http://www.newsobserver.com/164/story/476996.html

Martha Quillin, Staff Writer
Leticia Zavala was 8 years old when her father decided to move the family from Mexico to the United States. They landed on a cucumber farm in Ohio, where Leticia and her siblings were picked on for the way they talked, how they looked.
"When are we going home?" the children would ask their father. "Two years," he would tell them. Just two years, and he would have enough money to pay for a roof for the house he was building for the family back in Mexico.

Two years turned to four, five, 10. It has been 20 years now.

"We're still planning on returning," says Zavala, who goes to Mexico several times a year in her work as a union organizer with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, based in the Wayne County town of Dudley, 60 miles southeast of Raleigh. "Finally a few years ago, we finished the roof. But now everybody is married, and they have children here that only speak English. So now there is a big debate, a big division in the family on where is home."

Zavala sometimes thinks she would rather have a unified family living in the homeland than some of the material goods her life in America has afforded. She does not question her father's decision to cross the border; he felt he had little choice at the time.

Two decades later, thousands of immigrants feel they have no choice, either, she says. It's harder than ever to make a living in Mexico, she says, with U.S. corporations buying up large swaths of land to run corporate farms. At one time, an enterprising man could save enough money to open a small store and support his family on its trade.

"Now Wal-Mart is everywhere in Mexico," Zavala says. "You can't compete with Wal-Mart."

Meanwhile, she says, growers in states such as North Carolina need workers -- lots of them -- and so they hire illegal immigrants.

The workers live under false names, surrendering their identities, sometimes severing family ties to avoid the notice of immigration officials.

"To live without your name -- it's demoralizing," Zavala says. "I think that's why there is so much depression within our community. You come here, and you never really know who you should act like or who you should be."

She and her family became naturalized citizens through a 1986 worker amnesty program, she says. As they are torn over their status as immigrants, America is torn, Zavala says.

"They want them here, but they want them in the shadows where nobody really takes responsibility for them."