WACO (Texas) TRIBUNE-JOURNAL

January 16, 2008

The lure of El Norte:  Like thousands of other ambitious young Mexicans, Eloy Francisco and Rosario Hernandez risked death to pursue a more promising future

Story and photos by J.B. Smith

Tribune-Herald staff writer

TEHUACÁN, Mexico — A warm summer evening on the cathedral plaza of this city is a picture of Mexican prosperity. The young businessmen with their cell phones. Lines at the ATMs.

A poodle-grooming salon, a brightly lit discount store full of Chinese-made goods, a movie theater with a parking garage. Hotels with wireless Internet, sidewalk cafes with cappuccino.

Families stroll beneath the palm trees as marimba bands, balloon men and roasted-corn vendors compete for their pesos. They eat in restaurants where a dish of stuffed peppers with walnut cream sauce and pomegranate costs the daily average wage of a Mexican.

But head to the western edge of town — past the brightly painted townhouses of the middle class, past the gleaming new shopping mall, off the highway and across the railroad tracks — and the prosperity and the pavement end.

In an unpainted cinder-block house on a dark street, a man swats mosquitoes and recounts how his 13-year-old son died chasing the dream of prosperity.

Faustino Francisco Galvan is in his late 30s but looks older. Under a bare hanging light bulb, he speaks of how he might have saved his son, Eloy.

The year before, his 16-year-old nephew, Rosario Hernandez, persuaded Eloy to join him on a dangerous illegal journey to the United States.

Faustino lives every day with his regrets. If only he had told the boy to stay home instead of agreeing to go along. If only his own body had not given out in the southern Arizona desert. If only he had told his rescuers about the teenagers who had gone ahead, then Eloy and his cousin Rosario might not have died of dehydration and returned home in caskets.

“If we had known what was going to happen, we would have had better discipline,” he says, more than a year after the disastrous crossing in May 2006. “Because he was a minor of age. He did not have the faculty to make this decision.”

The two boys were best friends. Rosario, who dropped out of school in fourth grade, routinely took Eloy to junior high school. They played soccer together. They discussed their dreams.

For Rosario, the dream was to quit his job at the blue jeans factory in Tehuacán and join his father, Maximino, in North Carolina, working in a plant nursery. There, he could work alongside his father and send money home to his mother.

Eloy’s dream was to escape poverty by getting an education.

“He liked to have things, to have money,” Faustino says. “There was much dissatisfaction on his part because he said he wanted to be a civil engineer in construction. But then he changed his mind and said, ‘Why wait so much time to have money? I’m going to the United States.’ ”

This dilemma wasn’t supposed to happen in Tehuacán. This was the city once hailed as a Mexican miracle, where a seemingly inexhaustible supply of jobs promised to stop the exodus of poor Mexicans to the United States.

Until the 1990s, Tehuacán was a small, staid city, famous for its mineral springs and ancient history. It’s located 130 miles southeast of Mexico City in a semi-arid valley where historians say corn was first cultivated thousands of years ago. Its name in Nahuatl, tongue of the Aztecs, means “Place of the Gods,” a name that stuck when the Spanish declared it a city in 1660.

But in the second half of the 1990s, everything changed. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement lit the fuse for an explosion of garment factories in Tehuacán. During that period, American textile companies outsourced hundreds of thousands of sewing jobs to Mexican “maquiladoras,” or factories. Tehuacán, which already had a small-scale garment industry, went into overdrive.

In the late 1990s, Tehuacán’s maquiladora employment climbed to 70,000, according to local economic development officials. The town’s unemployment rate vanished, then job openings completely outstripped the number of employable people. Men, women and young teenagers worked night and day, often several shifts in a row.

The Tehuacán municipal population grew from 190,416 in 1995 to 215,174 in 2000, according to the Mexican census, but other estimates show much more growth.

Workers flooded in from poor rural villages, some from hundreds of miles away. They came because a patch of corn and beans could no longer support a family in a globalized era, when Mexico was flooded with cheap corn imports.

They came because factories were hiring like mad and paying the equivalent of $50 a week, twice the going agricultural wage.

Empty warehouses, storefronts, even houses became hidden factories where the fashion fantasies of another world were churned out. Levi’s, Guess, the Gap, Ocean Pacific, Polo: American clothing icons, stitched together by hands that just yesterday flattened tortillas and guided the plow.

But this economic development had its shadow side. Environmentalists and downstream farmers complained the creeks and rivers were poisoned with blue dye from the process of making stonewashed jeans.

Labor organizers in Mexico and abroad alleged dangerous conditions and workers’ rights violations in the factories.

Maria Luisa Ruiz Aponte, a Tehuacán native who now teaches English at a college here, recalls her few months working at a maquiladora in the early 2000s. She was living with her parents at the time, and they sent her to work in the factories as punishment for going to a party instead of looking for work.

“We had to sew 2,000 pockets a day or you wouldn’t get your full day’s pay,” she says. “They didn’t tell you that when they hired you. I made 350 pesos a week for working six days.”

That 350 pesos was worth about $35 a week, with a purchasing power equivalent to about $50.

Workers were discouraged from using the restroom or talking to co-workers, and they had to pay for broken needles, Ruiz says. The factory required workers to stay late to finish their work.

“They’d say, ‘It’s your fault for not finishing on time,’ ” she recalls. “But if you finished all of them before the eight hours were up, they’d say, ‘Where are you going? Stay here and work until it’s time to go.’ ”

Growth overwhelmed the city. Newcomers built shacks on the edge of town out of cinder block, scrap metal and cardboard. In the absence of planning and zoning oversight, the new shantytowns outgrew the Tehuacán Valley and climbed the surrounding hills, into rocky terrain without pavement or sewer.

New arrivals included Faustino Francisco and his family. He had grown up 30 miles west of Tehuacán in Nopala, a village of 300, where he learned to grow corn and beans and raise goats.

In Tehuacán, he found work in the booming construction industry, working with cinder block.

He also found religious freedom. He had converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1993 and found he was no longer welcome in a traditional village that was knitted together by the festivals and rites of Catholicism.

“The main motive was religion,” he says. “The authorities did not allow a religion that wasn’t Catholic. To avoid conflict, we moved here.”

Faustino’s sister, Cecilia, and brother-in-law, Maximino, moved with their family to the same new neighborhood in Tehuacán. Maximino worked in construction, while Cecilia sold tortillas from her home.

The gods of globalization give and take away. The same market forces and free-trade policies that shifted jobs here from Los Angeles in the 1990s began shifting them away in the early 2000s to Asia, where labor was even cheaper. Meanwhile, a downturn in the U.S. economy around 2002 also hurt the market for Tehuacán’s products, economists say.

The garment industry that employed 70,000 Tehuacán workers in the late 1990s would decline to 15,000 by 2007, says Javier Lopez, head of the national industrial chamber of commerce in Tehuacán.

Gordon Hanson, a University of California, San Diego, economist who studies immigration, says Tehuacán ranks as a prime example of how economic forces can either endow or derail prosperity in faraway places, sending people seeking new horizons.

“Tehuacán went from an era of stable poverty to an era of unstable prosperity,” he says. “When you look at places like Tehuacán and how tied they are to the global economy, they’re now exposed to competition from places they never had to compete with before.”

For that reason, Hanson says it’s simplistic to think job growth in Mexico will stop Mexicans from heading north.

“Globalization creates a new source of shocks that can force people into migration,” he says.

Through boom and bust, the better wages of the United States remain an ever-present temptation. By Hanson’s calculations, the average Mexican man in his mid-20s with a couple of years of high school could expect to earn $8.21 an hour in the United States in 2000. In Mexico, he could expect a wage with the purchasing power of $2.10 an hour.

Free trade was no magic bullet for Mexico, Hanson says, but it has brought unprecedented opportunities.

“It has helped Mexico,” he says. “There has been strong job growth and wage growth where the maquilas (maquiladoras) have boomed. Is that to say Mexico did everything well in how it managed infrastructure and congestion? Almost certainly, no. Trade liberalization is not a development strategy; it’s just one piece.”

* * *

As the maquiladora boom ended, construction slowed, and Faustino and Maximino found that the jobs were unpredictable. They sometimes went weeks without work.

Maximino finally decided to try his luck working at a plant nursery in North Carolina, a state that had become a magnet for immigrant labor. There, he could make $6.35 an hour and more than $300 a week. He could make more in a day than a minimum-wage worker could make in a week in Mexico.

The employer in North Carolina encouraged the journey, arranging a guide to take him through the Arizona desert.

“My dream was to have a regular house, not one of luxury,” Maximino says. “This was the dream of my son, too. To have something a little better, that was my dream.”

When Maximino left, 16-year-old Rosario was operating a sewing machine in one of the plants in Tehuacán, often working the night shift. The job required skill and paid about 600 pesos a week — $60, with a purchasing power of about $85 in Mexico. That was more than the average maquiladora wage, but he often had to work long hours without overtime pay.

Rosario decided not to go with his father to the United States. But a few months later, he changed his mind. He told his father he was fed up working at the maquiladora and wanted to join him.

“He had much ambition to come,” Maximino says.

Maximino told his son to wait until he paid off his debt to the smuggler, but Rosario refused. Maximino and his boss worked out a loan to help Rosario with the $1,700 fee to travel to North Carolina the same way he did, through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Maximino felt confident his son would be safe because Rosario would go with the same guide who successfully smuggled him through the desert only months before.

Rosario told his mother, Cecilia, that he planned to stay four or five years, sending money to her so that the family could buy a better house.

“I tried to talk him out of it,” she says. “I told him he was so young, he had no responsibilities to us.”

Rosario persuaded cousin Eloy to come with him on his adventure in the land of fortune and promise. They would return to Tehuacán with enough money to have cars and nice houses and respect, no longer forced to live on the margins.

Faustino couldn’t talk his son out of it. He decided instead to go with his son on a journey through some of the harshest terrain on the North American continent.

That year, in a lonesome stretch of Arizona desert, 184 migrants would die trying to enter the American promised land. Eloy Francisco and Rosario Hernandez would be among them.

The news came down like a hammer. In December 2006, regional officials from the Mexican Secretary for External Relations informed Maximino and Cecilia Hernandez of the results of a DNA test performed by Dr. Lori Baker, a DNA scientist in Waco. Baker’s analysis proved the remains found in Ironwood Forest National Monument in May were those of Rosario.

Eloy’s body, found near that of Rosario, had already been identified through dental records. But Rosario’s parents had long clung to the unlikely hope that Rosario was still somehow alive.

“When we got the results that the tests were positive, we lost all hope,” Maximino says. “All the illusion that we had disappeared. There was nothing left to do but accept it.”

By this time, Maximino had returned from North Carolina to be with his family as the investigation continued. Considering the debt he incurred to travel to North Carolina, he had nothing to show for his effort.

“I sacrificed all of my journey, all that I went through to cross,” he says. “The trip was useless. Now I feel culpable because I told (Rosario), ‘Come on, there’s work here.’ I never imagined that this would happen. Nobody knew that this was going to happen.”

Did he blame the coyote for abandoning his son and nephew?

“There’s only one person who’s guilty,” he says. “For encouraging them in their American dreams. That’s me.”

Maximino’s voice is tense and hoarse as he speaks of his guilt and despair. He’s still angry that, after the news, more than a month passed before receiving Rosario’s body. The boys were buried near each other in a graveyard on the edge of Tehuacán.

But even with the bodies of the teens in their native soil, Maximino feels no peace.

“Even though it’s been a year, it still feels the same way,” he says. “My wife still feels resentment toward me because of what happened. It’s a lot of effort for us to stay together.”

Eloy’s mother, Constanza, was reluctant to speak of her son’s death during a visit this summer. Faustino’s sister, Clara, who was rescued with Faustino in the desert, was still recovering from mental trauma and unable to discuss what happened.

Faustino’s church helped the family with the cost of recovering and burying the bodies, and also helped comfort him.

“In an emotional sense, religion helped a lot,” he says.

Maximino tried but failed to get a temporary work visa in December 2006 to return to the land of promise. He plans to return illegally to North Carolina sometime this year, taking his chances in another desert crossing.

“Whatever it takes, it’s worth it,” he says.

Not so with Faustino. He feels shame for breaking another country’s laws and searing guilt for not reining in his son’s ambitions. He cannot bear the thought of crossing the desert again.

“The story I told you last night, I never want to repeat that story because it’s like grabbing a pistol and putting it to my head,” he says.

“In our crossing, we encountered cadavers, poor souls in the middle of the desert. We encountered bones that were very dry, people in decomposition. I realized then that it was a place where only the desperate go....”

Faustino says he would like to return to work legally in the United States some day — a slim possibility under current immigration law. Temporary work visas are difficult to get, and the only way most unskilled workers can immigrate legally is to have family members in the United States to sponsor them.

In the meantime, he continues taking the bus to whatever construction site will have him. He continues trying to raise his family — his four remaining children and toddler granddaughter — in a little cinder-block house on an unpaved street while the promises of prosperity in Tehuacán and the United States pass him by.

In the future, if his son, 12-year-old Efraim, asks permission to go north, he’ll say no.

“We were born here in this country, and if we are poor, I believe we should look for other means to leave, or work harder, and not risk our lives,” he says. “Because life is beautiful, and you have only one. You should care for it.”