 |
|
|
 Business News | June 2007 
In Mexico, Many Ask: Why Stay?
 Jim Landers - The Dallas Morning News
Oaxaca, Mexico – We were talking about Mexicans who migrate to the United States and whether creating jobs at little factories like Mario's would keep the men at home.
"If you know anybody who would like to help us with that, let us know!" Mario Rendón said.
We understand about the pull of jobs and wages that bring Mexicans to Texas. Time spent among the poor of Oaxaca and Chiapas offers some insight into the push.
Jobs are scarce, as you might expect, and not that many of the residents of these two poorest states in Mexico get a good education.
But there's also a scarcity of credit, a scarcity of market access, and the unreliable roads and electricity that businesses have to negotiate. Add to that the strong resentment among Chiapanecos and Oaxacans toward their governments – resentment that's boiled over into mini-rebellions and helped drive away the tourists who were the area's economic mainstay.
Mr. Rendón is a 27-year-old agricultural engineer who employs five workers in a village outside Oaxaca. Their plant turns an ancient Indian grain called amaranth into flour, cereal, cookies and other snacks.
"Cortez wanted gold, but amaranth is the real treasure of Cuatemoc," Mr. Rendón said.
Centli Amaranto is a cooperative that supports 81 small farmers who grow the leafy, waist-high plant on the central hilltops and southern mountains of Oaxaca. Cultivation, suppressed in the 16th century by the Spanish conquistadors who wanted wheat, began again in the 1990s as a way to add nutritional value to the meager diets of farm villagers.
Once production exceeded local demand, the growers sought markets elsewhere. A food company in the state of Puebla bought amaranth for a couple of years but then stopped. So they built a small mill and bakery and hired Mr. Rendón to run it.
Five years on, annual sales are about $100,000. By the end of this year, Centli Amaranto hopes to break even for the first time since it began in 2002.
The little factory processes 20 tons of grain a year, including the bits eaten by birds that sneak beneath blue tarps covering mounds of the tiny seeds. Capacity, however, is 100 tons a year.
There is brave talk of introducing Mesoamerican amaranth to the world. Applications are being processed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Mr. Rendón says the nutritional value of amaranth is so great that baby food maker Gerber Products Co. has expressed interest.
For now, however, sales are largely door-to-door, minimarket-to-minimarket in Oaxaca.
"Finding markets is one of the great problems of Mexico," Mr. Rendón said.
You can see it in the central markets as well. There are gorgeous wool rugs and tapestries for sale at stores in the ancient center of Oaxaca.
But after last year's barricades and street riots that started over a teachers' strike, shop owners say the banks stopped processing their credit-card transactions. Cash-only is a hard way to sell to the wary tourists who have ventured back into Oaxaca and Chiapas.
Francisco Perez Gomez, 35, lives in a pine forest hamlet in Chiapas called Pinar. He makes rustic tables and chairs in front of his house with an electric table saw and other tools he bought with money he made as a construction worker in Panama City, Fla.
Mr. Gomez spent 18 months furtively working without immigrant documents. He made $13 an hour and sent home $120 a month to his wife, Maria.
The company that sent the money charged $20, which left Maria and the seven children with $100 a month.
She collected another $16 a month from the Mexican government as a low-income food supplement. Maria also sells a couple of wool Indian skirts she makes by hand every month.
Only the oldest of the children, a 13-year-old boy who carries a bird-lethal slingshot, goes to school.
Francisco came home from Florida with his table saw and tools in a silver Chevy pickup truck with Texas plates. He makes his tables and chairs on order through a shop in Tuxtla Gutierrez, about 50 miles away.
But for six months of the year, the rains wash out the power to Pinar, and Francisco's tools are useless. He expects to head back to Florida when the power gives out this year.
Domingo, a driver in Oaxaca whose family name is better left unsaid, given the violence here, spent three years in Southern California as an undocumented worker. He picked cucumbers and other crops, then worked in a machine shop. The money he sent home allowed his wife to build them a house. But all things considered, he said, he'd rather be in Oaxaca.
How would he turn things around to keep Oaxaca's men at home?
"Wow," he answered. "Well, since I've been back last year, we've been through really a lot here. I am with a group of people who talk about what we can do. ... I don't see any way out of this but open warfare."
Domingo points to a gas station barricaded from the street with tall sheets of corrugated metal.
"That station belongs to a guy from Puebla. The governor of Oaxaca doesn't like the governor of Puebla, so he closed the guy's station," Domingo said.
Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, who won Oaxaca's election in 2004 amid allegations of fraud and vote-buying, closed an opposition newspaper and dismissed the demands of striking teachers last year. So the teachers and their leftist supporters blockaded Mr. Ruiz's offices for five months.
After local police efforts failed to restore order, former President Vicente Fox ordered federal forces to break up the barricades. Twelve people were killed.
The Mexican Senate debated a bill to put the federal government in charge of Oaxaca, but that was voted down. A nonbinding resolution was passed saying Mr. Ruiz should resign, but he refused.
Mr. Ruiz has posters around Oaxaca supporting his Institutional Revolutionary Party's candidates in July's state assembly elections. They brag about 330,000 jobs created under his administration and urge voters to "Go for More."
Domingo said Oaxacans can't take much more.
"The system is set up so that some people just can't get ahead," he said. "Mexico is a rich country. But even doctors, engineers and other professionals can't get a job in their [chosen] fields."
"The upper-class people are with the governor. Things are working out fine for them," Domingo said.
"Like most people, though, I'm lower class, and we've had enough." |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us