Dayworkers Are Heroes to Families in Mexico

By its very nature, daily journalism often provides little more than a snapshot of any given story. Reporters document events as they evolve, and quite often the first published version of an incident yields only a glimpse of a much larger story.

That’s why we keep writing and reporting--to try to get it right, to set the record straight, to find that one truth that always lurks behind the headlines. But there is never enough space to write everything you want, to include all the background that helps round out stories and puts things in perspective.

I thought about this the other day as this newspaper ran another story on the Latino dayworkers who seem to have caused such a stir in some parts of Orange County. They hang around the streets and in convenience stores, loitering about drinking coffee until someone picks them up for a construction job or to plant shrubs or dig ditches for minimum wage.

Most of these young men are from Mexico, many of them are here illegally, and at times they have made nuisances of themselves by their mere presence. Some merchants, for example, say they scare away other customers by hanging around in knots in front of stores.

But their presence in the county is only part of a much larger story. The part that isn’t often covered concerns the motivation that brings these men here in the first place--and the wives and children and homes they leave behind.

Before joining The Times, I lived and worked in Mexico for more than 3 years as the Latin American correspondent for the Dallas Times Herald.

One of my last assignments in that job was a series on immigration, dealing with the young men who leave their families and travel to the United States to scrape up money that they can send back to Mexico. I spent several weeks traveling the countryside, visiting such small towns as Asuncion de Ocotlan, a village of maybe 1,000 residents outside of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. I talked to the men who would make the long trek to the border and to their wives about how the influx of U.S. dollars helped make ends meet.

There are hundreds of towns like Asuncion de Ocotlan in Mexico, desperate and poor and built on the barren, unproductive soil of Mexico, villages that literally send their entire male populations north looking for seasonal labor. Most of these people cross the border illegally, not with the intention of staying but only to collect enough money to get them through the next year.

Sit down with these people in their homes, and they will tell you of the heartbreak of seeing the men leave town en masse each year, how they pray at night that these fathers and husbands and brothers will make it safely across the border, how the children learn to grow up without their fathers around. These are kind and gentle people who risk so much for what, to us, seems so little.

I remember Rosario, a diminutive and gracious grandmother who pointed with pride to an old electric stove and a single bed sitting on a rusty metal frame. It was the only electric stove in Asuncion de Ocotlan; it was bought with the dollars that Rosario’s three sons had made by working in the strawberry and vegetable fields near Oceanside.

The floor in Rosario’s tiny adobe house was dirt. She said they planned to pour concrete with the money the boys made the following year.

I also remember the family in San Luis de la Paz, a village in central Mexico, where some of the men had gone to Dallas and Houston and other Texas cities to work. You could tell where these people lived: Their homes were the only ones with brick walls, concrete patios and shades on the windows.

In a village without running water or indoor plumbing, one kindly matriarch told me with pride how good her life had been because of the work in el norte. She is blessed, she said, because 9 of her 12 children are male. Men, she said, can go north to make money and in turn take care of the elderly and the women.

“They miss their children,” she said. “And we miss them. Sometimes they are gone for 9 months, sometimes a year. But there is no work here, so they must go.”

Sometimes, when I look into the eyes of the dayworkers who gather on the streets of Laguna Beach and Orange and Santa Ana, I see the faces of Asuncion de Ocotlan and San Luis de la Paz. And I know why they’re here.