Obama in Mexico Amidst Demands for Migrant Rights

Posted on May 10, 2013 by admin

Protestors Gathered Outside the U.S. Embassy, in Mexico City, During President Obama's Recent Visit to Mexico (PHOTO COURTESY OF ADAM GOODMAN)

Protestors Gathered Outside the U.S. Embassy, in Mexico City, During President Obama’s Visit to Mexico on May 2-3, 2013 (PHOTO COURTESY OF ADAM GOODMAN)

On May 3, 2013, President Obama gave a speech in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Speaking to a small crowd of mostly Mexican students, Obama quoted from Octavio Paz, Mexico’s Nobel Laureate of Literature, as well as Mexico’s first indigenous president, Benito Juárez, while praising Mexico’s recent economic achievements, strengthening democracy, and increasing opportunities for women.

President Obama said that the time has come for the U.S. public to look beyond the “sensational headlines” of violence associated with the drug trade that dominate most news about Mexico and for the United States and Mexico to begin working together on “mutual interests and [with] mutual respect.”

Click Here to Read the Full Story, Published in The North American Congress on Latin America

Posted in Honduras, Mexico, Mexico City, Migrant Workers, Places | Tagged Honduras, immigration reform, Mexico, Mexico City, migrants, Obama, protest, U.S. Embassy | Leave a comment

The Migration of Ideas

Posted on May 2, 2013 by admin

Mexico is a devoutly Catholic country, yet it often doesn’t seem truly Christian.

A Pyramid Rises From the Mayan City, Uxmal, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

A friend of mine once told me they heard an older Mexican man say, “in our country, we have two memories.” The first memory he referred to was the wealth of indigenous culture, beliefs, and language that came from pre-Columbian civilizations like the Aztecs and Maya. The second is the Christian and European colonial heritage brought to Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, whose influence permeates the architecture and everyday life of Mexico to this day.

I’ve found that in everyday conversation, Mexicans of both lower and upper classes are often as likely to recount, in a prideful voice, a mythic tale about the patron Saint of their small town, as they are to tell you a legend about the Aztec goddess, Coatlicue, the mother of the earth, often depicted in ancient sculptures at archeological ruins as a woman wearing a skirt of snakes and a necklace of human hearts.

“Ponte Coatli!”

A good Mexican friend of mine, who happens to be a sixty-year-old man, often says, “Ponte Coatli!” or, “Be like Coatli,” when I look tired.

Once after saying this, my friend entered another room, kissed his hand, and then touched his forehead, chest, and shoulders to make the sign of the cross.

The ways in which many Mexicans reconcile their religious beliefs creates a strange, homogenous, wonderful part of Mexican culture that can signify myriad things to different people.

Earlier this spring, I spent a few sultry days in a small coastal town in Michoacán, a mountainous state in western Mexico.

The dry expanses of Michoacán’s mountains eventually descend to a rugged stretch of Pacific where wide sandy beaches lined by palm groves occasionally intersperse the otherwise jagged coastline.

Maruata, Michoacan at Sunrise

There’s lots of amazing things about the beaches of Michoacán, but one of the coolest is surely that sea turtles nest there throughout much of the year. At night pregnant females crawl up the shore to bury their eggs above the high tide line. While they do, other baby sea turtles hatch, dig themselves out of the sand, and crawl towards the pounding waves under the silver glow of the moon.

Landing on Maruata’s Sandy Beach Poses a Challenge to Local Boaters

I arrived in the small coastal town of Maruata, Michoacán on the day of its fiestas patronales, or Saint’s Day. Each year on a hot morning in March, three small motorboats appear on the horizon straight out from Maruata’s long stretch of sandy coast.

One by one, the boats form into a line and head straight through the pounding surf and maneuver around the many rocks near shore. Their captains steer them towards the best landing: a calm area at the end of the beach where a small stream drains into the sea. Once there, men must haul their boats up the sand to above the high tide line, just like the sea turtles.

The first boat brings a Mariachi band from Michoacán’s distant capital, Morelia, dressed in suits. They serenade a crowd assembled on the beach as salt spray dashes their trumpets and the captain lands on shore.

Next comes two boats full of locals, the first centered with an old statue of Maruata’s patron saint.

Several men jump into the shallow water when the craft arrives at the inlet, lift the statue, and carry it up the inlet towards shore.

The men haul the statue up the stream and place it under a small frame adorned with yellow balloons.

Afterwards several women standing over pots heated by charcoal fires begin serving out steaming tortillas and bowls of fish soup, complete with fins and heads, to the crowd.

As everyone feasts, a group of young boys dressed in all red, green, and white, the colors of the Mexican flag, come to dance before the statue of the saint:

When they finish the dance, two men lift up the statue once more and an impromptu parade begins into town. It ends at Maruata’s church, an open-air structure covered in just a tin roof with wooden benches and an altar underneath.

The Parade in Maruata

In the afternoon, there’s a rodeo complete with bucking broncos down near the beach. At night, musicians play Mexican banda music in the town square. Men and women slam down beers, or tequila mixed with cheap soda. Townsfolk dance as young men wearing cowboy hats, wide leather belts, and tucked-in shirts look on. For a moment, it almost feels like you’re in Texas.

A month or so later, on Good Friday, thousands of people gather in a sprawling suburb of Mexico City, called Iztapalapa, where locals reenact the Passion of Christ.

The whole thing takes about eight hours, during which the actor playing Jesus is whipped and sprayed with fake blood.

Later he’s hung up on a cross overlooking the city when the performance culminates with the crucifixion.

The Crucifixion in Iztapalapa

Its pretty intense, really.

The costumes of all the actors who take part in the Iztapalapa performance are so good, and the performance so painfully long, that after a while you really do begin to feel as if you’re watching humans interacting in the relatively slow pace of real time. It seemed like the perfect device to convert nonbelievers.

Each Year, the Actor Who Plays Jesus in Iztapalapa is Carefully Chosen

But there’s a whole other side to all this Christian stuff in Mexico. Here, Christian beliefs often intersect with the indigenous ones that have existed here for centuries.

The Zócalo, Mexico City’s sprawling main square, was a center of activity and hubbub well before the Spanish arrived. Then, it was the center of the Aztec city, Tenochitlan.

When the Spanish showed up in Tenochitlan in 1521 and started killing people, the center of Tenochitlan was a prosperous modern city with schools, markets, and towering ceremonial pyramids.

The Spanish tore down the pyramids and used many of the same stones to build ornate Catholic churches, like the Metropolitan Cathedral that looks over the Zócalo, in the historic center of Mexico City.

The Metropolitan Cathedral Looks Over the Zocalo

Today, the Zócalo still serves as the heart of modern Mexico City. The remains of the Templo Mayor, a pyramid that once stood at the edge of the Zócalo, were discovered in 1978 during a construction project. The base of the pyramid is now fully excavated and the archeological site has been cordoned off and turned into a museum.

On most afternoons in the Zócalo, actors don traditional dress and perform the same ceremonial dances in the shadow of the Metropolitan Cathedral that men and woman in Tenochitlan once did centuries ago in the same space.

While a lot of the pre-Columbian history in Mexico City has disappeared, the endless urban sprawl of the capital’s northern edge, where I spend most of my time these days, is peppered with archeological remains. Most were built by another Mexican indigenous group called the Chichimecas.

The Pyramid of Tenayuca Rises From a Busy Mexico City Suburb

A curator at an archeological site, called Tenayuca, lost in the labyrinth of the city’s northern periphery, told me that locals here often found archeological remains while building houses on their properties when this region was converted from a dry desert to a city forty years ago.

“Many people have archeological remains in their backyards,” he said. “but they try to hide them and keep it a secret. If the government finds out, they’ll take over your land to preserve it as an archeological site. Nobody wants to move away from their property, so they don’t tell anyone.”

Before I left, the curator pointed at several display cases of Chichimeca and Aztec statues.

“Most of these were brought in by locals who found them while digging on their property. If you ask around, you might find someone willing to show you an archeological site on their property.”

A Young Actor at the Passion of Christ, Iztapalapa, Mexico

I asked a bunch of people near the archeological site of Tenayuca, and another one nearby, called Santa Cecilia Acatitlán, but nobody I spoke with knew anyone who possessed such remains on their property. “Nobody would tell you, anyway, cause they’re afraid of losing their property,” was the common response.

One local I met did say that, according to local rumor, there’s still an unexcavated pyramid buried underneath a distant hill with a large Jesus statue on top, not far from Tenayuca. Local lore states that people who settled near the base of the hill uncovered part of the pyramid’s foundation. Afraid of losing their homes and properties, they pitched in to build the giant Jesus statue, a sacred object in a very Catholic country that not even the Mexican government would dare destroy.

During my ill-fated search for the hidden archeological sites, I did meet a middle-aged guy, named Francisco Arroyo, who sells newspapers not far from the site of Santa Cecilia Acatitlán.

Francisco Arroyo at His Newspaper Stand

Like many people in the Mexican capital’s outskirts, Arroyo moved to Mexico City from the northern state of Guanajuato in search of work and a better life.

Arroyo has light skin that has forever bronzed over many years spent under the Mexican sun. Locals who pass by his newspaper stall affectionately call him guëro, Mexican slang for ‘white guy’ or blondie.

Despite the fact that Arroyo appears more European than most Mexicans, he considers himself Catholic and culturally Mexican. More on that in a minute.

When he was younger, Arroyo says he never had much interest in pre-Columbian Mexican culture.

“But,” he says, “one day I read a book, called Azteca, by Gary Hennings, and it trapped me in an obsession. I started reading everything I could about Mexican indigenous cultures.”

Arroyo says that ancient Mexican groups like the Aztecs and Mexicas had complex traditions for naming their children determined by the position of the stars. He analyzed where the stars were when he was born, and studied the forgotten traditions of naming children to learn what his name would have been, had he been born centuries ago.

“I discovered that my name would have been Acamatliel, which means, ‘the tenth rabbit of the great cane groves,’ in the Mexican indigenous language, Náhuatl.”

The Santa Cecilia Acatitlan Pyramid Stands Somewhat Out of Place in a Working-Class Mexico City Suburb

This discovery totally blew Arroyo’s mind because he happened to live right next to the Chichimeca pyramid of Santa Cecilia Acatitlán in Mexico City. In Náhuatl, Acatitlán means, ‘place of the reeds.’

All of these facts confirmed to Arroyo that there was a higher force, pulsating through Mexico, which was driving his life. And this energy was a mix of Christian and indigenous faiths.

I asked Arroyo how he maintained his faith in Catholicism, despite the fact that Christian Spaniards had destroyed most of Mexico’s indigenous culture.

Arroyo cites the story of Juan Diego, the young Mexican boy who in 1531 saw an image of the Virgin Mary on a hillside near Mexico City. According to legend, the Virgin’s image forever emblazoned on Juan Diego’s cloak. The boy showed the cloak to a local bishop who proclaimed it a miracle. Today, the woman that Juan Diego is believed to have seen is known throughout Mexico as the Virgen de Guadalupe. The image imprinted on the cloak hangs in a shrine built on the hill overlooking Mexico City where Juana Diego first saw the Virgin. Throughout the year, Mexicans make pilgrimages, on foot or bicycle, from their home villages and across the country to visit the shrine where the Virgin’s image is stored.

A Painting Depicts the Virgin de Guadalupe

Arroyo justifies his beliefs in Catholicism and indigenous tradition through his research about Juan Diego’s life. Arroyo read every account he could find about Juan Diego, and stumbled across one theory that Juan Diego was the grandson of both Nezahualcoyotl, the ruler of another great city, called Texcoco, just east of Tenochitlan, as well as the great Aztec king, Moctezuma.

Arroyo doesn’t see Juan Diego’s familial ties with the great pre-Columbian kings and his sighting of the Virgin as coincidental. For him, its destiny, a commingling of beliefs that culminated with Mexico’s recognition of the true Christian God.

“The things that you discover when you look into Mexico’s past are beautiful,” Arroyo said. “In schools, they only teach us about European history. We’ve lost so much of our past because of the culture that dominated us.”

As Arroyo said this, I considered how absurd it would sound if a white American said, “our indigenous culture has become lost by the culture that dominated us.”

Arroyo With an Image of Huitzilopochtli

But in Mexico, it seems people often identify less with race, and more with this rich, national history where Christian and traditional beliefs blur together.

Before I left, Arroyo gave me a neon blue paper printed with the image of Huitzilopochtli, patron god of war and the city of Tenochitlan. He says that he keeps these images on hand—tucked away behind stacks of newspapers and pornographic magazines which no doubt fuel the majority of his sales—so he can hand them out to curious locals, and tell them the stories of Mexico’s past so the next generation doesn’t forget.

Although Arroyo is an extreme example, I keep having conversations like this wherever I go in Mexico, both with people who come from indigenous regions of Mexico, and guëros, like Arroyo.

And with Mormon missionaries. During my current adventures looking for migration stories in Mexico City’s poor outlying regions, I run into a ton of these guys.

When I first started the urban chapter of my research in Mexico, I often thought I was the only foreigner out of my mind enough to ever visit Mexico City’s outskirts on a regular basis.

Turns out my level of insanity was only equal to that of the Mormon missionaries.

Elder Thompson and Elder Hatch (Left to Right). Mormon Missionaries Work in Mexico for Two Years and Must Save Money Beforehand to Support Themselves Abroad.

Mexico has well over a million members of the Mormon Church. That’s right, over a million. It’s the largest number of Mormons in any country outside of the U.S.

Elder Thompson, a 20-year-old Mormon missionary from southern California, spends his days traipsing through lower-class neighborhoods in the north of Mexico City teaching locals about the Mormon faith.

“We get positive responses from many Mexicans,” Elder Thompson said. “A lot of people tell us, ‘I was raised Catholic and was always just expected to believe without asking questions. Nobody ever took the time to actually explain the religious beliefs to me.’”

Even the Candy Land Style Churches in Mexico Exemplify a Mix of European and Indigenous Faiths

The missionaries willingness to take time and teach Mexicans about God ends in a high rate of conversions.

“I converted five people in my first month,” Elder Thompson said. “My brother, who served as a missionary for two years in Italy, worked an entire year just to convert one person.”

Elder Hatch, a 20-year-old guy from Idaho who has nearly finished two years of service in Mexico, opens up The Book of Mormon and shows me a page where Jesus appears standing on an Aztec ceremonial pyramid before a crowd of Mexican indigenous people in feathered dress who look just like the guys that dance in the Zócalo.

“The Book of Mormon says that Jesus also came to the Americas to preach the word of God,” Elder Hatch told me. “It doesn’t say when, exactly, Jesus came to the Americas, but some Mormons have theorized that much of Mexico’s indigenous religions, especially the beliefs associated with human sacrifice and ceremonial pyramids dedicated to different gods, are examples of how their practice of Jesus’ teachings became misinterpreted over the centuries.”

The Original Cloak Worn by Juan Diego Hangs in the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City

I spent an afternoon kicking it with the Mormons and I couldn’t believe that even the American missionaries, to some extent, had incorporated Mexican traditional beliefs into their own religion.

Mexico usually makes U.S. news because of the movement of drugs or poor migrants trying to cross the border.

Northern migration is a huge part of Mexican culture, but at home, many Mexicans define themselves and their country through a strange blend of Christianity, a religion that came from Europe, and traditional beliefs that have long-echoed throughout this part of the world.

Religious beliefs perhaps represent the greatest migration that has ever influenced Mexico. But unlike the physical migration over the U.S border that outsiders typically hear about, it’s this migration of ideas that gives life meaning to many Mexican living today.

Posted in Mexico, Mexico City, Michoacán, Places | Tagged indigenous culture, Mexico, Michoacan, missionaries, Mormons, religion, Tenayuca, traditional dance | Leave a comment

Camping at a Mexican Immigration Checkpoint

Posted on April 19, 2013 by admin

In July 2007, as the Mexican drug war was just beginning, I hitchhiked over 3,000 miles across Mexico.

Hitchhiking in Chiapas

My journey took me from the deserts of Chihuahua near the U.S. border south along the Mexican Plateau to Guadalajara and Mexico City. Hitching more rides brought me southeast across the steamy plains of southern Veracruz state and on into the Yucatan Peninsula and the Caribbean coast.

From the beach, my sweaty thumb and the kindness of strangers propelled me southwest through the mountains of Chiapas and Oaxaca in southern Mexico, before one last ride with a wealthy restaurant owner took me back to Mexico City.

Along the way, I was picked up by Mexicans who had spent years living in the U.S., and others who had never strayed far from their native villages, by German tourists and a Korean businessman, missionaries and the owner of a Mexican strip club who offered me $1,000 to sleep with him. When I refused, the offer went up to $2,000. When he offered $3,000, I asked him to stop and got out of the car.

But this story isn’t really about hitchhiking at all, it’s about census workers, cocaine, extortion, and the destruction of a country called Honduras.

Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas, stretches over a lengthy wrinkle of green mountains. Near the end of my Mexican hitchhiking tour, I once found myself stranded in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital city of Chiapas. That afternoon, a Mexican census worker traveling in a VW bug with his mentally-disabled grandfather had picked me up somewhere in mountains. He told me about how difficult it was doing census work in the remote Zapatista-controlled towns, where revolutionary-minded locals were skeptical of anyone working for the government.

“We had to rescue a coworker of mine last month,” he said, “because the locals had tied him up and held him captive for five days without food or water.”

View From the Window While Hitching in Oaxaca

As the old VW sped around curves in the road, I watched women and children wearing traditional, bright-colored skirts disappear up dirt trails into the mountains carrying armfuls of firewood. The driver kept yelling about the inequality in Mexico and his dedication to fighting for the lower classes. He told me about spending months in small towns doing census research, so officials in Mexico City could approve the funds necessary to install sewage systems. And then the local mayor stole the funds and bought a new car. “The injustice of it all!” he cried.

“But you know what?” he said. “If I ever have the opportunity to take advantage of the system, and take money from an open box like that guy did, I’m going to do it, because it’s the only way I’ll ever get ahead here.”

It was, far and away, the saddest thing I’ve ever heard a Mexican say.

The census worker dropped me in Tuxtla Gutiérrez at nightfall. I’d made one vow on that hitchhiking journey: not to try seeking a ride a night. I also really didn’t want to spend the night in Tuxtla. So I tried thumbing for awhile on the outskirts of town, the headlights of passing drivers illuminating me for an instant as they sailed past. A few drivers with their windows rolled down beeped their horns at me and laughed.

Eventually, I gave up and started asking people where I could find a safe place to camp for the night. Everyone I spoke with unanimously suggested I walk up the highway leading outside of town and try camping at the police checkpoint. This sounded like a horrible idea to me. But since every single person who I spoke with suggested this, and two guys I asked about camping possibilities at a gas station offered to drive me up the sloping mountain surrounding town to the checkpoint, I decided to give it a shot.

The checkpoint consisted of five armed men in uniform standing by the side of the highway under the ‘Bienvenido a Tuxtla Gutiérrez’ sign. A large blue tarp was strung over a sidewalk along the road.

Here's a photo I took when I arrived at the checkpoint that is completely ridiculous and I'm so happy I didn't delete

Here’s a Self-Portrait That I Took Upon Arrival at the Checkpoint That is Ridiculous, Scary, and Which Today I’m So Happy and Amazed That I Never Deleted

When I arrived the officers were pulling over buses and looking for illegal immigrants—in Mexico. This was one of many Mexican immigration checkpoints scattered around the southernmost corner of the country, places where officers scour every bus in search of non-Mexican nationals who they interrogate, deport, and, according to many Central American migrants I’ve spoken with, extort.

The Mexican immigration officers are so good at their job that most Central Americans hop freight trains that rumble across Mexico north towards the U.S. border. In the Mexican rail yards where they sometimes must wait for days at a time to transfer trains, the drug cartels, and even local police, commonly rob, kidnap, and rape them.

The first thing I saw at the immigration checkpoint was two officers interrogating a young man outside a stopped bus. One officer started yelling on a cell phone to someone who I guessed was a superior. I caught him saying something over the phone about ‘false papers.’ After some deliberation, they led the man to the sidewalk and waved the bus onwards.

I watched for a moment as the young man stood on the sidewalk shaking with nervousness.

A dark van pulled up beside the checkpoint a minute later. Two of the officers lifted the man up by his shirt, flung open the door of the van, and pushed him inside.

The van sped away. Just like that, he was gone.

Then the officers turned to me. I outstretched my hand and introduced myself.

“Name’s Levi.”

The officers instantly gave me permission to camp there. It was remarkable, in retrospect, how unconcerned they were about it. I pitched my tent under their tarp, unrolled my sleeping bag, and settled in for a long night of the big rigs rumbling by, the earth itself shaking as they did so, and the officers yelling at hopeful migrants they pulled off the bus.

“Where you from man? Don’t lie?” I heard the officers yell at another guy around 3AM.

“Cuba,” I heard him say. The conversation ended there, with the arrival of that mysterious black van, no doubt, and the slamming of its door punctuating the end of his sentence.

***

That was six years ago.

Today, the drug war has been raging in Mexico for about as long. I rarely hitchhike in Mexico anymore—too afraid. An estimated 50% of the cocaine which reaches the U.S. now passes through the Central American nation of Honduras, often arriving at the Caribbean coast. And while yuppie college kids throughout the U.S. were no doubt having a great time snorting the stuff over the last half decade, the Central American gangs were becoming more powerful and starting to partner with the Mexican cartels.

Now the gangs, by many accounts, extort the owners of most Honduran businesses. Many Hondurans refer to this practices a ‘paying rent.’

One of their victims was Juana Obregón

Juana comes from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. She and her family worked for years to open a small store in the front room of their house. They’d only had the store for a few weeks before the local contingent of the Mara, or gang, started demanding money.

“There was just no way we could pay them,” Juana told me.

After missing the first payment, Juana’s family received the first death threat. Juana’s home town of San Pedro Sula has recently been referenced to in a lot of international headlines, such as ‘Murder Capital of the World,’ among other such gloomy sobriquets. San Pedro Sula currently holds the honor of being the city with the highest murder rate on earth; over three people are killed there each day. The city lays in the northwest corner of Honduras, the country with the highest homicide rate in the world; about two people in Honduras are murdered every hour and a half. So when Juana received the death threat, she left, along with her husband, father-in-law, two cousins, and her seven-year-old son.

Mexico City: Many Honduras Fleeing Violence in Their Home Country End Up Here

The only family member they left behind was Juana’s elderly mother. She was just too old to make the difficult journey north, towards that distant beacon of safety: the U.S.

For reasons mentioned earlier in this story, when Juana’s family reached the Mexican border they had to start traveling by train, clinging for dear life on top of the box cars. The eldest member of their family, the grandfather, was in his mid-sixties. Juana’s son was seven.

They made it to a migrant shelter near the train tracks in the northern Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. That’s where they heard there was another migrant shelter in Mexico City that could put them in contact with a social worker who helped Central Americans apply for asylum in Mexico. Obtaining refugee status in Mexico is something many Hondurans fleeing death threats or worse try to apply for. Few are granted asylum, however. But the allure is often too good to pass up. After all, if you become a Mexican refugee, you’ll obtain legal permits to be in Mexico.

Then you can just take a bus all the way up to the U.S. border and keep going towards the real goal.

So Juana and her family headed south for the migrant shelter in Mexico City where I’ve worked as a volunteer for the past eight months.

Juana and I started spending a lot of time together. She was desperate to learn to English. So late nights in the shelter’s office we’d sit together, engaged in the slow task of translating long lists of Spanish words and phrases into English. Then we’d try to agree on the best way to phonetically write the words out so she would remember the pronunciation.

As we sat together one night, Juana admitted how unsafe she felt in Mexico City.

“You know, the Mara works in Mexico too,” she said. “I’m afraid to walk on the street here. What if someone recognizes me and discovers where the shelter is?”

“Well, you’re in one of the biggest cities in the world,” I said. “For that reason only, I can’t imagine a safer place for you and your family to be right now.”

Juana didn’t seem convinced. She was still just so traumatized.

I Snapped This Picture Last Summer During the Inauguration of New Migrant Shelter on the Train Tracks North of Mexico City. It Closed Three Months Later When Cartel Members Posing as Migrants Entered the Shelter in Search of People Who Would Make Good Targets to Kidnap

I Snapped This Picture Last Summer During the Inauguration of a New Migrant Shelter on the Train Tracks North of Mexico City. It Closed Three Months Later When Cartel Members Posing as Migrants Entered the Shelter in Search of People Who Would Make Good Targets to Kidnap

Late one evening, Juana told me that her father lived in Houston and was a permanent U.S. resident. Someone at a migrant shelter had told her that if she could just get over the U.S. border, she and her son could obtain U.S. residency through her father. I’d never heard of this and I told her so.

The next day I asked a lawyer friend of mine who specializes in immigration law if this was true. The answer was no.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” I told Juana the next week as we sat before a paper with a bunch of drawings that I’d used to illustrate the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt (this is particularly confusing for Hondurans because a sueter—pronounced ‘sweater’—means sweatshirt in parts of Latin America), “but neither you or your son will qualify for residency, even if you cross the border. I understand if you still want to cross,” I said, “but I thought you should know.”

Later that night, Juana told me the following:

“I have no option but to try and go to the U.S.,” she said. “I left my mother behind in Honduras because she was too old to ride on the train. Now, she’s there alone and I’m so afraid they’ll kill her. If I stay in Mexico, I’ll never be able to save enough money to get my mother out of there.”

On this particular night, the last night I saw Juana, she had pages of Spanish words awaiting translation. She was happy because her family had just received asylum and obtained permits to live and work in Mexico. But it grew late and we only had made it through half of the words on her list, so I promised to return in two days to translate the rest with her.

The Only Way to Ride: View From the Cab While Hitching Into the Mexican State of Tabasco with a Trucker

True to my word, I came back to the shelter 48 hours later but Juana was gone. The rest of the family had decided to stay in Mexico for the time being to work. Juana, her husband, and seven-year-old son, took the bus north.

I was particularly worried because Juana admitted they had no money to pay for a coyote. Her father said he couldn’t help them, either.

“How are you going to cross with no money?” I once asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have absolutely no idea.”

A Man Crouches by the Border Fence Between Arizona and Mexico. As You Read This Story, Juana's Most-Likely Trying to Cross the Border

A Man Crouches by the Border Fence Between Arizona and Mexico. The Day This Story Was Posted, Juana Was Going to Try Crossing the Border Again

When I found out she left for the border, I was terrified. Drug cartels have so much control of the Mexican border that coyotes must pay them just to smuggle people across. Oftentimes coyotes work directly with, or have been recruited by, the cartels. I’d heard stories of people trying to cross without coyotes being killed in order to strike fear in others attempting to do the same. Mexican drug cartels increasingly earn money from migrants. As they see it, any migrant crossing without a coyote is stealing from their business.

So I was considering this last weekend and thinking about just how scary it all was. When I heard about the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this week, I was of course equally frightened and upset. I got online that night and checked the Facebook pages of all my friends who live in Boston to make sure everyone was okay. I still feel unsettled.

Just a few hours after learning about the bombing, I started thinking about Juana again. And all the other Hondurans fleeing death threats from organized crime units funded, principally, by cokehead college students in the U.S. Prior to the bombing, I had held out some hope that if immigration reform passes, it might also contain new programs to address and solve the problems in Central America, especially those which force people to migrate, instead of just strengthening border security.

After the bombing, I felt like that chance might have disappeared. Nothing less than a 9/11esque terrorist attack could convince members of Congress, and the American public, that pumping billions more of defense money into border security, also known as the enforcement strategy, is a good idea.

Yesterday, the shelter’s director told me that Juana, her son, and husband had all tried to cross the border near Laredo, Texas the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. The Border Patrol easily caught and deported them to Mexico, from where they’d try to cross again.

I’m currently spending the year in Mexico on a Fulbright research grant. The Fulbright Program prides itself on sending Americans to foreign countries as ambassadors of sorts. When I sat with Juana, though, I didn’t feel like a proud ambassador. I felt ashamed to be from a country who’s cocaine consumption was inadvertently killing about one Honduran national every hour, and at the same time is doing almost nothing to stop it.

In the meantime, however, the U.S. will continue to be really good at stopping Hondurans from crossing the border. And if 9/11 is any indicator, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, we’ll probably become even better at trapping Hondurans in war zones, either at home or on the U.S-Mexico border, way before we ever attempt to end the conditions which force people to try and enter our country in the first place.

If the name, Juana, sounds like it’s made up, that’s because it is. Juana is a pseudonym for a real person currently risking everything for a chance to reunite her family outside of the world’s murder capital.

Posted in Chiapas, Honduras, Mexico, Mexico City, Migrant Shelters, Migrants in Transit, Places | Tagged Boston Marathon, Chiapas, drug war, hitchhiking, Honduras, Mexico, Migrant Shelters, migration | Leave a comment

Like Walking on Broken Glass

Posted on April 12, 2013 by admin

Ernesto Meñeta

Ernesto Meñeta earns a living by walking on broken glass.

Well, that’s not entirely true. He also lays on shards of broken glass, collapses on a pile of it chest-first, and to really make a good show, closes his performance by picking up a handful of broken glass and slapping it against his face.

Meñeta is 27-years-old and lives in a makeshift tent consisting of several old pieces of tarp strung to nearby trees. He’s set the tent up in a tiny dirt lot behind The Plaza of the Composers, a small park lined with statues of famous Mexican musicians located in an odd, triangular plot of real estate where two busy thoroughfares intersect on the western border of Colonia Condesa, one of Mexico City’s most chic, high rent neighborhoods.

The Plaza of the Composers: Meñeta and Miguel Angel Live in the Blue Tarps Hung Up on the Right

The Plaza of the Composers: Meñeta and Miguel Angel Live Under the Blue Tarps Hung Up on the Right

Meñeta was born in Toluca, a neighboring city just an hour west from the Mexican capital. He dropped out of school at age six. His older brothers used drugs and frequently beat him up. Meñeta recalls his brothers saying, “We don’t want you here. Get out of our house.”

So that’s eventually what Meñeta did. Like many young Mexican children who come from abusive families, when he was just nine-years-old, Meñeta ran away to Mexico City and started living on the street.

Miguel Angel

In the big city, Meñeta met another boy, named Miguel Angel, from the southern Mexico City district of Xochimilco. The boys joined a gang of street kids who often got in fights with other homeless youth.

Today, rings of scars extend from Meñeta’s left wrist about halfway up his arm. I asked him where they came from.

“A group of boys from a rough part of town near the airport cut me with a knife during a fight when I was 14,” he said.

The scars are so defined, it looks like someone held him down and carved out part of his arm as some sort of systematic torture.

“Look at these,” Meñeta said, showing me fresh cuts on the underside of his other arm. “Last week, a few guys invaded our campsite to rob us and they slashed me with a knife.”

Today, Meñeta and Miguel Angel attempt to lead a quiet life behind the statues in The Plaza of the Composers. They say all the cops who patrol the area know that they don’t cause trouble or commit crimes, so they don’t ask them to move the tent. Some officers even stop to bring them food. They know that Meñeta and Miguel Angel just want to do their glass act on the street for a few hours each day, make some change, and go back to their tent and lay down on the flattened lengths of cardboard they sleep on.

When I first past their tent last week, Miguel Angel was patiently using a rock to break some old beer bottles over a dirty rag. In the art of glass dancing, you want the broken pieces to not be too small, or they’ll easily become lodged in your skin. If they’re too big, however, they might break under your weight and you’ll slip.

For two or three hours each day, Meñeta and Miguel Angel take turns running out to a busy intersection a block from their campsite where they walk and lay on broken glass in front of drivers stopped at red lights. Just before the light turns green, they scoop up their collection of glass in a big rag and solicit the drivers for spare change. If they’re lucky, someone rolls down their window and passes them a few cents.

I could explain their act in more detail, but the following video of Miguel Angel does a much better job:

Anyone who frequently rides the Mexico City subway has probably seen this act before. Watch the video above again and you’ll notice how Miguel Angel has perfected appearing as if he’s hurting himself while barely making contact with the glass.

Many of the guys who do this act on the subway are even more hard core. They also perform their act shirtless, and most have long lacerations on their backs. Some even hold the bars inside the train, hoist themselves into the air, and do flips landing on their backs upon the pile of glass below.

Needless to say, it’s an awful thing to witness.

I worked with homeless adults in the U.S for almost two years, and the resounding complaint they often voiced to me was that the government doesn’t do enough to aid the homeless.

Meñeta Hands Miguel Angel the Large Rag Filled With Glass as the Traffic Light Turns Red

So it totally blew my mind when I asked Meñeta if he thought the Mexican government wasn’t doing enough to help people on the street and he said the following:

“Not really. I mean, there’s a shelter down the street where we can eat breakfast and lunch and take a shower for just seven pesos [about 60 cents]. I did always want to go to school,” he said. “It’d be great if there was some program where we could get an education.”

“And a real place to live,” Miguel Angel chimed in. “I’d love to have an actual home.”

On a good day, Meñeta and Miguel Angel say they make around 200 pesos, about $16 USD. But oftentimes, they only make 50 pesos. But it’s enough to survive.

And to get high. Meñeta says that he now rarely uses drugs, but Miguel Angel admits that he uses drugs everyday. He smokes marijuana and huffs what he calls ‘activo,’ any combination of glue or solvents soaked in a small rag or tissue. The cheapness of these chemicals, and the strong buzz they produce, has made their abuse by poor youth become a problem which has reached near epidemic proportions in Mexican cities.

The Plaza of the Composers

The most surprising thing about sitting down and chatting with Meñeta and Miguel Angel is how approachable they are. They smile a lot and are easy to talk to. It’s obvious they’re really nice guys who’ve been forced into a difficult situation.

Miguel Angel would only agree to being filmed doing his act in exchange for money. Before I said goodbye, I handed him all of the change in my pocket: 22 pesos, less than two bucks.

In the U.S., I’ve often seen homeless men and women on the street scoff at receiving such a meager handout. But Miguel Angel gave me a big, semi-toothless smile when I placed the coins in his hand.

For someone who jumps on broken glass for a living, often earning just a handful of pennies, I guess this was a pretty good haul.

Posted in Mexico, Mexico City, Places | Tagged homelessness, informal economy, Mexico City, street youth, urban migration | Leave a comment

The Lost Generation

Posted on April 5, 2013 by admin

Jose Ramirez

When Jose Ramirez was 18-years-old, his older brothers took him over the Mexican border and into the U.S. to pick fruits and vegetables during harvest time.

That was 63 years ago, way back in 1950. Today, Ramirez is 81-years-old and a U.S. citizen.

Bold wrinkles, hewn from years of hard work in the sun, line his leathery cheeks. His front teeth are covered in gold. Even after all the years he’s spent away from Mexico, Ramirez still wears a cowboy hat, button-down shirt tucked into his blue jeans, and huaraches—homemade sandals for working—the same garb that all men wear in the farming villages of the Sierra Gorda mountains in central Mexico.

When he was a young man, sometimes Ramirez crossed the border illegally, other times he went as part of the Bracero Program, a binational agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that brought Mexican workers into the U.S. on short-term contracts to fill labor shortages during the Second World War.

“Back in ’57, I was contracted through the Bracero Program to pick lettuce for eight months in Salinas, California,” Ramirez recalls. “Another time, I was contracted for just six weeks to pick cotton in Texas. But it was always better to go through the Bracero Program because immigration got me a few times when I went without a contract.”

Although the Bracero Program allowed Ramirez to enter the U.S. legally, the working conditions still weren’t ideal.

“In the Texas cotton fields, there was no place for us to sleep,” Ramirez said, “so we made camp at night down by the Rio Grande.”

Ramirez is from a small town in the Sierra Gorda, tall green mountains in central Mexico that rise from a dry desert. Ascending the mountain’s curvy roads, you pass miles of parched earth interspersed with cactuses and scrub brush. It seems impossible to believe that humans live above in this waterless land. But continuing upwards into the Sierra, you eventually reach a level where the altitude becomes high enough that the air cools and dew forms at night, turning the earth into rich arable land where tall pine and eucalyptus trees grow.

Deep Within the Sierra Gorda, Cobblestone Streets Are Far More Common Than Pavement

Deep Within the Sierra Gorda, Cobblestone Streets Are Often More Common Than Pavement

The high part of the Sierra Gorda is farming country. People have lived here for thousands of years, growing the staple crops of corn, beans, and tomatoes in the fertile mountain soil. Unlike some areas in southern Mexico, this is a traditional migrant-sending region, meaning that locals have been migrating from here to the U.S. to complete unskilled labor since the early 20th century.

The Bracero Program ended in 1964. But like most of the tough farm boys from the Sierra Gorda, Ramirez kept going to the U.S. to seek employment during the harvest seasons as an undocumented worker.

When his children grew older, Ramirez crossed the U.S. border with his entire family. A coyote led them across the border into Arizona, but the driver who was supposed to meet them on the U.S. side didn’t show up. Ramirez and his family slept in the desert that night while the coyote said they had to wait for the driver.

When they awoke in the morning, the coyote was gone.

Alone with his wife and children, Ramirez walked north through the desert for 14 days, following the interstate and eating cactuses to survive, until they arrived in Phoenix.

Arizona’s Sonora Desert at Nightfall. Ramirez and His Family Were Lost Here for Two Weeks When Their Coyote Abandoned Them

After making that crossing, Ramirez decided to stay in the U.S. He saved money and bought a house with several lots for his kids in south Florida.

“Even if you’re undocumented, it’s easy to buy a house in the U.S.,” Ramirez said. “As long as you have money, you can establish a family there.”

Strengthening security along the U.S. border was supposed to keep foreign workers, like the Ramirez family, out of the U.S. But it ended up being exactly what pushed the Ramirez’s to start a new life in Florida. The dangers associated with crossing the border didn’t allow Papa Ramirez to return home frequently to visit his family. So he took his family with him, on that fateful, 14-day walk through the Arizona desert.

Ramirez and his family all gained U.S. residency through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Still, Ramirez had to wait 26 years before his application for U.S. citizenship was approved. He became a U.S. citizen last year, just in time to vote in the 2012 presidential election.

Gaining U.S. residency allowed Ramirez to return to his mountain homeland in central Mexico at least once a year to do what he loves more than anything else, and what the global economy makes it impossible to make a living at: farming.

Over the years, Ramirez has bought 150 hectares of land in his small village. He returns to Mexico every few months, to plant corn in time for the region’s two harvests, and look after his 40 cattle.

Three Types of Corn From Ramirez’s Fall Harvest Dry on the Floor of His Home in Mexico

Ramirez never went to school. To this day, he can’t speak English. In his country clothes, I imagined he would look quite out of place in the U.S.

Like many who have left the Sierra Gorda for the U.S., Ramirez has built a spacious, modern house in his native village. Many Mexican immigrants spend their entire lives in the U.S. building large estates back home, each year vowing to return permanently.

But most never come back to Mexico to live. And their houses sit empty.

I spent an afternoon hanging out with Ramirez a few weekends ago. We talked while he removed the kernels off ears of dried corn by scraping them along a circular clump of old corn cobs held together by a piece of wire.

“Why do you still live in the U.S.?” I asked Ramirez. “It seems like you’ve worked so hard to create a life here in Mexico, and you still really enjoy farming here. So why stay in Florida?”

“Well,” Ramirez said, “All of my children are in Florida, and now they’re married and have families of their own who were born in America. My kids want me in Florida. But I still come back to Mexico every few months to take care of my land. You have to farm it, you know, or it goes wild.”

Here’s a glimpse of Ramirez working as we talked:

Watching Ramirez continue to scrape the kernels off the piles of corn from his fall harvest seemed like a tragedy. Here was an 81-year-old man who loved working in the earth of the small village where he was born. He had spent his entire life just trying to reach this point: build his own house and farm in Mexico.

And now, he’ll never be able to really enjoy it.

Despite all the years spent living the American dream, Ramirez’s real dream always remained in Mexico. But like many Mexicans, the long years of work in the U.S. necessary to achieve the Mexican dream meant transplanting a family to another country, and the next generation losing their connection with Mexico.

Unless the U.S. government moves away from increasing border security in favor of easing the restrictions to allow migrants workers to enter our country to fill jobs, mainly in the agricultural industry, there will be more Ramirez’s in the next fifty years, a lost generation of men who live in the U.S., but whose hearts remain in Mexico.

Scraping Corn Cobs

While watching Ramirez scrape the cobs of corn, I have perhaps never witnessed a better argument for opening the borders, so that men and women from Latin America can seek work in the U.S. without uprooting families. It’s perhaps the only measure which could stop the evolution of the next lost generation in Mexico.

Before I left, Ramirez told me that he would return to the U.S. in several weeks for an eye surgery scheduled in Florida.

But he’d come back to Mexico right after that, he said.

To plant his corn before the summer rains come.

Posted in Mexico, Migrant Workers, Places, Querétaro | Tagged bracero program, Immigration, immigration reform, IRCA, Mexico, migrant workers, Querétaro, Sierra Gorda, U.S-Mexico Border | Leave a comment

The Mexico-North Korea Connection

Posted on March 14, 2013 by admin

The small town of Chegdomyn, Russia lies in a mountainous region of northern Siberia about 200 miles northeast of the Chinese border.

This Young Chinese Man, Who Goes by the Name, Sasha, Has Live in Russia for Six Years as an Undocumented Worker, Selling Sunglasses on the Street. Russia Attracts Migrant Workers from Throughout Asia

This Young Chinese Man, Who Goes by the Name, Sasha, Has Lived in Russia for Six Years as an Undocumented Worker, Selling Sunglasses on the Street. Russia Attracts Migrant Workers from Throughout Asia

Like most places in Siberia, journeying to Chegdomyn feels like arriving at the end of the earth. Just reaching Chegdomyn from the regional capital of Vladivostok requires a day and a half journey on the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a seldom-used railroad line that cuts through northern Siberia, made sleepless from the rambunctious, vodka-slugging drunks that inevitably roam Russian passenger trains.

I journeyed to Chegdomyn in the spring of 2012 in search of North Korean guestoworkers for a freelance story I wrote for Russian Life Magazine.

My 36 hour trip on the BAM to this distant Russian outpost ended just outside the town of Novi Urgal, peering through the train window as the sun rose over stretches of swamp that fanned away to the base of distant blue mountains covered in the taiga forest.

The Train Station in Novi Urgal, Just South of Chegdomyn

When the train pulled into Novi Urgal, I buttoned my jacket and stepped outside into the chilly air.

Then I walked to a nearby road and started hitchhiking to Chegdomyn, about twenty miles north on a pothole-stricken back road.

A local, named Sergey, with bushy, white hair and wide eyes, soon pulled over in his truck.

“My family came here from Ukraine when I was thirteen,” Sergey explained as we flew over the rough country road at a deathly 80MPH while I made a futile search for a seat belt.

“Life is wonderful here,” Sergey remarked, taking his hands off the wheel and pointing at a mountain stream, still frozen over with ice even in early May. “Look, you can drink from that,” he said, “here you don’t need to buy water.”

The truck’s shocks screamed as we bounced over frost heaves and cracks in the shattered asphalt.

“Are there roads like this in America?” Sergey asked.

“In America we have really nice roads and really bad roads,” I said.

“Ha,” he exclaimed, lighting a cigarette and shifting into high gear. “In Russia all the roads are bad!”

***

Coal Mine, Chegdomyn, Russia

As Sergey drove, the forest eventually opened to a clearing with a line of log cabins and the tall shaft of a coal mine painted in white, blue, and red stripes to resemble the Russian flag. Sergey floored it up a steep hill towards Chegdomyn and we passed a bus full of miners, faces black with soot.

Sergey turned off at a lookout point on the hilltop just outside of town. Football stadium-sized heaps of coal and rock rose around the mine.

In the distance, snow-capped peaks of the Stanovoy-Khrebet Mountains glistened in the sun.

The Stanovoy-Khrebet Mountains (Notice the Giant Pile of Coal in the Center)

Chegdomyn could double as a living museum of the Soviet-era.

The one main road through town is lined by rows of aging, rectangular Soviet apartment blocks, some only half-built and abandoned.

They look just like this:

Half-Finished Soviet Apartment, Chegdomyn, Russia

Coal extraction is Chegdomyn’s lifeblood.

Dark smoke billowing from a slender smoke stack filters down into the town square and blows about in murky cyclones.

Even the muddy ruts between the apartment blocks are stained black.

Chegdomyn’s Town Square

A small lumber mill just outside town hints at the Chegdomyn’s previous function as a major timber producer.

Chegdomyn’s small museum, located just down the street from the town square, provides evidence of the migrant workers who once labored in the forests here; within the museum, past dioramas about coal mining and taxidermies of sables and black bears, a small exhibit on the region’s lumber industry displays several black and white photos of North Koreans sawing massive trees nearly the size of redwoods.

The story of North Korean migrant workers in Russia dates back to the end of the Second World War. On August 9, 1945, when the Allies dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the Korean peninsula had already been occupied by the Japanese for 35 years. On that same day in early August, Soviet forces launched their own attack on Japan.

The Japanese surrender, just days later, effectively ended the Second World War and left Korea divided, with the Soviet Union to manage the north, and the Americans to administer the south.

The end of Japanese occupation on the Korean peninsula gave birth to both South Korea—one of Asia’s most developed countries and strongest economies—and North Korea, a despotic, Stalinist dictatorship perhaps best known for its labor camps, famines, and a megalomaniacal cult of personality revolving around these two dudes:

Portraits of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s ‘Eternal President’ and Kim Jong-il the Now Deceased ‘Supreme Leader’ (Left to Right) Hang on the wall of the Korean Center in the State Regional Library in Khabarovsk, Russia. The Korean Center is Stocked with Korean-Language Books by North and South Korean Consulates in Russia. These Portraits Were Recently Removed.

North Korean migrant workers have been employed in Russia’s most easterly territory since the Soviets installed Kim Il-sung as the North Korean leader in 1945.

Ironically, just three years earlier, the U.S. began the Bracero Program, a 1942 binational agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that brought Mexican workers into the U.S. on temporary contracts to fill labor shortages during the Second World War. The Bracero Program’s creation marked the first time that foreign workers arrived in the U.S. on temporary labor contracts.

The Bracero Program was eventually formalized to become the U.S. Guestworker Program, which each year brings over 100,000 foreign workers into the U.S. to labor in the agricultural, forestry, and construction industries, among others, on short-term labor contracts.

North Korean Logging Camp Near Chegdomyn, Russia (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CHEGDOMYN REGIONAL STUDIES MUSEUM)

Although the Soviet Union dissolved over two decades ago, Russia’s post-WW2 tradition of contracting foreign guestworkers from a neighboring state lives on just like in the U.S.

North Koreans enter Russia on three-year contracts as guestworkers, with the option of staying longer if they perform well, to labor in construction, agriculture, and most often, remote logging camps in the Siberian taiga.

Most studies estimate that 3,000 North Koreans currently work in Russian logging camps, while others put the figure at over 10,000.

Even more inconsistent are the rumors concerning these workers quality of life in Russia.

A Small Logging Operation Outside Chegdomyn Hints at This Russian Town’s Former Role as a Major Lumber Producer

Some reports claim that North Korean guestworkers are unfed and receive pitiful wages of just $100 a month. Others suggest that North Koreans benefit by escaping their country’s harsh conditions, or merely earning an income to send home to their families.

What is certain is that through this tradition which has persisted since Soviet times, the North Korean government gains valuable lumber in exchange for the workers it provides to Russian lumber companies who, in turn, benefit by acquiring highly-motivated laborers willing to work for little.

My first contact with North Korean guestworkers occurred in the Russian port city of Vladivostok, just before my journey to Chegdomyn, while visiting Serge Patlakh, an old friend and designer for the Vladivostok Film Festival, in his offices by the Sea of Japan.

“Most newspapers in Vladivostok contain advertisements that list a phone number with two words: Cheap Koreans,” Patlakh explained. “North Korean workers live here in very closed communities with a chief who can speak Russian. You never see them alone, but I do often see groups of them on the street.”

“They are very good workers,” Patlakh added, “but not well paid, unfortunately. Most employers have to hire them though. Here, Russians are more expensive and mostly drunk.”

Before I left, Patlakh took me downstairs from his office to a children’s theater under renovation. In a wide hall with rows of upholstered chairs set before a stage, five North Korean workers furiously painted a banister in silence. One shot us a timid glance, then snapped his eyes back to the painting.

“Look,” Patlakh whispered, “aren’t they like zombies?”

North Korean Guestworkers Labor in a Construction Site Alongside an Inflatable Children's Castles in Vladivostok, Russia. Just Like in the U.S., Russian Guestworkers Toil For Long Hours and Have Almost No Contact With the Local Communities Where They Work

North Korean Guestworkers (Center) in a Construction Site Alongside an Inflatable Children’s Castle in Vladivostok, Russia. Just Like in the U.S., Russian Guestworkers Have Almost No Contact With the Local Communities Where They Work

This glimpse of the North Koreans is what inspired me to endure the 36-hour sleepless train ride to Chegdomyn.

In the mid-nineties, several years after the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia began opening up to the West, several foreign journalists reported that gated North Korean lumber camps operated near Chegdomyn where loudspeakers proclaimed the glories of Kim Il-sung and workers lived in squalid conditions.

An outdated Lonely Planet guidebook I found in Vladivostok even described Chegdomyn as an, “interesting side trip,” where tourists could easily see North Korean monuments and workers.

You heard me, Lonely Planet.

***

The curator of Chegdomyn’s small museum, an old woman with lustrous lengths of silver hair, told me that the Koreans had left town years ago.

Disappointed by this news, but still determined to figure out what happened, I walked out of the museum and asked the guard at a nearby school where I might find the Korean architecture in Chegdomyn. Instead of answering my question, he left and returned with a middle-aged English teacher with short brown hair, named Lena.

“The North Koreans left here ten years ago after the timber companies decided not to renew their contract,” Lena said. “They once built an oriental pavilion in our market, but they burnt that, and any other constructions they had made, before leaving, I think because they were angry.”

“I’m not surprised they were upset,” she added. “Their lives were much better here than in North Korea.”

It was late afternoon and Lena invited me to tea in her apartment.

Lena’s Apartment Building

“Now many people in the Far East of Russia are leaving for far-off cities like St. Petersburg, places with better jobs and opportunities,” Lena said as we walked along a muddy path between the crumbling apartment blocks. “I think of leaving too,” she admitted, “but this is my home. Still, sometimes I ask my parents, ‘Why? Why did you have to move here, to Chegdomyn?”

As she spoke a young man passed us, pulling a large metal bucket strapped to a rickety wooden cart.

“He’s bringing water home from a well,” Lena explained. “Here, we must take drinking water from wells, not from the faucet. People here live in the apartment buildings during the winter,” she said, “and go to dachas [rustic cabins] in the woods during summer to grow vegetables. Do people in American small towns also live in apartments like these?” she asked, pointing to the empty Soviet relics that rose from the taiga around Chegdomyn.

“In America people in small towns usually have their own homes,” I said. “Their houses are like dachas, only bigger.”

“To be honest,” she said, “I’m relieved that the Koreans are gone. Logging deforested the area so much that the wind now blows harder here than it did when I was a girl, making it much colder in winter.

Lena stopped at an old Soviet apartment near the town square and led me up a dark stairwell to her small apartment, a cramped three-room affair that she shared with her teenage son and aging father. Much of it had been redone with cheap linoleum to give it a modern look. At a small table in her kitchen, we drank tea and talked about the North Koreans.

“There were once many North Koreans in Chegdomyn,” Lena said. “During the day, they could walk around and go shopping. Many spoke enough Russian to get by. At night they had to return to their camp because they did a head count. Here in Russia they at least had some freedom to work and earn money for their families. But their lives weren’t easy here, either. They all wore the same clothes, one long sleeve shirt and pants with no coat, even in winter.”

North Korean Guestworkers on a Labor Camp in Chegdomyn, Russia (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CHEGDOMYN REGIONAL STUDIES MUSEUM)

“You know, when the Koreans were here they ate any dogs they could find,” Lena explained. “Because Koreans eat dogs! And snakes too! In summer, they hunted snakes to make their traditional medicines.”

“When did you last see North Koreans here?” I asked.

“Actually,” she said, “several weeks ago I saw three North Korean men walking through town. I’m certain they were North Korean because they wore badges with a picture of Kim Il-sung. It’s possible that Koreans still work in this region, somewhere far away in the forest.”

Hanging Out With Lena

Lena’s theory may be correct. In 2009 reporter, Simon Ostrovsky, made a documentary for the BBC about North Korean logging camps near the Siberian city of Tynda, about 500 miles northwest of Chegdomyn.

Two years later, Ostrovsky returned with photographers from the online media company, Vice News, and found the once bustling camps he had previously filmed abandoned. The photographers later discovered that the camps were moved to locations deep in the taiga accessible only by rarely-used rail lines.

After speaking with Lena, I hitchhiked back to Novi Urgal as the sun set.

A corpulent old man, named Ivan, whose round belly unfolded around the lower part of the steering wheel, pulled over in a gray sedan. He drove even faster than Sergey, the guy who gave me a lift to Chegdomyn.

“Are you traveling alone?” Ivan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

To avoid a washed out section of road ahead, Ivan swerved towards the ditch into a patch of loose sand and hit the gas. The car fishtailed as we careened back onto the rutted asphalt.

“That’s very dangerous,” he said, shaking his head with concern

“Why,” I asked.

“Things here are different now,” he said. “During Soviet times, men treated each other like brothers. Now, they act like wolves.”

***

Several people in Chegdomyn told me that most North Korean guestworkers now labor in Russian logging camps far away near Tynda. With my flight back to the U.S. leaving from Vladivostok in just several days, and my finances for the trip steadily dwindling, I gave up on finding the North Korean labor camps of eastern Siberia.

Another sleepless, 36-hour train ride brought me back to Vladivostok, a city overtaken by ambitious construction projects slated to modernize the city in anticipation of its hosting the annual APEC summit the following September.

North Korean Guestworkers at a Construction Site in the Russian Port City of Vladistok on the Sea of Japan

North Korean Guestworkers at a Construction Site in the Russian Port City of Vladivostok

In Vladivostok, scores of guestworkers from Uzbekistan and North Korea worked to install new sidewalks and bridges. A Russian student I met once compared migrant workers in Russia’s Far East to Mexican laborers in the U.S. Now, while walking through Vladivostok, I observed blonde Russian girls strut past workers laying bricks on fresh mortar, and, for a moment, Vladivostok actually resembled a typical city in southern California supported by Mexican migrant laborers.

In the last seventy years, industrialized countries, like Russia and the U.S., have increasingly utilized guestworkers to complete low-paying, unskilled work. The current U.S. Guestworker Program provides infinitely more labor rights and protections than the one between Russia and North Korea.

But just like the North Koreans charged with clear cutting the Siberian taiga, American guestworkers usually work in isolated parts of the U.S. and live in trailers on their job sites. Like the North Koreans, they also aren’t allowed to change their jobs if they’re not happy with the working conditions, they are sometimes paid less than the national minimum wage, they’re often afraid to give their names to journalists for fear of retaliation by their bosses if they speak about the working conditions, and the indentured servitude-esque work days often last 14 hours or more.

The Dry Deserts of Mexico are a World Away From North Korea, But Both Countries Provide Guestworkers, Who are Often Exploited, to Their Powerful Northern Neighbors

“We only left our job site in the U.S. once a week, when the boss took us to Wal-Mart to buy groceries,” a Mexican guestworker, who asked to be anonymous, once told me. “It’s interesting to work in another country,” he said, “but it also felt like being in jail, too. I know that people who cross the border illegally, and work in the U.S. with fake documents have more rights and freedom than I did.”

As the debate on immigration reform in the U.S. has become wound up in legalizing undocumented immigrants and pumping billions more dollars into border security, migrant rights activists and foreign guestworkers are left to wonder if Congress will ever talk about improving the working conditions of those who seek legal employment in the U.S.

Immigration reform presents an amazing opportunity to fix the current system of bringing foreign workers into the U.S. on labor contracts.

But right now, the current U.S. Guestworker Program looks a lot like the one used by North Korea.

Parts of this story originally appeared in the September, 2012 edition of Russian Life Magazine. To learn more about North Korean guestoworkers in Russia, check out this fabulous documentary by VICE News.

Posted in Mexico, Migrant Workers, North Korea, Places, Russia | Tagged guest worker, guestworker, Immigration, immigration reform, logging, Mexico, North Korea, Russia | Leave a comment

72 Hours With a Human Smuggler, or Fox in a Henhouse

Posted on February 28, 2013 by admin

Church, San Pedro Escanela, Mexico

Each time I travel to small Mexican towns in search of stories, I leave with the hope that one thing will happen: someone will invite me into their house.

Sometimes it happens, other times it doesn’t. On a recent trip to San Pedro Escanela, a small town in the Sierra Gorda Mountains of Mexico’s Querétaro state, nearly everyone I spoke with invited me to spend a night in their home.

I passed my first night in the Sierra Gorda camped on top of a concrete sewage tank. A rickety old bus dropped me off at dusk in a small town within the mountains, called Escanellia, from where I planned to hitchhike in to my destination of San Pedro Escanela on a nearby dirt road the next day.

A man, named Juan, let me inside a state park just outside Escanellia where I camped. In the darkness, I went to use the park’s outhouse, located on a steep hill, and heard a bubbling brook and the promise of a nice camp spot below.

In the dark, I took one step onto the hill, slipped, and started tumbling down the mountain. A concrete sewage tank below the bathrooms broke my fall.

And it was there, on that flat area, that I set up my tent and spent the night.

Sewage Tanks Make Surprisingly Good Camp Spots

The next morning I hitchhiked to San Pedro, a small mountain village with cobblestone streets. Just five minutes after arriving in town, a burly man in his mid-50’s with a long blistered scar along his right eye, named Alex, yelled to me as he pushed a baby carriage with a little boy strapped in it through town.

“Hey man, where you going?” he asked me in English.

“Just arrived in town,” I said. “I’ve come here to interview people who have worked in the U.S.”

“I spent most of my life in America,” Alex said, “I used to be a coyote. Man, I smuggled people over in vans, Uhauls—everything,” he said. “Say, if you need a place to stay tonight, come to my house,” he offered.

Meeting a coyote had always been a dream of mine. But in the last decades, the practice of coyotaje—smuggling people over the U.S. border—has become entwined with the drug trade. Coyotes must pay off drug cartels in Mexico’s northern states to maintain their smuggling routes. Migrants attempting to cross the border without coyotes have been killed by the drug cartels who seek to instill fear in migrants who think of crossing without a smuggler, a practice which takes away from the money they earn from migrants.

Terrified of conducting any research that might involve coming in contact with the cartels, I had long given up on ever getting to know a coyote.

Until now.

Alex’s House

Alex lives at the base of a hill in a half-finished house made of cinder blocks and cement. His long driveway leads up a small rise and ends where his rusted, green 1984 Ford F-150 is parked next to a small patch of sugarcane. Long screens are tacked over the windows for lack of glass. Empty beer bottles and purple and yellow dried ears of corn from the fall harvest litter the floors.

Alex and his wife, Josefina, sleep together in a small bed with their two-year-old son, Diego, in the front room. Their eldest son of five years, Beto, and their seven-year-old daughter, Lydia, share another room out back.

When I arrived at Alex’s house in the half-light of dusk, he welcomed me inside and we sat down to talk.

Alex’s father returned to Mexico after picking oranges in Florida and Arizona to take him to the U.S. when he was just 13-years-old. They crossed the border together in Arizona.

“I paid attention to everything that the coyotes did when we crossed,” Alex said, “I memorized the route, and I thought, this smuggling thing is too easy. I could do this.”

To do it, Alex needed to learn how to drive. He started working in the Arizona orange groves with his father where he made friends with a guy who had a car. Late at night, he would steal his friend’s keys and take his car out into the desert.

“That’s how I learned how to drive,” Alex said, “by myself.”

Alex bought an old car and brought his first group over the border when he was 15-years-old. Today, he loves to reminisce about the route over the border and to the orange groves: “highway 17 to Flagstaff, highway 40 to Memphis, and highway 75 down to Florida.”

“You know, lot’s of people think that coyotes make a lot of money, but they don’t,” Alex told me as his children played on the nearby bed. “You have to pay drivers to pick up the people once you make it over the border. In Mexico, you have to bribe police. If you get pulled over by a group of people involved in the drug trade, like the Zetas, you pay $300-400 for each person in the car. The bribes alone often add up to thousands of dollars.”

“Coyotaje is exactly like moving drugs,” he said, “the only difference is drugs don’t talk. The people you work with have to be de confianza.”

Although Alex likes to talk about how little money coyotes earn, he also likes to talk about how much they do. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized three million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Alex got a green card through IRCA and then a U.S. passport which allowed him to travel freely between Mexico and the U.S. Suddenly, a smuggling business which, in his words, seemed too easy, got really, really easy. And profitable.

“I started making two trips to Mexico each month to bring people north, once on the 1st, then again on the 15th,” he said. “I bought a house in south Florida with five plots of land. My ex-wife and our six kids all still live there.”

The Road to San Pedro Cuts Directly Through a Small Stream That Floods During the Rainy Season

“I used to bring people over the border in an old school bus,” he continued, “equipped with a special compartment built underneath and a hole in the floor so people could breathe. Eventually, I bought one of those huge motor homes that retired people drive around the country in. I paid $120,000 for it, in cash. I only had it for a month, though. I took it down to Mexico and I crossed through the Mexican border town of Sonoyta. Immigration had an x-ray machine, and they could see I was carrying a lot of people. They let me pass, then set up a road block ahead in the Arizonan town of Ajo. I pulled over at the road block and told everyone to run. Luckily, nobody told them who the coyote was. They assumed that I escaped. So, they deported us all and next month I went back to Mexico to do it again.”

After almost three decades in the business of human smuggling, Alex’s luck finally ran out. In 1999, he was arrested and convicted of transporting people into the U.S. The judge gave him six years in prison. When he completed the sentence, Alex lost his U.S. citizenship and was deported to Mexico.

“Prison was really dangerous,” Alex told me. “Once people find out that you were a coyote, everyone thinks you have money. I had knives pulled on me and I got in fights. They moved me every few years to protect me. I did my sentence in Atlanta, Beaumont, Texas, and Ashville, North Carolina. But I started over in jail. I read the Bible and found God. When I got out, I called my wife. She said, ‘I’m not moving back to Mexico.’ So I told her, ‘Well, I’m going to find a wife and start a new family.’ I left the house and everything in Florida to my kids. Then I came back home to San Pedro”

When Alex arrived in his home town, he only had $150, what he calls, ‘maybe enough money for a month.’

“I remember arriving in town,” he said, “and I saw someone drinking a Coke. It looked so good; all I had to drink was my saliva.”

Alex started working in the nearby and slightly larger town of Pinal de Amoles, not far from San Pedro, as a security guard. He got paid $250 each week and started saving money to build a house.

In time, he met Josefina, twenty years his junior, and they married. Today, he works as a janitor in San Pedro’s small school during the mornings. In the afternoons, on the days he’s not drinking that is, he works on the house.

“Asi es, Levi,” Alex said. “That’s how it is. The U.S. is a very good country to live in, but it’s a place that you have to respect. America gave me a chance to make a life there and I got greedy. I wanted to make more money than I needed.”

Alex With His Second Family in San Pedro

Alex (Far Right) With His Second Family in San Pedro

As we spoke on the first of what would become many nights I would spend at Alex’s, we heard someone screaming in the distance.

“Oh no, something’s got one of the neighbors chickens!” Alex exclaimed, standing up and running out the door. His little son, Beto, and I followed. Two men from a house perched on a nearby ridge ran down into a gully where the fox was dragging the chicken. Miraculously, they succeeded in rescuing the screaming hen from the fox.

Corn Drying on the Floor of Alex's Living Room. In January, Most Locals Pile Corn From the Fall Harvest on the Floors of Their Homes to Dry.

Corn Drying on the Floor of Alex’s Living Room. In January, Most Locals in the Sierra Gorda Pile Corn From the Fall Harvest on the Floors of Their Homes to Dry.

“La zorra tiene dientes muy filosos. The fox has very sharp teeth,” Alex’s son, Beto, repeated throughout the evening.

My first night at Alex’s ended watching a National Geograhpic episode with the family about a group of native people in Siberia who survive the winters by herding reindeer.

“You know, I like watching shows like this,” Alex told me, “because you learn how to survive in the wild. One time I was crossing the desert into Arizona with a large group and the driver who was supposed to meet us on the other side didn’t show up. This was before the age of cell phones, so we just kept walking, following highway 10 north towards Phoenix. Along the way, we chopped up these big, round cactuses we call, bisnagas, and sucked the water from the flesh to survive.”

I spent over three days with Alex. He told me about the people he murdered during his years as a smuggler. He related how a group of corrupt cops in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas once arrested him, stole his car, and took him to a mountain where they blindfolded him, fired shots in the air, and then left him alone without a penny in his pocket. He explained about how he then hunted several of these cops down and shot them in revenge.

“I used to be a bad person, a really bad person,” Alex said to me one morning over breakfast in his kitchen. “But I’ve read the Bible, I’ve changed, and I regret the things I did.”

During the three days I spent with Alex, we drank together with his friends. I drove his truck around and we took rides through the mountains. Our conversations drifted between Spanish and English. I liked Alex. And in time, I saw him as a victim in some sense, a poor man from an impoverished village who had chosen the criminal life for a chance at a secure existence he might never have achieved picking oranges like his father.

On my first night at Alex’s, after the chicken incident, his son, Beto, kept dancing around the room and talking about the fox.

“La zorra tiene dientes muy filosos,” Beto repeated.

Alex's Son, Beto, Holds Gata, the Family Cat

Alex’s Son, Beto, Holds Up Gata, the Family Cat

All night, Beto’s observation about the fox’s teeth kept replaying in my mind. The parable of the fox in a hen house seemed the perfect way to describe life in San Pedro, a small town where most left for the U.S. long ago, and where the remaining residents survive from subsistence farming and remittances wired to Mexico from family members living in the States.

For most folks in this town, in order to survive you must learn to be sneaky—how to cross borders and work jobs with fake documents. It’s a place where you have to pounce on opportunity, any opportunity.

In San Pedro, and countless other small towns throughout Mexico, you leave town with a coyote for a land far away, sink your sharp teeth into the chance for a better life, and carry the spoils back to your den.

This is the final installment of a four-part series about immigration in the central Mexican state of Querétaro. Click here to read more stories in the series. Some names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

Posted in Mexico, Migrants in Transit, Places, Querétaro | Tagged coyote, human smuggling, immigration reform, Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA, migrants, Querétaro, Sierra Gorda, the border | Leave a comment

Immigration Reform 25 Years Later

Posted on February 13, 2013 by admin

Mist Rise Above the Ridges that Surround San Pedro Escanela

Mist Rises Above the Ridges that Surround San Pedro Escanela

The small Mexican village of San Pedro Escanela rests deep in the green hills of the Sierra Gorda Mountains. A single dirt road climbs up and around steep cliffs and ends in the cobblestone streets of this isolated town. The nearest city, Querétaro, is a six hour ride away on a rickety old bus with no bathroom.

At night in the Sierra, mists descend over this tiny collection of farm houses. Mornings in San Pedro often begin underneath a diaphanous shroud that gives this village an otherworldly appearance. When day breaks, the thick fog-banks ebb and flow from the valley that surrounds San Pedro, erasing distant pastures and family homes on the ridges above town before the murky haze evaporates completely in the rising sun.

Likewise, the lives of San Pedro’s 350 residents also move back and forth, drifting between two places with the ease of the mist. The Mexican state of Querétaro, where both the Sierra Gorda and San Pedro lay, has traditionally sent larger number of hopeful immigrants to the U.S. than many other parts of Mexico. In San Pedro, it’s almost impossible to find someone who hasn’t spent part of their life in America.

Most people in San Pedro have family members who now live permanently in the States. It’s not uncommon for young men to leave for the U.S. when they’re teenagers and never return. The presence of organized crime in northern Mexico, and increased number of Border Patrol agents in the southern U.S., has made entering the U.S. illegally to find work both costly and far more dangerous. Those from San Pedro who successfully make it to the other side often never return to visit their families.

A Wall in the City of Nogales, Arizona Separates Mexico From the U.S. Enhanced Border Security Following September 11th Made Crossing the Border More Dangerous and Costly

Aquilino and Carmen Carranza, a couple from San Pedro, became U.S. citizens as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986. At the time, IRCA created a path to citizenship for three million undocumented migrants living in the U.S., held employers accountable for verifying the immigration status of their employees, and increased security along U.S. borders, a measure that over the next two decades more than sextupled the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents from about 3,000 to almost 22,000.

Aquilino and Carmen have U.S. passports and frequently drive all the way from their house in North Carolina to San Pedro, where they both maintain a second home and take care of their ailing parents. I caught up with Aquilino and Carmen one morning while they were looking after a small hardware store owned by Aquilino’s brother in the center of town on San Pedro’s one paved street .

“You want to interview me about my time in America?” Aquilino asked me. “What’s this about anyway?” He asked. “I’ll tell you right now: I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Aquilino had every right to be defensive. Many people who live in San Pedro today have been deported and are skeptical about the intentions of a foreign researcher arriving in their community. Even after two decades as a U.S. citizen, Aquilino still felt that he might somehow lose it all.

“I’m just a writer,” I told Aquilino. “I’ve come to San Pedro to learn about how U.S. immigration policy affects communities in Querétaro.”

“Oh,” said his wife, Carmen, with sudden realization, “you’re the guy that some people in town believe works for the U.S. government.”

It all made sense. Just the other day, a young man in San Pedro who had spent the last ten years working agricultural jobs in the U.S. as an undocumented migrant approached me in the street with a smile.

“Hey man,” he said in English, “where are you from?”

We started to chat and he explained that he had just returned to Mexico for a visit. In several months, he planned to use his savings to enter the U.S. once more with a coyote. When I told him that I was spending the year in Mexico to study migration issues, he turned away and didn’t say another word.

“That guy didn’t want to talk with you because he’s afraid that you’re an undercover agent for the U.S. Border Patrol,” Carmen told me.

With my hair still slick with dried sweat and dust after having spent the last several days hitchhiking and camping in the mountains just to reach San Pedro, it seemed absurd that anyone would believe that, given my unruly appearance, I was a government agent. Nevertheless, this incident proved just how strong the fear of deportation is within Mexican migrant communities today.

Central Plaza, San Pedro Escanela

“I don’t know the illegal life, walking through the desert with coyotes and all that,” Aquilino told me. “Carmen and I moved to Mexico City in the early 80’s in search of work. I heard that they were talking about legalizing all of the Mexicans in the U.S., so I decided to find a way there.”

Aquilino entered the U.S. on a tourist visa under the pretense that he would visit a cousin in Houston and return home. Instead, he met up with friends from San Pedro who were picking oranges in Florida. IRCA stipulated that all undocumented migrants who had worked agricultural jobs for at least 90 days in a one-year period beginning May 1, 1985 could apply for U.S. citizenship. Aquilino obtained his citizenship in 1988, but had to wait almost ten years before he could apply to bring Carmen to the U.S.

“Aquilino used to come visit me in Mexico for two months each year,” Carmen said. “I was able to apply for my U.S. citizenship because we’re married, but I wasn’t able to actually join my husband in the U.S. until 1997. We bought a house in Burlington, North Carolina. But I had to wait nine years, until 2006, before I got my U.S. passport. During all that time I couldn’t leave the U.S. to visit family in Mexico. When I finally returned to San Pedro, kids that I knew had become adults. That’s why Aquilino and I try to make it back here so often now.”

Neither Aquilino nor Carmen can speak English, yet they feel well-adjusted in America.

“There are eight other families from San Pedro who also live in Burlington,” Aquilino said, “so we have plenty of friends and a community there.”

A TALE OF TWO HARDWARE STORES

At the other end of San Pedro’s one paved street, Juvenal Martinez works in another small hardware store, located inside the concrete frame of a one-room building.

Each day Martinez works in the store at a desk surrounded by sacks of cement and plastic PVC pipes. A large cooler behind him is stocked with liter bottles of Coronas. By 2PM, most days, the hardware store doubles as a bar. Local men, most of whom have been deported from the U.S., or have voluntarily returned and have money to throw around, come to the hardware store to drink.

And drink they do. The first time I met Martinez he was making change for an old woman buying a length of rope while opening a beer for a local drunk laying on the floor, wiggling in his urine-soaked pants while searching his pockets for enough change to buy another drink.

I came back to visit Martinez the next morning, before the drunks arrived.

“I’m a poor guy,” Martinez told me. “If I was the owner of this hardware store, I’d be rich. But here, I’m just an employee.”

The Only Paved Road in Town Is San Pedro's Maine Street

The Only Paved Road in Town Serves as San Pedro’s Main Street

Martinez is both a San Pedro native and former U.S. citizen. Like many of the men in this small Mexican village, he traveled to the U.S. as a teenager and worked picking oranges in Florida and Arizona. In 1987, he became a U.S. citizen through IRCA.

Even after Martinez received a green card, he continued to follow the agricultural harvests around the U.S., going as far north as Idaho and Michigan to pick apples, peaches, and strawberries. He eventually settled in Immokalee, Florida, a small city about an hour’s drive from the Everglades.

Much of the swampland around Immokalee was drained and turned to farmland. In 1960, journalist Edward R. Murrow made a documentary about the unfair working conditions of African-American migrant workers who labored on farms near Immokalee, called “Harvest of Shame.”

A half-century later, Mexicans, like Martinez, now work in the fields near Immokalee.

After two decades spent picking fruit, Martinez started looking for other work. One afternoon, he saw an advertisement for a driver posted outside a shoe store, called El Oasis, in Immokalee.

“I stopped and applied for the job,” Martinez explained. “I was like a fish who took the bait,” he said in retrospect.

The job that Martinez applied for involved driving a 16-passenger van up and down the East Coast, primarily transporting agricultural workers, from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, between different harvests.

“I went on one trip each week,” Martinez said. “My boss would give me a map and I’d take people to different parts of the country. For example, one time I took some people up to Virginia, and there I picked up another load of workers and drove them to a corn field Indiana. It was like a transport service.”

Sunrise, San Pedro Escanela, Mexico

Even in the winter, Martinez drove migrant workers north to work in places like a CD factory in New Jersey, or a turkey farm in Virginia. After having spent a year working for the transport service based out of Florida, Martinez’s life changed forever when the highway patrol pulled him over one night in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“I had 11 people in the van,” Martinez said, “and all of them were illegal. They arrested us all and I spent the next 14 months in a jail in Alexandria, Virginia for transporting undocumented workers. There was a trial for me in Atlanta, but I didn’t go to court because I was in jail.”

After Martinez finished his sentence, he lost his green card and was deported to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas and about 500 miles north of San Pedro.

“I didn’t have any money when they dropped me in Matamoros,” he said. “Thankfully, I was able to get in touch with my brother in Florida, who wired me enough money to take a bus back home.”

Martinez has been in San Pedro ever since. He said that he misses everything about the U.S.—the money, the food, the beautiful cities.

“I really miss the Golden Corral buffet, a restaurant chain all over the U.S.,” he said. “They had a ten dollar buffet there with everything—shrimp, beef, ice cream, and fruit—everything. In the U.S., I could always eat well. Here in Mexico, most of us can’t afford to eat anything more than beans, eggs, and tortillas. In the U.S., I was able to buy a car after saving my money for a few months. I’ve been back in Mexico for six years and all I’ve been able to buy is a bicycle.”

These days, Martinez longs for that ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ sense of opportunity—the belief that anything is possible—which U.S. politicians often like to boast exists for immigrants in America.

When Martinez became legalized through IRCA, that’s how he felt. That if he worked hard, he’d make a better life for himself and his family.

Now that dream is gone. And he’s not happy.

“I broke my back for over twenty years harvesting onions, oranges, and apples all over the U.S.,” Martinez said. “I worked hard to help the country grow, produce its food, and to become a citizen by following the laws. And they still took my green card away.”

Before leaving the hardware store, as the first drunks of the day began filing through the door, I couldn’t resist asking Martinez if he really believed that all of the workers he drove as part of the transportation service were legal.

“My work is my work,” he said, “and that’s it. I just assumed that my boss wouldn’t have asked me do a job that’s against the law.”

Martinez never found out if his boss was held accountable for the transportation of undocumented workers.

***

Today, many locals in San Pedro refer to IRCA as la amnistía, literally, the amnesty. Most folks who live in the Sierra Gorda have older brothers and sisters who became U.S. citizens through la amnistía. IRCA was designed to stop illegal immigration to the U.S. by offering citizenship to those already there without documents and increasing security on the borders. But it did little to stop the factors in Mexico and Central America which still influence people to migrate north in search of work.

As I walked down San Pedro’s main street between the two hardware stores, I thought about Martinez’s story. If I had been caught transporting undocumented migrants, I probably would have gone to jail, but nobody would have taken away my U.S. citizenship. After paying taxes for two decades, and doing strenuous work that I, and most U.S. policymakers, will never have to do, I felt that Martinez had every right to be angry.

There is no easy answer about how to revise current U.S. immigration laws. But when visiting communities like San Pedro, it often seems like the solution to the current debate over immigration reform lays in Mexico, not the U.S.

Many Locals in the Small Towns Scattered Within the Sierra Gorda Say They Just Want to Start a Business in Mexico. To Achieve That Often Means Finding a Way to the U.S. and Saving Dollars for Years so They Can Return to Mexico

Many Locals in the Small Towns Scattered Within the Sierra Gorda Say They Just Want to Start a Business in Mexico. To Achieve That Dream Often Means Finding a Way to the U.S. and Saving Dollars for Years so They Can Return to Mexico

Several years ago, I met with a researcher at the National Population Council in Mexico City who said, “As long as there are low-paying, unskilled jobs in the U.S. that Americans don’t want to do, Mexicans will continue to find a way over the U.S. border. The only way to stop this phenomenon is for Mexico and the U.S. to begin working together to create economic incentives for people to stay in Mexico.”

Today, immigration reform presents a tremendous opportunity for the U.S. and Mexico to unite in their search for solutions to problems that affect each country. But the first bipartisan proposals for immigration reform focus on increasing enforcement along the U.S-Mexico border, instead of looking at why people are trying to cross it in the first place. These first proposals greatly resemble IRCA, and so far none of them include a binational plan for working with the Mexican government on immigration reform proposals.

After visiting a place like San Pedro, investment in Mexican communities, by both the U.S. and Mexico, sounds like it has more potential for stalling immigration to the U.S. than increasing border security.

Each year, the U.S. government is currently estimated to spend almost two billion dollars on maintaining the 250 detention centers that hold undocumented immigrants before they are deported from the U.S.

It’s one of many programs funded with money that could perhaps be used to create investment within Mexico, or fund an alternative version of immigration reform, 25 years later, that does more than just try to seal off the U.S.-Mexico border.

A Camper Operated by the Organization, No More Death, Offers Aid to Migrants Crossing the Sonora Desert into Arizona. Most Studies Estimate that over 5,000 People Have Died Attempting to Cross the Border Through Remote Deserts In the Last Ten Years

A Camper Operated by the Organization, No More Deaths, Offers Aid to Migrants Crossing the Sonora Desert into Arizona. Most Studies Estimate that over 5,000 People, More Than the Number of U.S. Soldiers Who Died in the Iraq War, Have Perished in the Last Ten Years While Attempting to Cross the U.S. Border Through Remote Deserts

Posted in Mexico, Migrant Workers, Places, Querétaro | Tagged immigration reform, Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA, migrant workers, migrants, Querétaro, Sierra Gorda, undocumented migrants | 1 Comment

Memoirs of a Guestworker

Posted on February 2, 2013 by admin

The Sierra Gorda, Querétaro, Mexico

Arturo Ramirez reckons that he’s crossed the border from Mexico into the U.S. at least fifteen times.

I met Ramirez after hitchhiking into his home town of San Pedro Escanela, an isolated farming community tucked into a small valley within the green hills of the Sierra Gorda Mountains in Mexico’s Querétaro state.

“What are you doing here, man?” Ramirez asked me in English, poking his head out from the entrance of a small store as I wandered along San Pedro’s cobblestone streets.

“I came here in hopes of meeting people who have spent time in the U.S,” I said, shouldering my heavy backpack and camping gear.

“Well, you’ve got one right here,” Ramirez said, “stop by my house and we can talk anytime.”

Two days later, I knocked on Ramirez’s door. Houses in San Pedro stand out in stark contrast to the simple farmer’s homes, often made from cinderblocks and cement, found elsewhere in rural Mexico. Most locals estimate that half of San Pedro’s residents now work or live in the U.S. Those who return to San Pedro often build squat, rectangular houses that resemble smaller stucco versions of ranch houses in the U.S. Ramirez and his family live in one of these Americanized homes, set behind a black, iron fence and surrounded by a small yard complete with green grass.

Ramirez opened the door and welcomed me into his living room. The insides of Mexican houses always remind me of a tropical version of American homes in the 1940’s or 50’s. Ramirez’s home was no exception; the austere décor a mix of handmade decorations and several prized modern appliances. Sprawling, embroidered doilies covered his coffee table and the living room’s two couches. A tall wooden bureau which held the wide screen of an old television extended along most of one wall. A warm afternoon breeze played with the long, white curtains hanging from the windows, allowing the sunlight to shine in on several water-stained family photos displayed from frames on the wall.

“Would you like a beer?” Ramirez asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Ramirez soon returned from the kitchen with two caguamas—Mexican slang for cumbersome bottles of beer, just slightly smaller than a liter—of Corona and we sat down to chat.

Ramirez, now 37, is the youngest of four children. His two brothers and one sister all left for the States in their teens. Only Ramirez and his parents still live in Mexico.

The Remote Village of San Pedro Escanela

All three of Ramirez’s siblings became U.S. citizens after Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) into law in 1986, which legalized over three million undocumented migrants living in the U.S.

“I wasn’t old enough to head for the States during the 80’s,” Ramirez said. “But I went as soon as my parents let me. In 1991, when I was just 15, some friends and I traveled up to the Texas border. We paid a coyote to take us over the Rio Grande, then we bought a car in south Texas and drove it straight to Florida where we found work picking oranges.”

“Getting to the U.S. was easy back then,” he said, stopping to sip from his caguama. “But everything changed after September 11th. Now the U.S. Border Patrol is much larger and well-organized, so it’s harder to cross.”

But despite the increased risks, Ramirez headed for the border just after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York

“My first son, Eric, then just a baby, got really sick that year,” Ramirez said. “We took him to the hospital and the doctors told us that he needed a blood transfusion or he would die. It was really expensive and we didn’t know how to pay for it. So, despite the difficulties of crossing the border, I headed north for the Florida orange groves again so my son could live.”

As Ramirez and I talked, Eric, now 14, sat across from us on the other couch in the living room. Today, he is a healthy teenager, the first wisps of a downy mustache appearing on his upper lip. He’s not much younger than Ramirez was the first time he went to the U.S.

I couldn’t resist asking Eric the same question that I hated answering when I was his age: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“That’s easy,” Eric said. “I want to become a doctor, so I can save people who were sick like me.”

BY THE SHORES OF LAKE ONTARIO

Ramirez and I talked about a lot of things that afternoon.

He told me how once, while working in western New York, an employee in an Olympia Sports store had approached him and said, according to the paraphrase that Ramirez told me, “You don’t understand, motherf@$&#, I don’t want Hispanics here. Goddamn illegals.”

We also talked about the time he was robbed while trying to cross the border into Texas, subsequently lost all his money, and had to find a way back to San Pedro. Based on the more tragic accounts of other men who I met in San Pedro who had far more harrowing experiences while attempting to cross the border, Ramirez’s good fortune might well be a local record.

Perhaps most of all, Ramirez wanted to talk about the eight seasons he spent in the Florida orange groves, an experience that he usually recalls with a deep, poignant resentment.

The Road to San Pedro Escanela

“In Florida, I always lived with a bunch of other pickers in a cramped trailer,” Ramirez recalled. “We got up at 4am to make our lunch and go catch the bus to the orange groves. Dew covers the trees in the early morning, so you immediately get soaked. By 11AM, the sun comes out and you dry up for about ten minutes. Then the humidity kicks in and the sweating starts—soon you’re just as wet as before. You don’t get home until 5 or 6 in the afternoon, and you work six days a week and a half day on Sunday.”

“People suffer in the orange groves,” Ramirez said.

At the end of one orange season, Ramirez and a friend decided to try their luck picking apples in western New York during the fall. The two bought a car, drove north, and slept on a stretch of beach along Lake Ontario until they found work in the orchards of a company called Fowler Farms in the small town of Wolcott, New York.

Fowler Farms now contracts Mexican workers on temporary, H-2A agricultural visas, and provides their foreign employees with houses to live in for free, pays them a decent wage, and offers the option of overtime if they want more hours. From some of my previous research in Mexico, I’d learned that the U.S. agricultural industry is often fraught with incidences of worker exploitation, so landing a job with Fowler Farms sounded like winning the lottery to me.

The Sun Sets Behind a Snow Drift in Western New York. Each March, Ramirez Travels to Work for Eight Months on a Farm Near Here.

“During the summers in New York, I often work 14 hours or more a day,” Ramirez said. “We aren’t forced to do overtime, but most of the Mexican workers do. When we’re in New York, we don’t have families to go home to at night, so we’re willing to work much longer hours than most Americans would.”

Although Fowler Farms seems like a decent employer, the farm still couldn’t escape the fraud which often accompanies the contraction of foreign workers in the U.S.

Most U.S. agricultural companies that contract foreigners on H-2A visas rely on recruiters in foreign countries who handle the formalities associated with getting workers the visas.

Fowler Brothers formerly worked with a Mexican lawyer (whose name I’ll leave out) in the state of San Luis Potosí, just north of San Pedro. As required by U.S. law, Fowler Brothers provided the lawyer who handled the visas with money to cover the workers travel expenses to and from the U.S. Instead, the lawyer pocketed the money and charged each of the workers $700 for their travel expenses.

“This act of fraud committed by the recruiter was discovered when some workers asked Fowler Brothers to reimburse them for their travel expenses,” said Miguel Montalvo, a Mexico-based lawyer who partners with legal organizations in the U.S. to protect the rights of Mexican migrant workers.

“Private attorneys interviewed workers in the New York apple orchards to confirm that the recruiter had taken advantage of them,” said Montalvo, “then they hit Fowler Brothers with attorney’s fees which forced them to reimburse the workers for the expenses they paid to the recruiter in Mexico.”

During this controversy, Ramirez was working for Fowler Brothers with fake documents, so he was not a victim of this all too common instance of recruiter fraud in Mexico.

“It’s unfortunate that recruiters in Mexico do stuff like this,” Ramirez said as we finished our beers. “It makes me afraid that Fowler will stop hiring people from Mexico.”

Ramirez worked in Fowler’s apple orchards for many seasons before one of the managers discovered that his work permits were fake. The company told Ramirez that he had to leave, but with the promise that they would invite him back next year on an H-2A visa. Now, every March, Ramirez crosses the border legally on a visa and spends eight months driving tractors, mowing fields, and spraying pesticides in the apple orchards of Fowler Farms.

As the sun set behind a tall ridge overlooking San Pedro, Ramirez and I had already spent a long afternoon chatting together in his living room and draining caguamas. At Ramirez’s suggestion, we walked outside and piled into his truck. Then Eric drove us up a long dirt road to a lookout point where we got out and watched the sun set over the Sierra Gorda.

Shadows Darken a Distant Mountain as the Sun Sets in the Sierra Gorda, Querétaro, Mexico

Shadows Darken the Mountains as the Sun Sets in the Sierra Gorda, Querétaro, Mexico

“You know, I think that I’ve spent more of my life in the U.S. than in Mexico,” Ramirez said as the sun went down and we stood, leaning against the side of his truck, and shared one last caguama.

“Do you ever think of staying in the U.S. and trying to bring your family there?” I asked.

“No, the U.S. is too different,” Ramirez said. “Especially, how American families act. I don’t think that kids respect their parents as much in the U.S. as here in Mexico. If I brought my family to America, then my son would go to school and learn to speak better English than me. I think that would make us grow apart,” he said.

Eric lowered his face and blushed at this comment.

“If I keep working in New York, I’ll be able to send my children to a university in Mexico City,” Ramirez said. “This will be great for my family, but unfortunately my kids are growing up without a father. In a few years, Eric will leave San Pedro to study and I’ll have practically missed most of his life.”

Ramirez took a long swig from the caguama and passed it to me.

“What I really wish more than anything is that they would give me a green card, so I could just travel to the U.S. to work when I need to,” Ramirez said as I finished the beer and placed the bottle in the back of the truck.

“The H-2A visa is great because it allows me to work in the U.S. each year,” Ramirez continued, “but I dream of, just once, being able to spend an entire year in Mexico with my family. I’ll never do that, though, because I’m afraid that if I don’t go to New York next year they’ll give my job to someone else and I’ll never get the visa again.”

“That’s a chance that my family and I just can’t take,” he said as we got back in the truck.

Some names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

Posted in Mexico, Migrant Workers, Places, Querétaro | Tagged guest workers, guestworkers, H-2A visa, Immigration, immigration reform, Mexico, migrant workers, Querétaro, Sierra Gorda | Leave a comment

Illegal Immigration in the U.S. Jumpstarts Mexican Small Businesses

Posted on January 26, 2013 by admin

Young Cows Drink Water From a Natural Spring on the Morelos Ranch High in the Sierra Gorda

Young Cows Drink Water From a Natural Spring on Morelos’s Ranch High in the Sierra Gorda

Each year, Francisco Morelos leaves the small community of Las Joyas, a cluster of farm houses high in the green forests of the Sierra Gorda Mountains in Mexico’s Querétaro state, and enters the U.S. on a fraudulent passport.

In an era of high-tech security on the U.S. border that includes radar systems, walls, night-cameras and aircraft surveillance, Morelos just walks right into the U.S. He is able to bypass the world of border patrol agents and coyotes [people smugglers] because each year a former childhood friend who left Mexico decades ago, and gained U.S. citizenship, lends Morelos his U.S. passport so he can visit his family in Mexico and return to the U.S. to work.

“I’ve been going to the U.S. for 23 years now,” Morelos said in perfect English that he learned years ago while taking night classes after working long days picking oranges in Florida. “Over the last two decades, I’ve saved enough money to buy 40 hectares of land here in Las Joyas and to start a small ranch where I raise cattle.”

“There’s plenty of work to do here in Mexico,” Morelos said. “The big problem that many Mexicans face today is finding a way to raise enough money to start a business.”

Even in this remote part of Mexico, there is opportunity for small business owners, like Morelos. The rarely-told story of America’s southern neighbor, which often lurks behind headlines of widespread poverty and lawlessness, is that the Mexican economy is booming, currently growing even faster than Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy. Despite the Mexican diaspora to the United States, over 115 million people—nearly twice the population of France—actually live in Mexico. And each one represents a consumer who could potentially buy goods, like beef raised on Morelos’s small farm.

The Torre Mayor (Center), Mexico City’s Tallest Building, Holds Offices of Companies Like Hewlett Packard and Western Union. Mexico is Forecast to Outpace China in the Number of Manufactured Goods Imported to the U.S. by 2018

In Morelos’s home of Querétaro, a small mountainous state in central Mexico, many locals who dream of starting their own business do so by laboring in the U.S. as undocumented workers and sending their earnings back home. When Morelos and I met, he had just returned to Mexico after working on a farm in North Carolina. He said that, this time, he will stay in Mexico for at least two years.

“I may have to leave for the U.S. once more to get my farm off the ground,” Morelos said, “but that will be the last time. After spending more than two decades working in the States, I’ve almost finished building my home and business here in Mexico. Now, I’ll have something to leave my children.”

Over the last five months, I’ve interviewed scores of Mexican nationals who have spent time working in the U.S., and the theme of people wanting to create a life in Mexico, but not having enough capital to do so, keeps coming up in my conversations. Getting a new business off the ground requires start-up cash, a reality that forces many Mexicans to work illegally in the U.S. for years in order to raise the funds necessary to create a business back home.

A few miles away from Las Joyas, following a dirt road that curves around the precipitous turns of the high-altitude Sierra Gorda, lays the small town of San Pedro Escanela. Throughout most of the year, about half of the men in San Pedro are gone, picking grapefruits and oranges in Florida, onions in Georgia, or apples in Western New York. Some leave for the States on H-2A agricultural work visas, others go de mojado—illegally. Most of the men who remain in San Pedro farm the land and raise cattle on rocky pastures that curve up into the mountains.

The Road to San Pedro Escanela

In this out-of-the-way Mexican town, where most women still carry on the traditional role of cooking and raising children, Juana Villeda is something of a trailblazer. A San Pedro native, Villeda is a single mother and the owner of one of this small Mexican village’s only businesses, the Restaurant Villeda.

And just how did she accomplish this? Working double-shifts at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis, of course.

Locals in San Pedro will tell you that this community survives from remittances, money transfers from family members working in the U.S. In Mexico, the dangerous act of crossing the border to work physically-demanding jobs in the U.S. has traditionally been a man’s job. But Villeda is one of a growing number of Mexican women who have begun entering the U.S. in higher numbers over the last decade in hopes of creating a better life for their families back home.

Villeda’s journey to the U.S. began when a Peruvian doctor, who was studying medicine in Los Angeles, arrived in San Pedro with her young child to complete a year of voluntary medical work in the town’s local clinic. Just 14-years-old at the time, Villeda began looking after the doctor’s young child. When the doctor prepared to leave for Los Angeles to complete her studies, she invited Villeda to join her.

“I asked my parents for permission to go,” Villeda recalled, “and then I took a bus to Tijuana. The doctor left all of her documents in California and the two of us entered the U.S. together with coyotes through a small tunnel dug under the border wall which separates San Diego and Tijuana.”

Villeda and the doctor left Tijuana at three in the morning with the coyotes they had hired. The two women followed them along the border wall for three hours until they arrived at the tunnel’s entrance. Then they got down on their stomachs and started crawling.

“Getting through the tunnel was a tight squeeze, but when I came to the other side someone reached down and pulled me out,” Villeda said. “The first thing I saw was train tracks and several parked cars. The coyotes ushered us inside one and the driver took us to L.A.”

The Border Wall Between San Diego and Tijuana. Juana Villeda Entered the U.S. Through a Tunnel Built Under the Wall by Smugglers.

The Border Wall Between San Diego and Tijuana. Juana Villeda Entered the U.S. Through a Tunnel Dug Under This Wall by Smugglers.

Villeda spent two years in the U.S. going to an American high school in the morning and babysitting for the doctor in the afternoon. When the doctor finished medical school, Villeda returned to San Pedro, married a local man, and had two children.

She only stayed in Mexico for three years.

“After my second child was born, my husband went to seek work in the U.S. He left for the States and we never heard from him again. He abandoned us. I had two children and was living with my husband’s mother. So I left my two children with my parents and went back to the U.S.”

Villeda had several brothers who worked on chicken farms in Virginia and Pennsylvania who lent her the money to find a way back to the States. In the nearby town of Jalpan, she found a coyote who was taking a group of 40 into the U.S. near the Mexican city of Piedras Negras, just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.

“My second crossing into the U.S. was a disaster,” Villeda recalled. “The coyote led all 40 of us through the desert and into Texas at night. Suddenly, a helicopter appeared above us, shining a spotlight. It landed and soon two more helicopters arrived with Border Patrol agents. The coyote yelled for us to scatter and hide. I waited alone at the base of a mountain while the Border Patrol apprehended about half of the group. After they left, the coyote whistled and yelled for us to come out of hiding. In total, we spent 28 hours trying to cross the border.”

Juana Villeda (left) in the Kitchen of Her Small Restaurant. Villeda Worked in an Indianapolis McDonald's For Four Years to Save Money to Start a Business in Mexico

Juana Villeda (left) in the Kitchen of Her Small Restaurant. Villeda Worked in an Indianapolis McDonald’s For Four Years to Save Enough Money to Start a Business in Mexico

Villeda was one of the lucky ones. She made it to the other side with the coyote who then dropped her off in a van bound for Indianapolis. After leading hopeful immigrants over the border, many coyotes then leave them with other drivers who operate out of the main smuggling corridors in Arizona and Texas, and then transport them to different cities all over the U.S.

“It was practically door-to-door service,” Villeda said. “They took me and several others all the way to Indianapolis, dropping some people off in cities along the way.”

Villeda had an uncle in Indianapolis who obtained a fake green card for her so she could work.

“I got up at 5AM each day to work for a cleaning company,” Villeda said, “then in the afternoon I changed into my uniform and worked the 5PM to midnight shift at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis. On the weekends, I sold tamales on the street with my aunt and worked the night shift at McDonald’s. I spent four years in the U.S., normally working 15 hour days, seven days a week.”

“I was always tired,” she said, pointing to the first wrinkles around her eyes as evidence of the stressful years she spent in Indiana, “I only slept four hours most nights to work both jobs. But I made friends at the McDonalds. Most of the people who worked there were from Mexico, or Honduras and Guatemala, and they were illegal like me.”

The Money You Spend on a Big Mac Might One Day Be Used as Venture Capital to Start a Small Mexican Business. Juana Villeda Risked Her Life For a Chance to Flip Burgers at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis

Villeda sent her savings to family back home. After four years of cleaning houses and slaving away for minimum wage at McDonalds, she was able to buy property and build her own house in San Pedro. While in the U.S. she also sent money to her sister, who used it to start The Restaurante Villeda, right off San Pedro’s town square. Now, the two women work together in San Pedro’s only eatery.

“Almost everything here is from the U.S.,” Villeda said, while leading me on a tour around the restaurant, a small room filled with four plastic tables next to a cramped kitchen. “The television, our ice maker and coffee pot, all of this stuff I sent to Mexico with a friend who was driving here,” she said. “I invested in all these things, so I couldn’t just throw them away when I came back home.”

Villeda enjoyed her time in the U.S. but has no desire to return. Before leaving the restaurant, I asked Villeda what she would say if her son or daughter expressed interest in leaving to work in the U.S.

“I would tell them to get an education first and then try to go with a visa,” she said. “But I don’t think they will ever need to go,” she added. “Now that my sister and I have our own business, I’ll be able to help my children to study. I started working when I was eight-years-old, washing clothes. I want my children to have the educational opportunities that I didn’t.”

The Restaurant Villeda in San Pedro Escanela, Mexico

“And besides, Mexican families aren’t like American ones,” she said, laughing. “It’s not uncommon for people here to marry and have families of their own, then spend their entire lives with their spouses living at home with their parents. After working in the U.S., I was able to build a large house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, so my children will always have a place to live in San Pedro.”

“The truth is that we’re quite happy here now,” she said, smiling as the afternoon sun shone in through the wide entrance and illuminated her small café.

Some names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

Posted in Mexico, Migrant Workers, Places, Querétaro | Tagged illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Immigration, immigration reform, McDonalds, Mexico, Querétaro, small businesses, undocumented migrants, women migrants | Leave a comment