Economic Shocks South of Border Resound in Lennox : Jobs: Like other immigrant areas, it has inexorable ties to Mexico. Southland’s downturn adds to hardships.

After almost 20 years spent shuttling between two nations, Carlos Magallon returned last fall to his native Mexico, hopeful of settling down for good with his wife and four children. He savored the prospect of a quiet, orderly life, far from the tumult and anxiety of Los Angeles’ low-wage immigrant subculture. A taco stand, financed in part with U.S. savings, was to provide a modest living.

But the devaluation of the peso, announced six months ago today, derailed his plans, along with those of countless compatriots. “People in Mexico don’t have extra money to spend anymore,” observed a disappointed Magallon.

He is back on familiar turf: the streets of Lennox, a dense grid of boxy homes and congested streets directly beneath the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport. Separated from his family once again, Magallon now lives with friends at an apartment complex housing a dozen families from his hometown of Jiquilpan, in the western state of Michoacan, long a mother lode of U.S.-bound emigrants.

The intricate relationship between Jiquilpan and Lennox--”LNX” in the tagger shorthand that adorns walls both here and in Mexico--offers a window into the unfolding fallout from Mexico’s deepening economic crisis. While last December’s devaluation of the peso obviously hit hardest in Mexico, its tremors have also shaken immigrant communities in Southern California.

Binationalism is more than a buzzword here. Economic ebbs and flows in the two countries, border crackdowns, the bitter Proposition 187 debate, revisions in immigration laws--all inevitably reverberate between neighborhoods like this one and their sister communities in Mexico.

A generation ago, Lennox developed as a suburban bedroom community for aerospace workers and other blue-collar laborers--mostly migrants from the Midwest and East--whose storied pursuit of the American Dream helped fuel the region’s postwar prosperity. But the factory jobs that provided them with a modest middle-class existence have largely vanished, casualties of a vastly changed Southern California economy.

Today, this South Bay community shelters the progeny of a more recent, and decidedly more controversial, migration--one that crosses international boundaries. This is a throbbing new-immigrant barrio, a place where Spanish is the predominant language and the school population is 95% Latino.

The neighborhood is illustrative of scores of Southern California communities transformed in the past two decades by a new wave of settlers from Latin America. Its rows of pastel houses and garden-style apartment complexes--many marred by graffiti and fortified with bars--are contemporary counterparts of the East Coast tenements that sheltered the great immigrant throngs a century ago.

The proximity of LAX is not coincidental. Many were drawn by the lure of work in area hotels and restaurants, the low-wage service jobs now largely the domain of immigrants. Indeed, Lennox is a kind of late-20th Century company town, housing a Third-World servant class of maids, waiters and others whose cheap labor sustains an international transportation and tourism hub.

And most are here to stay. This is especially true for those in the country illegally, who fear that stricter border enforcement will trap them in crisis-ridden Mexico should they return.

But the majority of immigrants in Lennox are legal residents. Many are hastening to apply for U.S. citizenship, a widespread response in California to the divisive Proposition 187 debate. And beyond that, it is quite possible that Magallon, a legal resident, is the first part of a wave of returning green-card holders who had hoped to make a living in Mexico--until the peso devaluation forced an about-face, experts say.

At this point, though, Lennox residents--who have considerable firsthand expertise in the intricacies of cross-border migration--say they have detected no major upsurge in new arrivals.

One who did make it through the difficult-to-cross border without papers was Ramiro Nunez. A 19-year-old carpenter from Jiquilpan, Nunez sneaked over from Tijuana one evening this spring after seeing his real wages decline precipitously during the peso’s free fall. He got lucky, eluding la migra and crossing on his first attempt--a once-common feat almost unheard of in these times of tightened border enforcement. Nunez said he was terrified during an episode in a speeding smuggler’s van crammed with two dozen other pollos (“chickens,” as illegal immigrants are called), some stacked on top of him like cordwood.

“All I was hoping for then was that we’d get stopped by the la migra and arrested, so I could go home to Jiquilpan and be safe,” Nunez recalled as he sat on the front steps of a relative’s apartment, oblivious to the earsplitting roar of jets as they thundered overhead. Jobless for six weeks, Nunez said he was about to leave for the Central Valley, where, word had it, there was work in the pistachio groves. Telephone inquiries with hometown relatives from coast to coast had produced few other leads.

“I never imagined that I’d come all the way here and find no work,” said a perplexed Nunez.

It’s not just the newcomers who are facing hard times. Everywhere in Lennox there are signs of economic distress among a population that, in many cases, has been here for 20 years or more. Residents say they are struggling just to feed and clothe their families, send their kids to school and pay the bills. They understand why there has been no tidal wave of new immigrants since the devaluation.

“Why would people go through so much trouble to come all the way here if there’s no work?” asked Roberto Ceja, one of a number of Jiquilpan natives who gather most mornings in the parking lot of a doughnut shop across from the Century Freeway.

At 56, the deep-voiced Ceja is one of the pioneers of the Jiquilpan-to-Lennox exodus. He first ventured to the United States in the 1950s as a contract farm worker under the bracero program, a joint U.S.-Mexico initiative. Like many other ex-braceros, he kept coming north after the program ended in 1965, eventually finding work in the rapidly expanding service sector, where jobs were bountiful as Southern California’s economy boomed.

When he came to Lennox some 20 years ago, only a few Latinos lived on his street.

Today, Lennox’s population is predominantly renters, reflecting other immigrant neighborhoods. More than a third of its residents speak little or no English. A small island of unincorporated county territory, Lennox is also densely populated: Some 25,000 reside within its 1.25 square miles, boxed in by LAX, the San Diego and Century freeways and the city of Inglewood. Multiple families cram into single apartments lined along its narrow streets, sleeping in shifts, the better to save on rents.

In the view of Ceja and others, an oversupply of immigrant workers has saturated the job market, depressing salaries and generating intense competition for any employment, however ill-paid. That situation would only get worse if a new wave of immigrants were pushed northward by a deepening economic crisis in Mexico.

“The best thing to do now is to find a new place where no one else has yet gone looking for work: It’s almost like finding a new island,” explained Jose Luis Espinoza, a 38-year-old longtime busboy who lives in a rented house with his wife, Josefina Espinoza, and their three young children. The parents, both Jiquilpan natives, met in 1977--not in their hometown, but at LAX: Josefina was working as a maid at the Ramada Inn and Jose Luis toiled in a Sheraton restaurant.

The Espinozas, like many Lennox families, have long sent money back to relatives in Jiquilpan. Many still do. But finding extra cash is now beyond the reach of the Espinozas and other families, despite the pressing need in post-devaluation Mexico. There simply isn’t enough, either for $50 checks for aging grandparents or the considerably larger sums needed to sponsor the arrival of a relative or friend.

“We’re just living to pay our expenses,” said Josefina Espinoza as she walked her daughter home from bunker-like Jefferson Elementary School, the absence of windows a nod to the proximity of the airport. “There’s nothing left over.”

Down the street, at the bustling corner of Lennox Boulevard and Inglewood Avenue, Martin Silva verges on the despondent. He runs a motorized food wagon--”Tacos Jiquilpan,” after his hometown--that is the product of years of savings. He has seen business plunge, however, and now wonders if he can keep up with his payments. It wasn’t like this when he arrived 15 years ago.

“There was plenty of work then,” Silva, a father of three whose wife is pregnant, recalled recently as he served heaping plates to sporadic customers. Ramiro Nunez, the recent arrival from Jiquilpan, is now deeply in debt; he borrowed $350 from a friend to finance the coyote , or smuggler, and paid another $75 for counterfeit documents. He wonders if it was all worth it.

If he finds a job, Nunez plans to remain in the United States for at least two years. With border vigilance growing, Nunez fears that even a social visit back to Mexico will preclude a return to the United States.

That may be one unanticipated legacy of the peso devaluation and tightened border enforcement: the permanent “settling out” of the huge undocumented population that is already in the United States. Trips back home are an increasingly risky and expensive luxury for those here illegally. Some have had to miss the funerals and marriages of loved ones in Mexico.

“No one without papers can chance going back to Mexico now,” noted Maria de Jesus, an Jiquilpan native and mother of five who works as a maid in an airport-area hotel.

De Jesus, her husband (a minimum-wage dishwasher) arrived in Lennox five years ago, when entering without papers from Tijuana was still relatively uncomplicated--and Mexico’s economy was healthier. She was a political activist in Jiquilpan, and has worked as a volunteer on behalf of fellow workers in Los Angeles. De Jesus, like others in her predicament, hopes a future amnesty or government program will legalize her family’s status, an unlikely prospect given the current political atmosphere.

During a long conversation at her kitchen table, De Jesus questioned the trade-offs that she and others have willingly made. She voiced fears about Proposition 187, the prospect of mass deportations, the future of her children in a neighborhood plagued by drug and gang activity. Like many, she wonders how much of Mexico’s rich cultural heritage will survive in those exposed to the less traditional, more materialistic ways here.

De Jesus hopes her children’s futures hold something more fulfilling than her backbreaking toil in the hotel, where she cleans 15 or more rooms a day for $6.50 an hour. But as difficult as things may now be for new immigrants in Southern California, her family would have even fewer prospects for betterment in Mexico, especially since the peso’s slide.

“My idea has always been to go back to Jiquilpan, but there is so little there for the family,” De Jesus said. “We’re here now, and my greatest hope is that my children will prosper.”