Machines, Migration, and Survival: A Latino Worker’s Life Through the Great Depression
Summary: This essay presents the fictional life of Rodrigo Mendoza, a Latino immigrant laborer, as a historically grounded worker’s perspective on the Great Depression. Through Rodrigo’s experiences, the narrative illustrates how technological change, racial discrimination, and economic collapse shaped the everyday realities of working-class people in early 20th-century America. His struggles with unstable work, hunger, limited access to New Deal programs, and exclusion from relief efforts reflect broader patterns faced by immigrant and nonwhite workers. While fictional, Rodrigo’s story is rooted in historical scholarship and serves to highlight how the Depression exposed deep inequalities within capitalism and inspired labor consciousness and collective resistance among workers across racial and national lines.
Rodrigo Mendoza was born in 1900 in the railroad town of Quito, Ecuador, where the whistle of steam engines marked the rhythm of daily life. As a child, he watched the iron locomotives cut across the valley, symbols of a technological future that dazzled his imagination and promised prosperity. His father, a modest schoolteacher, often read aloud from newspapers at the dinner table, describing the sewing machines that doubled factory output, the gasoline engines replacing horse teams, and the electric generators lighting up cities in places Rodrigo had only dreamed of. In Nell Painter’s words, machines in the early 1900s became “central to industrial and agricultural expansion,” raising production to unprecedented levels (Painter 2). Those stories sparked in Rodrigo a profound belief that modern industry could lift families like his out of poverty.
At age nineteen, after years of saving sucre (Ecuador’s past currency) earned from repairing farm tools, he migrated to the United States. By 1925, he settled in rural Kansas, joining the growing population of Latino laborers who arrived seeking wage work on railroads and in agricultural fields. Yet he quickly learned that the United States was not the land of easy ascent he had imagined. As a working-class Latino immigrant, he stood at the bottom of a rigid racial hierarchy that shaped wages, opportunities, and even basic human dignity. His jobs were unstable, seasonal, and often dangerous.
Still, daily life carried its small rhythms. Rodrigo lived in a two-room wooden shack on the outskirts of town with his older brother’s family—nine people in total. They ate simple meals of beans, day-old bread, eggs when they were lucky, and occasionally cheap cuts of beef from the butcher. Clothing was patched over and over; Rodrigo’s work boots were repaired so many times that the soles were more stitching than leather. Health care was a luxury most laborers couldn’t afford. As Kyvig notes, ordinary Americans in the 1920s and early 1930s faced rising medical costs and limited access to physicians, especially in rural communities (Kyvig 276). Rodrigo relied on home remedies and the advice of older workers when illness struck.
He found steady employment at the Blue, Red, and White Stars Agricultural Company, repairing mechanical threshers and engines. Mechanical knowledge gave him pride—each bolt and piston felt like a small rebellion against the poverty he had known. But by the late 1920s, he witnessed a darker truth embedded in technological progress: machines were replacing workers. Automated harvesters required only a handful of operators, and new industrial efficiencies made human labor increasingly expendable. As Painter explains, machines generated “record profits,” but they also eliminated masses of jobs, leaving working families vulnerable to economic crisis (Painter 2).
When the stock market crashed in 1929, the collapse came swiftly and mercilessly. Rodrigo remembered the morning the factory foreman gathered the workers and said, “Machines will save us.” But within months, orders vanished. Workdays were cut, then eliminated. Finally, workers were told they were being “released,” a gentle word masking a brutal truth: they were no longer needed.
As unemployment spread, Rodrigo joined thousands in Kansas City's breadlines. Kyvig describes how food scarcity during the Depression forced families to “stretch meager ingredients,” rely on relief kitchens, and endure chronic malnutrition (Kyvig 290). For Rodrigo, hunger became a familiar ache. His nieces’ shoes were held together with twine. His brother fell ill but avoided the doctor, fearing the cost.
During these years, Rodrigo became active in labor meetings, where he first encountered cheap pamphlets summarizing the ideas of Karl Marx. Marx’s argument—that wages are shaped by an unending struggle between capitalists and workers—matched everything Rodrigo had lived. The Goulds, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers controlled the railroads, factories, and banks. They controlled Congress. They controlled the terms of survival. Workers, Marx insisted, had no rights unless they organized to seize them. Rodrigo came to believe that employers and workers did not share common interests. Employers sought profit; workers sought survival. When profits were threatened, it was labor—not capital—that bore the burden through wage cuts, layoffs, and hunger.
The Great Depression did not forge new injustices; it revealed old ones. Rodrigo often reflected on the racial history of the United States in the 1930s. He read accounts of Reconstruction and learned, as Du Bois argued, that the North had never waged the Civil War to end slavery, only to preserve the Union:
“The North did not propose to attack the property. It did not propose to free enslaved people… This was to be a white man’s war to preserve the Union.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 55
For Rodrigo, this confirmed what he witnessed in Kansas: despite shared suffering, white workers were often protected first; people of color—Black, Mexican, Asian, and Latino—were pushed out of relief lines, excluded from jobs, and blamed for unemployment. Historian David Kyvig notes that discrimination intensified during the Depression, as white workers and local governments targeted immigrant laborers for displacement, deportation, or exclusion from relief programs (Kyvig 305–308). Rodrigo’s own foreman told him bluntly, “White men get the jobs first.”
When President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, Rodrigo felt a cautious hope. Yet, like many Latino laborers, he discovered that the New Deal’s promise was unevenly distributed. He applied for work with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), only to be told—politely—that only young “citizens” would be accepted. He tried to register for WPA construction work but saw white applicants chosen ahead of him. His brother found occasional work through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), but Rodrigo remained excluded.
New Deal agricultural policies brought no comfort either. Mechanization continued to accelerate, and programs intended to support farm owners often harmed farm laborers, especially people of color. While the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) rewarded landowners for reducing production, thousands of field hands lost what little work remained. For Rodrigo, the New Deal provided some public meals and occasional shelter, but little lasting employment. Kyvig emphasizes this inconsistency: New Deal programs “helped many” but systematically excluded or marginalized racial and ethnic minorities (Kyvig 314).
By 1933, Rodrigo joined a multiracial coalition of workers organizing strikes across Kansas and Missouri. They demanded fair wages, safe conditions, and the right to unionize. At mass meetings, speakers invoked the possibility of a nationwide general strike—believing that only by halting production entirely could workers force the hand of capital. Rodrigo believed deeply in this idea. Productivity and profit were the foundations of capitalism, and both ceased without the hands of labor.
As the 1930s progressed, Rodrigo survived through odd jobs: repairing engines, shoveling grain, hauling freight, and—on several weeks that felt like miracles—working briefly for the WPA when a sympathetic administrator called him in. He sent money to his parents in Ecuador whenever he could, who were themselves facing economic turmoil due to falling global commodity prices. His health deteriorated; a persistent cough plagued him, the result of long winters spent in unheated shacks. When he finally visited a free clinic in 1936, a doctor told him he had early-stage pneumonia—common among the unemployed and undernourished during these years.
Yet he endured. Like millions of ordinary workers, Rodrigo believed that the Depression exposed the failures of a system built on inequality, racial hierarchy, and unchecked corporate power. By the time prosperity slowly began to return near the end of the decade, he had become not only a mechanic but a committed labor organizer and political thinker. He saw clearly that the collapse of the old economic order was not simply financial; it was moral.
In his later years, Rodrigo would tell younger workers that the Great Depression was not just a story of hardship, but a story of awakening. He believed, as many did, that the world was witnessing the breakdown of a capitalist paradigm that had become unsustainable. And he hoped that future generations—workers of every race and nation—would build something better in its place.
Citation:
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. Free Press, 1998.
Kyvig, David E. Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression. Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
Marx, Karl. Wage-Labour and Capital. Translated by Frederick Engels, International Publishers, 1933.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. W.W. Norton, 2008.