Latino/as are not recent arrivals to Washington State but dates back to 1774, when Spaniard sailor Juan Pérez led an expedition aboard the Santiago ship along the coastlines of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Spain abandoned its small settlements at Rada de San Lorenzo de Nutka, on Vancouver Island and Bahía de Núñez de Gaona in Neah Bay when it ceded all Northwest claims to the United States under the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty. After Mexico gained independence from Spain the northern boundary remained along the Oregon-California border until 1848 when the boundary shifted southward. During the late nineteenth-century Mexican soldiers, mule packers, fur trappers, ranchers and gold-seeking miners continued to travel northward to Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia.
By the turn of the twentieth-century Mexican workers were riding aboard the Great Northern Pacific Railroad in search for work in the agricultural fields of Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The political turmoil of the Mexican Revolution and relaxed immigration restrictions during World War I drew more migrant families to the Pacific Northwest, some settling permanently in small farming communities. Not until World War II, however, did an unprecedented number of Mexican male workers arrive in Washington State to pick peaches, green beans, hops, apples and thin sugar beets. A bilateral agreement between Mexico and the United States allowed Mexican nationals to enter the United States as contract laborers (braceros). By 1945 Washington State comprised six percent of the total number of braceros imported to the United States. Unlike those in the Southwest, Northwest braceros endured colder winters and received little protection from U.S. and Mexican government officials. A series of bracero strikes and high transportation costs convinced Washington farmers to stop importing braceros in 1947 and begin recruiting Mexican migrant families from Texas and other Southwest states.
Migrant women contributed enormously by pitching tents or building shelters in new surroundings, gathering water from nearby riverbank, and cooking meals over makeshift stoves. By the 1960s families abandoned the migrant circuit and planted roots in the Yakima Valley. As the Chicano Movement gained momentum across the Northwest the United Farm Workers Union’s organized hop workers and students boycotted grape sales at college campuses. In Seattle, a group of Chicano residents took over an elementary school and covert it into El Centro de La Raza. Today, El Centro de La Raza provides social services to an increasingly diverse Latino population. According to 2002 figures Washington Latinos comprise 8% (490,448 out of 6.1 million), a majority of Mexican origin (75%) followed by Puerto Ricans (3.6%) and Central Americans (2.8%), South Americans (2.0%). Despite being the largest minority group in Washington State, Latinos still face major political, social and economic challenges. These include a 50% high school drop out rate, below-the-poverty level wages and poor housing for farm workers, and low voter registration rates and minimal political representation in local, county, and state offices. Despite these challenges Latinos will continue to built institutions and organizations that will allow them to reclaim the Northwest as their own.