Going Home : Illegal Immigrant Returns to Mexico Amid Hopes, Fears

Beyond the communal cornfield where Silvia Alfaro learned to plant seed as soon as she could walk, the highland valley exploded in a brilliant blaze of gold.

From one ridgeline to the next, as far as the eye could see, jagged plots of maiz dominated the hard, black earth.

And from the north, storm clouds swept across the land, quenching the thirst of the arid fields and leaving a trail of rainbows over this mountainous region in southern Mexico, inhabited by the “people of the clouds.”

Surveying this landscape for the first time in years, Alfaro knew that there was no place like home.

Certainly life in the United States had never looked as good, she sighed.

She had slipped into the country illegally nearly five years ago, 15 years old and newly married in a union brokered by her parents. Her husband beat her, she said, and she eventually left him only to end up broke and alone, 2,000 miles from home.

She worked the toughest, lowest-paying farm jobs in Oxnard. But when voters approved Proposition 187, she gave up trying to make it in the United States.

Sick with worry that each contact with a doctor or a police officer would end in deportation and separation from her children, Alfaro chose to return to Santiago Asuncion, a poverty-choked pueblo in her native state of Oaxaca.

“I decided to leave before it got any worse,” she said. “No one knows what it’s like to live in fear, to be afraid to wait for the bus or go to the market. I won’t have to worry about those things anymore.”

Last week, Alfaro gathered her two boys and her life’s belongings and hopped a bus for the pilgrimage to her homeland.

Now, with the grueling 30-hour journey behind her, she stood at the lip of this golden valley, sure this is where she belonged. The rainbows were an omen, she said, a sign that her decision to return had been a good one.

“It’s magical, like a dream,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m home.”

The Journey Home

The long journey home began at 7 a.m. at a bus depot on the outskirts of downtown Oxnard.

A charter bus warmed its engine, preparing to deliver Alfaro and her two boys--Adrian, 3, and Eduardo, 4 months--to a depot in Los Angeles. Another bus would take them across the border, and yet another to the Tijuana airport.

Felix Rubio, Alfaro’s fiance and the father of her youngest child, loaded her baggage into the belly of the coach. There wasn’t much, considering it was all she owned.

She had sold many of her belongings to lighten the load and help pay for the trip home.

Rubio, who is also an illegal immigrant, planned to go to Minneapolis after Alfaro’s departure, a place rumored to have plenty of work. They would like to stay together, but there is no work where Alfaro is going.

So Rubio will work in the United States and send money when he gets it. Alfaro will live with her parents--and four of her brothers and sisters--so there will be no rent to pay. Her father said he would support her and the boys even if Rubio never sends a dime.

The bus slipped onto the Ventura Freeway, slicing past rows of emerald farmland being worked by stoop laborers. It lurched through heavy traffic in Los Angeles and then Santa Ana.

Alfaro stared out the window, considering her decision to leave a man who had finally treated her with some decency. She also considered how she could have stayed with another man who treated her so badly.

Nearly five years ago, Alfaro joined the stream of migrant laborers that flows out of Santiago Asuncion each year to work Oxnard’s strawberry crop before surging farther north.

She had only been married three days, and hadn’t known when she repeated her vows that she was signing on for a trip to el norte. Unlike others in Santiago Asuncion, she never really wanted to leave.

“But I thought at least over there it would be very beautiful and that you would never suffer,” said Alfaro, now 20. “I was wrong.”

The suffering set in quickly. She and her husband slept three nights in Oxnard’s Del Sol Park, unable to find work or a place to stay. They borrowed money and rented one of the many garages that double as apartments in the city’s La Colonia barrio.

When she did find work, she labored for as little as $10 a day.

Marital Problems

The marital problems also set in. Her husband beat her often, Alfaro declared in documents filed in Ventura County Superior Court during a custody dispute.

He once punched her in the eye and kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant, the court papers said.

The couple had no telephone, not that it mattered. Alfaro had no one to call. She said her husband tore up letters she wrote to her father begging him to come to her rescue.

“I saw people when they got married, how beautiful they were in their white dresses, eating cake,” she said. “What they don’t tell you is that it’s only beautiful for that one day.”

Eventually she escaped, running away in the middle of the night. She was poor and alone but she endured, grabbing hold of the American dream as if it were a life preserver.

Then came Proposition 187, approved overwhelmingly by voters in November. Its aim was to drive out illegal immigrants such as herself. Given all she had put up with in the United States, she didn’t need much of a push.

She thought of following Rubio to Minneapolis, where there is no such law. Or staying put, as most other illegal immigrants are doing, awaiting the outcome of court rulings that so far have delayed implementation of the initiative.

But in the end, so consumed by fear that she rarely ventured outdoors, she decided it was best to go home.

“I was tired of hiding, of feeling unwanted in this country,” she said. “If everything here was really so good, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere.”

By the time the bus was barreling down the Golden State Freeway, Alfaro had turned her mind to other things.

She was intrigued by the idea that once across the border she no longer would be “an illegal.” She didn’t even notice the U. S. Border Patrol agents swarming around the international boundary when the bus rumbled into Mexico.

The agents didn’t notice her either. They could not have cared less about people heading south.

The Tijuana airport was a busy place filled with busy people flying home for the holidays. They wrapped their arms around suitcases and boxes jammed with Christmas gifts. With all the people, it was hard for Alfaro to find her father.

Guadalupe Vivar, 44, and a legal resident of the United States, would accompany his daughter the rest of the way home.

In the 20 years since Vivar first left Santiago Asuncion to find work, he has returned to his village every year around this time.

But this trip was special. Not only was his oldest daughter going home for good, but he would finally meet his youngest daughter, a 3-month-old born while he was away. The baby would be named once he arrived.

Once Alfaro was in her father’s arms, she lost all doubts about her decision. Automatically, they slipped into the native tongue of their Mixteca region, a tonal language that skips and dances on air.

On the plane from Tijuana to Mexico City, they swapped stories.

And when they were forced to wait seven hours in a Mexico City bus station for the next bus to Oaxaca, they talked through the night, bridging the years of separation with their words.

On the bus the next day, Alfaro said her father had told her that for all her suffering, it was a pity she returned home with nothing.

By the time the bus arrived at Huajuapam de Leon, Alfaro and Vivar were less than a two-hour taxi ride from home. Loading their luggage in a tiny car, they set off through the hills, rounding curve after curve on a narrow, two-lane mountain road.

Soon, Alfaro recognized landmarks. A magnificent, hillside cathedral was the same distance from her town as Oxnard is from Ventura, she said excitedly.

Finally, 30 hours after she started, Alfaro was home.

Off the main road, the taxi bumped along a rutted dirt road, its tires crunching to a stop in front of a two-story block house. The structure is one of the best in the village, a testament to years of sacrifice in the north.

“We go there, we sacrifice seeing our families, not because we want to,” Vivar said. “We go there because there is no other way.”

New Troubles Ahead

This time of year, laborers return en masse to Santiago Asuncion, a pueblo of about 1,600 people in the Mixteca region in western Oaxaca.

They come home for the holidays and to celebrate the fiesta of Guadalupe, the village’s patron saint. They come to get to know their families all over again.

In a few months, when the tide of laborers drains back to the north, the town’s population will be half that size.

This is sure to happen. Because in Santiago Asuncion, as in the rest of this region of indigenous Indian people, the peasant farmers hold fast to some hard truths.

Before northern migration from Oaxaca began in earnest in the mid-1970s, Santiago Asuncion was a village of palm huts and tin-roof shacks. Tucked deep in a poor pocket of one of Mexico’s poorest states, it had little work and less hope.

But nurtured by U. S. dollars, it has progressed over the years into a collection of concrete block houses, many sprouting satellite dishes and television antennas.

Most people now have enough to eat regardless of whether there is enough rain.

“Everything you see here, everything that is modern and new, was built with American dollars,” said Pedro Mendez, a legal immigrant who recently returned to the pueblo after nearly a year of working the fields in San Diego County.

The price of progress has not been cheap, however. Many villagers say they go months, even years, without seeing their families.

Progress has exacted another toll, as well. The local school used to have six teachers; now, it has three because so few children remain. The town used to have a municipal band, but most of the musicians also have gone north.

Even the native language is vanishing, shoved aside by the more widely used Spanish. After all, what good is a language that U. S. employers can’t understand?

In Santiago Asuncion, as in other indigenous communities, villagers say they have little choice but to head north.

The desolate Mixteca region, home to more than 1,000 mountain pueblos, has no economic base to support its inhabitants.

Without arable land to grow food--and with water in short supply--the men, women and teen-age children of this area say they must migrate for work.

“There is no work here, no opportunity,” said Serafin Vivar, the 64-year-old patriarch of the family. “That’s just the way it is. It is the only way we can survive.”

Yet, there is something about this town, some unspoken obedience to the call of the land of their birth, that keeps the residents returning year after year.

It is the same call that ultimately brought Alfaro back home.

To celebrate her homecoming, her family slaughtered a goat, skinning it and roasting its various parts in an earthen barbecue pit. They hugged her and kissed her and told her how good it was to have her home.

“I’m happy now,” cried her mother, Dominga Vivar. “I cried many times because she was gone.”

Then they put her to work. She busied herself in the kitchen--a dirt-floor hut not attached to the main house--making giant corn tortillas over a wood-burning stove.

All the food is made from scratch. Alfaro said she will miss Taco Bell and Pizza Hut the most. She said she will also miss bathrooms and supermarkets, stoves and running water.

Stepping into Santiago Asuncion is like stepping back in time.

For all of its recent advancement into the modern era, the pueblo remains in many ways the village it was decades ago.

There is one telephone in town. No indoor plumbing. Its dirt roads, rutted and scarred by deep fissures, are more often jammed with goats and burros than with cars.

The town centers around an ancient church--some say as many as five centuries old--where villagers exercise their faith. In the evening, youngsters play basketball in the town plaza while men sit around sipping Superior beer, warm and flat and 24 to the box.

On the day the storm clouds rolled across the golden valley, Alfaro helped her grandfather move corn into his tin-roof shack.

This is where she lived until she was 11, before her father ventured to the United States and earned enough money to build the family’s two-story block structure closer to the center of town.

So Many Changes

So much has changed since that time. The town has grown up, so much so that few of the old tin-roof huts remain. And even though she has just left some old problems behind, she knows that new troubles lie ahead.

She has returned to her village without the man she married, and in a small town, that is not a good thing, especially for a woman. She was embarrassed to leave her house the first few days, afraid of what people might say.

Then there are the things she gave up by coming home. In Santiago Asuncion, there is only an elementary school and the nearest doctor is 30 minutes away. In the United States, because her boys are citizens, they could have received an advanced education and regular access to medical care.

“I thought about it over and over again. It wasn’t easy,” she said, the rain now tapping a dance against the tin roof. “Over there, my children would have been educated, they would have been able to go to the doctor. They would have had everything.

“But I wanted to be with my family. I just decided there was no sense being over there, suffering and all alone.”

Ultimately, she knows that despite the often rancorous debate about borders and immigration, her homecoming is an isolated incident, one that goes upstream against the flow of Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, across the international boundary.

And she expects that one day her sons will join the migrant stream to the north.

“That’s what happens in this town,” she said. “That’s what people do. When they are old enough, they leave.”