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Border Street: A journey home to a beloved land parched of opportunity
Barry Gutierrez Š News
Tina Griego

December 28, 2006
SAN ESTEBAN, Mexico - On a hillside in this town outside Guadalajara is a street named Felipe Angeles. It is a narrow road, rutted and dusty and filled at various times of the day with children and trucks and dogs and chickens. A man and his wife live on this road, married now for nearly 40 years, the parents of 12 children, and though they have never left this village and know nothing of the Denver block known in these pages as Border Street, part of its story begins with them.

Doņa Antonia was 15 years old when she married her husband, Don Manuel, a green- eyed and burly man with hands so large and fingers so thick she would have a hard time finding work gloves to fit him. He didn't need them, anyway. He was a farmer from the time he was a boy and it showed in his rough hands, in his nails, rimmed with dirt. He plucked and cleaned cactus pads with those hands, unmindful of the fine thorns that snagged his flesh. Don Manuel was 18 when they married, and he inherited 15 acres from his father, who owned much land but sold nearly all of it.

Fifteen acres of tomatoes and corn will make no man rich, but the land was fertile and beautiful, climbing the hillsides of their village, fed by rivers and natural springs that were channeled into hand-dug irrigation canals. The trees bore limes, oranges, mangoes, guavas, bananas, and the land nursed agave and nopal cactus, the leaves of which could be eaten or used in lotions and shampoos. Over time, the waters of the river blackened with untreated sewage and garbage and discharge from factories, and so Don Manuel and the rest of the village expanded their fields of nopal, a prickly pear cactus, which requires less water and has the advantage of being a year-round crop. Nopal is not immune to the rise and fall of the market, but it is generally reliable, and in a life marked by unpredictability, there is much to be said for that.

Doņa Antonia and Don Manuel had their 12 children over a span of 25 years, which was both common and practical because the small farms of the countryside still relied on human labor rather than modern equipment. They fed their family on what they grew and sold the rest in a teeming and bountiful market in the city, but they were born poor and poor they remained. It was not surprising that when their two oldest sons entered their teens, they would announce they wanted to go to the United States to work. It was the early 1980s; millions of Mexican citizens, including Doņa Antonia's brother, had crossed the border already, and the air was filled with talk of forgiveness by the American government for trespassing on its land.

You don't need to leave, Doņa Antonia told her sons. She remembers now, more than 20 years later, that each said what hopeful young men and women of this village still say about the United States: "Yo quiero conocerlo." I want to know it. To which she replied: Ah, young men and their adventures.

At any rate, Doņa Antonia argued with them. She still argues with them. We have food to eat. Yes, it might be beans and tortillas, but, thanks be to God, we have enough. We have a house. We have work. It's humble, but it's ours.

She cried the day they left. But, amnesty made them legal residents of the United States and in that way, they were luckier than most of the men and women who followed them because the brothers could come and go between their two countries freely. Doņa Antonia gives thanks to God for that, too.

When the two brothers first left, they followed other men of San Esteban to Los Angeles and then to Washington and Oregon where they picked fruit, but someone went to Colorado and he found work plentiful. He told someone else who told someone else and soon a network was established, cousins, uncles, neighbors and their wives sharing housing, sleeping on apartment floors, on sofas and recliners, and now at least 100 people from San Esteban have made their home in Denver. Maybe more, the oldest of the brothers says. "I'm on a soccer team of 20 people, and 18 are from San Esteban."

The oldest of the brothers would buy a house on Border Street in 2004. His mother- in-law and her three sons also lived on the block. They, too, came from San Esteban, distant relatives of Doņa Antonia, and between the two families, cousins, nephews, friends from the village came and went. The oldest brother paid a coyote $5,500 to smuggle his wife and four children into the country because the wait to sponsor them legally was eight years. The family lived together for two years before he found it necessary to send them back to the village this summer.

He starts working harder than ever, finishing garage floors and installing cabinets seven days a week. It is still not enough to catch up on his bills, and he ends up walking away from his first home in the United States and from Border Street, the Denver block where, for a brief time, he and his family were reunited.

Finally, he decides to go back home. Just for a few months, he says. He's tired. He misses his family. Christmas is coming. He drives 32 hours straight to arrive on a Sunday morning a week before Christmas. He drives down through a canyon and up through the hills around Guadalajara, the home of mariachi music and tequila, a vibrant, noisy, crowded, centuries- old place where in the afternoon women and their children beg on the cathedral steps and in the evening a beautiful woman with a red carnation in her hair dances flamenco in a bar where the walls hold the mounted heads of bulls.

The oldest son drives down a narrow paved road that gradually climbs into the lush hills of his village. He drives past children playing in the street and roosters strutting across yards and whole families sitting on crates in their front yards, peeling piles of nopales with sharp knives. He drives past dogs panting in the gutters and bougainvillea and poinsettia and morning glories bursting violet and red and blue from the roadside and open-air kitchens where women cook beans and rice and grill meats over wood fires and serve them to customers along with stacks of homemade white corn tortillas so hot and steamy they burn fingertips.

He turns off the paved road, heading south, climbing again, bouncing now onto a dirt road, rutted and lumpy with stones before turning toward the hill that dominates the village. At dawn, it glows pink and the sun lights the white cross at its crest. Some of the townspeople call it the Cross of Hope, and it seems a good name for a place where faith in God and belief in the redemption of mankind offer as much sustenance as the cactus and the squash. This is his street, Felipe Angeles, lined with brick and concrete houses built with money earned in the U.S., filled with freshly washed clothes hanging from ropes, fences, wires strung across trees and rooftops, with shouting children, darting chickens, piles of tires, wood, trash, dishes, empty crates. A plastic blue-robed Virgin Mary lies on her side in a plastic manger under a tree decorated with red tinsel. An old pickup with expired Colorado tags sits on flattened tires. A horse grazes near a curious little pig that stands on its hind legs to peek over its pen.

The Legal Permanent Resident is back home, in the town of San Esteban, in the state of Jalisco. His wife and children wait for him. So does his younger brother, the Fugitive Boyfriend, and his brother's girlfriend, Maria the younger, and the couple's baby, Jared, who was born in Denver in May.

They are a long way from Border Street.

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The town in which Maria the younger, the Fugitive Boyfriend, their son, and the wife and children of the Legal Permanent Resident now live is a place of bounty and deprivation, of rust and wrought-iron, cardboard roofs, propane tanks, ornate brickwork, toilets with no seats that flush with buckets of water, Nintendo video games, expensive telephone bills, fresh flowers, and everywhere, posters, paintings, statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Christ, Our Lady of Zapopan, of angels and saints. Dust rises in clouds with the passage of Mexican men driving American trucks and settles upon the coats of dogs who sleep in the streets and wander into houses with curtains for doors where they loll and beg beneath kitchen tables only to be shooed away to skulk in front of the church where a crying baby is about to be baptized and a woman wears a dress the same red as the flowers in the trees.

Here then is the explanation for the clothes hanging on fences, the children playing in the streets, the loud music from trucks parked in the driveway, the front-yard, late-night conversations, the behavior that so annoys the Americans on Border Street. In this village, such sights are common, existing not so much out of necessity - there are backyards, side yards, courtyards - but as an invitation to their neighbors and a reminder that they are bound together. From their front yards, they watch who passes, they keep an eye on the children - theirs and others - they pass on the news of the day. It is the communion of a tribe.

It helps explain the loneliness of the young man who came to the priest of Border Street for help with his drinking. It helps explain why the townspeople who moved to Border Street met suggestions by their American neighbors to move their activities to the backyard with puzzlement and resistance. It also explains the conflicted feelings in San Esteban about illegal immigration and why, for so many residents, the main objection is not that it is against the law, but that it fractures the community. It separates families, and in this place what is not about family is about God and about the land. This is the trinity of the small farmer.

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Listen, Doņa Antonia says on the Sunday when her son arrives home, I have never stopped wanting them to come home. She is 53 years old now, but like many women of the village, the sun and the work have aged her. Her skin and her teeth, a few of which are missing, betray her poverty. The lack of teeth does not diminish Doņa Antonia's smile, which lights her face. It is possible that Don Manuel fell in love with her simply so that he would never be far from that smile. Her hair is more black than white, and she often covers it with a scarf. On the days she does not, she parts it down the middle and separates it into pigtails, which she twists up over her ears and ties in a knot on top of her head.

She sits in her front yard, in a plastic molded chair, the same kind her eldest son, the Legal Permanent Resident, left on his front porch on Border Street. Maria the younger sits in a plastic chair next to her. She wears her hair in a loose ponytail, her face full and smooth and free of makeup. She bounces her son on her knee. He is 7 months old now and has a cold, so she has bundled him in a sweat suit and knit cap. When she removes the cap, his thick, black hair sticks to his skull in damp curls.

Maria the younger still possesses the serenity that made her seem so mature on Border Street, where she sat in the Legal Permanent Resident's house, in labor, her sister's excited voice coming through the phone - are you bleeding, has your water broke - the Fugitive Boyfriend cleaning around her in a frenzy. But, she is different here. The circumstances under which she entered this family being somewhat scandalous and the fact that she is not yet married to Doņa Antonia's third son, the Fugitive Boyfriend, leaves her standing in some question and the resolute girl of Border Street often retreats into a more wary young woman.

"Such foolishness," Doņa Antonia is saying of the whole business that brought the Fugitive Boyfriend and Maria the younger to the village to live. How could you be such a fool, she reprimanded him when, at last, her other children told her what had happened, how the Fugitive Boyfriend had been arrested for having sex with Maria the younger when she was 14 and he was 25. A hospital social worker reported him to police while Maria was in the hospital delivering their child. Maria's arguments that they were a couple and that he did not force himself on her and that he wanted his son made no difference. It's still considered sexual assault on a child and is against the law in Colorado.

It was only the inefficiency of bureaucracy that allowed the Fugitive Boyfriend, an illegal immigrant arrested on a felony charge, to make bail. His brothers scraped together $5,000. He took a bus to Juarez. Maria followed him a couple of weeks later, riding with the Legal Permanent Resident's wife and children, illegal immigrants who thought it wise not to be in the house on Border Street should the police come looking for the Fugitive Boyfriend again.

Her son's actions hurt the family, Doņa Antonia says. It cost them money; it may cost one brother his house in Denver since he put it up as collateral on the bond; it exposed the Legal Permanent Resident's wife and children to danger and separated them again.

"He should have known better," she says. "But, all a mother can do is teach her children right from wrong, what they eventually do is their choice and they make it with the knowledge of their mother's lessons."

She says that a man must respect a woman but can only do this if a woman respects herself and if she does not, "well, a man will do what he wants." She says that a mother has a responsibility to watch over her daughters and a mother who does not, who leaves her daughter to long afternoons in empty apartments, is partly to blame if that daughter ends up pregnant.

She says all this in front of Maria the younger, who says nothing. Her face remains blank.

"No," Doņa Antonia goes on, "this kind of relationship is not unusual here. Not at all. There are young girls marrying old men. We had one girl marry an old man here. The old man died. And she married another old man. They do it for security, for money."

Maria the younger gives her boyfriend's mother a sidelong glance and shakes her head. This she cannot let pass. "Por amor," she says, her voice low. "For love."

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The town unfolds along a main road, which is swept once a month by mothers who receive a small government stipend to buy their children school uniforms and supplies in exchange for keeping the sidewalks and gutters clean. Though some of the older children sulk when the designated day and hour arrives, they take their brooms, too, and join their mothers and aunts, sweeping hard, sending more dust into the air, pushing trash into piles that are shoved into plastic bags and dumped into trash cans that soon overflow.

It's a thriving road, full of little homes and stores that sell sodas, chips, individual cigarettes, posole, rice, fruit popsicles, and fresh fruit and vegetables, many of which are imported from other countries, either because the local produce is not yet in season or because it is cheaper or both. That so much is imported is a sore spot in this town where people argue that if they were paid better for their crops, if they had had the subsidies of U.S. farms, perhaps struggling farmers would not be flocking to cities looking for jobs. Perhaps, they say, rural residents would not be spilling out of saturated cities and heading to El Norte, al otro lado, los Estados Unidos, where work is plentiful and the federally mandated hourly minimum wage of $5.15 is much higher than the similarly mandated minimum wage of about $4.35 a day in Mexico. In 2005, according to a report prepared by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, the average daily income of Mexican farmworkers was about $9.50, an increase of 14 percent since 1990.

The situation is complicated. A structural change is under way in agriculture, which has left many farmers without enough work. Some blame the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it undermines the small farmer. Others say the causes lie in a post-revolutionary land distribution that for decades meant that farmers shared land, had rights to it, but could not easily sell it or use it as collateral. Still others point to a lack of education, which has left the people of rural areas ill-equipped to adapt to the changing economy of the countryside.

In 2000, only about half of Mexicans 15 and older had educations beyond elementary school, according to the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report. A recent survey by the Mexican Secretariat of Agriculture found that half of farmers receiving temporary government subsidies never finished elementary school.

Jalisco, with more than 6 million people, is one of the top sources of immigration to the U.S. The state's Secretary of Economic Promotion was recently quoted as saying that he estimates more than 4 million Jalisciense are living in the U.S., both legally and illegally. In 2005, the state received $1.7 billion in remittances, the USDA report says.

The state has an official "Day of Absent Jalisciense," to recognize those working in the U.S., and under a government program, remittances sent by official "Hometown Clubs" - which represent a fraction of those living in the U.S. - are matched three to one and invested in local town projects with the hope of improving life enough to keep men and women from going to the U.S.

San Esteban is home to about 680 families, and it is widely believed among residents that every one of those families has a relative living in the U.S. They go to Washington, Utah, Texas, Colorado and California, says the elected federal delegate of the town; "they go because they have to go." His children have lived illegally in the United States. Three are in Utah, married, with children who are citizens. He has a son now working in the village as a mechanic.

"Do you know how much he earns?" the elected delegado asks. "Six hundred pesos a week, $60."

At this, one of his sons interrupts. He has just returned from Utah, where he worked with a fake Social Security number he bought for $50.

"When I worked overtime, I made $600 a month."

See, his father says, "for this reason, they leave; they start new lives."

In Guadalajara, in the sleek Chamber of Commerce building, a past president of the organization shakes his head. He is not surprised so many people from the village have left. The Mexican government estimates that at least 10 percent of its 107 million people are living in the United States, at least half of them illegally.

"For Mexico, it's really a shame," he says. "Some Mexican officials are focusing on the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The wall is not the problem. We should focus on creating jobs. The problem is that since the time of the Spanish, there really has been two Mexicos. The very structure, the skeleton of Mexico, has to change to improve things, and I would say the first effort should be toward education. In Mexico, people get instruction, reading, writing, math, but they do not get an education and that means respect to yourself, your environment, to be willing to get involved. It is a quest of 25 years to prepare a generation."

He shares the cynicism expressed by many here about their government, saying he does not believe it has the desire to make that change. "Their attention is focused on other subjects, not the welfare of the country. They are first focused on staying in power. I would say somehow the immigrants take care of themselves, so it's not a problem of the government. The illegal immigrants send money home. They help their families. They keep the government comfortable."

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Many who leave send money home. It buys pickup trucks, appliances, clothing, but it is most visible in the houses. In the replacement of old adobe, tin, cardboard and wood with brick and concrete. With more money comes tile and paint and wrought-iron windows. And with more comes modern kitchens, extra freezers, spacious living rooms, showers, televisions, stereos and video games.

The Fugitive Boyfriend came to the U.S. in 2000 to work and with the money he sent home, his family began to build his house. It sits across the road from the Legal Permanent Resident's, a two-story brick home with no roof. Until he has the money to finish it, he and Maria the younger are living next door to his mother and father in the house of another brother now in the U.S. Their bedroom is large; the roof is brick, laid in small, well-crafted arches. The walls are painted blue and Maria has covered them with posters of Jesus and a prayer asking for salvation and a placard of Goofy and Mickey. The Fugitive Boyfriend has hung baseball hats in a row on the wall just like he did in his brother's house on Border Street, only here some of the hats are tiny and worn by his son.

The money sent home also allows people to invest in small businesses, though the immigrants of the '60s, '70s, '80s who have returned to San Esteban say this does not happen enough anymore. We went to work, to earn money, to come back home and start businesses and hire other Mexicans, they say. Too many now go to play. They drink. They buy trucks. They come home to show off. They forget their values.

"They get caught up in another vision," the Legal Permanent Resident says.

The people who live here know the political climate in many parts of the United States has chilled. Word of the recent immigration raids at the Swift meat plants spread quickly here, and they remind each other of the risks of living as an illegal immigrant, of the danger of crossing, and of the expense. Coyotes are charging $2,500 per person, they say. A woman who returned to San Esteban earlier this year with her American citizen children and who lived for a brief time on Border Street said she could not find a job without fake papers and she was unwilling to break another law and buy them. Her husband was not as reluctant and is still in Denver. It's a good life, she says, if both parents are working.

But what is most often mentioned are the children who left and never came back, who stopped sending money, who got their legal papers and promised to help their wives or mothers get theirs and never did. They talk about brothers who can no longer remember their older sisters and of grandchildren they have never met and the wailing in church when the bodies of those who died in the U.S. come home.

"I want to go the United States just to see my father," says an 18-year-old girl whose father left the family before she was born. "I know he has another family and kids over there, but I still want to see him. I would go with my heart in my hand. I don't expect to be a part of his family or anything. I just want to see his face and how he smiles and how the wind blows through his hair."

"La sangre llama," she says. The blood calls. "All the time."

She has a younger cousin who hasn't seen his father for eight years. "I want to go to find him," he says. He doesn't know where he is, but he says with the faith and bravado of the young: "If I go there, I know I will find him."

Doņa Antonia says that on the other side of the hills, a village has disappeared. Everyone, she says, has gone to the United States. She says she has heard of villages in Zacatecas, a neighboring state, where only women live. Since it is no longer easy to cross back and forth, their husbands no longer try. They stay in the U.S. They call for their families to join them or they forget them.

In the village, the priest says illegal immigration is a problem "for the women, especially. They feel lonely. The children don't know their fathers. The children run around and do what they want. The women only cry. They only cry and nothing more."

But, he too understands the pull. For five years, 30 years ago, long before he became a priest, he was an illegal immigrant in the U.S.

So, a daily ritual takes place in San Esteban. The pros and cons of leaving are weighed. If I stay, I will have my family and my freedom. I will survive, if humbly. I will not have to pay rent. But if I go I can earn in a week what might take a month to earn here. I can build a house. I can support my family and give my children opportunities I did not have.

"My mother is right," the Legal Permanent Resident says. "I didn't have to leave. I could have made it here. But, once I married and had a family, I could not maintain them. If one has any ambition to a better future, you have to leave."

•

The Legal Permanent Resident likes to joke that his father became so used to the money he and his brothers were sending to Mexico that he didn't want to work anymore. It's not hard to understand why.

Just after dawn, several days before Christmas, Don Manuel, his sons and grandsons head to a friend's field to pick nopal. Don Manuel has a few thousand plants of his own, but they are planted in the hills where it is colder and the plants grow slower in winter. They pick about 300 kilos, 660 pounds, of nopal for which he pays about 6 cents a kilo.

After he drops the nopales off at the house, he and the boys go out to his own land where they plant chayote squash for a few more hours. That afternoon, he, Doņa Antonia, a few of their children and a few grandchildren set up plastic chairs on the packed dirt of the front yard, beneath the trees, next to the stone fire pit where the family cooks food in pots too large for the indoor gas range. They sit, covering their laps with aprons or plastic sheets, spreading their knees to accommodate makeshift little tables of crates and wood planks and they begin cleaning the nopales with knives. It is fast and sometimes dangerous work. The strokes must be even and swift, deep enough to remove the skin and thorns, but nothing else. Once each side of the pad is cleaned, they trim its edges and toss the bright green nopal into another crate. For a while, the only sounds are the clack of knives against wood and the ceaseless crowing of the town's roosters.

The children of the family started helping when they were 10 and 12 years old and they do it now without being asked and without complaint. The same scene is repeated daily throughout San Esteban.

The family works past sunset. Don Manuel will sleep two or three hours, waking at 2 a.m. to drive an hour to market. His first customers arrive at 4 a.m. He repeats this schedule three or four times a week.

This is the good season to be a nopal farmer. The colder air limits supply during the winter and demand is high. Peeling nopal can reduce its weight by a third, but, once clean, Don Manuel can sell it for about 13 cents a kilo, 7 cents more than he paid. If he does this three times a week, he says he will net $240 a week, an excellent wage here.

Of course, he says, the flush times do not last. After February, nopal will be plentiful. He might pick 500 kilos a day, but they will sell for only 3 cents a kilo - about $45 a week. The family can't live on $45 a week. His children help. One of his daughters takes care of a wealthier family's children in a nearby canyon. The other has a small space where she sells coffee at the market. The three sons, including the Legal Permanent Resident, living in Denver send what they can. The family makes do with other work, he says, shrugging. That's a farmer's life.

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The Legal Permanent Resident once worked for the delegado. He made $120 a month, working six days a week as a landscaper. In Denver, he makes $10 an hour working on garages. He remembers that when he left San Esteban for the first time, he was just 16. He had heard the men of the town talking about the U.S. and was seized by curiosity. "I wanted to see it. I wanted to see what it was."

It has not been as easy as he might have once believed. He found Border Street to be an unfriendly place, cold, and he could not understand why the gulf between him and his Hispanic American neighbors was so wide. The same blood runs through us, he would say. But they did not like the laundry on the fence and the beer drinking in the front yard and he resented that they would call the police to complain rather than come to him directly.

He still does not speak English and that, more than anything, kept him an outsider on Border Street and in the U.S. This oldest son of Doņa Antonia and Don Manuel is both a creator of Border Street and a product of it, a man in transition on a street in transition.

He stands outside his home in San Esteban on a beautiful clear evening. He is happy with this house he built with his own money and his own hands for his family. It is brick with concrete floors, two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom, which is like many of the others - no lid, no seat, just a bowl. He's not finished yet, he says. He's building a living room, another shower. He has more work to do in the kitchen.

"It's a question of money," he says. "And of sacrifice to the family, because that's the price one has to pay."

He looks up at the stars and says that he breathes easier here. One day, he says, he will come home for good. But, not yet.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com