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Frank P. Barajas, Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo. Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870 to 1930., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1538–1539, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1538
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For those who came of age during the civil rights era of the latter twentieth century, the representation of Spanish-speaking people in the United States often consisted of stereotypes. When not omitted, people of Mexican origin were portrayed by the media and academics alike as somnolent peons beneath the shade of cacti. Social scientists, moreover, frequently characterized the Mexican community as apolitical, disorganized, and tractable. This narrative is what historians of the Chicana/o experience such as Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo have challenged since the late 1960s.
Garcilazo's perspective as a scion of the Chicana/o movement and a former United Farm Workers union organizer frames his central argument in Traqueros: since the late nineteenth century men and women of Mexican origin were central to the creation and maintenance of railroads owned by United States corporations on both sides of the southwestern border. Although frequently thought of as foreigners, Garcilazo asserts that people of Mexican origin inhabited the Southwest prior to the United States' imperialist expansion in 1846.
