CONTRA COSTA (California) TIMES

December 23, 2007

Dreams of returning home sustain Guatemalan immigrants

By Matt O'Brien  STAFF WRITER

HAYWARD -- A 61-year-old night janitor named Lucas was the first of the Kaqchikel Maya to settle in the flatland suburbs near Tennyson Road.

At least, that's the legend according to those who have been here the longest. He was el pionero -- the pioneer.

When he left Guatemala in 1994, he pledged to God he would go back to his country and the congregation of charismatic Catholics he served there as a lay church leader.

But as he planned the return, his 18-year-old son, Amado, wanted to join him in California, sharing his father's dream of returning home with enough capital to buy their own plot of land.

"He said he wanted to come. I said, 'Bueno,' good," Lucas recalled. "I'm going to cancel my plane ticket."

Next came another son, also named Lucas, who was 17 then and recently turned 26. Then came nephews, brothers-in-law and cousins. The first of them hailed from Agua Escondida, where the elder Lucas had devoted himself to the village church on a verdant ridge overlooking Lake Atitlan.

Later they followed from neighboring rural communities to the north, south and east -- places such as Chitulul, whose soils have sustained the Kaqchikel with corn, squash and beans since long before the Spanish conquered the region in the 1520s.

But this "Mayan way" of sustenance and society is being interrupted by migration, said the Rev. Greg Schaffer, a Catholic priest from Minnesota who has lived and served near Lake Atitlan since 1963.

"I see it as pretty tragic,” said the priest, who knows a few of those now living illegally in Hayward, as well as the families they have temporarily left behind.

Most come because they consider it a family duty and a necessary service, not because life in the United States is better for them. Indeed, their lives are typically difficult, defined by long hours of manual labor, cramped living conditions and daily challenges of dealing with a new language and culture. Even those trying to assimilate into largely Latino neighborhoods find that their Mayan ethnicity can set them apart.

They dream of funding a better lifestyle back home -- building a new house, sending children to a level of schooling beyond what they could imagine for themselves -- and rejoining their families in that better life. Some realize those dreams; some don't.

Some find that the time and distance away changes everything.

Lucas and those who followed came to Hayward the only way they knew how -- sneaking across the tropical border between Guatemala and Mexico, and then across the arid southern border of the United States.

They left a place of great beauty, beside a deep lake surrounded by towering, emerald-colored volcanoes.

"One by one, many came," said the younger Lucas, drinking coffee in a local Mexican-owned bakery as more Guatemalans who had recently arrived -- some from regions far from Lake Atitlan -- waited for work on the other side of the street. "It's almost like everyone came."

In the beginning, Lucas and his sons used networking to find jobs. They still do. But several years ago, they say, a brother-in-law, who has since returned to Guatemala, went to the Superway market near the railroad tracks and found work with a man selling flowers. Soon, 40 people were gathering outside the store fronts every day for work.

Perhaps the genesis of the Guatemalan day labor phenomenon here was not as simple as its pioneer family remembers. But in the past three years, there is no mistaking: The men have grown a few hundred strong.

In a city less diverse, the transition to the United States might have been more jarring -- both for the migrants and the surrounding community.

In Hayward, they tried to assimilate into a street where Latinos, and particularly Mexican-owned businesses, are already the norm. When merchants complained, the laborers dispersed and spread themselves thin, waiting in smaller clusters along the Tennyson corridor.

A year ago this month, with minimal controversy, the Hayward City Council voted to authorize funding to create a day-worker center at the Eden Youth and Family Center off West Tennyson Road, in the heart of the district where the Guatemalans and others were already waiting for jobs.

Hundreds signed up for the center, and a crew of workers began enrolling in English classes and showing up at a visiting health clinic -- often for their first medical attention in the United States.

But few in Hayward intended to stay. Some have already left.

Zaqueo Coche, 23, looked for day jobs on Tennyson Road for more than two years, and then in August he went home.

"I made the decision because there was not enough work," he said. "There comes a moment when one begins to despair."

The apartment, the food, everything was too expensive, he said, and he had little money left to send home.

He bought a one-way ticket to Guatemala City and returned to his family's slice of land in El Naranjo, a hamlet just south of Agua Escondida.

His mother, at least, was relieved.

"I am so happy to see him back here again," Cipriana Tax said a few days after her son returned. He climbed the steep slope behind his home and began cutting coffee plants, cleaning up the family plot for the coming harvest.

"It's pretty and peaceful and the air is pure," he said, comparing it with his isolated life abroad.

Catching a breath beneath a tall gravilea tree his family uses to shade the coffee plants, Zaqueo, wearing a ball cap embroidered with the words "San Francisco," said he didn't think his time in Hayward was very fruitful. But he did it "por la necesidad" -- for the necessity, or need. It's the phrase that almost all poor rural Guatemalans use to explain why they must go.

A report released this month by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean indicated that money sent to family members from Guatemalans working in the United States reached 4.2 billion this year, or 12.5 percent of Guatemala's gross domestic product. The importance of remittances to Guatemala's economy continues to rise. In 2001, remittances took up 3 percent of the country's GDP.

Most day laborers in Hayward say they try to transfer from $200 to $800 a month, and some send more. Others with few connections have trouble sending anything, especially during the cold and rainy months when outdoor work opportunities subside.

In San Gabriel, just south of El Naranjo, a man named Fermin began building a mansion several years ago with money he sent home from California. Amid houses of adobe, bahareque and concrete block, the tiled roof and Mediterranean arches of Fermin's house stood out starkly from its peasant surroundings. Some in San Gabriel viewed it as folly, because Fermin never came home, and his house lay empty and unfinished on the main road through town. Yet it raised the limits of what was possible.

Hayward day laborer Santos, 34, owns a plot of land on a slope overlooking Fermin's house. All the profit he makes here is going to pay his father and brothers to build him a house on that plot of land -- but nothing showy like Fermin's, he said. The project began in May and by December it was almost finished -- although he had to halt the construction during October because he wasn't making enough money in Hayward.

The effort to build a home for himself has cost him more than $14,000 -- and parts of two fingers.

He was working one East Bay job when his hand was caught in a lawn mower. His contractor gave him $150 to make up for the loss. Friends told Santos he could fight against the employment abuse, but he wasn't interested in suing.

"I didn't come here to take from people," he said.

The Kaqchikel men ride across the Tennyson corridor on inexpensive bicycles, always with a watchful eye. Many -- including Zaqueo -- have been robbed of a day's income or cell phones on their way home at night. All have stories of unscrupulous contractors who paid them late or never.

And before organizers of the day-labor center began inviting them to Hayward City Council meetings and holiday cleanup events this year, they remained entirely in the underground -- a population removed from the society around them.

"A lot of them just come in and are talking to me. They are just so lonely," said Carla Dardon, a manager of the work center. "They feel that they're trapped here. It's like, finally they made it here. And they can't go back. Mostly because of the money."

Rafael, 30, a carpenter from the lakeside town of San Lucas Toliman, joined the Hayward Kaqchikel community in September after putting up 40,000 quetzales, or about $5,220, for a coyote, or smuggler, to bring him here.

If he doesn't pay back his remaining $4,900 debt by March, the coyote has the rights to take the home in San Lucas where his wife and three children live, he said. And he is growing increasingly nervous, waiting at all hours of the day for work that just won't come.

"I make a little bit for my family and a little bit for the debt," he said.

Schaffer, the priest, is doubtful that the remittances are as beneficial to the local economy and the Mayan community as some reports suggest.

"We think barter," said Schaffer, whose community projects and work to make his church a protected space during decades of civil war have made him a widely respected figure in the region. "Our people know the value of 10 pounds of corn but not 10 quetzales. If they've got money, it goes. But if they've got corn, they're very careful and conservative and get the most and best use of it."

He said the loss at home is also great, with distance dividing families. Some return and are not accepted. Others create hardships by their absence.

Before he left for Hayward almost three years ago, San Lucas resident Carlos, 35, was one of the top recommended guides taking tourists up the heights of Atitlan and Toliman volcanoes -- long climbs that sometimes involved camping overnight. He was featured in an English-language tour guide in 2002.

Carlos was also a community leader, a family man who was "really good to his wife and children" and someone who had managed to do well for himself despite a mountain of adversity dating to childhood, said Schaffer, who has known Carlos since he was a boy.

"They wouldn't tell me he was going because they know I'd be down looking for a way to try to stop him," Schaffer said. "We miss people like that. ... But it didn't surprise me. He's the guy who could do it if he could be given a little space, a little room."

But Carlos did the math. He had always been without his own land and property, working at the whims of others. He said he was watching his children grow up and realized he would not be able to pay for their education.

Carlos stuffed himself into crowded trailers full of corn and apples that carried him through Mexico to the U.S. border.

"I've never used false papers," he said. "It's not worth the pain. If I don't have papers, I don't have them."

No matter how poor they were financially, the fullness Hayward laborers said they felt in their day-to-day lives in Guatemala contrasts deeply with the restrictions of U.S. life as an illegal immigrant.

Lucas, the pioneer, still aims to go back. When he left, his country was still officially at war -- peace accords between the government and guerrillas were signed in 1996.

In the early 1980s, he worked for a large landowner in Agua Escondida who was slain, probably by guerrillas, and Lucas long feared that his connection to the murdered man would also put him in danger. In the end, though, it was marital trouble that prompted him to leave.

He expects it would be difficult to return to Agua Escondida after 15 years gone. But a clandestine life in Hayward has never become comfortable.

It took him a long time before he dared to set foot in the local Catholic church that he now considers his regular place of worship. He was originally told that going there might alert immigration enforcement forces to his presence.

A kindly, small man, he works a steady night job and spends the daytime sleeping or at home. His apartment is decorated with a large painting of white-capped North American mountains, a gift he earned from a moving job.

"I don't get out much," he said. "The worry is always with us."

His son, Lucas, said he believes his father's attachment to Guatemala, and his pledge to return, will bring him home some day.

"When you make a promise to God, you have to complete it, because it's a promise to God."

Is there a legal route for Guatemalans to work in the United States?

Finding a legal route to the United States is nearly impossible for most rural Guatemalans.

In 2005, the U.S. government issued 5,245 temporary work visas to Guatemalans. Of those visas, 110 went to seasonal agricultural guest workers; 5,071 went to guest workers in other industries, such as forestry, construction and landscaping; and 174 were H1 visas, which go to skilled workers with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

The number of invited guest workers is tiny compared with the estimated 320,000 Guatemalans living in the United States illegally, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Mexican border serves as gateway to U.S.

Part of the landscape for more than a century, some migrants stop if they find work; others continue on their journey north

By Matt O'Brien  STAFF WRITER

COMITAN, Mexico -- First they must get to Mexico and cross it.

In the roads, forests and papaya fields southeast of Comitan, in Mexico's southernmost Chiapas state, Alejandro Lopez Cadenas watched for them.

"I respect life more than anything," said Lopez Cadenas, a 35-year-old agent with Grupo Beta, the humanitarian, nonenforcement arm of Mexico's immigration patrol.

He was walking down a path behind a popular local recreation spot called the Lagos de Colon, an idyllic collection of small natural swimming holes, when he and his Beta partner, Ricardo Ley, spotted a group of migrants moving west from the nearby Guatemalan border.

Unarmed, wearing Grupo Beta's trademark orange shirts and just hoping to give them a safety lesson, Lopez Cadenas and Ley tried to flag down the men, but they sprinted away. They were probably Hondurans, Ley said.

"Normally, the Hondurans and the Salvadorans go running," Ley said. "The Guatemalans, no. They stop."

Migrants have been part of the Chiapas landscape for more than a century. Some stay to legally work on local fields; others flee north from the poverty or violence of their homelands. Lopez Cadenas remembers, as a child, when they regularly passed through his family's farm en route to somewhere else.

Guatemala's border with southern Mexico is 600 miles, or about one-third the length of Mexico's northern border with the United States. It is an unwieldy, porous and forested border that has long served as an illegal  gateway for tens of thousands of Central Americans each year, as well as migrants from other countries and continents trying to find a back route into the United States.

Some cross by raft into Mexico over the Suchiate River and on toward the city of Tapachula. But the shutdown this year of the main freight train line on Mexico's Pacific Coast plain has left many migrants stuck in southern Chiapas. Others now skip this region entirely, heading to the northern, jungled reaches of Guatemala before crossing into Mexico.

Many still jump onto moving trains farther north, putting their lives and limbs in danger. Others face a different kind of gauntlet, hiding in buses and trucks and avoiding robbers, gangs, drug-runners, local police and federal immigration agents.

Newspapers in Chiapas frequently report on the biggest immigration catches -- 69 Central Americans detained in a produce truck one day. An additional 213 caught stuffed in a trailer and sent back.

"There's days you don't see anyone and there's days you see 20, 30," Lopez Cadenas said. "We tell them about the dangers they're going to find. We ask them if they're OK, if they have any health problems, if they've been extorted by any authorities."

Most pass in the night, avoiding Mexico's immigration checkpoints on the daytime roads.

About a half-hour after Lopez Cadenas and Ley tried to flag down the group of migrant men, Lopez Cadenas spotted three Honduran women crossing cow pastures leading to a bubbling, shallow stream. One had a 3-year-old girl. Another had a baby with a cough.

Jackeline, 25, started to tear up when the agents stopped her. She thought it was over after all that work.

She said she was off to join her father in Florida. He left 20 years ago. Her mom died of lung cancer when she was 11. Jackeline was taking her 3-year-old and leaving her oldest child in Tegucigalpa, in the care of an aunt.

"He has never wanted me to go there," she later said of her father. "He doesn't know."

But that wasn't going to stop her any more than the three borders she had to cross.

Risky journey

The International Organization for Migration estimates that 6,000 to 12,000 Guatemalans enter the United States illegally through Mexico each year.

Not all stay for long. In a record year of deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expelled more than 21,000 Guatemalans.

Many more are deported by Mexican immigration enforcement, which reported ejecting more than 84,000 Guatemalans, along with 58,000 Hondurans and 27,000 Salvadorans, last year.