Migrants’ Social, Economic Ties to Mexico Stay Strong : Finances: Those who come north to work provide seed money for businesses and community projects back home.

The first time Salvador Espinoza went north looking for work, he was 16 and so broke he walked the 1,400 miles from his hometown to the Mexicali border crossing.

Forty years later, he commutes between his vegetable processing plant in Salinas, Calif., and his cattle ranch and Jetsons-style hotel in Jerez in a maroon Cadillac with his name emblazoned on the side.

His collection of Stetsons, a red Corvette and a bolero-style gold chain that ends with his initials set in diamonds have earned Espinoza the nickname “Panchodolares.” And the poor rancher’s son is not shy about sharing the secret of his success:

“America is a land of opportunity, if you work,” Espinoza said. “But you have to work. I left Mexico because I had no chance to better myself here.”

His advice repeats the common wisdom that has sent generations of villagers north to seek their fortunes. In the process, half a dozen Mexican states have developed a migrant tradition that has transformed rural hamlets into international communities.

This pattern of migration--of Mexican farmers turned U.S. farm workers, dishwashers and construction laborers moving back and forth between the north and their home villages--has set Mexicans apart from other nationalities who have come to the United States. And the strong, lingering ties between immigrants and their hometowns have important implications, both for the Mexican villages that send them and the U.S. communities that receive them.

Just as there are no good estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States (figures range from 3.5 million to 8 million), no one really knows what proportion of Mexicans migrate rather than putting down roots in the United States. But the number is large--a majority, most researchers say.

Even the minority who settle down in the United States, buying houses and raising their families, return for hometown festivals and dream of retiring in Mexico. Migrants form village baseball teams organized into leagues of players from their state. They join social groups with names such as the Tepitongo Sporting Club of Baldwin Park--for people from Tepitongo, a town of about 2,000 near Jerez--to keep traditions and support networks alive.

“The onetime migrants, now immigrants, become receiving points,” said anthropologist Victor Garcia, who studies Mexican migration patterns. The settlers invite younger sisters north to look after the children so wives can get jobs. Settler families provide room and board for male relatives who work in the United States for short periods.

The most successful immigrants, like Espinoza, become employers.

After his three-month hike to Mexicali, Espinoza roamed America for two years, getting jobs wherever he could as a farm worker or on construction cleanup crews. He eventually became a contractor in California’s Central Valley, finding workers in Mexico for U.S. growers.

One Sunday, he filled a rented pickup with lettuce that pickers had left in the fields the week before and sold it for $1,000 to a business that cuts up vegetables for salads for fast-food restaurants. The next week, he rented two trucks. As the business grew, Espinoza planted his own lettuce, using a loan from his customer to rent the fields.

As Espinoza and his customer worked together, they formed a partnership and expanded the plant. Espinoza put his older children to work there during the summer.

“Even my daughters have chopped lettuce,” he said. “I want my kids to know how money is made.”

Now, he employs 400 people in Salinas--most from his hometown and surrounding villages.

Pattern Not Typical

The Mexican migrant pattern contrasts sharply with America’s immigrant tradition, typified by groups such as the Italians who settled at the turn of the century in Eastern cities and towns such as Kennett Square, Pa., where Garcia is now doing research.

An ocean separated European emigrants from their homes; only a thin border lies between Mexico and the United States. And more important than distance is attitude. Mexicans come north looking for work that will help finance a rural lifestyle that they value highly, rather than seeking a new way of life.

“The Italian population severed its social and economic links,” Garcia said. “There was no going back home to visit for baptisms.”

But the situation is strikingly different for Mexicans he studied in Central California. “The majority are truly migrants,” said Garcia, a professor at Indiana University in Indiana, Pa. “They come with the intention to work and return.”

These migrants’ links to Mexico often are stronger than their ties to their temporary American homes. Mainly single adults, they are less likely to use social services--particularly schools and, to a lesser extent, medical care--than the smaller group that settles permanently, said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego.

The key point in the transition from migrant to immigrant is when people bring their families north. They start to attend parent meetings at school migrant education programs. The children quickly learn English; the parents may, as well, recognizing language as a passport to better jobs.

But even Mexican settlers become involved in American community life more slowly than other immigrants. Legal Mexican immigrants are only about half as likely to become U.S. citizens as people from other countries, government records show. The pattern seems to be extending to Guatemalans and Salvadorans as well, experts say.

“The principal reason is that most Mexican immigrants don’t come to live, they come to work,” said Celestino Fernandez, an immigration expert at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “They don’t see this as their permanent home--even people who have been here for many, many years and bring their entire immediate family. If you see yourself as a temporary resident, you are not going to integrate yourself fully in your new country.”

One consequence is that migrants and immigrants alike have become an important source of venture capital in parts of impoverished rural Mexico. Money earned in the United States has financed businesses here, from closet-size dry goods stores to five-star hotels.

In recent years, changes in U.S. immigration laws and Mexican economic policy have converged to encourage and channel that entrepreneurial spirit. The Mexican government has made emigres an official part of the nation’s development program.

“We used to think of migrants in Los Angeles as lost manpower,” said Raul Rodriguez Marquez, economic development director of Zacatecas, the state in which Jerez is located. “Now we see them as a resource.”

The government is not fostering emigration, he said. Rather, officials are recognizing that migration is an economic and cultural tradition as old as the oldest zacatecanos .

In Jerez, the migrant tradition stretches back at least as far as World War II, when Lupe Villaneda and Paulo Banuelos went north to work.

Villaneda, who is now 86, and his father took off for the United States in the 1940s. They traveled to San Pedro, Oakland and Santa Fe, N.M., before returning home to stay.

Banuelos, 89, made his first trip to Kansas City, Mo., in 1944 to work on the railroad. During the next decade, he picked vegetables in Colorado and did odd jobs along the border.

For them, the trips--which were legal under the bracero program for foreign workers--were more adventures than money-making enterprises. Villaneda found his calling crafting leather in the United States. Banuelos is destitute, living at a local senior citizens center built with contributions from later migrants.

By the time the bracero program ended in 1964, removing the legal northward path, migration had become part of the economy in villages like Jerez.

With its temperate climate, Jerez--named for the Spanish city where sherry is made--was a weekend retreat from the mining centers of Zacatecas and Fresnillo. Its colonial heritage is still visible in the Gothic architecture of its public buildings.

But as the mines played out, people were left to earn a living in the fields, depending on sporadic rain and marginal soil. Zacatecas became known as an “expeller” state; for many people born here, migration was the only way to survive.

So, men such as Maurilio Mota went to work picking strawberries in California, sending back money orders to their families every week. Their dollars bought tractors and fertilizer for family farms.

But no matter how much money he sent for improvements, Mota and his brother--who stayed home to work the land--could not get ahead.

For 13 years, the Motas took up the pattern of life in migrant communities: Mota came home at Christmas, stayed through the spring planting and returned to California for the harvest and vegetable packing seasons.

Then, in 1974, a lawyer told Mota that he was entitled to legal residency because his 3-year-old daughter had been born in the United States.

A year and a half later, the entire family moved legally to California. That was the turning point for Mota; from then on, he put his energy into succeeding in the United States instead of building a nest egg in Jerez.

One Sunday, shortly after receiving his immigration papers, Mota was hired to prune a tree. He earned $400 in one afternoon--a week’s pay.

“I decided that was the business to be in,” Mota said. He started West Covina-based Tree Service 15 years ago.

Now, the Motas operate four trucks and own four rental houses in the Los Angeles area.

The Motas’ experience was a precursor to what would happen to thousands of Mexican families a decade later, when the amnesty clause in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted legal resident status to migrants who could prove they had lived in the United States since 1982.

Sending Money to Mexico

Although amnesty reunited families that had been split by migrant traditions, the effect on rural Zacatecas was devastating.

The bank in Tepitongo, whose main business had been processing money orders from the United States, closed. Real estate prices plummeted. “This used to be a dollar economy,” said Sebastian Muro, a teacher in Tepitongo. “When the dollars stopped coming in, it caused a crisis.”

The solution, the government decided, was to find another way to channel migrants’ dollars back into their hometowns. Successful businessmen such as Espinoza and Mota had to be persuaded to invest; the Los Angeles area social and sports clubs--always generous in providing charity--now would be asked to donate money for civic projects.

To give the clubs an incentive, the Zacatecas state government in 1988 proposed matching every dollar contributed for community projects.

The program was so successful that this year the federal government has added its sponsorship and expanded the effort to include other migrant states, such as Jalisco, Michoacan and Oaxaca.

Now, every dollar donated by migrants is matched by $2 in government funds--$1 each from the state and federal coffers. Zacatecanos have proved so eager that the government had to put a cap on their contributions, at $640,000 this year.

In Los Angeles one recent evening, that enthusiasm was evident among the 50 or so representatives of sports clubs and groups linked to villages and towns all over Zacatecas who filled the waiting area of the Mexican Consulate near MacArthur Park.

“We are not only a state, but we are a family here,” said Manuel Cruz, president of the federation of clubs.

Rodriguez Marquez, the state development director, went through a list of bridges, potable water systems, trash trucks and school remodeling projects that the clubs had agreed to help finance. The audience responded with numerous questions and some frustration over snags, disagreement and a lack of information.

Despite the problems and confusion, none of the clubs backed away from their commitments.

“Count on us for support and say hello to the governor,” said one club representative, whose group had raised $22,000 for a series of projects. In mid-November, about 300 zacatecanos greeted Gov. Arturo Romo at Los Angeles International Airport. Romo and their representatives later signed a pact at the consulate cementing some details of investments in the state.

Investments Are Crucial

Not all the Los Angeles groups have been able to raise enough money to get matching funds for projects that their hometowns need. Still, back home, people who live in villages such as Jomilquillo, with dirt streets and adobe houses, say the program has been crucial.

The state government laid a series of pipes across the river in the village to form a bridge four years ago. The pipes were too low; when the river rose, branches and debris would catch on the bridge.

“It acted like a dam,” said Maria Perez. “The water backed up the street. That room filled with water,” she added, pointing to the lowest part of her modest home.

With a $20 assessment from each of the village’s 100 families plus contributions from migrants in Los Angeles and state funds, a new, higher concrete bridge was recently finished. Two weeks later it passed the test when heavy rains filled the river to its banks--and it kept on flowing.

Heron Rojas Sanchez, mayor of Fresnillo, sees the community works projects as just the beginning. “The idea is to bring investment,” he said, “to convince zacatecanos who live in Los Angeles to invest some of their savings in their hometowns.”

Espinoza and Mota exemplify that kind of repatriated investment.

Three years ago, Mota invested $80,000 at 2.5% interest in the Zacatecas Quinta Real, a colonial bullring remodeled into a hotel so spectacular that it was chosen as a site for a key meeting in the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is one of six migrants who put a total of $800,000 into minority stakes in the hotel.

When Espinoza was asked to invest in the Quinta Real, he decided instead to build his own $1-million, 68-room hotel in his hometown. Called the Hotel Leo, after his astrological sign, it has grounds and buildings decorated with statues and engravings of lions.

Espinoza, who says he never went to school and cannot read, proudly explains that his engineer son designed the hotel, whose futuristic architecture stands out in the colonial town.

Rojas Sanchez hopes to see more such investments. “This is the way to keep our people home,” he said. “We already have enough immigrants in Los Angeles. We don’t want more.”

But persuading people born here to come home to invest money made in the United States may prove easier than persuading them not to go north to make money.

At the cattle ranch and the hotel in Jerez, Espinoza employs about 100 people. That is about one-fourth the work force at his Salinas vegetable processing plant.

He unabashedly says that the source of his capital is the United States. And he seems untroubled at the suggestion that his example encourages young Mexicans to keep migrating.

“If you want to make money, you have to go to the United States,” he said. “Mexico is a fine place to invest once you have money, but if you are poor here, there are no opportunities.”

Times staff writer Jesus Sanchez in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

About This Series

Today’s article is part of an occasional series, “The Great Divide: Immigration in the 1990s.” As debate about immigration grows more heated, The Times examines the significant issues for California and the nation.

Mexico’s Migrant Homelands

A tradition of migration links California and Mexico, particularly its central states. Experts say more Mexicans travel back and forth across the border than settle down permanently in California. With one foot in Mexico and one in America, they have developed a unique binational culture and economy.