Women of the Route 66 Service Economy

The Route Sixty-Six preservation narrative has a few faces it returns to consistently. Angel Delgadillo, the barber. Tom Snyder, the documentarian. Bob Waldmire, the illustrator. They are all men. The daily economy that made Route Sixty-Six work, the diners, the motels, the laundries, the roadside stands, was substantially operated by women, often without formal ownership credit and rarely with preservation-era visibility.

Mary Colter is the most documented exception. She was the primary architect and designer for the Fred Harvey Company for more than three decades, responsible for some of the most distinctive buildings in the Southwest tourism corridor, including the La Posada Hotel in Winslow, completed in nineteen thirty, and the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon. Colter researched Indigenous building traditions and incorporated them into her designs with more seriousness than was common in the period. The Fred Harvey Company, her employer, was not above commercial Indianness as a marketing concept, but Colter's own scholarship in the subject was genuine. La Posada was her favorite project. When the Santa Fe Railway closed it in nineteen fifty-seven she considered it a personal loss.

The women of the smaller Route Sixty-Six operations are documented in fragments. In New Mexico, Lucy Cordeiro and her daughter Linda Cordeiro operated a women-owned restaurant business on the corridor, documented in New Mexico Route Sixty-Six Association oral history materials; the specific dates and location of their operation are preserved in oral record rather than formal archive, which is exactly where most of this history lives.

Navajo and Hopi women's weaving labor supplied the trading post economy that Route Sixty-Six amplified. The tourists who bought rugs at Hubbell Trading Post were buying the work of women who wove for weeks to complete a single piece. The price was set by the trader.