http://www.sbsun.com/Stories/0,1413,208 ... 61,00.html

Migrants brave border for better life back home
Journey takes two days and $3,600
By Brenda Gazzar
Staff Writer


Sunday, July 10, 2005 - With only a large moon as their light and the howls of animals in the distance, Javier Lopez and his 20-year-old son, Daniel, climbed over the steep Tecate mountains for 10 hours straight before daybreak. One young man in the group from Mexico City cried for his mother. Another, from Javier’s hometown of Tacátzcuaro, stepped on a snake and was overrun by small red ants.

In the darkness, they spotted the flashlights of Border Patrol officials on the hunt three hills away. During the day, their 12-man group hid among the shrubbery of the slopes as patrol planes circled overhead.

"We thought they were going to catch us," Javier, 46, said of the Border Patrol. "Always when we walk, we are almost certain they are going to catch us."

Javier has made similar treks – leaving his hometown in Michoacán, Mexico, and heading to the United States – more than a dozen times for one reason: money.

Javier sends between $200 and $250 each week to his wife, Concepcion, and the three of their seven children still living at home. The wages and tips he earns drying cars at an Inland Valley car wash are what largely sustains them.

"For those of us here that have family (in Mexico), we have to keep sending money so they can eat, and we can send something to have something," Javier said.

This trek across the border in mid-April was among the easiest he’s ever had, Javier said.

Unlike previous trips, there was plenty of fresh, worm-free drinking water in the streams. The temperature was neither too hot or too cold. Most important, the men made it across on their first attempt, walking just 13 hours.

Their guides over the hills even brought a burrito for each traveler, which they ate along with the tuna and bread each carried in their backpack.

After Javier and Daniel spent the night on the floor of a San Diego home, they were taken to a house in Santa Ana, where they waited until they could be taken to Javier’s daughter’s home in Fontana.

There, Maricela waited anxiously for them to arrive.

"Crossing like this has one’s soul by a thread," said Maricela, using a Spanish expression, "tiene el alma en un hilo," to explain her fear about their crossing.

When Maricela’s husband, Antonio Natividad, came home from his job as a truck driver, he counted out $3,600 in cash to pay a Santa Ana man – one of the coyote’s many workers – who would drop off Javier and Daniel.

"It’s too much money," Antonio said as he counted out the bills.

But a phone call from the coyote, Fernando, in Tijuana suddenly changed their plans.

The coyote’s worker had refused to drop Daniel and Javier at Maricela’s home after the coyote told him journalists would witness the transaction.

The coyote’s associate finally agreed to meet Antonio at a 24-hour Circle K not far from Maricela’s house to make the dropoff. One caveat: No press allowed.

"We’ll see if they arrive with shoes," Maricela said. "Sometimes with so much walking, they tear because of stones and thorns."

When Antonio picked them up an hour later and they walked up the driveway, Javier smiled broadly as his ebullient grandchildren – ages 2 and 3 – shrieked and ran up to greet them.

Javier and Daniel’s pant legs and shoes were muddy. One of Javier’s hands was scratched and bloody from the climb over the steep hills.

Javier, who is easily affected by his diabetes, was paler and thinner than when he left Tacátzcuaro, but content.

"We crossed quickly," he said.

‘This is the life of Mexicans’

It took Javier just one day to find work in the Inland Valley. The third car wash he went to had full-time openings and hired him on the spot.

Using the name of a green card-carrying friend from Michoacan, Javier was told by his employer to show his documentation when he got the chance.

Six weeks later, Javier said he had been asked for documentation by his employer, but had yet to show it or fill out an application.

As he’s done at previous jobs, Javier goes by the name of his friend, who used to live in Chicago. He shows his friend’s Social Security and green cards, which were loaned to him six years ago.

Javier usually gets paid by check, and thus pays income taxes and has money deducted for his friend’s Social Security.

"If I wasn’t working, (his friend) wouldn’t be getting his pension," Javier said.

Javier works nine hours a day, six days a week, for minimum wage plus tips – roughly $100 a day. He chooses to work more than 50 hours a week drying cars, though he gets no overtime for the additional hours.

"I don’t think it’s very good, but I can’t get a better job," he said. "Maybe in a factory, but in factories, we’re only going to get the $260 we earn (for a week’s work at minimum wage). I won’t get tips or anything."

One May morning, Javier and several other men at the car wash were idle, waiting to see if they would be sent home because of the dark rain clouds above them. Javier was hoping to work, since he wanted to send money to his wife.

In the first three weeks after his arrival, he sent $800 to his wife and children. But with all their expenses and debts back home, it’s not enough, he said.

"This is the life of Mexicans," he said, pointing to the car wash employees resting in the back and likening them to dogs outside a meat market. "We’re waiting for them to throw a bone to us."

Javier worked just four hours that day, then returned to his Chino apartment.

But everything’s relative. It is because he suffers much more in Mexico, he acknowledged, that he is even in America.

His hands, calloused from lifting heavy blocks in Mexico, are proof that he works much harder there in construction. And he earns four times less.

Here, his hands simply get wet and his fingernails black from the tire polish.

"It’s sadder to be there, without money, and to be working like a slave and not have anything," he said.

Life in America

Javier and his daughter, Maricela, agree that life in America is more tranquil in one important respect: money.

"Over there (in Mexico), one only earns enough to eat, but here you can buy more," Javier said. "You benefit more from your work here than there."

Consequently, Javier’s life in America revolves mostly around work and sending money home. During this stay in the U.S., he started out living in a two-bedroom Chino apartment with five other Mexican immigrants, sleeping on a black leather sofa or in a corner on the carpet.

In May, he moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Pomona with four other men, including two others from his Mexican hometown. His share of the rent is $180.

He made the move because a few of his Chino roommates would often get drunk, play loud music and not let him or the others rest, Javier said.

"We sleep at 3 a.m. because they are drunk and because of the music," he said.

To make this latest trip, Javier had to borrow $1,500 from a godmother of one of his children, at 6 percent interest. The money was used to buy Javier and Daniel’s plane tickets to Tijuana, and for Concepcion’s daily expenses until Javier could send more.

Javier and Daniel also borrowed $3,600 from family members to pay the coyote.

Javier believes it will take him three or four months to pay off his debts. When he doesn’t have enough money to send home, he borrows money from people from his pueblo who are living here, and sends that home.

Despite the money Javier remits, he and his children still spend most of their money in the Inland Valley for daily expenses, including rent, food, clothes and bus fare.

When Javier went to the emergency room of a local hospital three years ago after becoming ill with diabetes, he had to pay $3,500 for his three-day visit in installments.

While Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, mainly living in the United States, sent a total of $45.8 billion to their homelands in 2004, it is estimated that about 90 percent of income earned in this country by Latin American immigrants is spent in the United States, according to a 2004 survey conducted for the Inter-American Development Bank.

"Even though immigrants are sending an important chunk of their income on a regular basis . . . still the lion’s share of the money they make remains in the United States," said Sergio Bendixen, president of the Florida-based Bendixen and Associates, which conducted the survey. "They are contributing to our economy."

Mexican immigrants send the most money out of any Latino group - about 22 percent of what they earn, or $400 a month on average, according to the Washington D.C.-based policy analysis center Inter-American Dialogue.

On Javier’s days off, he often visits his grandchildren in Fontana and runs errands, including wiring money to his wife.

He has no transportation of his own, relying instead on buses. Family and friends occasionally take him where he needs to go.

The little free time he has is spent watching Spanish-language news â€â€