Southern California Job Market : On The Border : New Faces on the Road North : Mexicans with no tradition of migration to the U.S. are being drawn by the irresistible lure of paychecks in dollars.

It’s easy to miss the turnoff for Francisco Saravia. Pick the wrong time to pass one of the trucks that creep along the two-lane highway, belching smoke at trailing motorists, and you will have passed the entrance. A small woods hides the village from the main road.

But follow the right strip of pavement for a few curving miles and you might believe you have driven straight out of rural Mexico into a Los Angeles suburb. Instead of the whitewashed cubes with narrow slits of glass topped by corrugated metal--typical housing in Mexican villages--homes on the main street of Francisco Saravia have L-shaped designs, picture windows and tiles or shingles over sloping roofs. Many also have pickup trucks with California license plates in the driveway.

After all, Francisco Saravia and its neighboring villages around Lake Chapala in west-central Mexico are the source of a large part of the Southern California labor force. Villagers spend their youth picking fruit, washing dishes and sweeping factory floors in California, then come home to Mexico to build the houses they’ll live in when their children take their turn north of the border. Here, emigration is a tradition developed over generations.

As Mexico’s economic crisis and the U.S. shortage of unskilled labor continue, new emigrants are joining this traditional flow: urbanites who can make in an hour at an American McDonald’s what they’d earn in a day in Mexico City; Indians who barely speak Spanish; Central Americans, tired of life in southern Mexico’s refugee camps and skeptical that they can ever go home. Together, they are making labor one of Mexico’s most important exports.

“Every day you run into people who are going (to the United States),” said Juan Manuel Sandoval Palacios, general coordinator of the Permanent Seminar on Chicano and Border Studies, a Mexico City-based group of scholars.

“In San Juan del Rio (a town northwest of Mexico City), I talked to 117 workers who planned to go in July--and that is not a traditional migrant area,” he said.

The lure of paychecks in dollars has become irresistible for many Mexicans as jobs in their own country become scarcer and lower-paying. For the past eight years, Mexico has been trying to recover from a borrowing spree that left it the second-most indebted country in the developing world.

International bankers and officials of industrialized countries have praised Mexico’s economic reforms--reductions in government spending, deregulation and privatization. However, those reforms have worsened an already bleak employment situation.

The government has cut the federal deficit in part by laying off bureaucrats. Another approach has been to eliminate subsidies by selling hundreds of unprofitable state-owned companies to private business. The new owners’ first move toward profitability is nearly always to trim payrolls.

Trade tariffs have also been reduced. Faced with increased competition from imports, factories have scaled back production as markets shrink. Or they have increased productivity, thereby cutting costs to meet international prices. Either way, they need fewer workers.

Today’s sacrifices eventually will result in a sound economy, more investment and, finally, jobs, said economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O. Meanwhile, the Mexican economy is nowhere close to generating enough jobs to employ the 1 million new workers who enter the labor force each year.

With job applicants lining up outside their gates, employers have little incentive to raise wages or increase worker benefits. The spending power of the minimum wage--which about one-third of the labor force earns--has been halved during the past eight years and now stands at about $4 a day.

If options are limited for Mexicans, even fewer opportunities exist for Central American refugees. Working in clandestine factories near the Mexico City airport or tending 2-square-yard market stalls in southern Mexico refugee camps, many wait for word from relatives in Southern California.

“What does he say? When can we come?” asked Eulalia Cristobal in halting Spanish, inquiring after her son, Diego, who was granted political asylum in Los Angeles last year. Diego’s attorneys from El Rescate, a public interest law firm in Los Angeles, had hoped that the case in which he won asylum would establish right of asylum for all Quiche Indians from Guatemala, allowing him to send for his family. However, the ruling applies only to him.

His mother is eager to leave the Maya Tecum refugee camp in the Mexican state of Campeche, the family’s latest stop in the five years since their hometown in Huehuetenango province was burned by the army. “I am from the mountains, and it is so hot here,” said Cristobal, a short, thin woman with braided gray hair who wears the subtlely striped, straight, ankle-length skirt that is traditional in northern Guatemala.

About the only work available for refugees in this impoverished area is heavy manual labor, not the kind of jobs for which aging women are hired. She tries to earn money selling needles, thread and plastic trinkets at an improvised market of stick huts in the center of the camp. Sales are slow, she said, because no one else has money either.

Her husband, Cristobal Diego, is helping to build another camp that will have a water pump for every four houses--an improvement over Maya Tecum, where women must line up once a day at a water truck. Because of his work, if they decide to stay in Mexico, they will be allowed to move to the new camp.

Like many Guatemalans who eagerly ask about conditions in their home country, the family’s first choice would be to move back. However, the same fear for their safety that drove them across the border causes them to hesitate.

Continuing north is their best option.

Mexican Indians from the tropical south--the poorest region of the country--are also pushing north.

During the 1950s, the Mixtecs of the Pacific state of Oaxaca began working on the coffee plantations in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. Within a decade, they were also picking crops and peddling wares on the Baja California peninsula.

Now, they form an important part of the California agricultural work force in northern San Diego County, Fresno, Santa Rosa and reach as far north as Salem, Ore., said Lilia Marcela Moreno, a Mexico City researcher who studies emigration.

The Mixtecs, for centuries an isolated group that has kept its own language and customs, are remarkable because of the extent to which their emigration is a cooperative, community effort, she said. A community will pool resources to send one or two people to the United States. That has allowed the Mixtecs, among the poorest of Mexico’s poor, to become migrants.

Before, that option was available only to the middle class of rural Mexico, those who could raise $300 or more for bus fare to Tijuana and a coyote, or guide, for the perils of a covert border crossing. As workers from towns with a migrant tradition, such as Francisco Saravia, moved to better-paying jobs in factories and services including as gardening and restaurant work, the Mixtecs took their places in the fields.

Today, workers from traditional migrant towns usually have legal resident status in the United States or can easily obtain it through relatives who live there, Moreno said.

The newer emigrants are those most likely to be affected by laws that punish employers who knowingly hire people who are not legally permitted to work in the United States, she said. But even they are not discouraged.

“If anything, you just get new flows (of workers) to places where the (Immigration and Naturalization Service) does not have much presence,” said Francisco Javier Guerrero, another participant in the border studies seminars.

“It’s difficult to believe that emigration will stop,” he said. “The flows will continue to increase.”