"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.

Santa Julia

Last week I went to Santa Julia, an orphanage in San Miguel. It was the first time I’ve ever been to an orphanage – I had no idea what to expect. I’d heard about it from a friend of a friend who handed me a card and briefly said I ought to go check the place out.

When I got to Santa Julia, I found that it was, in ways, grimmer than the orphanages I had imagined: the girls at Santa Julia have not been orphaned because their parents have died; instead, most are there because their families simply can’t afford to feed them.

Most of the girls come from single mothers. Some have court ordered placements here because of abuse or neglect, but the vast majority is from families too poor to have another child. Mothers and fathers come to visit, and sometimes if circumstances have changed, a child is reunited with their family.

Santa Julia is run by four nuns with elementary-level education and gigantic hearts. They work from five in the morning until midnight and demand that volunteers do the same (probably explains why they rarely have them…). Together the nuns care for 48 girls ages one to 24.

There are poor kids everywhere in the world. There are orphans and neglected children everywhere in the world. But seeing Santa Julia and interviewing some of the people who work there made me realize that Mexican poverty has a distinctly female face.

In the world of international economic development, the education of a nation’s females is one of the best indicators of human development and potential for economic growth. Lack of education for females in Latin America, though has proven to have disproportionate effect on the income levels of women; that is to say, if a boy and a girl are equally uneducated, the girl will probably make less money.

And then there is the mass exodus of men to the United States and Mexico City: a survey of Mexican rural women conducted in 11 of the country’s 32 states by the National Network of Rural Promoters and Advisors revealed that in 7 out of 10 rural Mexican homes, women are the sole breadwinners in the family and that only 31% of rural households headed by women have an income above the monthly minimum wage.

If drugs and emigration are the only viable economic options for poor men, both leave women faced with hard decisions, alone or abandoned.

P.S. I’m thinking of trying to start an online pen-pal program between girls Santa Julia and kids in the states. The emails could be translated by the social worker at the orphanage, or they could be an interesting way for English-speaking kids to practice Spanish. Email me if you (or your kids) are interested in trying to make something work …

Guanajuato vs. Michoacan

I’m of two minds about the safety of this place: one the one hand, it seems like everyone I talk to is on a campaign to tell me (and everyone else they meet) how safe Guanajuato is. I want to believe them because so many businesses are failing and because, well, I want to think it is a safe place because I feel so safe here.

Yesterday I interviewed Jesus Ibarra, a local reporter who had recently written a memoir piece about Mexico’s freedom of the press luncheon with the Attorney General in May. He assured me that it was safe here if you’re not dealing drugs. He explained that La Familia Michoacana, the drug gang that has taken over the neighboring state of the same name, has begun to kidnap kids who are selling drugs in Guanajuato towns to threaten them into selling La Familia’s drugs.

He said that this kind of violence shouldn’t bother good citizens because it is only happening between criminals as a way to expand turf.

But, Michoacan has been taken over by its drug cartel and the violence is no longer only entre ellos, between them.

And even if the violence was only within the drug cartels, violence is still violence is still people being hurt, regardless of the victim’s legal status. As for me, I know that kids shouldn’t be selling drugs. But I still I don’t think anyone should be kidnapped and I don’t think that journalists and politicians should let it fly, even if it is entre ellos.

Ibarra and I also discussed the emigration from the region. He connected emigration to the lack of jobs and the lack of jobs to the rise of gangs; Guanajuato and Michoacan are the two Mexican states with the highest rates of emigration. What do they have in common? They are the two states whose economies are most dominated by agriculture.

In my next few interviews (one with the District Attorney and one with a small non-governmental organization), I am going to be looking in to why Michoacan has fallen to a gang of drug lords and Guanajuato has not, I’ll get back to you if I figure it out.