Thousands Can Travel Without Fear : Amnesty Allows Massive Holiday Return to Mexico

In a landmark migration that experts say is without precedent in American history, hundreds of thousands of newly legalized Mexican immigrants are returning home this year for Christmas reunions with families some have not seen for decades.

Free to travel without fear for the first time since leaving Mexico, husbands are rejoining wives and children left behind, old people too frail for the hazardous trip across rivers and border hills are visiting brothers and sisters they have not seen for years, and American-born grandchildren are embracing their Mexican grandparents for the first time.

“There is no event in immigration history I can think of quite like this,” said Dr. Leo Chavez, a Mexico immigration researcher and an assistant anthropology professor at UC Irvine.

“This really is the story of Christmas, the story of families migrating, looking for a place to be together. . . . And for those who have amnesty it is truly a dramatic moment, a wonderful moment, a time when an emotional dam they have built up over years is breaking and flooding back into Mexico.”

For Reina Nunez, 27, a Culver City domestic, this holiday will be the answer to a dream she has nourished since she was 6 years old: to see her family again together under one roof. Her father left Sinaloa when she was 6 to work in Los Angeles to support his family. At 13, she was sent to live with him, leaving her mother and sister behind.

“I’m going back to see my mother for the first time since then,” she said, waiting in a long line at the Mexican Consulate here to obtain travel permits. She now has two children of her own. On Jan. 14, the first day she could get tickets, she and her father will fly back to Sinaloa. A family she works for is paying their fare.

“I pray every day that this will bring my mother and father together again,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks as she got her travel papers.

It is impossible to say how many such stories there are, let alone how many immigrants are traveling back to Mexico and other countries after obtaining legal residency under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. More than 3 million people applied for amnesty under various provisions of the act, well over 2 million of them Mexican.

Such pilgrimages are not new. For decades, migrant workers have been traveling back to Mexico, many of them at Christmas, and returning after the holidays to work in spring crops.

But over the years, illegal crossings have become increasingly expensive and hazardous, discouraging many immigrants from traveling to Mexico. Not only were people in danger of being caught by the Border Patrol and losing their jobs if they did not make it back on time, but “coyotes” (alien smugglers) often charge several hundred dollars and have been known to rob their clients.

Amnesty has given these immigrants the right to stay in the United States--and the right to leave it and return legally.

Double the Number

Dr. Jorge Bustamante, an immigration authority who is president of the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana, estimated that in all, 1.5 million will travel back to Mexico in 1988, double that of 1987. Not since Operation Wetback in 1954, when about a million Mexicans were expelled from the United States, have so many workers returned home.

“Nobody here has ever seen anything like this before,” he said. “The bus stations are overwhelmed. The number of people going back and forth legally this year is absolutely without precedent.”

According to the Mexican Government Tourism Office in Los Angeles, more than 10,000 buses are expected to leave Tijuana for the interior this month, four times that of December, 1987. Train seats are virtually sold out through the holiday. Airports are jammed with families hoping for standby seats on wide-body planes substituted for smaller models.

Officials say most families are traveling by car, an option never before available to illegal immigrants who had to swim rivers and walk mountain trails to return to work here.

The Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles has had to add 10 people to its staff this month to process the unprecedented 1,500 people who line up daily for travel documents, said Eduardo de Ibarrola, deputy consul general.

In Chicago, consular lines were so long that fire safety officials said they were violating fire regulations.

Cards for 400,671

“As of September, Mexican consulates in the United States issued 400,671 (identification cards) to Mexican citizens lacking sufficient documentation to enter Mexico,” De Ibarrola said. “That reflects people who got legalization and are free to visit their families.”

Assuming that rate keeps up, more than 500,000 people could be visiting Mexico on such cards this year, apart from countless others who already had documents in order.

So large is the flow that some Mexican officials predict the gift-bearing travelers will have an economic impact, albeit temporary, on hundreds of small towns and villages across Mexico. Dollars sent into Mexico from workers in the United States already constitute Mexico’s fourth-largest income after oil, manufacturing, and tourism.

But one need only look at the faces of the people in the lines that form before dawn at Mexican consulates around the country to see that the most dramatic impact of this holiday migration is an emotional one. And the emotions run from exhilaration to apprehension and loneliness.

“No more mojado (wetback)!” shouted 71-year-old Francisco Gomez Ojeda, who is going back to Zacatecas to see his two sisters for the first time in 17 years.

“I wanted to go before, but how could I? I was a young man when I crossed the first time. Now, well . . . Have you heard how tough coyotes (alien smugglers) are getting these days? They’d shoot you in a minute for a dollar.”

Memories of Children

Beside the triumphant Gomez Ojeda, other men and women who were little more than children when they left home stand silently with husbands and wives of their own. Some will go back to see parents--or the graves of parents--who gave them money for the trip north years ago, wished them Godspeed and never saw them again.

Some of these immigrants have gone for years without seeing their spouses. In many cases, marriages made in Mexico are put asunder by the border, the law and the passage of time.

Perhaps because the separation of family has become so common, the phenomenon has been accepted as commonplace. In many Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, it is taken for granted, mistaken for normal.

“It’s very hard to live like this, because when you’re here, you want to be with your family there, and when you’re there, you want to be with your family here,” said Maria Cortez, 30. But almost no one talks about it because everybody is in the same situation.

When a reporter asked to speak to people in consular lines who hadn’t seen their families for a long time, those who had been apart from families for two and three years quietly deferred to those who have been separated for eight and ten. Those who have been separated from brothers and sisters deferred to those separated from parents and children who have kept in touch only by letters, if they were literate, or by phone, if they had the money.

Family Reassembled

“I have gone back and forth every two or three years as I could, but this is the first time I will be able to spend Christmas with my children in 15 years,” said Marta Curiel of Pacoima, who said she had to leave her seven children in the care of her eldest in 1973 to come work in Los Angeles to support them.

She was 36 then. She is 51 now.

Through all those years, she said, she has dreamed of uniting her children in the United States. But the best she could manage was shifting them in and out of the country like chess pieces, fearful each time a child was placed in the custody of a “coyote” or a friend to help him or her across the border.

Although she worked two jobs at the same time--selling furniture by day and doing piecework making notebooks by night--the most she could afford, with sending money home, was a one-bedroom apartment in drug-ridden neighborhood.

Sometimes, she said, though it broke her heart, she sent children home to Mexico to keep them from drugs. Never has she been able to bring more than four of her children together at once. In 1985, she finally bought a house for them in Morelia, where the youngest three live together.

Ironically, now that she can finally travel legally, her children are grown. The youngest is 18. Four are married, three in weddings she saw only in photographs. But, she added proudly, “I still know each of them well enough to know what to get them for Christmas.”

Finding a Better Life

Rina Rodriguez, 40, a Los Angeles County clerk, came here in 1968 with three brothers and sisters to honor a lifelong wish of her mother’s that her seven children move north to make a better life for themselves.

But, she said, every step that the American siblings take--the speaking of English, the dressing in American clothes, the graduations from school--is a step away from their Mexican sisters.

Now, she said, her mother’s family is split in two--four here, two there. A seventh child, her big brother, whom she last saw when he was 20, died in her absence.

This Christmas, for the first time since 1981, her 80-year-old father will have all his children around him at Christmas. All except one, that is. The other daughter, Soledad Rodriguez, 50, will go in January as the others are leaving “so our father will not have to feel the pain of all of us going at once,” she explained.

Dr. Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies in San Diego, one of the nation’s top experts in Mexican immigration, said teams of researchers he works with will travel to Mexico in January to assess, among other things, the numbers of Mexican workers going home for the holidays and what long-term impact, if any, the freedom to travel will have on immigration patterns.

He said one type of Mexican worker--the “shuttle” migrants, or seasonal agricultural workers applying to legalize under a separate section of the 1986 act applicable to farm workers--may actually be less likely to go back to Mexico this year because many are still in the legalization process.

Bullets in the Air

But not all those returning for Christmas are Mexican. Lines are also long, for instance, at the Salvadoran and Guatemalan consulates.

“There were bullets in the air when I left Guatemala eight years ago,” said Antonio Luna, 33, of West Covina. “I haven’t been back since because most of my family is here.”

Since he obtained work here in a shipping firm, he has been sending money back to his family, particularly to his grandmother, who has used the money to fix up her house and buy cattle. Now, he said, he plans to drive back to Guatemala with wife, children and cousins in a caravan, carrying an entire truck of clothing and gifts for relatives there.

“I wanted to surprise my grandmother, but that would have killed her,” he said. “I can’t wait to get back for the fiestas at Christmas, the fireworks, the tamales!”

J. William Orozco, who owns a travel agency on Broadway that caters to Latin American travelers, said he has turned away dozens of holiday travelers who wanted to celebrate their new status but who failed to make reservations until the last minute.

“I’ve been just flabbergasted by all the people,” he said. “And particularly the new mood. Many people who went down before illegally now feel as free as the wind. . . . Some families are able to travel together for the first time.”

Reunion With Strangers

For many, however, trips home are a double-edged sword.

One 29-year-old Salvadoran living in San Francisco, who asked his name not be used because of threats to him and his family, said he will be going back for the first time since he left in 1981. More than 30 relatives will be at the airport in El Salvador to meet him, he said. But many will be strangers.

“Since I left, my sisters got married, and I don’t know their husbands,” he said. “I have nephews who call me ‘uncle’ on the telephone that I’ve never seen. . . . I’m trying to prepare myself for this return, but I’m afraid I’ll just make a scene and start crying at the airport.”

But to see his family in El Salvador, he must leave his wife and 7-year-old daughter in San Francisco. Like most Salvadorans and many immigrants from other countries, they came after Jan. 1, 1982, the day Congress selected as the dividing line between immigrants who could be legal, and immigrants who could not.