more was a challenge!

During fruit season, workers found that most growers offered no housing or sanitary facilities, so they camped under bridges or in tents in the open fields or built temporary shelters with fruit boxes. Innovative families used wooden crates to create tables, chairs, cabinets, or bed platforms. Not until WWII did ethnic Mexicans come to settle more permanently in the segregated colonias of San José or Santa Clara County, called by Anglos “Mexicantown” or “Jimtown” in reference to Jim Crow laws of the South.

Scholar Talk

https://vimeo.com/812901133?share=copy

Identifier

B4SV Exhibit Topic Two: Slide 009