Coming Home : A Family Gives Up on American Dream and Returns to Mexico

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 United States 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 found herself 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 month, 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 that 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 long journey home began in Ventura County 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 younger child, loaded her baggage into the belly of the coach. There wasn’t much. She had sold many of her belongings to lighten the load and help pay for the trip home.

Rubio, who also is an illegal immigrant, planned to go to Minneapolis after Alfaro’s departure, a place where he hears there is plenty of work. He will send money when he can.

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

Alfaro stared out the window, considering her life in the United States.

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

She had been married only three days, and had not known that when she repeated her vows she was also signing on for a trip to el norte.

“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 an Oxnard park, forced eventually to borrow money to rent a garage that doubled as an apartment.

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

“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, 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 withhold health, education and welfare benefits from illegal immigrants such as herself. Given what she had endured, she did not need much of a push.

She thought of staying put, as most other illegal immigrants are doing, awaiting the outcome of court rulings that have delayed implementation of the initiative.

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

“I was tired of hiding, of feeling unwanted,” she said.

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 did not even notice the U.S. Border Patrol agents swarming around the international boundary when the bus rumbled into Mexico.

The agents did not notice her either. They do not care about people heading south.

The Tijuana airport, where she would meet her father, was jammed with people flying home for the holidays, making it hard for her to find him.

Guadalupe Vivar, 44, and a legal resident of the United States, would accompany his daughter the rest of the way home. Since leaving his village 20 years ago, he had never failed to return 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.

They flew from Tijuana to Mexico City, where they boarded a bus for Oaxaca. From there, Alfaro and Vivar loaded their luggage in a taxi and set off on a two-hour trip through the hills, rounding curve after curve on a narrow, two-lane mountain road.

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.”

*

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.

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.

“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.

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

“There is no work here, no opportunity,” said Serafin Vivar, the 64-year-old patriarch of the family.

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

It is the same call that brought Alfaro back home.

To celebrate her homecoming, her family slaughtered a goat, skinning it and roasting it 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-floored 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.

For all 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 and no indoor plumbing. Its dirt roads, scarred by deep fissures, are more often jammed with goats and burros than with cars.

Alfaro sacrificed many things by returning 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 would have received an advanced education and regular access to medical care.

But ultimately, she expects that they will one day join the northbound migrant stream.

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