Thread: The Waiting Game Sob Story

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The Waiting Game
By CHRIS ECHEGARAY The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jun 4, 2006


MATAMOROS, MEXICO - Dust blows down dirt streets lined with concrete houses and an occasional animal pen.

Voices of young men playing baseball rise upstairs to an apartment, where Norma Rodriguez is making her way down the outside stairs - no railing, rebar sticking out from the sides.

More than 1,300 miles away from Plant City and a life of promise she once knew, Rodriguez is walking to a neighbor's to help prepare fish for a family reunion.

She yearns for a future in Florida, where her sisters still live, where she once had a place near the Florida Strawberry Festival grounds and held two jobs - working the counter at bodegas and sorting tropical fish.

"God willing and if the politicians allow it, I'll go back," she says.

Rodriguez is part of an economic pipeline dating back three decades, a connection legal and illegal between Hillsborough County and the border city of Matamoros. People throughout Matamoros rely on family ties to Plant City, Dover, Ruskin and Tampa to keep them clothed and fed.

With immigration reform coming from Washington, and 6,000 National Guard troops sent to back up Border Patrol agents, the flow may slow soon.

This month, the U.S. House and Senate will try to negotiate an immigration measure from vastly different plans. The Senate version allows a path to citizenship for some of the estimated 12 million immigrants living illegally in the United States; the House plan makes felons of them.

Both would require that at least some illegal immigrants return to the countries they came from before they can enter the pipeline legally again.

Matamoros, in walking distance of Brownsville, Texas, first supplied seasonal workers for the orange groves of Hillsborough County. Over the years, many people from Mexico settled in the county, and now newcomers work in construction and service as well as the fields.

The pipeline has helped boost Hillsborough's Mexican population to 5 percent - or 52,000 people - and the state's to 3 percent, according to 2004 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Thousands more in the Hillsborough work force remain uncounted.

Rodriguez was part of that invisible work force until she returned home in 2001. She hopes to come back again, but not as the wife of a U.S. citizen - a path she has declined. She is independent, she says, and her principles wouldn't allow it.

Rather, she is counting on a sister in Florida to sponsor her.

"I would hope to God she can do that," she says.

Finding Her Way
Rodriguez earns her living in Matamoros taking care of 3-year-old Diego, whose parents are in the Mexican military. She earns $100 every two weeks, for as long as four months at a time. This is the steadiest job she has had in Matamoros.

Using her cousin's border-crossing card, Rodriguez entered the United States illegally but without a problem in 1994. The two women closely resemble each other.

She moved to Plant City with a sister and made $640 a week at her two jobs. Much of the money went to her mother in Matamoros or to a savings account at a Mexican bank.

She was making far more than most Mexican immigrants - the equivalent of $33,000 a year, compared with an average of $19,000 for Mexican immigrants nationwide, according to a 2000 report from the census. The comparable figure for native-born Americans was $37,000, the census said.

Last year, Mexican nationals in the United States sent $20 billion in remittances to Mexico, according to the World Bank. For every dollar sent back, the World Bank reported, they spent $18 in the United States.

In August 2001, Rodriguez returned to Matamoros to help with funeral arrangements for her younger brother, Jose Manuel, 18. He had been shot to death. She planned to return to Plant City the same way she always had - using her cousin's crossing card.

The Sept. 11 attacks changed that. Border agents were checking closely and recognized that the fingerprint on the card didn't match hers. She was arrested and jailed two days before a relative paid the fine.

Now, her two sisters, in Plant City and Orlando, support the family back home. One married a citizen.

Families Separated
Families separated by toughened U.S. border enforcement are common in Matamoros. In this city of assembly plants, or maquiladores, whose population swells with would-be border crossers from the interior of Mexico, people on every corner remember lives on the other side before Sept. 11.

Roberto Hurtado Sr. is one of them.

Wearing a Hooters T-shirt from Brandon, Hurtado shops for eggs and other groceries in the downtown plaza. Money from his son in Hillsborough County, who buys and sells used cars, helps a lot.

In the 1970s, Hurtado was one of thousands of migrants picking tomatoes and other crops in Immokalee, Bonita Springs and Fort Myers. He learned English and moved to better jobs, on oil rigs, welding and driving trucks. He earned his legal residency.

"Florida is the paradise for illegal immigrants," he says. "They need the cheaper labor. Without the illegals, they can't make it."

Hurtado lost his legal right to enter the United States after serving time for a marijuana conviction. He crossed over some before Sept. 11, but now that's out of the question.

"I'd walk across the border on the bridge, and because I speak English, it wasn't hard to go over there," says Hurtado, 49. "Then, in 2002, they caught me for re-entry."

Accustomed to the U.S. lifestyle and amenities, his wife and three U.S.-born children refused to move with him to Matamoros from Texas.

Despite the separation and without access to a border-crossing card, he won't attempt to walk over the bridge.

Hurtado lives with a roommate near the downtown plaza. He finishes his shopping and walks home alone.

Illegal Entry
Some 60 percent of the immigrants illegally in the United States came from Mexico.

Of the total population, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 are in the country on expired border-crossing visas, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center study. They entered at a border checkpoint and never went home.

The requirements for a crossing card: a letter from an employer verifying a stable job paying at least $200 a week; strong family, business and social ties to the home country; and a hunch from U.S. consular officers that the applicant won't stay in the United States illegally.

An additional 4.5 million illegal immigrants stayed in the United States after tourist or work visas expired.

The majority, 6 million to 7 million, evaded immigration and Border Patrol agents, entering illegally, according to the study. Many take their chances by crossing the deadly deserts and mountains in the neighboring states of Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona.

Others try sneaking in through Texas.

Across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Border Patrol agents drive back and forth in sport utility vehicles, on the lookout for crossers as well as bandits who prey upon them.

For Mexicans looking to the United States, a move to Matamoros is supposed to be a stepping stone. But most run out of money by the time they reach Matamoros and have to settle, in a city where jobs are scarce and adults and children peddle cheap candy and other goods at the plaza.

They bring their idiosyncrasies and their food, making Matamoros a confluence of culture and vernacular from other Mexican states. It also makes for an unhappy populace.

Jose Lamas, now a documented U.S. citizen, was the first in his family to enter the Florida pipeline, in the early 1970s. He earned a living in construction, using a Social Security card he bought in Miami. It was an illegal move but, to Lamas, a necessary one.

"I still remember the number," Lamas says, reciting it. "I have the real one in my wallet, and I don't know it by heart."

He went back to Matamoros in 1977 to get two brothers, Carlos and Beto, who settled in Plant City. Eventually, the three became U.S. citizens.

Finding Prosperity
Lamas straddles both countries, living in Miami and spending time in Matamoros, where the pace is more to his liking. He rents out the upstairs apartment that is home now to Rodriguez, the woman who dreams of returning to Florida.

One day recently, Lamas' two Florida brothers arrived in the neighborhood unannounced after attending a funeral in Texas. They drive a red Ford Expedition with leather interior and a DVD player. Back when they entered the pipeline as migrant workers, they made the trip in the bed of someone else's pickup.

Lupe Lamas, Carlos' wife, sat in the shade near the dust-blown street. A former migrant worker, she went to school and works as a nurse at San Jose Mission in Dover.

She grew up a half-hour from Matamoros in Vallehermoso. The name of her town, which means "beautiful valley," is deceiving, she says.

"We call it the town of three lies," Lupe Lamas says. "It's not a city, it's not a valley and it's not pretty."

She turns to a 14-year-old nephew from Matamoros, who conked his head on the DVD player while crawling around the Expedition. He is in awe of the vehicle's appointments.

She considers for a moment what immigration reform will mean to her nephew's place in the pipeline.

"Learn English," she says, "and you can stay with me."

"Si, tia," he says - yes, aunt - and he smiles.

Contact Chris Echegaray at (813) 259-7920 or cechegaray@tampatrib.com.

Norma,

Twice you've mentioned God helping you to do something illegal.

Here's one instance:

"God willing and if the politicians allow it, I'll go back," she says.

If you're talking about the God of the Bible, then you should also apply it to yourself and not ask God to help you disobey laws. Instead, scripture says we are to "obey the laws of the land."

So please stop bringing God into the equation unless you want to do what is right and not hoping for divine help to do something that is clearly against the law.

Comprende?

Due to declining Church enrollment the following laws have been suspended for those "wanting to work to seek a better life."

7. Thou shalt not steal.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods.