“Iron Road”

Background: Many songs composed by Mexican immigrants expressed homesickness, disappointment, and concern over the adoption of “American” values. In the following song, the completion of a railroad line stretching over six hundred miles from Victoria, Texas, to central Mexico is portrayed as an occasion for alarm rather than celebration.

El Ferrocarril

La máquina pasajera
No puede hacer cosa buena
Porque “oscurece” en su casa
Y amanece en tierra ajena.
¡Ay! ¡qué dolor!
Tendrían los mexicanos
Al ver el ferrocarril
Que traen los americanos.
La máquina chiquitita
Es la que ha quedado aquí
Y la quieren llegar
Hasta San Luis Potosí.
Oigan y oigan
El ferrocarril bramar
Él que lleva a los hombres
Y nunca los vuelve a traer.

Iron Road

She’s like a bird of passage
Who never can do the right thing.
She leaves her home every evening
Just to see what the morning might bring.
Oh, what a pain
Will visit those Mexicans
When they hear her steaming down
the track, The train of the Americans.
Just a little bitty steam engine
Is all they left for me
And they really think it’ll go from here
To San Luis Potosí.
Listen, listen,
Hear her roar down the track
She’s coming for a load of men
That she won’t be bringing back.

Source: Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States (1930).