Cooperation and segregation: A history of North Central Texas coalmining towns, organized labor, and the Mexican workforce

As the railroads traversed Texas in the 1880s, it was coal that fueled their locomotives. A thriving coal industry developed in North Central and South Texas and men and their families came to Texas from across the United States and foreign countries to mine the "black diamonds." Nineteenth-century business management practices caused a wealth of discontent between workers and capitalists as both grappled with finding their place in the new industrial order. The ethnically diverse groups of coalminers in Texas organized into the United Mine Workers' of America (UMWA) to aid their battle with the coal operators. For a time, solidarity and progressive leadership, in the UMWA and the Texas Federation of Labor aided them in their battles.;After 1920, the railroads converted their engines to oil and the coal industry declined in Texas. Most immigrant mineworkers were able to find other jobs and slowly began to assimilate into their adopted societies. However, Mexican immigrants were not allowed this opportunity. Union solidarity created an environment of tacit acceptance in the North Central Texas coalfield, and it seems the prejudice many South Texans held for Mexicans did not exist to the same degree in North Central Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reports in the U.S. of the revolution in Mexico and Texas-Mexico border violence, however, created an image of Mexico as the antithesis to the progressive society that many U.S. residents felt they had fashioned for themselves. This negative image of Mexico extended to its citizens in the U.S. as well as Texas Mexicans. Acceptance vanished and was replaced by an increasingly hostile attitude towards all immigrants and workers from Mexico.