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| A man rides a burro down a street in the capital city of Zacatecas early in the morning. He arrived in town early to set up a spot to sell beverages carried in large jars on the burro. The city's modern storefronts are a contrast to the state's rural zones, where some farmers still rely on pack animals to haul goods. <<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>> |
"Labor Omni Vincit" (Labor
conquers all)
-- Zacatecas state motto
By Sarah Kessinger
Harris News Service
ABREGO, Zacatecas - Next to a walled graveyard, farmers tanned
by relentless sunshine, young men in baggy pants and sideways
baseball caps and women wrapped in woven serapes gather with
children in
the shade of a huisache tree.
It's Nov. 2, All Souls Day, and the priest reciting mass
for the newly buried
adds a word for "los migrantes" - locals who make the dangerous
trek north.
For more than a century, families here have taken the journey. Sending
fathers, mothers and older teen-age children to work in the factories,
fields and feedlots
of Kansas and elsewhere in the United States.
There are those who believe Abrego's future is "over there," where
children are assured an education.
Yet others reject what they view as a materialistic, time-clock-driven
U.S. society.
They want stability for their young amid this tranquil cluster of white-washed
adobe homes and corrals. They want parents to stay here and raise their
youngsters, despite hardships such as no water purification system
and, at times, hunger.
What
American dream? Young man disillusioned after trek north
By Sarah Kessinger
Harris News Service
CARRIZALILLO, Zacatecas - Mauricio Perez relaxes on his mother's well-worn
couch in the late afternoon shadows of their earthen home.
He returned from Salina eight days ago, stressed to the point that his
stomach still cramps.
Last year he was deported to Juarez from Kansas but found a "coyote" -
a human smuggler - to get him back to Salina.
He had to go back, he said. He had to pay off a debt to his brother in
central Kansas for a loan a couple years earlier.
That loan of $2,000 paid for a coyote to sneak him across the darkened
desert where Mexico and Arizona meet.
"The second time, I got another loan," Perez said. "Again
I paid a thousand up front and a thousand after I crossed."
The 27-year-old farm hand is shy, calm. His voice is barely audible to
strangers.
"I knew I faced six months to 10 years in prison if they caught me
again. But I felt bad. I hadn't finished paying my brother.
"You borrow money from your family and you pay it back as you work."
But life "de mojado" -- as a wetback, as he put it -- meant constant
tension.
"Pure fear."
It intensified on his second trip over the border.
Stopped,
deported
Perez wasn't expecting local authorities to notice him that day in Salina.
He had been in the city since 2000, living with his brother and working odd jobs.
He bought his driver's license on the street, uncertain how the vendor got it.
A big fan of Los Tigres del Norte and other Mexican norteno bands, Perez
liked their music booming from the car stereo.
That day it boomed a little too loud.
Police stopped him and after discovering the false identification, called
in federal immigration authorities. Perez was sent to a detention center in Kansas
City.
From there, authorities took him and other detainees by plane to one of
Mexico's largest border cities, Juarez, where they were left at a bus station.
"Many got on the bus to go back to their pueblos," he said.
He took a taxi to his sister's home in the city.
With the initial debt hanging over his head, he said, he soon searched
the streets near the Rio Grande for a coyote who could get him back across.
This time he crossed in daylight. Perez walked over the bridge to El Paso,
he said, and handed the U.S. official a false identification card purchased from
the smuggler.
"I was afraid. I knew if they stopped me what could happen."
The document worked. He strode into the city where he would catch a bus
back to Kansas.
Work
available
In Salina work was never in short supply, Perez said. Although he spent
some time looking for a job, he eventually was hired as maintenance man at a
fast-food eatery.
His employer was kind, he said, but Perez was unhappy and frequently felt
ill.
"I couldn't play soccer in the winter there," he said.
Down the hill from his home in Mexico, men in his village often play
a pick-up game of "futbol" till dusk.
"And I didn't like the cold."
He gradually earned enough to pay off debts and purchase a used pick-up
truck, a maroon Ford that his mother says is the apple of his eye.
In October, he left Salina and drove the two-day trip home to the mountains
of north-central Mexico.
There would be no immigration officials escorting him off a plane this
time.
"I want to stay here now," he said. "I want to get married
and make my life here."
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"In 50 years we'll see most of the people have left here and gone there.
People right now are just living to get by," said Angel Garcia, 62, who
as a teen-ager was contracted through the U.S. government's "bracero" program
to pick crops near Deerfield, Kansas.
""There's no future, no way to support oneself. Here people spend weeks
without money coming in. It gets difficult."
When he left the fields, Garcia supported his family for years as an
undocumented worker in the "matanza," the kill floor at a beef-packing
plant in Finney County.
He eventually came home to tend cattle and farm with a son.
Later granted status as a U.S. permanent resident, he now travels occasionally
to visit the rest of his family scattered across the United States.
History
of migration
Zacatecas'
history can't be told without
its stories of mass migration.
The semi-arid state faces drought frequently and has always sent people
north when
local fields
fail to produce.
Of the state's 2.5 million people, an estimated 1.5 million now spend
part of the year in the United States.
Many, such as Garcia, have traveled back and forth from jobs and homes
in Salina, Great Bend, Wichita and Garden City.
"We are a bi-national community," said Fernando Robledo, head of migration
research for the state of Zacatecas. "It costs us not only in
terms of workforce, but also in terms of our educated public."
Today Zacatecans have on average six years of formal education, one of
the highest rates in the country.
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The Sierra Madre mountain range rises in the distance as a man hauls a bundle of oats near the village of Carrizalillo, Zacatecas, in November. The harvest, below average this year, will feed local livestock. <<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>>
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In Abrego's
neighboring village of Carrizalillo, education appears to have
expanded since 2000. The federal government built a new kindergarten
classroom
a few years
ago.
Grade school teacher Terry Santos Amador wants to prepare students for
jobs in Mexico to avoid the lure of the United States.
"I've seen young people leave here as noble, simple people," she said, "and
come back changed, troubled, sometimes into drug addictions."
But those who have migrated are quick to point out the benefits. The small
homes often are spruced up or expanded with money sent from migrant
relatives.
Across this mountainous state, Zacatecans receive thousands of dollars
each year from family living across the border, Robledo said.
Two places called home
Those who have left, some of them years ago, often return to visit or even
to retire.
As she prepared for work one morning in Salina, Rosa Torres recalled her
lifestyle years ago in Abrego.
"I feel good going back to my roots," said Torres who now works
at the Exide battery plant.
She and her husband moved to central Kansas 30 years ago.
But she maintains a home in her Zacatecan homeland and plans to move back
eventually to open a store in the city of Fresnillo.
"It is a nice life in the United States, I have so much to be thankful
for here," Torres said. "But my children are now grown, some going
to college. They have their own work and I'd like to live a little more
relaxed pace."
Ongoing ties
Back in Carrizalillo, Jose Santos Ruvalcaba, a long-time southwest Kansan,
sits with his wife in plastic lawn chairs alongside their small retirement
home.
"We like to spend time here for a while," he said, "then we'll
go back to Garden City."
Doing laundry on her dirt patio nearby, Concha Perez said migration has
improved her family's lot, pointing to new appliances and a truck parked
beside the
house.
First interviewed by Harris News Service five years ago, Perez watched
devastating drought force locals to migrate, including her son.
A few years later she obtained a U.S. tourist visa and visited him and
other family in Salina.
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| Dawn brings the sound of roosters crowing and ranchers calling cattle as they herd from nearby pastures into several corrals in the Mexican village of Abrego. Families continue to live from their local produce and animals as they have since the village was founded as an hacienda in the 1600s.
<<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>> |
U.S. immigration laws prevent several of the villages' young adult generation
from gaining legal papers in the United States.
"It's very dangerous to go as mojados (wetbacks)," Perez said. "So
many are now staying here."
Drought has passed and green has returned to the Zacatecan countryside
this year.
Rains came too late for much of a bean crop, but November was high season
for the verdant nopal cactus bearing "tunas," a sweet fruit enjoyed
by people and livestock.
Outside her Carrizalillo home, Luz de la Cruz buys a batch of fresh tortillas
from a small delivery truck.
De la Cruz lives in a modernized adobe home thanks, in part, to dollars
sent from her five daughters in Salina.
She'd like to see them more often, she said, but they are undocumented
and can't return to their village for fear they won't get back across the
border
to work.
Yet many return to villages throughout the state. The steady flow back
and forth has led American Airlines to offer direct flights from southern
U.S.
cities to
Zacatecas' capital city.
Bus lines, too, now pass through Kansas to pick up passengers headed there.
And migrant clubs continue to organize in the United States to collect
money for development projects such as road pavement and drainage systems.
Stemming
the flow
Abrego native Manuel de la Cruz is the first state legislator elected
to represent migrant Zacatecans living in the United States.
"We have 300 non-profit clubs now in the United States that have financed
2,000 public work projects," he said. "We'd like Zacatecans
in Kansas to organize one."
Families have come to rely on the sums of money wired by their loved
ones, de la Cruz said.
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| Maria Guadalupe Arias Calzada (right), 8, dressed for her school party as the bride of late mariachi star Pedro Infante, heads for a dusty courtyard stage during the school's annual celebration of the Day of the Dead. Arias's aunts and uncles live in Salina, but her mother hopes her daughter's future is in Mexico. <<Click here to view the entire photo gallery>> |
"If
they didn't send them, all of these people would be crossing
the border. Do Americans want that?"
Angel Garcia, who is now Abrego's mayor, agrees.
He strips away weeds from his family's gravestones in preparation for
All Souls Day mass at the local cemetery. It is a traditional part
of the Dia
de los
Muertos, a national celebration of ancestors each November.
He fills rusted coffee cans with carnations, roses and tiny white flowers
known as "lluvia" (rain).
His parents are buried here. He expects he, too, will be someday.
Garcia is uncertain what the future holds for his children and grandchildren.
He and daughter Carmen say a brief prayer and step carefully out of the
cemetery at dusk.
"It's difficult," he says quietly. "In 20 years, who knows
who will be left."
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