Mixtecs Shed Pain of Oaxaca Poverty

‘At least here in Tijuana we always have enough to eat.’

There’s no running water in Emilia Alfaro Vasquez’s hillside home. Nearby, raw sewage runs down from the outhouses that serve as bathrooms in the neighborhood of steep canyons known as Colonia Obrera, or worker. The deep-rutted, unpaved streets are virtually impassable by car but hardly anyone can afford to own one, anyway. Residents walk a mile to catch a bus to downtown.

There is no garbage collection, no police patrol. In the winter, fierce rains wash away the steep paths and flood the simple houses of scrap wood and sheet metal, creating havoc in this densely populated squatter’s colony.

It’s not an easy life, but Emilia Alfaro and her neighbors say it is luxurious compared to the existence they left behind in their home state of Oaxaca, 1,500 miles south.

“We’re happy here,” said Alfaro, sitting at a kitchen table bearing a pleasant clutter of beans, tortillas, bananas and other foods. “At least here in Tijuana we always have enough to eat. We can even afford to feed dry tortillas to the chickens! Never in Oaxaca. There, the children didn’t know what meat was, they didn’t know what milk was.”

Alfaro, like most of her neighbors in this section of sprawling Colonia Obrera, is a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca. She lives in a section of Colonia Obrera that is home to 2,000 or so Mixtecs from impoverished rural communities with melodious but tongue-twisting names such as Juxtlahuaca, Xalpatlahuac and Chicahuaxtla. Like others here, she speaks her native Mixtec language with greater ease than her adopted Spanish.

The Mixtecs, like tens of thousands of other poor Mexicans, have migrated to Tijuana and other border towns in search of farm-labor jobs in the United States and the large-scale irrigated agricultural zones of Baja California. The Mixtecs, whose ancestors, along with the neighboring Zapotecs, created magnificent architectural monuments in ancient Oaxacan cities such as Monte Alban and Mitla, explain their migration to the north simply: they left to avoid starvation.

“In Oaxaca, if it rained, the crops came and the people survived,” said Juan Perea Vasquez, a middle-aged Mixtec who said he left Oaxaca when he was a teen-ager and lived in various areas of Mexico before settling in Tijuana 15 years ago. “If it didn’t rain, the people didn’t eat.”

Unlike the historic northern migration of mestizos, the mixed race of Spanish and Indian blood that comprises the majority of Mexicans, social scientists say that the movement of Mixtecs to the north is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning slowly some 25 years ago. Previously, some Mixtecs had migrated to other areas of Mexico, notably to Mexico City and to the sugar cane fields of Veracruz.

The Mixtecs’ flight to border areas such as Tijuana and Nogales is part of what observers characterize as a massive migration of these indigenous Mexicans from their highland home region, known as La Mixteca, which is concentrated in western Oaxaca but also includes adjoining portions of the Mexican states of Guerrero and Puebla. The area is traditionally among the poorest in Mexico, and the nation’s faltering economy has only made things worse.

Faced with worsening soil erosion, frequent droughts and Mexico’s general economic decline, the Mixtecs have been forced to leave their traditional agrarian communities and move north to work the giant, agribusiness farms of the western Mexican states of Sinaloa and Baja California, as well as the fields of California. At home, they grew subsistence crops such as corn and beans on small plots, often without the benefit of irrigation.

“The immediate problem of these communities is that there wasn’t enough productivity in their land or enough non-agricultural work to stay there,” said Michael Kearney, a professor of anthropology at UC Riverside who has studied the Mixtecs. “People would literally starve to death if they stayed . . . The Mexican economic crisis has aggravated the situation.”

Because they are Indians, Mixtecs face special problems in the north. Many speak limited Spanish; they feel more comfortable in their native, tonal language. Mixtecs and their supporters say they are often treated like second-class citizens by other Mexicans. Apart from discrimination in jobs and other areas, Mixtecs say they are often singled out for harassment by Mexican police and immigration officers--a charge publicly denied by Mexican officials.

Such discriminatory behavior allegedly occurs in a nation where officials publicly express great pride for their Indian heritage, a country where Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec ruler, is revered as a national hero.

“The Mixtecs are discriminated against socially, politically and economically,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a Tijuana anthropologist who has worked with the Mixtecs for seven years. “Our leaders pay lip service to our Indian roots, but that is just part of the political discourse.”

Although the Mixtecs represent the largest indigenous community in Tijuana, the border city also has significant populations of Zapotec and other Indian groups. Like the Mixtecs, economic hardship has forced them from their ancestral communities. Some researchers say that Indians from southern Mexico, who are typically hard-working and unlikely to agitate over low wages and substandard working conditions, are increasingly being sought to till the fields and pick the fruit and vegetables of the Californias.

“The growers are more and more turning to Mixtec labor,” said Kearney, author of a 1981 paper and a forthcoming study of the use of Mixtec workers in Mexico and the United States. “Mestizos are being replaced by Indians from the south.”

Conditions at the farm labor camps in both Mexico and the United States range from bad to atrocious, according to Kearney, Clark and the Mixtecs interviewed. During harvest time in the giant farming area of San Quintin, south of Ensenada, tens of thousands of Mixtecs live in camps without basic amenities such as running water.

“It’s absolutely the worst,” said Celerino Garcia Sanchez, a 22-year-old Mixtec whose brother is a farm-labor activist in San Quintin. “The houses people live in are no more than giant chicken coops.”

Like immigrants to the United States, the Mixtecs tend to live in their own enclaves, where community and family ties provide support to wary newcomers. In these microcommunities, researchers say, centuries-old cultural traditions and the Mixtec language are preserved and nurtured.

Some Mixtecs periodically return home to Oaxaca and support families there. Others say they plan to save enough money to return permanently to the south. A few say they never intend to go back.

“Maybe I’ll go back to visit someday,” said one man.

In Tijuana, the Mixtecs have settled in Colonia Obrera, a sprawling, dusty, rock-strewn series of hills and ravines south of downtown where makeshift dwellings constructed of scrap wood, cardboard and sheet metal are impossibly perched along canyon walls. House sites have been scooped from hillsides. Nothing is wasted here: junk tires serve as retaining walls, steps and planters; rusted old mattress springs delineate plots of land.

Most residents, like thousands of other Tijuana families, are squatters who have staked their claim to a parcel of rocky soil. The Mixtecs, who are only a tiny minority in teeming Colonia Obrera, tend to live amid the worst conditions in the vast neighborhood.

Although most houses seem to have electricity--often a luxury in Mexican squatter settlements--running water and other services are non-existent. Trucks periodically deliver water to 55-gallon drums that are omnipresent here; the water gets to homes via intricate systems of hoses. Residents pay for the service, a major expense for most families.

Although by American standards the conditions are appalling, most Mixtecs interviewed agreed that their living standard had improved significantly when they came to Tijuana. Here, at least, there seems always to be enough food--even though the starchy diet is far from ideal. Residents noted the availability of work and the presence of amenities such as gas stoves and electricity that were unavailable in rural Oaxaca.

“There was no work in Oaxaca,” said Guadalupe Estrada, a woman in her 50s who recalled making the straw hats that are one of the region’s few industries. “We’d work all day to make a few hats, and in the end we’d just receive a few pesos for them. That was no way to live.”

Tijuana serves as a kind of staging area for Mixtec families. By basing their homes close to the border, men can work in California and quickly return to their wives and children.

Many Mixtec women, dressed in colorful traditional clothing and often carrying their children in blankets, sell gum and small trinkets to American tourists in downtown Tijuana. Some women also beg. Men do farm labor and, to a lesser extent, construction work in town.

Carlos Rivera Hernandez, 22, said he brought his two daughters and his wife, who is expecting her third child, to Tijuana two months ago from Oaxaca. He said his uncle, a Tijuana resident, had told him of a plot of land where he built a simple house. Sitting outside a small shop on a dirt street in Colonia Obrera, Rivera and two other Mixtecs explained the advantages of life in the north. All had worked in farm-labor camps in the United States and Mexico.

“We came because of the poverty,” said Rivera, who has found construction work in Tijuana.

In Oaxaca, he said, a man could earn a maximum of about $1 a day in farm or other work--not enough to feed a family. In Tijuana, it is possible to earn $6 or more per day.

Back home, he noted, there was no safety net if crops failed on the small, unirrigated plots traditionally held by the Mixtecs.

“In Oaxaca, there was simply no way to live,” said Ismael Garcia, 30, a father of four who said he left with his family when he was 12 years old. “It was just not possible to make a life there.”

Up a rocky hill from where they spoke, Mixtec children were milling around the yard of a preschool building named after the wife of Benito Juarez, the Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca who rose to be president of Mexico and a national hero. Here, and in the elementary school down the street, students are taught in both the Mixtec and Spanish tongues. A U.S. group, Los Ninos, sponsors a nutrition program for the children.

The Mixtec preschool, housing about 40 children, sits side by side with a school for non-Indian children. The difference in their conditions is striking--and instructive.

The one-room Mixtec school has gaping holes in its tar paper and scrap-wood roof and its sagging walls; the dusty Mexican earth serves as the floor. In a corner sits a haphazard pile of debris, including junked tires and twisted desks. The two-room mestizo school, while hardly luxurious, is at least brightly colored and well-maintained; its roof is intact and it has a cement floor.

“We indigenous people always receive the fewest services,” noted Eva Escobar Perez, a 21-year-old Mixtec teacher.

One admittedly positive government move, beginning in 1982, was the recruiting and hiring of Mixtec-speaking teachers from Oaxaca for the kindergarten and elementary school in Colonia Obrera. At the elementary school, where conditions appear considerably better than at the preschool, about 60% of the 500 students are Mixtec; classes there are integrated among Indian and mestizo youth. School officials acknowledged that some mestizo parents resisted the arrival of the Mixtec teachers, fearing that their children’s education would suffer.

“Having bilingual teachers has enabled more Mixtec children to complete their courses here,” said Tiburcio Perez Castro, the school’s 30-year-old principal, an Oaxaca native who, like the other teachers, lives in the neighborhood. “We encourage children to be aware of the value of their culture, to maintain their (native) language. But it is very important that they learn Spanish, because that’s how they will be able to advance themselves.”