"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.