The Morenos pt. 3

The next morning, someone knocked on my bedroom door before sunrise. It was Sabina and Cruz’s son, José. Though I hadn’t seen him at the family gathering the night before, I instantly recognized him from Minnesota, from Lakewinds, the grocery store where we both worked. I didn’t know him well, but it was still José.

José who worked in the produce department.

José who religiously cleaned the lettuce every day except for Saturday.

José who I remembered to be quiet and whom I had suspected of pretending not to speak English.

(I have since found out that he actually doesn’t speak English.)

José said he’d woken me so that we could climb to the top of the peña – the rock I had heard so much about and glimpsed the night before -- and that we’d better get an early start since the sun would be too hot come midday.

We walked out the door with his dog in tow and a roll of toilet paper in my hand and headed toward the volcanic rock.

It took an hour (without a bathroom break, so the toilet paper was a waste) to scale. Most of the climb was walking, and we only used our hands to climb the steep rock at the very top. We didn’t speak, I was out of breath and José’s quiet anyway. I was scared but filled with adrenaline, the drug that quelled the fear and propelled my body up the face of the rock.

Out of breath and tired, we reached peña’s peak, and sat, looking out over the puebla. To the east, I saw a coalmine, to my right, there was a shrine on the mountain for those who had died on it.

I felt like I should say something like “We made it!” But instead the silence of the rock froze me and I did not know what to say to my companion. I began to feel out of place, like I had blindly journeyed with someone and had forgotten to ask their name and then arrived, only to sit in silence.

I had known Jose, but I had known him in another life in a snowy city where we worked together in a grocery store. I hadn’t been friends with Jose. We were cordial at work and I would ask him for bruised apples to take home for free, but other then that, we had never really talked.

For me, Jose was one of the hundreds of faceless, nameless Mexican workers we see in every city in America.

And now I was next to him, alone on some magical rock in the middle of the Mexican desert. My mind began to spin. I wanted to ask him questions about his journey home and if he liked it here and what he missed most about Minnesota. But before I could say anything, I looked over at José and noticed that he had covered his face with his cowboy hat and fallen asleep. I took his picture.

After a while, José awoke and began to walk down the mountain. I followed in silence.

When we got home, he said he had to go to work – selling water – and said he’d drop me off with Araceli and Jorge.

Araceli worked nights with me at the Lakewinds. I knew Araceli as the kind of woman who, instead of showing pain or fatigue, exhibited endurance and courage with a laughing grin. She had a lot of energy to clean and cook at work and I knew she had two kids at home to care for.

Her husband, Jorge was a goofball. He dubbed the white dishwasher at Lakewinds, Paul, “Pablo,” and often mocked the management’s strict rule of writing the name of the salad on top the dish by labeling tuna salad “spaghetti,” enchiladas as “tomato soup,” and so forth.

Araceli worked nights and Jorge worked days and they made it work. They bought a house, and in the sixteen years they lived in Minnesota, had three children who went to public schools.

I found Jorge, Araceli and their three children digging out a dirt hole alongside a dirt road in the desert.

When I saw them, I felt excited right away, like I could not possibly say or ask enough. I shed the dissonance I had felt with Jose and talked and talked and talked.

I updated them on others we had worked with, I told Jorge that Paul/Pablo, who is developmentally disabled, had been moved out of the kitchen since he had problems focusing after Manuel left and was now Lakewinds’ janitor. I asked about their children, I told them about my family, and, at last, I saw the baby that had grown inside of Araceli’s belly while we worked together.

His name is Joshua and he is almost four. He looks exactly like Jorge.

It took only an instant to realize that life was not easy for Jorge and Araceli in Bernal. They explained to me that they were in debt to the person who had smuggled them across the border so long ago, and that the coyote had confiscated their house long ago. The hole that they were digging was to become their house.

The Morenos, pt. 2

I decided to visit the Morenos after I was settled in Guanajuato. In the weeks pending my visit, I read about Bernal and daydreamed about seeing Araceli’s children again. I realized that the baby boy who kicked in her belly while we worked at Lakewinds would be three.

There is not much on the internet or in travel books about Bernal: it is tiny. The town has received some attention in the past few years, though, because Mexico’s new age-ers have identified the volcanic rock in the town as having healing energy. (see: http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/2003/the-magic-of-bernal/) When I did read about the town, words like “magical” and “healing” came up.

I suppose this is all to say that I had no idea what to expect from Bernal.

I took a bus from Guanajuato to Queretaro and then another bus to a town outside of Queretaro and then asked a taxi driver to bring me to Bernal, which I expected to be a few miles away. Forty minutes later I arrived at the state prison. The taxi driver had heard penal instead of Bernal.

After paying the driver a sum unheard of as far as rural Mexican taxi drivers go and winding through the desert for another hour, I arrived in Bernal.

The taxi let me out in the center square, and I stood and looked around, tired and confused and not sure how to carry my recording equipment, backpack and the flowers I had picked up to give Manuel’s mother.

Manuel’s only instructions had been to arrive in Bernal and ask for his mother, Sabina Jiminez.

I asked the first person who walked by where Sabina Jiminez lived. The person whom I asked (who I’d later be formally introduced to) told me that Sabina was her cousin and brought me to the gates of the Jiminez home. I rang the doorbell but no one answered. I sat on the curb outside of the door and prepared myself for a wait.

A few minutes later, an old man opened the door. I asked “Sabina Jiminez?” and he smiled and waved me inside. Manuel had never told me that I’d be visiting his father too.

I’ve since found out that Sr. Moreno was absent for much of the family’s upbringing – he drank too much and rode a mule an hour a day to get to the family’s farm outside of town, where he sometimes slept. A few years ago he had a stroke, and he hasn’t been able to speak clearly since.

He showed me inside. I asked him what his name was and he pointed to the crucifix on the wall.

“Jesus?”

He crossed his opposing index fingers and muttered.

Cruz. Cruz Moreno.

He looked like Manuel. He dressed the way elderly men sometimes do in the states, wearing a cardigan and slippers, only he also wore a cowboy hat. He sat down and pointed me to the garden, the horse, the kitchen and the bedrooms. The house consists of several rooms that the Morenos have spent the past fifty years building from wood and concrete, there are no hallways, and a tropical garden is in the center of the compound. I had chosen the wrong gift: the carnations I brought were pale compared to the orchids.

I didn’t know what to say to a man I had never met who could not speak. I smiled, we sat together waiting for Sabina.

Sabina arrived with dinner and half of the town in tow. I was not petted or admired. I was not chased around or stared at. None of the things that happen to the Hollywood movie white girl when she lands at an unknown third world location happened to me. The Morenos and their cousins and friends just asked me a lot of questions and then carried on with their conversation, they offered me food and I helped to cook. I felt, almost instantly, at ease.

The Morenos pt. 1

I’ve been back from Mexico for over a month and my experience haunts me. It haunts me because the drug war is in the news almost every day, it haunts me because I remember faces and names of people who are struggling or scared, and it haunts me because I am back in Minnetonka and so everyone asks about the Morenos.

The Morenos are the family of Mexicans I worked with in high school. Santiago and his brothers, Manuel and Jose had worked at Lakewinds, a local natural foods store, for nearly ten years before I started in 2003. Their cousins, Joel and Araceli, her husband Jorge had followed and also worked in the kitchen.

When I first came to work at Lakewinds, Manuel was the person I wanted to impress. He wasn’t my boss and he had no official title in italics below his name on his name tag, but everyone knew that he was the one who ran the kitchen. Manuel was shown the food before it went to the deli to be sold, Manuel made the food for the Christmas parties, Manuel had the last word. The kitchen worked like a finely oiled machine – everyone came to work on time, the food was beautiful and perfectly cooked and it was a wonderful place to smell.

I’d purposefully do dishes in front of Manuel to try to show him that I wasn’t just another white girl earning mall money; I’d try to ask him about Mexico and show an interest in his past. But he never really showed approval or opened up.

I became good friends with Santiago, his younger brother, because we worked the night shift together.

I got to know Araceli, who had a lot of energy and usually made me laugh, and befriended her just as she got pregnant with her third child. During her pregnancy, I’d ask a lot of questions about what she was feeling and, one time, I went over to her and Jorge’s house to meet her older two children and have dinner.

Time went by, and I really got to know the Moreno family. Manuel started to at least laugh at my jokes and acknowledge my pathetic efforts to prove my worth. Through Araceli and Santiago, I was gradually told a little bit about the part of Mexico the Morenos are from: a little puebla outside of Queretaro named Bernal, famous for its gigantic rock.

One day, I found out that the Morenos were illegal immigrants and had been fired from Lakewinds. There was no threat from outside; the human resources manager for the company had returned from a week vacationing in Cancun paranoid about their status and decided to get rid of them.

Work was never the same. Lakewinds burned through managers and the turnover was incredible, the food didn’t look right and I felt strange walking through the kitchen. I left for college but kept Santiago’s phone number and called him when I was home for breaks.

Joel, Araceli and Jorge went back to Mexico because Joel and Araceli’s mother was dying and Araceli wanted her children, who had been born in the United States and had never traveled outside its borders, to meet their grandmother in Bernal.

Manuel cleans houses in Minneapolis and Santiago does landscaping.

Jose, their brother, went back to Mexico to try to help on their family farm.

More time passed, memories of the Morenos subsided as I went through college.

I graduated from college in May and decided to spend the summer after graduation studying emigration from Mexico. Each time I was pressed to explain my interest in the issue, I'd think of the Morenos but would only sometimes explain my relationship to the family and how affected I was by what happened to them. They were always in the back of my mind but the thought of seeing them again was more fantasy than feasible.

About a week before I was to leave for Mexico, Manuel called. He had heard from a friend of a friend of my mother that I was going to be in Mexico for the summer. He wanted me to visit his mother. He hadn't been home in nearly twenty years and he wanted to send a visitor.

I accepted the task wholeheartedly.

Money

There's a lot of money in Mexico. The richest man in the world and telecommunications mogul, Carlos Slim lives here (his attorney's desert mansion was pointed out to e a few days ago). There thriving industry in Mexico City and Mexico has oil.

The problem is that none of this money is invested in the development of the country.

I've spent a lot of time in Brazil -- in Rio and in the northeast cities of Macio and Forteleza -- so I find myself drawing comparisons between the development of the two countries. In my experience, there is a much larger sense of nationalism in Brazil: the police are less corrupt, people believe in Lula, the president who rose from the favelas to take charge of the country's labor party, and people are, generally, proud to be Brasileiros. Of course none of these ideologies directly translate to investment in the country, but they sow the seeds of success for the next generation of educated young people to reap within the boundaries of Brazil. People want to come and work in Brazil, people want to work within the confines of Brazilian industry.

In Mexico, though, the next generation is dying to leave. The rural poor NEED to leave to survive and the educated youth are often too scared to stay. The violence in Mexico is at the point of driving its youth away.

In Brazil, there was this sense of connectedness with the crime. The favelas had drug lords who were at war with the police and the government and the networks of the drug lords spread to the prisons and the pick-pocketing youth.

This connectedness allows for the rich to distance themselves from the crime. The beef is between the police, the government and the drug lords and gangs. That being said, there are still kidnappings.

In Mexico City, however, the beef is between the rich and the police and the criminals. Only the police are on the side of the criminals. I spoke with a friend from a wealthy area of Mexico City yesterday who explained to me that the rich are simply without protection. My friend, Mariana Azarcarte, knew a girl who had been raped by the police, had a neighbor who had been shot in the eye when he refused to bribe the police, and she said that nearly everyone in her neighborhood had had "an incident."

"An incident" means a kidnapping. My friend's own mother was the victim of an express kidnapping, where the victim is kidnapped for a day or so and in those desperate hours, as much money is taken from the person as possible.

Mariana said that she felt like the border was safer than being rich in Mexico City.

"In the border, you know that you are not going to be killed when you're asleep in your bed. No one is after you unless you are a drug dealer. Of course you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in Mexico City violence can happen anywhere, you can open your front door and they're waiting for you. You can get into a cab and they're waiting for you. It happens anywhere at anytime and you are the one they're looking for. And forget the police, they'll take your money too."

All of this unorganized violence breeds a terrifying and divisive sense of "us" versus "them." The idea feel victimized by, quite literally, the rest of their country steers investment elsewhere and oushes the dreams of the nation's best educated youth elsewhere.

"So Close to the United States, so Far from God"

The Arizona law goes in to effect in a few hours and Mexico City is abuzz. Shelters in the north of Mexico are bracing for a influx of deportees and everyone I spoke to today mentioned tomorrow's importance. There is a banner in the main square protesting the law.

A taxi driver asked where I was from, and upon hearing my response, told me about his daughter in Phoenix. He's worried because the rest of his family lives in Juarez, and he fears that if she is deported she'll go there.

In Bernal, though, people hadn't heard about the Arizona law. The newspapers don't reach into the small towns and somehow the information hadn't reached.

I realized after a few days in the small town in Queretaro that most of the men working in the United States are working in Minnesota. Apparenently this is common in small towns in Mexico -- a few men go and pick a city and the rest of the puebla follows.

I've always had an idea about a small town but, before Bernal, I had never been to the kind of small town of my imagination: a place where a few large families marry each other and everyone knows each other or is somehow related. It's strange for me to imagine this kind of environment transplanted a thousand miles away in the snowy Midwest. It's also strange to imagine the Midwestern economy being so directly tied to the functioning of a desert town in Mexico.

Everyone I meet in Mexico has a relationship to the United States. For the educated and often wealthy, this means the eventual goal of working in Miami or New York. Everyone else either wants to leave to work there or has a brother or father who already has.

It's simple and it happens all of the time:

"Where are you from?"

"The United States, are you from Mexico?"

"Yes. Where are you from in the United States? I used to work in (Phoenix, Tuscan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas)"

"Why did you come back?"

Here the answers vary. People come back for all kinds of reasons. Jose and Araceli, a couple I knew from Minnesota but saw in Bernal, returned because her mother was dying and Araceli wanted her children to meet their grandmother.

But then almost everyone says the same thing: "Life is hard in Mexico, it is hard to make money, it is hard to live."

The US dollar is everywhere, figuratively and literally. Today at the supermarket I waited for a while in line because the woman in front of me insisted on paying with a fifty dollar bill.

When Corn's the Culprit

As the debate over the constitutionality of Arizona’s controversial new immigration law dominates Washington’s discussion of immigration, new pressure has been put on Obama to come forth with a concrete stance on immigration policy.

Within this discussion, there lives the idea that if we change immigration law, somehow our nation’s immigration crisis will cease, or at least improve. If we have better protection at the border, less people will enter illegally or if we create a path to citizenship for those who are already in the United States, we will have somehow done due justice.

Though changes are no doubt necessary to our nation’s outdated immigration policy – nothing will change unless we address the underlying factors that cause migration to the United States: agricultural, trade, and labor policy.

When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the bill promised to allow Mexico to “export goods, not people,” by increasing employment opportunities in Mexico and closing the gap between U.S. and Mexican wages. Mexican migration since the agreement, though, has more than doubled, we are to the point where about nine percent of the population born in Mexico is now living in the United States. (http://www.migrationinformation.org).

Part of this mass migration has to do with the fact that, from 1994 to 2010, US exports to Mexico have increased 400 percent, while Mexico failed to invest in the technology, infastructure and research and development to effectively compete.

Looking to where people are migrating from helps solve a part of the puzzle: the states with the higest rates of emigration are Guanajuato and Michoacan. These are the states with the largest sector of their economy vested in agriculture.

With NAFTA came a flood of exported below-cost corn from the United States. Between 1995 and 2006, the government paid out $56 billion in corn subsidies (http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn). Corn is our most lavishly subsidized food crop by a long shot; since 1995 it has drawn more subsidies than wheat ($22 billion), soybeans ($14 billion), and rice ($11 billion)–combined.

All of this government aid helps corn flow south in a torrent and all of this government aid helps to put Mexican corn farmers, well, out of business.

I saw this all to much in Bernal – a place with empty farms, hungry mules (and people) and a unifying hope in the town of sending sons northward.

For more info, check out:

http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/

Bernal pt. 1

I´ve spent the past few days in Bernal, a small town in the state of Queretaro, a few hundred kilometers northwest of Mexico City. It is the home to a large rock that came from outer space a long time ago and the Moreno family, among other people, quite a few animals and several less interesting geological formations.

I got to know the Morenos when they worked in the kitchen at Lakewinds Natural Foods. I remember the moment I realized that the people who worked in the kitchen were related -- Santiago and Manuel are brothers and Joel and Jose Luis are their cousins and Araseli is their sister and Jose is her husband.

I remember hearing stories about Bernal (about the horses and the farms and that big, magical rock). I remember admiring their work ethic and how much they were giving up to make under $8 an hour.

I also remember the day the management found out that they were illegal immigrants. many of them returned to Mexico, some of them stayed in Minneapolis.

My directions to the town were simple: get on a bus, get off in Bernal and ask for Sabina Jiminez Moreno. I did these things and arrived safely at the birthplace of the Moreno family.


Santiago and Mauel's father, Sr. Moreno used to farm -- the family has several acres of land outside of the pueblo, but it´s not worth it for him to farm anymore. He can´t compete with the larger farms that use expensive equipment to sow the fields, and he simply doesn´t have the capital to invest in new farm equipment. So, the mules are fed once a day but they do no work. They just stand there, in the unfarmed fields, aging and getting dusty.

The cost of living in Bernal is relatively low, but the town (like much of Mexico) operates within this weird system where sometimes things are valued at a peso that is equal to 10 cents and sometimes things are valued at a peso that matches the US dollar. Wealth, at least in Bernal, is measured by how many of your sons are working in the states.

Many of the women I met were empty-nesters: photographs line the living room walls, pictures of their sons who cannot return. The photographs are from years ago, before their songs became old enough to cross the border or rich enough to pay the Coyotes.

Sra. Jiminez Moreno, the mother of Manuel and Santiago, visited the states five years ago to see her sons. When she told me about this, I imagined her getting on a plane in Mexico City and disembarking in a cold Minnesota, an airport-type reunion. Snow on the ground, maybe.



The reunion was actually quite different.

Sra. Jiminez Moreno, who is in her late 60s, was smuggled across the border with a Coyote. Once she arrived in the California desert she was picked up by a friend of her daughter´s and then rode several busses to arrive in Minnesota. Sra. Moreno hasn´t left Bernal either before or after this venture, though she said she loved the snow.