| | |  Editorials | Issues | December 2008 
For One Mexican Family, Pull of US has Faded
 Oscar Avila - Chicago Tribune
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 |  | That's why they call it the land of opportunity. Isn't it? |  | | |
Zinapecuaro, Mexico — For the Villafuerte family, back home in Mexico for five years now, the pull of the U.S. no longer seems so strong.
Jose Villafuerte's mother was dying, so he came home with his wife and teen daughter, Gaby. He left behind a home in Aurora bought with five of his adult children.
While in the Chicago area, he also earned enough to build a far humbler home in Mexico, with concrete floors and a tidy plot of land where he grows corn. He makes enough to subsist by selling cucumbers, cherries and other produce in smaller villages, a far cry from the $800-a-week roofing job he held down during eight years in the U.S.
But Villafuerte, 48, says the economic crisis in the U.S. has definitely tilted the balance back to Mexico.
That, and the little family joys he is rediscovering, such as serving as godparents for his niece's 5-year-old daughter, Diana. Diana's mother is an illegal immigrant, but because she dreamed that her daughter would be baptized in Mexico, she sent the girl back this Christmas even though she could not risk returning home herself.
With less money coming from his sons in Aurora, Christmas will be more modest this year—maybe a mound of tamales instead of the traditional ham. But as Villafuerte passed out glasses of soda and bottles of Victoria beer at a post-baptism lunch, he sounded like a man happy to be replanting roots here.
Still, the lure of the American Dream hasn't faded entirely.
His daughter, Gaby, now 19, admitted that this could be her last Christmas here for a while. In a voice soft enough that her parents couldn't hear a few feet away, she said she is considering returning to Chicago illegally because her brothers tell her life is better there.
"That's why they call it the land of opportunity," she said. "Isn't it?" |
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