Migrant Labor Camps of Lubbock County

Federal policy shaped who picked the county's cotton. For more than twenty years the bracero program brought several thousand Mexican nationals to Lubbock County each summer for the harvest, until it ended after the 1963 crop as machines took over the work. By the 1980s some 8,500 wells irrigated more than 250,000 acres of the county. The Hispanic share of the county kept growing: about 21 percent of Lubbock's people in the 1980s and 33.4 percent of the county's in 2014, and Las Fiestas Mexicanas became one of the city's yearly draws.

What the plaque says

Migrant Labor Camps of Lubbock County Early Hispanic residents of frontier Lubbock County included ranch hands in the 1880s. Railroad lines brought many workers to the South Plains, the majority recruited from El Paso. Rail companies built row houses near construction sites, and Lubbock's rail labor camps became ethnic enclaves for Hispanic workers. One of the early settlements southwest of town was called Shipley's Railroad Camp. Cotton raising, which began as a side crop on area ranches, also attracted temporary labor as production increased. One field labor camp developed near the Slaton roundhouse. Cotton pickers from south Texas and Mexico arrived in a seasonal migration, although some found year-round ranch work. While on the migration circuit, Hispanic citizens lived in large labor camps throughout the county and along every major highway into Lubbock. In the city, a barrio called "Mexican Town" or the "Chihuahua District" developed in this locale. Standard homes were tents or simple structures, and the neighborhood was poverty-ridden and overcrowded. The Great Depression worsened living conditions for most residents but especially for the working poor. Mexican migrants and Hispanic citizens also faced segregated facilities including schools, theaters and restaurants. In 1948 the city council paid for a corrugated metal building at the largest camp as a labor recruiting site. In May 1970, a tornado destroyed much of the neighborhood, and of the twenty-six people killed nearly half were barrio residents. By 2000, Hispanics made up about one-third of the city population and one-half of the public school enrollment. Lubbock also boasted dozens of Hispanic organizations advocating for business, civil rights, leadership, families, the arts, youth and education. Aztlan Park is the site of the former migrant labor camp. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buddy Holly Center — 1.3 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 1.6 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 2.3 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 3.1 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Yellowhouse Canyon — 0.6 mi
• Congressman George Mahon — 0.7 mi
• The 1970 Lubbock Tornado — 0.8 mi
• The Fujita Scale — 0.8 mi