For Those Headed North, Sense of Despair Sets In : Mexico: Worsening economy squeezes incomes. Foiled border-crossings and hardships in California take toll.

Here in the tree-shaded central plaza, where couples stroll in an age-old courtship ritual, young men in baggy trousers and Raiders jackets affect confident swaggers, a dashing air of having experienced life beyond the sticks.

For generations, ambitious inhabitants of this provincial center and its rural environs have cheated poverty and small-town tedium with dollars earned in the fields, factories, hotels and restaurants of California.

Today, however, a palpable sense of despair often lurks just behind the bluster of the young men back from the north.

Even as the plummeting Mexican economy has squeezed job opportunities and real incomes, reinforcing the need for U.S. salaries, the long-institutionalized sojourns to “the other side” have become ever more difficult--and expensive--propositions. Tales of foiled border crossings and hardships in a once-bountiful California battered by the twin afflictions of recession and the nasty Proposition 187 debate have largely supplanted the idle boasts of dolares to be scooped up for the taking.

In the broadest context, the prospective narrowing of Mexico’s historic “safety valve” of emigration at a time of economic distress has begun to worry Mexican officials, intellectuals and others. Some wonder about the potential for increased social unrest amid a frustrated population that is increasingly denied opportunities at home and across the border.

Although many people here still heed the siren call of the north, others are clearly thinking twice about the trip, even opting to remain at home and aguantar, or endure.

“Why go north just to suffer?” asks Victor Hugo, 23, back from a stint in California, where he only found part-time, minimum-wage work that barely paid his expenses. “If I have to suffer, I’d rather suffer at home.”

The mixed experience of Jiquilpan, emblematic of traditional Mexican emigration patterns, reflects the evolving situation in hundreds of other “sending” communities almost six months after the peso devaluation triggered warnings of a drastic upsurge in immigration.

Mexico’s economic tailspin has pauperized tens of thousands of families--and will continue to impoverish many more--providing legions with a greater impetus to emigrate, experts say. But studies show that the correlation between emigration and broad economic and social trends in Mexico is a subtle one based on a number of factors, not exclusively need.

Who emigrates, scholars say, has more to do with family connections in the United States than relative poverty. Loved ones who are already in the north often underwrite the journey, later providing room, board and critical job contacts.

The poorest Mexicans seldom have the option of leaving. They can’t afford it. The vast majority lack the network of U.S. relatives whose subsidy is essential at a time of rising costs.

Consequently, there has been no major surge in emigration from the southernmost state of Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest regions, despite the outbreak last year of a guerrilla conflict that has created thousands of refugees. Financing the long trip to the northern border is beyond the means of most residents of Chiapas, which lacks a history of sending many north.

Tradition of Emigration

Few areas have a longer, more intricate tradition of emigration than Jiquilpan. The township of about 60,000 people sprawls through verdant valleys and rugged hills in the western state of Michoacan, south of majestic Lake Chapala. Michoacan, along with neighboring Jalisco and Guanajuato, is among the handful of states that have historically provided the bulk of U.S.-bound emigrants, although major new sending regions, notably Mexico City, emerged during the nation’s foreign debt crisis of the 1980s.

The trickle northward from Jiquilpan began about a century ago, when some men left for job opportunities with U.S. railroads, farms and ranches. The flow became a torrent during the bracero program that legally dispatched thousands of laborers to the fields of the western United States. The joint U.S.-Mexico labor initiative, which began in the 1940s, lasted for about 20 years. But many braceros stayed, beating a path for future generations.

Since the 1980s, a movement once composed largely of men on seasonal journeys broadened to encompass entire families. Townsfolk and peasants, the illiterate and the college-educated, were swept up in the migratory spiral. Women whose role had always been to care for families became maids, waitresses and housekeepers in California. Many stayed in el norte for good; others returned infrequently for the occasional fiesta or funeral, bringing back children who spoke broken Spanish.

Today, some villages in the area are virtual ghost towns much of the year, inhabited largely by the elderly, a pattern prevalent in immigrant-sending zones throughout Mexico. Two-story homes with satellite dishes poking from the roofs--financed with U.S.-earned dollars--stand eerily vacant on deep-rutted byways; pickups with California license plates sit idle in concrete driveways.

Wayne A. Cornelius, a professor at UC San Diego, has suggested that a wholesale abandonment of some parts of Mexico by families who used to shuttle back and forth seasonally has partially dried up the pool of potential immigrants. That may be one factor contributing to the absence of a massive, post-devaluation push to the border.

Another factor, interviews here indicate, may be an inverse cushioning effect of the peso devaluation.

Perhaps one-third or more of all households here receive dollars from families in the United States, although such payments may be dwindling as expatriates become less and less attached to Mexico. Dollars are now worth almost 50% more than six months ago--a boon for those receiving remittances in Jiquilpan and other emigrant zones. Many elderly people and others who have returned to live on U.S.-earned pensions and savings also benefit from their inflated value.

“There’s not much of an economy in Jiquilpan, so families are nourished by money sent from the other side,” said Father Rafael Barragan Orozco, a Roman Catholic pastor who for 15 years has bestowed blessings upon those bound for the north, imploring them not to forget their ancestral values. As if to emphasize tradition, a library next to his church office houses stacks of birth and marriage records dating from the 17th Century.

But in the past few years, Barragan has detected a significant shift: a downward trend in emigration. Secondary-school dropout rates, he notes, have declined sharply, as many have opted to stay in school rather than bolt for the border.

The Cost of Crossing

The more recent trend coincides with two developments: the recession in California and the steady buildup of U.S. border enforcement, which has raised the cost of illicit crossings. The vast migratory grapevine promptly channels word of such matters back to Jiquilpan and similar communities.

Over at City Hall, Yolanda Jimenez Vazquez, the city treasurer who works as a part-time immigration consultant, also noted a new attitude.

“The instinct to go north is not as automatic as it was a few years ago,” said Jimenez, whose father emigrated to Riverside as a young boy with his family early in the century. He returned to Jiquilpan to stay in 1942, disgusted by the then-blatant bias against Latinos, and began a business assisting thousands with their immigration paperwork.

Today, townsfolk back from California complain of scarce, minimum-wage employment, often part time, against a backdrop of increasing social hostility. The payoffs seldom match those of the booming 1980s, when jobs were plentiful and the anti-immigration movement was a marginal political influence. (Relying on Mexican press reports, many here wrongly believe that Proposition 187 is already in effect.)

“Everyone takes advantage of you if you’re an indocumentado ,” said Flavio Magallon, a hotel clerk who was trained here as an accountant but only found work as a laborer and truck driver while living in Compton. He says he is back in Jiquilpan to stay.

Of course, some immigrants, perhaps most, have always returned to Mexico. Differences in culture and lifestyle have long lured exiles back to a more hospitable environment.

Yet disaffection with the tradition of emigration is often evident in conversations with the young, particularly among students at the Jiquilpan Technological Institute, a government-funded business college that is one of a number of excellent schools here. (More than one expatriate family in California sends their children to Jiquilpan for their education.)

“I think Mexico needs people to stay and build up this country,” said Julio Cesar Cervantes, 21, a student who has three siblings in the United States but has thus far rejected the option of heading north.

His elder brother, Jesus Cervantes, a highly trained veterinarian who has worked as a farm laborer, busboy and waiter in California, is among the well-educated who left during the mid-1980s to take low-paying jobs in the United States. There are early indications of a similar flight of professionals in the wake of Mexico’s current crisis.

Most of his contemporaries left long ago, the younger Cervantes says, usually for California but also for opportunities elsewhere in the United States and Mexico. Nonetheless, recently married and a father, Cervantes hopes to remain in Mexico and embark on a business career.

The reports of anti-Latino sentiment emanating from California, as well as the prospect of taking a dead-end service job, bother Cervantes and other students interviewed on campus. The often raucous homeboys of the zocalo, or central plaza, also trouble career-minded youths, who view them as inhabiting a kind of cultural warp: half Mexican, half American, never at home in either place.

Inevitably, many here link delinquency, drug abuse and other social woes with the corrupting influence of California. The presence of graffiti proclaiming “Compton,” “Lnx,” (Lennox) and other northern beachheads of the Jiquilpan diaspora are visible signs of the cultural clash.

“I feel like we’re losing our beloved Mexico,” Salvador Mejia Olivares said as he sat in the tailor shop he runs out of his home on a quiet street of adobe homes, many owned by families now in California.

Almost half a century ago, Mejia also succumbed to the wanderlust, passing a season as a bracero in the vegetable fields of California and Arizona. But life in the rugged migrant camps never held much appeal. He is proud that his three children all remained in Mexico, studied and embarked upon careers in medicine and law.

But for many in the days since devaluation, eschewing the road north is less a matter of choice than a direct consequence of cost. Increasingly left behind are young men and women--their real earnings slashed by peso devaluation--who would very much like to head for California but cannot come up with the $1,000 or so that many say is now needed to finance transportation, smugglers and other travel expenses. Relatives in California and private lenders--traditional sources of such start-up funds--are wary of fronting such substantial sums.

“We’d all go to the north tomorrow if we could,” said Carlos Ramos, a slender, 29-year-old, onetime indocumentado in California who was among eight young men gathered at a playing field in the nearby hamlet of La Joya. “But there’s no money.”

Overriding whatever hesitations Ramos and his friends might have about wanting to go north is an essential fact: One hour of work in California, even at the legal minimum of $4.25, now equals about a day’s wages in much of post-devaluation Mexico.

And while prices have shot up since December, salaries here have remained relatively stable. The legacy: more meals without meat, reduced purchases of clothes and other items and even fewer frills in an already drab existence.

Land Does Little Good

This was hardly the vision of Jiquilpan’s most acclaimed native son, Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico’s revered ex-president, who championed land reform during the 1930s that resulted in the breakup of large haciendas and the creation of vast quasi-communal farm tracts. Many here now have land, but it does them little good. Small farmers despair of ever making anything beyond a subsistence living on the farm--a microcosm of Mexico’s beleaguered agricultural sector.

“We used to make a profit from the harvest,” said Luis Francisco Rodriguez, a farmer’s son who was among those strolling recently in the zocalo . “Now we earn just enough to pay our expenses, if that. What’s the point?”

The Jiquilpan area is a hotbed of the leftist social doctrine known as cardenismo, articulated by the ex-president and championed by his son, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a twice-defeated presidential contender. Conversations suggest that as the safety valve of emigration becomes constricted, social and political tensions may be rising in Jiquilpan and elsewhere.

A feeling of desperation is evident amid the Figueroa family of Cotijaran, a sun-scorched stretch of chaparral east of Jiquilpan. Five of the family’s 12 children regularly live in California, sending home money earned in the fields to care for their aging parents. Emigration is a fundamental survival strategy, not a question of choice or adventure.

This spring, a group of about two dozen villagers set out on the well-traveled route to the border. Among them were four Figueroa siblings, two sisters and two brothers. The group sought to enter Nogales, Ariz., where word had it that crossing was easier than in Tijuana. U.S. authorities thwarted them on each try. After one of their brothers was attacked by a thief, the two sisters returned home, stunned at the level of difficulty.

Maria Figueroa, 17, said she longed for her previous life of at least meager prospects as a farmhand in California. Her failure to make it across had devastated her; her eyes moistened with tears at the prospect of a future in tiny, bleak Cotijaran.

But she vowed: “We’ll try again.”

Tuesday: Reverberations of the peso devaluation are felt north of the border in Lennox and other Latino communities with Latino immigrants.