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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2007 
Gift-Laden Mexicans Worriedly Heading South for the Holidays
 Dudley Althaus - San Antonio Express-News
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 |  | After traveling for days or weeks by foot and rail — and now within sight of the United States — many find themselves stopped at the Rio Grande by stepped-up Border Patrol enforcement or the dangers of the river crossing itself. |  | |
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico — Christmas for some of Mexico's poorer communities has been rolling southward in thousands of vehicles of sons and daughters now living in the United States.
About 1.2 million Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born dependents were expected to make the pilgrimage home this holiday season, many of them through this gateway, the most direct land route into the Mexican heartland.
As they do every year, the immigrants came bearing billions of dollars in gifts for those they left behind. But this year the returnees also made the journey with growing concerns about evaporating jobs in the United States and a hardening of attitudes toward undocumented immigrants.
"There are many families (in Mexico) who survive" because of the Christmas gifts, said Marta Grimaldi, 38, a school maintenance worker from Houston heading to central Mexico to visit her stepmother. "And they are very worried because things seem to be getting worse."
Those worries are echoed by Mexican officials, who are concerned about the treatment of their countrymen and aware of the key place immigrants hold in this country's economy.
"We hope to have in the future a country that doesn't expel any of its children because of hunger," President Felipe Calderón said last week in a ceremony welcoming the immigrants home for the holidays.
More than 6 million Mexicans now live in the United States illegally, a recent Calderón administration study said. Other studies suggest that perhaps another 6 million have become legal U.S. residents, many after arriving without legal papers.
In recent years, Mexican immigrants in the United States have been sending home at least $23 billion annually to support their families and invest in their communities, according to the Mexico's central bank. That money flows into some of the country's poorest communities, providing a lifeline to 17 million people, other studies report.
In addition, the immigrants who returned this Christmas season were expected to bring $5 billion in gifts to family and friends, a Mexican congressional commission estimated.
That bounty has created expectations back home that can weigh heavily on the returnees.
"Money, money, money, " a wearily smiling Isabel Gutierrez, 53, a naturalized U.S. resident and carpenter in Atlanta heading home to visit relatives in rural Michoacán state, said with a shrug. "That's what they always want. We just don't have it."
"Everyone thinks we're rich because we go to visit them every year. It couldn't be more different," said Gutierrez, who was traveling with his Mexican-born wife Rosa and 12-year-old daughter, who struggles with Spanish. "We are completely in debt."
Still, things in the U.S. are better than back home. The license plates of the vehicles heading south — mostly late-model minivans, pickups and sport utility vehicles — tell the tale: Texas, California, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Virginia and others.
All kinds of goodies — bicycles and all-terrain vehicles seem especially popular this year — have been stuffed inside the vehicles or lashed to their roofs and tails. More than a few pull a second car that will be left behind in Mexico.
"Many of them say that we are rich," Grimaldi, the Houston maintenance worker, said of her family members on the receiving end of the giving. "But when they come up themselves they realize we sweat for what we have."
Most returnees are legal residents in the United States. Getting back to homes and jobs north of the border after the holidays would prove too difficult and expensive otherwise.
But many also originally went north without legal documents. And they have friends and relatives still living illegally in the United States. The chorus for tightening the border and clamping down on illegal crossers has left more than a few fretful.
"A lot of people never know when they are going to be sent back," said Rosa Gutierrez, who became legal with her husband in the 1986 immigration reforms. "They don't want to buy anything, they don't want to spend more than they must."
Even as the immigrants poured south from Laredo along the Pan American Highway last week, others headed north.
The economies of Mexico and Latin America might be improving, but not nearly enough to provide for all. Spurred on by the apparent success of people returning from jobs in North America, many of the short-changed hit the road.
After traveling for days or weeks by foot and rail — and now within sight of the United States — many find themselves stopped at the Rio Grande by stepped-up Border Patrol enforcement or the dangers of the river crossing itself.
Nearly 100 people, most of them Central Americans but others from across Mexico, found temporary refuge last week at a shelter in a rough Nuevo Laredo neighborhood run by the Scalabrinis, a Roman Catholic religious order dedicated to helping the undocumented worldwide.
"I am a migrant," says a prayer in Spanish on the wall of the shelter's dining hall, which the priests say has fed about 10,000 travelers this year alone. "I am a person searching for the work I couldn't find in my own land," the prayer continues. "That is why I've put myself on the trail, in hopes of a better life for myself and mine."
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
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