Thread: Looking for a better life

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Looking for a better life

Illegals seek part of the Mexican dream
By Tim Carpenter
Topeka Capital-Journal

Editor’s note: The following project is the beginning of a series about immigration written by the staff of the Newton Kansan and its sister newspaper, The Topeka Capital-Journal. Other stories about the controversial issue will follow in the coming months.


CUERNAVACA, Mexico — Musician Hector Piedra learned to play the blues at Blaney’s in Kansas City, Mo.

Melancholy rhythms discovered at jam sessions in the Westport nightclub district now provide contour to the anguish Piedra endures in his hometown of Cuernavaca, a city prized by Aztecs and Spaniards for its refreshing waters.

Sitting alone on a living room couch, verse pouring from Piedra’s lips and chords flowing from his acoustic guitar speak of a family divided. Not by ambivalence or betrayal, but by laws that forbid Piedra, who entered the United States illegally in 1999, from residing legally in Kansas with his U.S. citizen wife, Jessica Allen-Piedra, and their daughter, Racquel, and son, Jahleel.

“Never going back,” he said, wiping tears with the back of his hand. “That’s the fear I have now.”

Rut Aviles Rueda, who lives with her two children in the poverty-stricken Mexican mountain village of Paintla, senses that agony in reverse. Her husband left this town south of Mexico City to find a job in the United States that paid enough to support a wife, daughter and the son he has never seen or held.

“My husband has been gone three years,” she said, stoic despite an awareness that his return isn’t assured. “I want to see him, but I can’t.”

Piedra and Rueda have learned that for everything the North gives — love, sustenance, hope — it exacts a price in return.

Mexican dream

The flow of immigrants across the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States has grown beyond anyone’s expectations during the past 25 years. It surged with Mexico’s economic problems of the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s with the U.S. economic boom.

This exodus has reached record dimensions. One of every seven Mexican workers migrates to the United States. Entire Mexican communities are nearly void of working-age men. Half of the estimated 12 million illegal migrants in the United States are believed to be from Mexico.

Tension between North and South over this migratory inferno is a growth industry. Activists have taken to the streets in both countries. U.S. law enforcement flexes its bulging immigration enforcement muscles. Smugglers in Mexico retool to counter threats to their livelihood.

With covert entry to the United States less of a certainty, millions of people who splashed across the dark green waters of the Rio Grande River no longer take the risk of returning several times a year to visit family in Mexico. This pins unauthorized immigrants in a grinding fault line of international relations that tears at family structure.

Still, the desire to leave a country plagued by unemployment and corruption remains so great that no Berlin Wall jutting from the Boca Chica beach on the Gulf of Mexico to Tijuana’s shoreline on the Pacific Ocean, no get-tough speeches by politicians in an election year and no confrontation with the working end of a Border Patrol agent’s weapon has much chance of stemming this tide of humanity.

Polls and interviews indicate a majority of Mexicans believe it their right to enter the United States without permission and stay as long as they choose.

Those caught crossing illegally, try again. To be captured two, three, four times is irrelevant. The fifth crossing may be successful. Or the 15th.

Plenty of those who arrive without documentation lack the best intentions. Importation of drugs from Mexico is a thriving enterprise.

The bulk of unauthorized migrants are interested in cobbling together their own version of the American Dream. Call it the Mexican Dream. These illegal immigrants stay in the United States long enough to afford a well-built home, reliable car, moneymaking private business or more education for the kids. If all goes well, papa comes home for good.

For the future

John Berrios’ dust-covered boots and splattered white overalls testify to his vocation as a auto body repairman. His shop across from a grassless soccer field in Mexico City is modest. Bare electrical wiring gives visitors reason to pause. The shop is covered partially by tin and tarp. A dog naps in an area of the building that has no roof.

But the business is the property of Berrios, and he owes it all to wages earned in construction a few years ago in Houston and Brazoria, Texas.

“I went to earn money to buy tools,” said Berrios, rubbing a rag on the tailgate of a battered van. “My goal was to be independent, not work for others. U.S. dollars made it possible to get started.”

This type of economic opportunity doesn’t easily materialize in Mexico, which suffers from lack of investment capital for start-ups. That is crippling in a country with a per capita income one-fourth of the United States. Forty percent of Mexico’s population lives below the poverty line. Individuals with an entrepreneurial drive are drawn to the United States where it is possible to earn — legally or illegally — enough money to launch a small business in Mexico.

Berrios, who has three children and three grandchildren, said he hooked up with a smuggler, or coyote, to cross the border at Piedras Negras carrying nothing but containers of water and cans of tuna and sardines. He was caught by immigration agents and released at Piedras Negras. Within hours he crossed again with another coyote, but was caught by noon. Again, it was back to Piedras Negras. He made it to Houston on the third try, paying a smuggler $1,300.

He worked half a year on all sorts of construction projects before slipping back into Mexico.

“I worried about my family,” he said as Beatles’ tunes blare from the shop’s radio. “But it’s worth it to suffer a little bit to enjoy what you have with your family.”

$20 billion incentive

Pastor Carlos Lopez, who leads a Presbyterian congregation in the old silver mining town of Taxco, said the Mexican government must accept responsibility for sustaining conditions that fuel the movement of so many to the United States.

“Sad to say, but one cause is corruption in the government,” he said at a cafe overlooking the city’s narrow cobblestone streets filled with VW cabs. “Rather than invest in the generation of jobs, those in government steal money and place it in Swiss banks.”

He said endemic corruption, which acts like a regressive tax, impedes healthy commerce. So many people are on the take that it is routine in Mexico. Not even a large sculpture of Jesus that overlooks Taxco could be completed without a local government official lining his pocket.

Too few of Mexico’s 107 million people are employed in jobs that pay a livable wage, Lopez said. The desperate, perhaps 10 percent of the population, respond by stepping onto northbound highways leading to the United States. These travelers reason that somewhere in a vast, wealthy nation — meatpacking in Kansas, lawn care in Georgia, farming in California, restaurants in Illinois, housekeeping in New York, roofing in Texas — they can find financial salvation, he said.

Lopez said families in Mexico depend increasingly on cash from the North. The Inter-American Development Bank, a lender to Latin American and Caribbean nations, estimated Mexican immigrants wired more than $20 billion “migra-dollars” back home in 2005 — more than twice the total sent in 2002. This cash from the United States is the country’s second-largest source of income, trailing oil and surpassing tourism.

“It’s a safety valve that eases pressure on the Mexican government to institute reform,” Lopez said.

No. 1 export: Men

Lopez escorted us on a Sunday morning to the village of Paintla, Mexico, which doesn’t appear on most maps. The best houses in the town are made of concrete; the weakest of wood, mud and tin. Water is funneled to homes through a mass of tangled garden hoses that snake through the forest. Men ride horses for transportation, not pleasure.

Miles from the nearest paved road, the NAFTA agreement has had no visible impact on job creation in Paintla. In this community 140 miles north of Acapulco’s luxury hotels, subsistence farming is the chief occupation. Small cornfields dot the highlands. A few cattle and chickens wander in search of a meal.

Paintla’s most substantive export to America is unquestionably young males — men like Rut Aviles Rueda’s husband.

Rueda, a petite woman with hair as black as coal and wearing a rose-colored dress, accepted an invitation to stick around after the church service to talk about her personal experience with illegal immigration to the United States. Sitting on a wood pew in the plain white sanctuary, she brushed the face of her daughter, Jael, and cradled her son, Christian, as she spoke of what it was like to be a single-parent in Mexico with a spouse working to support them on earnings at an Illinois restaurant.

“Sometimes he sends money, sometimes he doesn’t,” she said. “Even when he sends money, it’s not enough.”

Rueda, who preferred her husband’s name not be published, said he left three years ago when she was pregnant. The boy has never set eyes on his father. To Rueda, it is as if circumstances placed her husband in a bizarre form of exile.

“We speak by telephone,” she said.

Other members of her congregation appreciate the situation. Two dozen joining her for a question-and-answer session said they had undocumented family members in the United States or had immigrated illegally themselves in the past.

The fathers, brothers, uncles and sons of Paintla are scattered across America. Only a family crisis or deportation judge has the power to usher them back.

Living amid hostility

Eliseo Vega was born in Mexico and moved to the United States at age 17. His mother had dual citizenship and decided economic distress in Mexico and an improving racial climate in the United States merited a change.

The middle-aged Vega now runs a small Assembly of God Church in Topeka that ministers to a growing immigrant population. It is just a guess, he said, but as many as half of the people who worship there are undocumented. Folks just show up on his doorstep. Most are from Mexico, but increasingly they emerge from countries in Latin America and South America, he said.

“It is not an easy life here,” Vega said. “Different culture. Different language. It’s no holiday. I know.”

Undocumented migrants to the United States are easy prey for those who want to exploit their status, Vega said. Employers, landlords and neighbors angle to get a piece of men and women who live in perpetual fear of deportation, he said.

Mining engineer Gustavo Castillo, who works in the mountains south of Mexico City, said undocumented workers in the United States are bombarded with conflicting messages. He said U.S. industry hangs out a “Help Wanted” sign in front of risk-taking migrants while the vibe from U.S. law enforcement is they all should just “Keep Out.”

Castillo also said citizens of the United States who despair at the flow of laborers from Mexico increasingly rely on a message of hate. The rise of anti-immigration vigilante groups in the United States is an unsettling trend, he said.

“To be the target of that treatment, that makes people angry,” Castillo said.

No dance with death

Alvaro Rodriguez Arellano, wearing a two-day beard and a pair of donated glasses, stands inside the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, terminal of El Conejo bus company in the middle of a journey home from Lee’s Summit, Mo. He has been riding for hours, and there is plenty of highway to tame before crossing the border at Laredo, Texas, and pressing on to Monterrey.

His departure from the United States was a matter of necessity. He was among a fixed number of people lucky enough to receive a six-month visa from the U.S. Embassy. That cherished document permitted him to work legally at a Mexican restaurant in Missouri. If he ever wants to win a visa lottery again, it is essential not to be labeled an absconder.

“I wish it were easier to work here,” Arellano said. “But this is your country and you make the rules.”

Ideally, he said, the U.S. government would develop a program that allowed millions of law-abiding Mexicans to retain jobs indefinitely in the United States and to travel freely between the two countries. It isn’t necessary to tie amnesty or citizenship to that kind of arrangement, he said. But, he said, the process of obtaining that documentation shouldn’t be so agonizing.

Arellano said he would jump at the chance to work again in the United States. Unlike others from his homeland, that desire doesn’t rise to the level of slipping in illegally.

“In my case, no. There’s a lot of things that happen at the border — robberies, rapes. People die. I will not risk my life for that,” he said.

The love story

Jessica Allen-Piedra, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law school student, met Hector Piedra at a Spanish language church service in Olathe, Kan. Neither predicted the outcome. They fell in love, got married and produced a daughter, 3-year-old Raquel.

A complicating factor in this relationship is that Piedra was an undocumented immigrant from the time he walked across the Arizona border in 1999 until he voluntarily returned to Cuernavaca in January. To live legally under one roof in Kansas, Piedra must obtain a U.S. government waiver from a law that bans him for 10 years because he admitted to residing in the United States for more than one year without permission.

The family has excellent legal representation, and they are now keenly aware of fine print in immigration law, but there are no guarantees. For now, they wait.

“We just kind of have faith that it will work itself out,” Allen-Piedra said.

The predicament has led her to speak publicly about possible changes to immigration policy.

“We need reform that puts an emphasis on families,” she said. “Most do not realize how devastating the immigration laws can be for U.S. citizens.”

In the United States, Piedra led a construction crew by day and played music at night. Back in Mexico, he works part-time jobs and picks up a few pesos at informal gigs. He’s started writing music about the plight of families like his. Lyrics contrast the harshness of division with the joy of reunion. His words seek change that brings people and nations together.

“In music,” he said, “there are no borders.”

Tim Carpenter can be reached at

(785) 295-1158 or

timothy.carpenter@cjonline.com.

This is a sad story , but things have to be done the right way anyhow