May 27, 2008, 10:03PM
Remittances Slowdown has a long reach

As the U.S. economy softens, families and entire villages in Mexico suffer from the weakening flow of money

By GREG BROSNAN
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle



LA PAROTA, MEXICO — Freddy Arroyo's wife was nearly nine months pregnant, but the $10 a day he earned delivering water couldn't feed his two children, let alone a new baby.

It was time to do what generations of young men in the parched village of La Parota in Mexico's western state of Michoacán have traditionally done in tough times — head for Houston.

Catalina Orozco did not speak to her husband for weeks. Then five days after her daughter was born, the phone rang in the shack where the 26-year-old lives among other desperately poor relatives.

Calling from Houston, Arroyo listened with joy to the baby's cries and then gave his wife the bad news.

"He said there was no work and that he couldn't send us any money," she said.

Villages across Mexico depend on money from migrant workers in cities like Houston. But now, as the U.S. economy slows, relatives in industries like construction are increasingly limited in what they can give.

"These days you just scrape by, nothing else. You can't afford to send anything back," Alberto Cruz, an illegal Mexican day laborer, said by telephone from Houston.

After oil, remittances are Mexico's biggest source of foreign cash. By 2006, remittances had soared to $24 billion a year, but last year they barely grew and, in fact, fell in some states, like Michoacán.

"It's worse than a recession," Javier Aparicio, an economist at Mexico City think tank CIDE, said of the effect the decline in remittances is having on places like La Parota. "It's like a big depression."

With about 500 inhabitants, La Parota is an outpost of dirt roads and shacks separated by rusty barbed wire about 200 miles southwest of Mexico City.

Little rain falls, and temperatures often exceed 104 degrees.

Work is virtually nonexistent.

One recent scorching weekday afternoon, the only visible economic activity was an old man roasting peanuts in a blackened barrel.

Houston connection
The roots of migration from La Parota to Houston are lost in time.

As with other such links, the movement of workers north likely began after a pioneer migrant sent word home.

But there are connections to the Bayou City on every corner.

"It's very hard to find anyone here without a relative in Houston," local teacher Alfredo MartÃ*nez said.

Houston has been the lifeblood of 63-year-old corn farmer Constantino Santos' family for three generations. His father worked in the area under the post-World War II bracero program.

He himself toiled illegally in a downtown pizza parlor in the mid-1980s.

"It was beautiful, and you could find work," he recalled of the city.

Santos' sons Javier and Victor took his place in Houston while still teenagers, supporting the family for two decades.

Now in their 30s, they are unemployed and can barely send $100 a month because of the slowdown.

Feeding 12
Since her daughter's birth on March 27, Catalina Orozco has only received $150 from her husband, who has struggled to find work painting houses. She has moved back to her family home — a tumbledown shack that lodges 12 people who depend on relatives in Houston for money.

Orozco sleeps with the baby, her 7-year-old daughter and
8-year-old son on a battered red sofa and armchairs.

Her diabetic grandmother, Maria Patiño, who can barely walk, depends on three sons and a daughter in Houston. Their dwindling remittances also support Patiño's son Angel, a 25-year-old with Down syndrome.

Wearing a "Texas Lone Star State" T-shirt his brother sent, he proudly shows off blisters on his hands from roasting peanuts, but his work only brings in pennies.

"If I don't owe any money, I can get by just eating the most basic things," Patiño said of the money her children send.

"If I ate good food, it would be finished in a week."

Construction halted
The migrant cash crunch is extinguishing any economic activity there was in La Parota.

Salomón MunguÃ*a, 51, worked enough double shifts at a Houston restaurant as an illegal immigrant to buy a small plot of land.

He was building a modest house on dusty wasteland with money wired home by two sons in California, but they have had their hours cut.

The construction is frozen, and as MunguÃ*a struggles to support his wife and mother-in-law, he is getting desperate.

"They sent $100, and this is all we have left," he said, holding up a cardboard box of dwindling beans and rice bought with the last money wire. "I don't have enough to eat. I'm scared."

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