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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2007 
Los Cabos Boom Helps Mexicans Stay in Mexico
 Alfredo Corchado - Dallas Morning News
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 |  | I have everything I need here: job security, a home, a family and plans to expand. I know it sounds strange, but this is the Mexican dream made right here in Mexico.
- Jose Antonio Mendoza Sarabia |  | |
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico - This seaside jewel is the stuff of immigrant dreams.
Maribel Uribe, 38, still can't get over her first glimpse of beauty: a paycheck "three times what I made in my hometown," says the single mother of two. "Opportunities are everywhere."
Humberto Lozada Balderas, a waiter, is just as effusive: "The demand is insatiable."
While this may sound like Mexicans waxing poetic about the American dream, this dreamscape is actually hundreds of miles south of the U.S. border with Mexico - in the state of Baja California Sur.
Construction here is booming. U.S. tourists and residents arrive in droves - buying million-dollar homes or paying hundreds for luxurious overnight hotels. The economy is growing at an average rate of 15 percent, compared with 3 percent for the rest of the country.
The result: fierce competition for Mexican workers by both U.S. and Mexican employers in Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo - a resort community commonly known as Los Cabos.
In many ways, this area represents the kind of prosperity that Mexico wants to duplicate in other parts of the country to keep its workers at home. And much of that investment - in the billions of dollars - comes from Americans seeking a second home and a different lifestyle.
Juan Mucino, a developer at La Vista, a posh residential project with a stunning view of the Gulf of California, recalls greeting workers from the interior of Mexico as the ships landed in nearby La Paz.
'I'd tell them, 'Welcome to Baja California,' he recalls. 'And the workers would totally ignore the word 'Baja' and think they were actually in California.
"Overnight, they'd hightail it out looking for Los Angeles," he said. "It took a while for them to realize that we are hours away from the border, and that we would pay them good money, sometimes as much as a U.S. employer."
Mucino and other employers often pay up to $200 a week - three to four times the going rate in the rest of Mexico - for workers to build half million- and million-dollar homes.
The result is rare opulence in a largely impoverished country.
Tourism is Mexico's new oil - "a powerful engine to create jobs" - as President Felipe Calderón has said and others have echoed.
"For every worker who finds a job in Los Cabos, that's one less worker heading to the United States," said Arturo Trevino, state tourism minister for Baja California Sur. "You never know. With more Cabos, the United States may actually miss our countrymen someday."
NOT YET LIKE IRELAND
Mexico is at least decades away from repeating the Ireland experience, immigration experts say. The booming economy in that once-impoverished European nation continues to draw thousands of Irishmen back home - so many that some employers in New York City and Boston are beginning to feel their loss.
Similarly, if Mexico manages to attract more immigrants back, their loss would be felt north of the border, experts say.
"Mexican laborers have been a part of our economy and society for over 100 years," said Hilary Dick, a specialist on Mexican migration at Pennsylvania's Bryn Mawr College. "It would be a tremendous loss to the U.S. if we were to drive out this dedicated labor force."
For the most part, Mexicans today still struggle to make a living. This economic reality is responsible for the continuing exodus of their countrymen, including some of the brightest and most ambitious.
But Los Cabos represents a bright spot for Mexico - a peek at what could be ahead as the country's birthrate falls and the economy gradually improves.
Private investment has increased from $9 billion in 2000 to $12.85 billion in 2006. Much of that investment was earmarked for communities along the Pacific Coast and Gulf of California, particularly the Baja California Sur region, said Bertha Villalobos, spokeswoman for the Secretary of Tourism department.
Los Cabos, in particular, continues to be "a very strong market for foreign investment," Villalobos said, "and a magnet for job creation."
Personal stories underscore the hope that Los Cabos has come to represent for many Mexicans.
Jose Antonio Mendoza Sarabia was a college graduate going nowhere. He thought of heading to the United States to work, make some money, return to Mexico, buy a home and get married. And he thought Los Cabos would be an ideal place to make enough money to pay a smuggler.
CHANGE OF PLANS
Instead, Sarabia met Mucino, the developer, who hired him as his personal driver.
After a few months of work and witnessing the economic explosion around him, Sarabia saw his own future. And it was bright.
He quit his job, started his own coconut business and found the woman of his dreams, Gilda.
He now owns Cocorchata, one of two fresh coconut shops in Los Cabos. He and his wife have a 4-month-old son, Amado Rodrigo, and own their first home. Thoughts of heading to the United States have evaporated. Instead, he plans to expand into a shopping mall crawling with Americans.
"I have everything I need here: job security, a home, a family and plans to expand," Sarabia said. "I know it sounds strange, but this is the Mexican dream made right here in Mexico." |
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