The history of Iowa’s Latino population has largely been untold and unrecorded, but thanks to a grant awarded by the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa State professor Stephen Coon is assembling pieces of that untold history in a project entitled “Boxcar Babies: An Oral History of Iowa’s Early Latino Population.”

The $1,000 grant for Coon’s project was one of 24 grants provided by the Iowa Sesquicentennial Commission during the last two years to eight Iowans and 16 other researchers across the country, said Marvin Bergman of the State Historical Society.

“Professor Coon will have until September 1, 1996, to work on this project and submit a manuscript suitable for publication in the State Historical Society’s publication, The Palimpsest,” Bergman said.

Coon, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication, said he has had a long interest in minority history. Coon said the project for The Palimpsest is an outgrowth of a larger video documentary project on Iowa’s Latino population that he worked on during spring semester.

“We still have a Latino population in Iowa who have spent a good portion of their lives living in empty boxcars while working for the railroad in Iowa at the turn of the century,” Coon said. “This population will be the focus of the ‘Boxcar Babies’ project.”

Coon said about 80 percent of the Latinos who came to Iowa around 1900 to work for the railroad were from Mexico.

“These early Latinos in Iowa are still alive and have done interesting things with their lives. There are sections in Des Moines and Mason City that are still referred to as the “boxcar” section of town,” Coon said.

Coon hopes to conduct at least 20 interviews in all areas of the state and to include photocopies of diary entries, pictures, newspaper clippings and birth and death records to complete the project for the State Historical Society.

Outside of a few articles written by older Latino residents of Iowa, Coon said very little research has been done on the boxcar population. He said he feels his work will be appropriate for classrooms and other smaller audiences studying the Latino culture rather than for commercial broadcasting.

“I think this is an area that deserves reporting and I think there is a growing interest among younger Latino scholars in the state about this topic,” Coon said.

Coon noted that the Latino population of Iowa is expected to reach 2.3 percent of the population by the year 2015. According to the 1990 Census report, the white population in Iowa was 97 percent and the Latino population was about 1.2 percent.

Coon said Iowa’s Latino population has its highest concentrations in Muscatine, Des Moines, Sioux City, Mason City, Perry, Fort Madison and Columbus Junction.

“It is interesting to examine Iowa’s younger Latino citizens and see that many of them have come to the Midwest for the same reasons the ‘boxcar babies’ came,” Coon said. “Iowa is, for the most part, a peaceful place to live and offers jobs to Mexican immigrants who can’t find jobs on the United States-Mexico border.”