them into selling their land. In fact, the Rangers were known popularly in the late-1870s as los riches de la Kineña, an allusion to the belief they acted as King's private security force. Gilded Age The 1880s for Mexicans Americans was a period of substantial change, marked especially by the emergence of the Southern Pacific Railway. In El Paso, the Southern Pacific reached the city in 1881, at which point it birthed an immediate economic and industrial revolution, as new industries emerged in mining, smelting, and construction. The economic boom was felt throughout the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico, and it brought new national and transnational migrants into the region. In addition to Mexicans entering the U.S. from Mexico, Chinese laborers came from San Francisco, African Americans fled from the Jim Crow South, and European Americans came from the East Coast. The influx of new capital and immigrant labor into the region helped transform Texas from a barren terrain into a hub of international commerce, and El Paso emerged as the region's primary economic hub and an international commercial depot. Nevertheless, racial violence continued. Mary Jaques, a British tourist who spent two years in Central Texas in the 1880s, wrote that the murder of Tejanos "carried a sort of immunity with it", as Mexicans appeared to be "treated like a dog, or, perhaps, not so well". Migration into the United States in this period was also soon complicated by racial restrictions. For the first time in its history, the U.S. barred an entire national-origin group from immigrating when it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This caused difficulties at the Mexico–United States border, since the Act officially excluded Mexicans of Chinese descent from entering the U.S. as well. "Chinese Inspectors" were hired by the United States Customs Service to inspect immigrants at ports of entry in the Southwest. While official U.S. policy was to deport all ethnic Chinese immigrants to China, migration policies were slightly revised for Chinese Mexicans, who were deported to Mexico instead, if they held Mexican citizenship, had lived most of their lives in Mexico, or were married to Mexican nationals. This "Chinese inspection" force would grow into the U.S. Border Patrol. These continued indignities suffered by Mexicans and Mexican Americans did not go completely ignored, however. In 1885, María Ruiz de Burton, a Californian Mexican-American, published The Squatter and the Don, a novel set in