| | |  Editorials | Issues | December 2009 
More Mexicans Returning Home to Poverty
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
go to original
December 24, 2009
| | Valentin Martinez worked for nearly a decade as a house painter in West Palm Beach, Fla., earning $100 on a good day. Now the work in the U.S. has dried up, and he has returned to the sunbaked cornfields he left years ago. On a good day now, Martinez makes $7.50. (Keith Dannemiller/Houston Chronicle) | |
La Florida, Mexico — Not so long ago, grateful villagers who fled to jobs across the United States erected a monument to the dollar bill in this community of dirt farmers staked to the barren highlands of central Mexico.
Today, amid the worst hard times in even great-grandparents' memories, many of those same migrants have returned home for good to the hunger they'd hoped to escape.
And the metal dollar monument stands rusting at the entrance to a small horse track carved into the cornfields, a fading memorial to dreams postponed or abandoned.
“Those who come back will have nothing,” said Gloria Ramirez, 36, who was helping relatives this week hand-harvest a patch of scraggly corn in the shadow of the sign. “There just isn't anything here.”
Few of Mexico's poorer corners have been hit harder by the U.S. recession than La Florida and neighboring, largely indigenous, villages northeast of Mexico City.
Many of the estimated 6,000 local men and women who migrated illegally in the past 15 years had worked in construction or at service jobs that disappeared in the downturn. Hundreds of jobless men have returned home penniless, likely for good.
Remittances plummet
Those remaining north of the border have hunkered down, unable or unwilling to send the amount of money that long has kept food on tables and roofs over heads here. The usual Christmas flood of vacationing migrants flush with cash is barely a trickle.
“People have no work up there and the remittances have just collapsed,” said Fernando Escamilla, a local official in Cardonal, the long-played-out mining town that is the county seat for La Florida. “Families really are feeling it.”
Tied to the U.S. economy by exports and money sent home by migrants, Mexico is one of the countries hit hardest by the global recession.
The Mexican economy will shrink by some 7 percent this year, taking at least 300,000 jobs with it. Economists estimate that some 7 million teenagers and young adults are neither working nor in school, creating a vast army of unemployed. The money wired home by migrants in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent compared to last year.
“The United States economy collapsed upon us,” President Felipe Calderon said in a speech this month.
In addition to the downturn north of the border, Mexico's economy was battered by last spring's swine flu outbreak, the drop in both prices and output for its oil exports, and the ongoing crackdown on narcotics gangsters.
The La Florida area's mass illegal migration to Texas, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas ignited in the mid-1990s following Mexico's last serious economic crisis. The village's pioneering pathfinders invited siblings, cousins and friends to join them.
“Those who had gone before painted the situation as a marvel and everyone wanted to go,” said Pedro Gotthardt, 69, a Roman Catholic priest who is one of a handful of German missionaries who for 40 years have tried and largely failed to create stable jobs in the area. “Many people still want to leave.”
Verdant vegetable fields carpet the land a few miles to the west of La Florida, watered with sewage and storm runoff from Mexico City. But La Florida's scraggly corn and bean crops cling to thin topsoil punctuated with cactus and stone.
Those coming home to stay in La Florida and other villages face iffy yields on their dry-land farms, poor pay as day laborers in neighboring fields or hit-or-miss work in distant cities. Those who have invested savings to open small stores or other businesses often fail for lack of customers, Gotthardt said.
“Many of the young bachelors are coming back,” the priest said. “What are they going to do here?”
No greener pastures
Valentin Martinez stooped low to his work this week in the cornfield near the dollar monument. His right arm swinging a scythe, Martinez and other men chopped their way through the stands of drying stalks.
Martinez labored for nearly a decade as a house painter in West Palm Beach, he said, pocketing $100 on his better days. Since returning home early this year, the father of three has scrounged for work, earning just $7.50 for the day of cutting corn.
“The work just dried up,” Martinez, 39, a beanpole of a man with a weathered face and gap-toothed grin, said of his U.S. job. “And there is nothing here.”
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us