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 Editorials | At Issue | April 2006 
Mexico's Building Boom: Fragile Foundation
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
| | Migrants' dollars are translating into new homes, but many won't return to live in them. |
Santa Maria Atexcac, Mexico - After six years illegally working construction in the United States, Martin Sanchez has come home to this mountainside village transformed.
Sanchez, 23, left here an unskilled laborer with few expectations and a sixth-grade education. He's returned as a master drywall installer with money in the bank and plans for a prosperous future.
But the changes to Atexcac, a community of 5,000 people clinging to the sunrise side of Mexico's highest volcanoes in central Puebla state, may have been greater still. Rutted dirt roads have been paved, rattletrap buses replaced by cars and pickup trucks, adobe shacks transformed into brick multistory mini-palaces.
"This town is different, more modern, more open," Sanchez said one recent morning, his eyes scanning a street on which every house seems under construction. "People are richer now."
Atexcac's building boom, which began about five years ago, is mirrored across much of the Mexican countryside as villagers working in the United States invest in a future many intend to spend in their hometowns.
But experts say the impact of such investments will prove shallow unless the money translates into more substantial investments that create lasting jobs. While they might seem to scream progress, the showy new houses going up in such places as Atexcac often do more to push people north rather than keep them at home.
As the U.S. Congress wrestles yet again with what to do about illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America, the lack of rural development in sending countries and their growing dependence on migrants' earnings make stopping the flow all but impossible.
"They are never going to be able to get rid of the Mexicans," said Sanchez, who said he earns $120 a day in Baltimore, more than he could in a week in Atexcac. "They can throw out one, but 10 more will replace him."
Mexico's migrants a great many of them working illegally sent more than $20 billion home in 2005, according to government figures and a just-released study by the Inter-American Development Bank.
Repatriated savings or remittances are the country's third-largest source of foreign income, after petroleum and the foreign-owned factories called maquiladoras. And they're by far more crucial to local economies than any government program, some villagers say.
"We have to do things ourselves. The government doesn't give us very much at all," said Felix Castellanos, 58, whose two migrant sons have sent money back for building houses.
And "those who don't have a good house now, want one." But the apparent prosperity in places such as Atexcac will prove short-lived without a longer term plan, some experts say. Efforts to get migrants to invest in factories or other job-creating businesses have fallen short so far.
"People invest in what they think is progress. The first thing you do is buy a house. You don't invest in a business," said Manuel Orozco, a remittances expert at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. "But to expect remittances to transform a local economy is to ask too much of that money."
And the pull of migration has torn families apart and emptied Atexcac of young people. Those who haven't already left are dreaming of doing so.
"We can see improvement in the economy, with the houses and all, but it's destroying the families," said Justino Sanchez, Martin's 28-year-old brother, a bishop at one of Atexcac's two Mormon temples. "They are disintegrating. People are losing their values."
Many of the newly built houses in Atexcac, like those across rural Mexico, stand empty or are lived in by parents and children the migrants have left behind. While many migrants intend to one day return home, many likely will not.
"They're building all these houses, but they don't go back to them," said Rodolfo de la Garza, a political scientist who studies immigration at Columbia University. "What are you building them for? It's the myth of return."
Hunched in the shadows of the twin volcanoes Popocatιpetl and Iztaccihuatl, Atexcac has been a farming village for almost its entire existence. Families grew corn, herded goats and tended orchards on small patches of soil.
But the land and the farming are playing out. Village men have long sought work at construction sites in Mexico City and elsewhere when the cash ran low.
Migration to the United States began in the early 1990s, when several local boys went with those from a nearby village, finding work in the restaurants in Wilmington, Del.
Word of good jobs, at good wages, got back to the village. More young men went, then women, then entire families.
After a 1999 earthquake damaged many of the town's houses, migrants started replacing them with bigger, better ones, paying as they went.
Today, nearly half the houses in Atexcac are either newly built or under construction, the town's mayor estimates.
Some houses are virtual mansions, painted in the bright oranges, reds and yellows favored by Mexican homeowners. Others are more sedate and smaller, but still far grander than families here have ever known.
Porfirio Diaz, 34, decided to head to Delaware four years ago after a brother built a two-story house across the road from his parents' one-story place.
"People see what working there can do, and now everyone wants to go," he said.
The rush for better housing has boosted Atexcac's economy. In a farm village where field work pays just $9 a day, bricklayers can make up to $180 a week nearly as much as in Mexico City or elsewhere.
A new restaurant has opened. Schoolchildren are better dressed and better fed. Late-model cars cruise streets.
Bricks, other building supplies and sand for making cement stand stacked high in front of many lots. The air rings with the sounds of saws, hammers and digging shovels.
"There is much more work in the community," said Mayor Delfino Morantes, who also works as a construction foreman. "It wasn't like that before. As they want their houses, they are generating a lot of income here."
Fairly dramatic changes had already begun in Atexcac before migration began. The Roman Catholic Church still holds its traditional place next to the mayor's office, but many villagers have become Mormons in recent decades, and a large Pentecostal church sits at the entrance to town.
The lessons learned by migrants north of the border, and transferred home by their return and investment in houses, may be pushing the changes further still.
"You have to admire the Americans, the way they work," said Benjamin Sanchez, Martin's uncle, who is building large houses in Atexcac for three sons working in Delaware. "If they know how to save money, we can learn here to do the same. The idea is to put the savings to work, to be able to build something."
Still, not everyone is pleased with the new Atexcac or should be.
Returning migrants have brought with them sometimes jarring ideas and ways of doing things. Drug use is on the rise, some villagers say.
Families have been torn apart as migrating husbands and wives have left children with grandparents.
Many teenagers finishing ninth grade in the local junior high schools have opted to migrate rather than stake their futures at home.
As many as half of Atexcac's 2,000 adults now live in the United States, Morantes said.
Anyone who can run, it seems, has run for the border.
"The children are acquiring the mentality of leaving," said Raul Vasquez, a junior high school principal.
"They finish here and they want to head out immediately. There are very few who want to keep studying."
"Remittances are pulling everything up," he said. "It's improved the area. But we are becoming dependent upon migration."
Martin Sanchez, the drywall installer, came home last month to get married. Although he hasn't anyone in particular in mind yet, he intends to be wed within two months and to take his bride back to Baltimore.
He'll train her in drywall installation, Sanchez said, and together they'll earn and save lots of money. Then they'll come home to stay.
"It will be different this time," Sanchez said of his return north of the border. "I'm planning for the future." |
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