Mexican Hearts, California Dreams : Simpson-Rodino Is Losing to Tradition and the Harsh Reality of Economic Survival

Throughout Mexico, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, better known as the Simpson-Rodino act, is the most absorbing topic since Fernando Valenzuela. It has meant hope to those who seek to qualify for its amnesty provisions, but its main purpose--controlling U.S. borders--inspires mostly scorn. Mexicans conclude that, like the flurry of panic when it went into effect last May, Simpson-Rodino will eventually subside and be forgotten. They dismiss it as a unilateral reaction to a bilateral dilemma, conjured by distant politicians who haven’t the faintest idea of what is happening in Mexico, let alone in much of the United States.

Three times each day, researchers from Tijuana’s Colegio de La Frontera Norte photograph Zapata Canyon, where most indocumentados cross the line, to count the numbers passing through. In May, they noted a slight decline, but things have since returned to normal. Just to the north, immigration scholar Wayne Cornelius at the University of California, San Diego, calculates the labor shortage he expects in the United States by the 1990s and figures that we’ll soon be inviting Mexicans back.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has spent millions of dollars, added staff members, and recently imposed its first warning sanctions against employers. But, given Mexico’s economic prognosis for the rest of this century, passing legislation to halt extra-legal immigration across the southern border of the United States smacks of trying to repeal the law of gravity by edict. Instead, the Simpson-Rodino act may accomplish the opposite of its original intention, awarding permanent residency to thousands of former illegals while others continue to arrive.

WHEN THE NEW U.S. IMMIGRATION BILL passed, priests in the pueblo of San Juan de Los Lagos braced themselves.

Each year, 3 million people descend upon this shrine in the Los Altos highlands of the Mexican state of Jalisco to glimpse an icon credited with resuscitating the dead. According to legend, in 1623 an acrobat in a traveling circus slipped from a tightrope suspended over daggers and was impaled. But she sat up, unharmed, when an Indian girl placed a painted figurine of the Virgin upon her breast. The original statue, draped in blue silk and crowned with gold, remains in San Juan’s cathedral; replicas are found throughout Mexico, Texas and California.

During the Vietnam War, many Latino veterans came here, limbless victims of land mines and shrapnel, crawling alongside pilgrims who shuffled on bloody knees down the long center aisle of the domed basilica, imploring divine intervention. When Simpson-Rodino took effect on May 5, everyone expected another influx from the north, this time of displaced undocumented workers seeking meals and shelter.

Sacristan Jose Guadalupe Marquez watched them begin to arrive in groups of eight or 10, distinguishable from local peasants by their North American denim work clothes. Kneeling before the holy image, they gave thanks for their safe journey from the United States. “And they asked her not to forget them, now that they were back in Mexico.”

But after the first trickle, the massive numbers the newspapers were predicting didn’t materialize. The fixings for thousands of sandwiches to be served in the San Juan seminary weren’t needed. “Did the U.S. change its mind?” Marquez asks.

State borders in Mexico are often erratically drawn--the result, many historians believe, of deals stemming from people’s devotion to their patrias chicas , or native birthplaces, loyalty frequently more intense than their allegiance to whatever government currently rules the nation. Jalisco’s shape, resembling a blob of jelly with fingers leaking outward, suggests just such gerrymandering. “ Ay, Jalisco . . .” goes the refrain, “ tus hombres son machos y cumplidores, valientes y ariscos y sostenedores --your men are all male, all dependable, brave, tough survivors.”

To be from the state’s northeastern finger, known as Los Altos, invokes even more pride. Foreign conquerors, both Spanish and French, were seduced by Los Altos’ balmy climate. Many established haciendas here when their empires were overthrown in the capitals, and the locals, known as altenos , frequently allude to their continental roots and European physiognomy.

The cobbled, red-tiled villages of Los Altos, each clustered around a resplendent, gold-domed church, share a weekly newspaper, which regularly boasts that the region produces nearly one-fifth of Mexico’s eggs and is famed for its hogs. Yet only in the standings of local futbol and basquetbol leagues do team names such as “Angeles” or “Los Lakers” hint at the truth about Los Altos. Spiritually and geographically, its soul is in San Juan de Los Lagos--but its heart has been transplanted 1,200 miles away.

It’s a hefty commute, but the whole region is a gigantic bedroom community of Los Angeles.

On a Saturday afternoon at a roadside stand just outside the pueblo of Valle de Guadalupe, Eli Leyva discusses this with Regino Gonzalez over an extended lunch. They’re eating a Los Altos specialty, carnitas --chunks of deep-fried pork basted in milk and Pepsi-Cola, so prized by homesick altenos that every year a few fragrant tons of it are spirited up to Los Angeles. Leyva, in his late 30s, wears a mussed white shirt, U.S.-made Levi’s, and cowboy boots. Simpson-Rodino doesn’t affect him--he’s had a green card for years--but he’s fuming over it on philosophical grounds. Though he worked in a Torrance furniture plant for nearly two decades, he’s not planning to return to the United States soon, because he’s upset.

“Everyone should be. The U.S. steals our oil, our cucumbers, our beef. It takes our corn and sends us cornflakes, our tomatoes and sends us ketchup, our lemons and sends us frozen lemonade. It buys our stuff cheap, sends it back expensive. And our people are just another resource. Simpson-Rodino isn’t going to keep them out, but it’ll force down the price of their labor because employers will claim that they’re taking bigger risks. It’s one more racist way of controlling a sub-developed country.”

Gonzales, a stubby man with a pencil mustache, doesn’t know about that. But the law makes little sense to him: Already the TV is showing scenes of harvests lost in California and Oregon; bosses from the United States are calling workers via the larga distancia down at the hardware store on the plaza, telling them to come back. Not that many are around--law or no law, most everyone from Valle de Guadalupe is still in Los Angeles County.

“It used to be so easy,” Gonzales remembers, back when he got his U.S. residency. “Your boss just wrote a note to the migra (INS) saying you were indispensable to his business. With that, you could bring in 50 relatives.” That’s how Gonzales did it, working for a nursery in Carson whose generous letters became famous in central Mexico. When a shoulder injury ended his career after 14 years, they even let him keep the gray work shirt he wears now with his name stitched in blue on a white oval.

On cable TV programs coming over parabolic antennas, they’ve seen explanations of the new law’s provision for amnesty, with its complicated formulas of qualifying dates and the amount of consecutive time spent in the United States. Many altenos will be eligible, but many others, accustomed to spending part of the year here, probably won’t be. “Fine,” says Leyva, scooping up his remaining beans and nopalitos with half a tortilla. “Let them kick everyone out. Then we’ll see who in the United States is willing to wash cars or pick lettuce for $3.50 an hour. The migra calls the world’s best work force a foreign invasion. Meanwhile, for 500 years Mexico has been invaded by Spain, France and the United States. The U.S. invades Chile, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada. Next Nicaragua. U.S. agribusinesses grab our best land. Who the hell is invading whom?”

Leyva and Gonzales drive into town, along a cobbled road lined with tall eucalyptus and flowering blue tabachine trees, past Holsteins grazing in fields that no one plants because the few months of rain don’t yield enough profit, especially compared to what can be made up north. The shallow fork of the Rio Verde that runs by here is often dry, and groundwater is too scarce for pump irrigation. What cultivation that does occur is mainly corn for animal feed; its deep-green stalks add to the summer illusion that Los Altos is lush, not brown, most of the time.

Eli Leyva (not his real name; he fears his current activities could jeopardize his green card) is part of an effort to organize yet another Mexican Socialist party (“the rest have all sold out,” he contends), and for a while he saw an opportunity in Simpson-Rodino. People forced to stay in the country would grow furious over all the things their government fails to provide and maybe focus their wrath against the monopolistic PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has controlled Mexico for 60 years.

But that doesn’t seem to be working. A visit to Antonia Jimenez’s house suggests why: Simpson-Rodino itself isn’t working. Jimenez, a widow in her 40s with gray-flecked curls, has three sons in California, and none are concerned about being sent back. One--Nivardo--went up in May, the month everyone was allegedly headed the other direction. He and brother Manuel are plucking chickens in Fresno, while their sibling Martin is a musician in Santa Monica. On the brick wall above the Panasonic tape deck Martin brought back hangs a photograph of his group, Los Candys, dressed in white suits and bright-red ties.

Until he died, their father worked in various Santa Monica restaurants and, in what was practically an alteno tradition, bused tables at the Malibu Sea Lion. Maybe twice a year he’d come home, but mostly he just sent money. “Now my boys send $200 money orders every couple of months,” Antonia Jimenez says, glancing up from the pomegranate pattern she’s cross-stitching onto linen. Her dish-towel sets, embroidered with a different fruit for each day of the week, sell for 7,000 pesos--$5.15 U.S. At the rate of a towel a day, her profit for a week’s work is $3.

So she cannot conceive of a life in which people no longer go to the United States. “Every family, every store in town depends on money from there. What future would these children have here?” she says to Leyva, indicating her daughters, Guadalupe and Delores. Although the town’s standing population is only about 5,000, so many other Valle natives reside in Santa Monica that they have an association there, El Club Social Valle de Guadalupe. Recently, Lupe won a singing competition, one of several fund-raisers sponsored by El Club in both Mexico and California. The contest persuaded her to follow in Martin’s footsteps; as soon as she’s old enough, she’s headed north to become a singer.

“Why not--what work is here?” her mother repeats. The egg and pork industries, locals agree, make a few owners rich but create relatively few jobs. For instance, Pegueros, a pueblo down the road, is surrounded by aluminum-covered chicken houses and pig lots, but it has so many vehicles with blue-and-yellow license plates that it’s known locally as Pegueros, California.

Across town, Leyva and Gonzales stop by Rigoberto Martin’s big yellow concrete house, one of the few in town whose construction wasn’t financed with earnings from the United States. Martin is proud that he doubled his money this year on the cattle he raises on 100 hectares inherited from his father. Fourteen years earlier, he and Leyva’s brother worked in a Santa Monica furniture rental store, hauling mattresses in and out of hotels. When the INS escorted him to Tijuana one day, he came home and stayed.

“I make my money in Mexico, and I bank it here, too,” he likes to mention, but he knows he is exceptional. His five siblings have to work in Los Angeles: The land can’t support more than one family, and Martin is trying to hold his own brood to two children, so he isn’t faced with choosing just one heir from among many, as his father had to. “Or my uncle. He’s got land, but also 13 kids. Guess where 12 of them are.”

Recently, in the local Banca Promex, a bank manager had told him that 80% of the deposits come from the United States, and with the peso so unstable, the guess is that a lot more money stays out of the bank, in dollars. With Mexico’s interest rates and inflation continuing to bob around 100%, each day it takes eight more pesos to buy a dollar. “Cattle feed goes up while subsidized milk sells at a fixed price, so farmers are selling their cows,” the banker had commented. He’d paused, lowering his voice. “For months I’ve been half expecting an armed uprising. If Simpson-Rodino ever really worked, what would keep us from that?”

Rigoberto Martin’s cousin, Valle de Guadalupe Mayor Rafael Martin, also wonders about that. “The minimum wage is 4,000 pesos per day (about $3 U.S.). A kilo of corn costs 2,000 pesos; a pair of shoes 15,000 pesos. If you took away the wages they earn in the U.S., it could come to violence.” Martin, a slight, youthful man who belongs to the PRI, struggles to find some hope. “Salaries,” he offers, “have been adjusted 70% since the beginning of the year, closing part of the inflation gap. The president is doing the best job possible. But our debt can’t be restructured overnight, any more than we can wipe out the 20 years of corruption that created it.”

When Simpson-Rodino passed, Martin’s immediate fear was where to put everyone if all the Valle de Guadalupe expatriates suddenly turned up. Town officials went door-to-door, asking people if they’d take in refugees. He is proud that his pueblo was prepared to meet the emergency that, gracias a Dios , didn’t occur. But such pride has its limits: In a country where schoolchildren learn that greedy yanquis took half their territory and invaded with impunity well into the 20th Century, Simpson-Rodino has underscored the embarrassing extent to which people here depend on the United States.

“Our patriotic values,” says Rafael Martin, “get confused.” From the courtyard beyond the open door, yellow light falls across his plain desk, above which hangs the coat of arms of his pueblo. “We respect and admire the prowess of the United States. It would be good if the U.S. reciprocally respected the manpower we give them, instead of discriminating against Mexicans. We need that manpower, too, but we lack the infrastructure to employ it. Someday, if we educate our children, perhaps they’ll be able to stay home, develop our resources and be independent.”

Valle de Guadalupe’s cantinas close on Sunday afternoons; people bring out chairs and sit alongside the cobbled streets, visiting quietly. Old men such as Gonzalo Marquez, now on pension from the Santa Fe Railway he helped build, reminisce about the years lived in Venice, Calif., about greens-keeping at the Los Angeles Country Club, about daughters who became teacher’s aides in Inglewood and clerks at Woolworth’s. Minolta-slung visitors like Rafael Perez, who installs water heaters in Santa Monica, come by with their families, snapping mementos of their pueblo. Perez was undocumented his first 11 years in the States, but now he has papers. Anyone else who wants them will get them one way or another, he expects.

“Already, they’re reforming the law every day. Here, what is there? Even the pinto beans are U.S. surplus, left over from the earthquake.”

And the town ambulance is a gift from the Club Social de Santa Monica. In other parts of the country, marijuana and heroin poppies provide economic relief, but they don’t grow well around here. Indeed, no one knows of anyone crazy enough to return to Mexico because of Simpson-Rodino except for young Martin Lopez, who panicked when the law passed and blew a $5-per-hour job at an Oakland auto-parts store. Now he finds sporadic grunt labor for the same wages he earned here before he left--but everything costs three times what it used to.

“I feel like I’ve lost two years,” he tells people. “I’m going back”--to the United States.

Vespers bells ring, and village girls in dresses and heels, their chatter punctuated with occasional phrases in startling, unaccented English, pick their way over the stones to the last evening Mass. When it ends, they continue to the plaza, where they stroll arm-in-arm counterclockwise around the filigreed gazebo. A smaller circle, composed of boys carrying sprays of pink Madonna lilies plucked from the hillsides, forms inside that of the girls. As the girls pass by, the boys offer them flowers, and occasionally a lad dares to ask one to accompany him on a turn around the square. This Sunday serenata is a courtship ritual as old as Jalisco, and hundreds fill the plaza to watch. At 10 p.m., it ends; some of the girls have paired off with their boyfriends, but many more have not. This time of year most of the eligible young men are away, observing another village tradition: working in the fields and cities of the United States.

‘AMNESTY,’ ” SAYS GUILLERMO REYES, “seems a rude, drastic term. For us, it signifies ‘pardon’--as though someone were guilty of something. Of course,” he adds, smiling slightly, “every country has its political terminology.”

Through the broad windows of Reyes’ office, the spires, domes and concrete rectangles of Guadalajara extend toward the distant San Isidro mesa. During the late 1970s, Reyes was Guadalajara’s mayor; now he is Jalisco’s regional director of the Mexican migration service. He puzzles over the effect Simpson-Rodino might have on his city, one of the loveliest in Latin America. “Since 1979, 100,000 people have arrived here each year. Now we are 4 million, second to Mexico City. Internal migration to urban areas has some enriching advantages, but in such increments it tends to dilute Guadalajara’s provincial nature.”

Reyes suspects that, were Simpson-Rodino to work, it would not halt migration but only reroute it. With only one-fifth of the country suitable for cultivation, a growing population of landless peasants must take its chances either in the United States or in Mexico’s already swollen cities. Because Mexico has its own stringent migration laws, its officials have refrained from much public criticism of the one the United States recently passed. But they worry: In Guadalajara’s airport, Mexican immigration agents have seen some families arriving on flights from Los Angeles lugging enormous cardboard cartons. So far, their numbers aren’t sufficient to cause alarm, but requests in Los Angeles’ Mexican consulate for duty-free permits to take personal belongings into Mexico have recently quadrupled.

Angel Ferrer recently returned to Sector Libertad, a vast east Guadalajara barrio of houses packed tightly along streets crudely paved with hunks of limestone. Sixteen years ago when his father died, Ferrer came here from the neighboring state of Michoacan to work in a shoe factory. He was 12 at the time, the oldest son and sole support of his mother and 10 siblings.

Last year, inflation had so outdistanced his $160-per-month salary that he took a bus to Tijuana and paid a coyote, or smuggler, $200 for passage to a safehouse on Brooklyn Boulevard in East Los Angeles. From there he jumped to the grape harvest in Lodi and then to olive picking in Corona. He ended up in Riverside, feeding the presses of an advertising-circular company.

After three months he’d received a raise and was moonlighting on a construction crew--a 70-hour week. But in May the INS started coming by the job sites, asking bosses which workers were getting their papers together. Ferrer’s nervous employers guessed that, with less than a year in the States, they’d have to let him go or risk a series of fines that could put them out of business.

Back in the cramped brick house he built for his family over the years, he frowns over what he sees as the law’s paradox. “It’s hurting the U.S. as much as us. If the workers stay, bosses can lose their businesses. But if the workers all go, they’ll lose them anyway.”

Up and down his street, people are headed to the United States as usual. But the trip isn’t cheap: Bus fare plus hiring a coyote averages 350,000 pesos. Not willing to risk that kind of money but unable to find work here after a month of trying, Ferrer is down to his final hope: starting a business.

Last year, his brother-in-law Jesus Rivera invested his savings in a vintage industrial sewing machine and a set of wooden lasts for making women’s shoes. Originally, Ferrer was to bring back enough money from California to get them started, but since he had to depart prematurely they’re beginning with what little there is. And Ferrer wasn’t prepared for the fact that prices had doubled in the year he was away. Nor do they know what to do about the 50% cost increase of shoe leather in the past month.

“We’ll never make it,” predicts Rivera, but they have no alternative, so they try, copying styles from magazines, peddling ladies’ sandals door-to-door to shoe stores at wholesale prices ranging from $3 to $12 per pair. By renting their equipment to free-lance cobbler Tony Alvarez they make a little extra. Until recently, Alvarez had 30 employees and his own factory, but after the last peso devaluation he was forced to sell everything, just to afford to pay severance wages. Ironically, he closed shop for good on May 5, the day Simpson-Rodino took effect.

“Most of my workers headed for the U.S.,” he says, shrugging. “Businesses are starving here. If they enforce Simpson-Rodino, we’ll start seeing lots of robbery. Then the big factories will lower their wages because everyone will need work. The rich will get . . . well, you know.”

There are dozens of tiny shops like this all over Guadalajara, and more in Leon and Aguascalientes, other shoe-manufacturing cities. Alvarez remembers the good money he once made as an auto mechanic up in Santa Barbara, but he came back because he’s a fourth-generation cobbler, and he will keep trying here, knowing that few will survive such competition. Angel Ferrer nods. “The government claims that the worst is over, but they said that last year and the year before.” He runs a perspiring hand through his dark hair, snuffling against the odor of congealing glue in the hot interior of his shop. “In California I saw abuses: Mexican pickers piled into barracks, working $8 jobs for half that much. But up there, for a while the economic heaviness lifted from my soul. Here, it’s descended again.”

In a nearby neighborhood, 20-year-old Lupe Aguilar informs her friend Rosalina Gutierrez that she’s definitely going back. She and her brother returned from Anaheim after Simpson-Rodino passed because their mother was frightened for them; an older brother and sister, who qualify for amnesty, remained behind.

Lupe’s black cabled sweater from the United States is the one she wore when her legalized cousin brought them back across the border. The woman in front of her was clutching a television, but Tijuana customs officials demanded more money from her than it was worth, despite her importation permit. “I’ll destroy it before you bastards get it,” she sobbed, and released her grip. The Sony shattered at their feet. Sorrowfully, Lupe handed her cousin the tape player she had wanted to bring home.

In Guadalajara, she’s applied for work at several stores, but her only experience is in California, and she’s heard they give preference to those who have stayed. “It’s true,” says Rosalina. She used to smuggle polyester clothes, making the 30-hour round-trip between here and Laredo twice a month. She could bring 15 dresses at a time, earning about $10 apiece. But peso devaluations ended all that, sticking her with an expensive inventory.

With the last of her money she made a final trip, purchasing hair dryers, clippers and permanent kits. But the economic crisis has killed business in the beauty shop she opened, except in September when girls sit for school pictures. Lupe’s been showing her the latest California hair styles, but Rosalina doesn’t have much hope that a grasp of current haute coiffure will improve things much.

Lupe’s mother, Maria de Jesus Aguilar, is resigned to the fact that her daughter is going back, this time taking her little sister, Irma. They know a woman in Tijuana who sells false passports, and there’s a ring of Central Americans who rent any document needed, even matching photographs. Luckily, employers only have to see, not verify papers--Simpson-Rodino’s most self-destructive loophole. Still, an alien caught with forged IDs risks not just deportation but jail too.

Next door live Lupe’s brother Ramon and sister-in-law Esther. The $260 Ramon makes each month delivering medicines for Farmacia Guadalajara won’t stretch too far, so they’ve decided to limit themselves to three children. He and Lupe are from a family of 10, as is Rosalina. “Before,” says Senora Aguilar, “no one thought to control. The priests don’t like it, but now, especially with la Simpson-Rodino , we have to. What can we do?”

Southeast of Guadalajara, thousands of North Americans have found a picturesque, economical retirement paradise on 50-mile-long Lake Chapala. Mexico welcomes them to live here, in villages whose natives often are in the United States. On Chapala’s northeastern shore, the industrial city of Ocotlan’s two multinational factories, Nestle and Celanese, have yet to experience rashes of job applicants returning because of Simpson-Rodino--but that could change. Celanese, which makes polyester thread and cigarette filters here, has long offered its 2,000 workers 100 days off each year and a letter qualifying them for a U.S. tourist visa. Many thus work three months in the United States and nine months here. Increased vigilance by the INS could disrupt this felicitous arrangement, although no one’s noticed that so far.

Of more concern is the fact that workers here are being pensioned lately at age 50, to be replaced by automation.

“You don’t want to work there anyway,” Juan Garcia tells his son Carlos. Garcia operates loading equipment at Celanese; it’s hot, the chemicals smell, and his back permanently aches--all for $7.50 a day. Carlos nods, barely taking his eyes from the TV. He and his four brothers are shirtless, passing a muggy afternoon watching a videocassette of the movie “El Norte.”

Until recently, Carlos, 19, was sewing blouses up in El Monte. He’d been there too briefly to qualify for papers, but his father doesn’t completely buy his story about having to return because lawyers were telling the garment workers that to arrange to stay would cost $1,800. Carlos had been pining for his girlfriend back home, and Simpson-Rodino provided an excuse. But he was too late: When he arrived here, she had another boyfriend.

Now he’s not sure what he’ll do. Depressed, he’s been watching a lot of television. “That’s San Diego,” says the voice on the screen. “Pretty, no? Tomorrow we’ll be in Los Angeles.”

Across the street, their neighbors, the Vasquezes, are celebrating. Son Ruben is back for good, with enough dollars from driving a truck in Pico Rivera that now, by drawing 98% annual interest in an Ocotlan bank, he can afford his own 18-wheeler down here. Several brothers and sisters, here from California on vacation, are also watching TV. When it is reported on the news that INS chief Alan C. Nelson says that Simpson-Rodino is really a jobs bill, because the work illegals must abandon is ideal for U.S. minorities, everyone hoots.

“Los negros will never submit to what a Mexican worker will,” declares Ruben’s brother-in-law Jose Torres.

The rest agree. Their sentiment reflects a proud, if somewhat ironic, national conviction: Mexicans will endure more than anyone. This, people say, explains generations of success at stoop labor in the United States and the stoic acceptance of conditions at home that would detonate revolution elsewhere. It is the twist of character that has led Mexicans, ever since their ancestral Indian mother submitted to their conquering Spanish forefather, to regard survival as a kind of triumph.

“For most of us,” says Francisco Vasquez, Ruben’s dad, his spine wrecked, he says, from too much lifting at Nestle, “survival is all there is.”

East of Ocotlan, Jalisco gives way to the state of Michoacan. Here, the transversal range of the Sierra Madre rises over valleys of black volcanic soil planted in thousands of hectares of strawberries. Scattered around the city of Zamora, where freezers prepare the fruit for export to the United States, are villages named El Platanal, Etucuaro, Tangacicuaro, Gomez Farias, and hundreds more, all with identical economies. Each year, their men head to California, often to the strawberry fields around Watsonville. After the harvests, they return home to essentially the same work, except here they make in a day what they make there in an hour.

There is little fear of Simpson-Rodino in rural Michoacan because nearly everyone not currently in the United States is busy filling out forms provided by Catholic Charities, verifying that they’ve given at least 90 days of agricultural labor before May, 1986, qualifying them for continued temporary worker status. Many feel that the $300 it costs them for applications, photographs, fingerprints, etc.--an amount that infuriates immigrant advocate groups--is well worth it: That’s what they pay the coyote every time they cross. Now they won’t have to.

Of course, technically under Simpson-Rodino, their children may not be able to follow in their footsteps, but no one takes this seriously. “Every 30 years,” says Don Manuel Cruz of Etucuaro, who first headed north in 1919, “the U.S. gets nervous and passes some law to keep us out. Then everyone forgets about it.”

At Zamora’s Colegio de Michoacan, immigration expert Gustavo Lopez concurs, citing the forced repatriations in the 1930s and Operation Wetback of the 1950s. But he disagrees with those who call the United States a safety valve for Mexico’s unemployment. “The poorest don’t go. It’s too expensive. The ones who can afford it don’t migrate for survival, but to better their lives.”

Around Michoacan there is evidence to support this: farmers renting their plots to agribusiness because they make more picking lettuce in the Imperial Valley than growing it at government-controlled prices back home; tales of graduates of law and engineering schools waiting tables in Beverly Hills. But just across the street from El Colegio, residents of a Zamora slum hear Lopez’s thesis and shake their heads. Young Jose Luis Bernal was picking avocados in San Diego County when Simpson-Rodino passed. The foreman wouldn’t let Bernal ride the truck from Fallbrook to the orchards, fearing that the migra would punish them.

So he began walking to work, three hours a day, because there were eight sisters and brothers at home to feed. After May 5 they wouldn’t even let him do that. So he came back, to peon jobs that barely paid. After a month he headed again to the border, this time avoiding California. From Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, he telephoned his father in Greeley, Colo.

“If you want to suffer, come,” Senor Bernal said. He’d just learned that he was losing his job at a warehouse, because he couldn’t get papers. Jose Luis turned back. But between his mother selling tacos in Zamora’s bus station and his occasional bricklaying jobs, they can’t make it. Soon, he’ll go north again; poverty is making him dizzy as well as desperate.

Dolores Renteria and her four youngest children have just reluctantly returned to the nearby city of Sahuayo; her husband, Ramon, and two oldest sons who qualify stayed in Orange County. Ramon has worked there for years, and for years they’d saved to bring the family together--the coyote fees alone cost nearly $1,000. Finally, they joined him in Santa Ana, but a few months later, with the new immigration law in effect, the migra was suddenly very prominent in the streets. Her sons couldn’t get to work; the only faint consolation came from a terrified Nicaraguan neighbor who also lacked credentials:

“Ay, you Mexicans. No wars, no contras or Sandinistas awaiting you. Only inflation. How fortunate.”

The Renterias arrived home in time for the city’s annual Carnival de Santiago Apostol. People dance and parade; Sahuayo clubs from California and Chicago send floats, and children dress in grotesque costumes. Dolores’ kids have already selected theirs: Ronald Reagan masks, a popular choice this year.

“But it’s not America’s fault,” says Enrique Garcia of Sahuayo. His son Benjamin has just had to return from Anaheim where he, too, didn’t qualify, and is frantically searching for work in Guadalajara. “Our so-called revolutionary Mexican leaders provide no jobs in this rich land. They steal everything for themselves and treat us like animals. May God liberate us from our liberators someday. The prejudice we encounter in the United States is nothing compared to the injustice we endure here. Until that changes, Mexicans have only one choice: to go there.”

Where California is concerned, cyclical migration is especially unlikely to end, if for no other reason than the fact that Mexican migrants get to live in two spectacularly different worlds, each with its own pleasures and anguish, knowing that when the latter becomes too pervasive in one place they can escape to the other. So far, no one’s noticed that their U.S. employers aren’t finding ways to accommodate them; no one expects next year’s tomatoes to go unpicked.

A 1985 report released by the Rand Corp. concludes what Mexicans figured out long ago--that this symbiosis is to California’s economic benefit, whatever Washington and the INS believe to the contrary. “Who,” muses old Manuel Cruz back in Michoacan, “are these guys, Simpson and Rodino, anyway? How is it they think they know what’s best for so many people?”

A reasonable question--and probably soon to be a moot one.