Brothers Take Divergent Paths on Immigration

Jose and Pedro Garcia are brothers, both born in the town of Ameca, Mexico, three decades ago. They share stern parents, coffee-colored skin and a natural gift for storytelling. Soon, however, they will be citizens of different nations.

Later this month, Jose will take the oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Younger brother Pedro, meanwhile, languishes in Ameca, deported there after U.S. immigration authorities in Los Angeles labeled him a “criminal alien.”

The saga of the brothers illustrates why the public has developed such dramatically conflicting views of what Mexican immigrants contribute to--and take from--California. It is the story of how an older brother sweated his way toward prosperity, and how the younger one fell victim to his own impatience to get ahead.

Generations of Latino immigrants have seen this trap: Older brothers blaze the trail. Then come the younger ones, expecting easy money, seduced by postcards from the north, never appreciating the price their elders have paid for a mere chance at success.

For Jose, 35, a mechanic for a large shipping company who recently bought a house in Watts, Los Angeles has brought the rewards that come to those who play by the rules. He dreams of traveling to New York. “To see the Statue of Liberty,” he explains. “For what it says. What it stands for. Its history.”

For Pedro, 30, a career petty criminal, Los Angeles is a place that offers unlimited opportunities for enrichment though crime.

Pedro first made his mark in the United States by selling marijuana on a South Gate street corner, ultimately earning 49 cents an hour beheading chickens as an inmate in the state prison in Lancaster.

Deported earlier this year after completing a three-year sentence, Pedro tried several times to jump the fence back into the United States. Each time, he was caught by the Border Patrol. Out of cash and luck, he wound up in a Tijuana homeless shelter. There he met a reporter and told his story, embellishing it with several lies that the reporter uncovered only after tracking down Jose in Watts.

The brothers had not spoken for almost three years. But when the reporter told Jose about Pedro’s plight, the older brother hopped in his Buick that day and headed for Tijuana. He was determined to confront Pedro and make sure he didn’t try to cross the border again.

“It’s not too late to help him,” Jose said just before he left. “If he comes back here he’s just going to get in more trouble.”

A few hours later Jose arrived in Tijuana and found his brother, mopping the floor at the homeless shelter, seeming to avert his eyes, as if he didn’t want to be seen.

His Brother’s Keeper

It wasn’t the first time Jose had rushed off to rescue his younger brother.

There was the one time, many years ago, when his Christmas dinner with his parents in Mexico had been interrupted by a phone call from a woman in Los Angeles. “Pedro is dead,” she announced. He’d been gunned down in a bar.

Jose rushed back home to Los Angeles and called the police, who told him, with wry humor: “Oh, he’s not dead. He’s in good hands, right here with us.” Pedro had been shot at--but not wounded--then arrested in the barroom altercation.

Pedro was in trouble almost from the first day he arrived in California. And Jose was always trying to persuade him to straighten out, trying to set the example, trying to show him that you didn’t have to break the law to get ahead, as long as you worked hard enough.

Pedro is a tall, lean man. Jose is short and stocky. Both men have dark-complexioned features that could easily be mistaken for Arab or African American.

When he lived in Los Angeles, Pedro favored gold chains and watches, so many that his brother thought “he looked like Mr. T.” Jose, by contrast, wears overalls and old jeans and doesn’t mind getting grease under his fingernails.

Jose’s outlook is relentlessly optimistic. He always seems to be thinking about how to make do with less. He reads La Opinion and clips out stories with tips on how to save on home loans. On the weekends he hunts for garage sales, buys things, and then tries to sell them at swap meets. Over the years, he’s bought dozens of jalopies and fixed them up and sold them at a profit.

Pedro’s mood is darker. Ask him what it was like to live Los Angeles and his answer is that it’s a place where you have to watch your back. “You have to be really sharp, on top of things. It’s very dangerous.” He sees enemies everywhere. He lived in Compton once and assumes the reason he never had problems with its black residents was “because I’m so dark. Everybody thought I was black.”

Older brother Jose came to the United States first, as a teenager. He left Ameca in the state of Jalisco on March 2, 1979. (He remembers the date because it was right after the town carnival ended.) He traveled alone by bus from Ameca to Tijuana, where he had an aunt who helped him get to the United States. Crossing the border was easier then. He remembers sitting in the back of a car with a cousin’s green card. Next thing he knew, they were on the open, multilane freeways of the United States.

“I was so young that I thought that was the way you always crossed the border,” he says. “It was nothing.”

He arrived in Los Angeles and hooked up with a relative, an older cousin who told him to rest a few days. After that, an uncle would help him look for a job. But Jose didn’t want to wait. “I told him, what do I want to rest for? I haven’t been doing anything. Let’s go now.”’

He worked painting with his cousin, then later at a downtown garage, painting and doing body work on cars, hearing his cousin’s voice, words that resonate to this day: “When you do a job, do it well. Do it the best you can or don’t do it at all.”

The words were lost on Pedro when he followed his older brother to Los Angeles a few years later.

Seeking Easy Money

Pedro was a restless 17-year-old, and the unskilled jobs that thousands of immigrants fight over didn’t appeal to him. They didn’t pay the sort of easy money he expected to make in the United States.

Instead, he passed the days at his brother’s home on State Street in Lynwood, a busy thoroughfare lined with trees and dingy apartment buildings. There was a lucrative drug trade. Jose remembers seeing drug deals being made not far from his front door.

Pedro tried to hide his new job from his brother. “He never sold in front of me,” Jose says. “He would hide. He would make like an innocent person when I was around.”

If Jose had any doubts what his brother was up to, they evaporated in March 1988.

South Gate police had the corner of State Street and Sequoia Drive under surveillance--the intersection was about 10 yards from the Garcias’ apartment. An officer spotted Pedro apparently selling drugs to the drivers of passing vehicles. The officer arrested him and retrieved a brown sack with five plastic bindles of marijuana.

Pedro pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana for sale. His sentence for this first offense: 90 days in County Jail and three years probation.

The jail stint did little to change his lifestyle. Jose began to see him on the street in the company of some seedy-looking friends, near a cantina whose name he can’t remember. “He even had bodyguards. When you’re in that kind of life you have a lot of friends.”

To Jose, the drug money seemed piddling compared to the danger. “He was helping bigger people. What could he make? Ten, twenty, 100, 200 dollars a day. He couldn’t make more that that. And for that he’s marked for life.”

Four months after his first arrest, Pedro was arrested again and convicted of providing false identification to a police officer.

Having concluded that he need to do something to save Pedro, Jose took him along on a family visit to Ameca, a small town 50 miles west of Guadalajara, hoping to persuade him to stay in Mexico. “I told the jefes [parents] that I didn’t want him here,” Jose says.

Jose went back to Los Angeles alone. But Pedro didn’t stay in Mexico for very long. Soon he was back in Southern California, living on his own. By June 1989 he had been arrested and convicted of possession of marijuana for sale. According to court records, he had been spotted with a group of 15 men at a street corner drug bazaar. Officers staking out the location had recorded the drug dealing on videotape, about 40 sales in all.

The probation officer assigned to the case listed Pedro’s primary source of income as “criminal activity,” and added: “He does not learn from prior mistakes.” In his presentencing interview, Pedro was still denying that he had ever been arrested before. He drew his first state prison term: two years.

Meanwhile, Jose was applying to live permanently in the United States under the 1986 immigration reform law, which granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. He had gotten married and was starting to settle down. He moved out of that dangerous neighborhood in Lynwood and gradually lost touch with his brother. Pedro, he concluded, was simply a victim of the bad company he kept.

The amnesty application was a long paper chase that had Jose tracking down former employers and collecting receipts for all the utility bills he had faithfully paid over the years, proof that he’d been living in the United States for the five years required by the amnesty law.

“I legalized my situation,” Jose says. “And I was always thinking about becoming a citizen. They told me I’d have to wait five years. So I waited the five years.”

Pedro remembers Jose encouraging him to apply. “My brother would tell me, ‘Go get that fixed, you’re going to need that.’ ” But the amnesty deadline came and went.

“To tell you the truth,” Pedro says, “I was never interested in those things. I’m never going to stop being Mexican. Even if I change my name, if I call myself Peter instead of Pedro, I’m not going to stop being Mexican, because my color will still be brown.”

The system, Pedro had decided, would always keep him down. And so there were more charges--including one for possession of cocaine for sale--with increasingly grave consequences: Each was also a probation violation.

Jose, meanwhile, was saving to make the down payment on a house, setting his sights on a piece of property in Watts, an unassuming white bungalow on a quiet street of single-family homes.

It became his in August 1994. He moved into the little guest house in the back with his wife and three kids, renting out the main house to an American family that had lived there for many years. Their rent helped pay his mortgage.

About the same time, Pedro, having completed one prison term, wound up again in the care of the California Department of Corrections.

In December 1993, he had tried to break into a Huntington Park apartment, according to court records. In a stroke of bad luck, one of the men who lived in the apartment was sleeping on a couch in the living room and woke up when Pedro started to pull back a window screen at 3 a.m.

The resident surprised Pedro, then chased him down the street for a block and held him for police.

For this failed, first-degree burglary, Pedro was sentenced to three more years.

In Lancaster, they put him to work at the poultry factory. He took some pride in the fact that his jailers considered him trustworthy enough to hold the knife he used to behead chickens. Still, it was forced labor and he felt “like a slave.”

Even worse, he says, when he finished his sentence and was handed over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service last January, all of the money he made for being a good inmate (about $200 a year) was confiscated.

Deported to Mexico

Once the INS deported him to Mexico, Pedro tried to return to Los Angeles. But now there was a new fence and more agents along the same frontier that his older brother had passed through so easily two decades before. Each time Pedro tried to get back to California, the Border Patrol grabbed him and sent him back.

Eventually he wound up at the Casa del Migrante shelter, a motel-like complex in a working-class neighborhood of Tijuana. About 100 men spend two or three nights a week here, getting warm meals from the Catholic workers who run the place.

Pedro met a reporter one evening just before dinner at the shelter. He told his story and gave the reporter his brother’s address, setting in motion the chain of events that would lead Jose to drive his Buick down to Tijuana.

“Que paso?” Jose asked when he spotted his brother in a remote corner of the shelter, mopping the floor.

Pedro said he was trying to save enough money to go back south to Jalisco.

“You’re not planning on jumping over [the fence] again?” Jose asked.

“No.”

“Get your things and let’s go,” Jose said. “And say thank you to these people here who took care of you.”

Pedro said he didn’t want to leave because an “engineer” he had worked for in Tijuana still owed him $30 in back pay. Jose gave him the $30 and an extra $100 for good measure. He also gave his younger brother some clothes he had brought from Los Angeles that didn’t fit him any more.

Soon they were on their way to the Tijuana airport. “I didn’t want to give him time to react, to hide or anything,” Jose says.

Jose bought a ticket, placed his younger brother on the first flight to Guadalajara and then called his parents in Jalisco and told them to pick up their son at the airport.

Today Pedro lives in Ameca with his parents. He’s taking high-school classes at night and working part-time for the Mexican ministry of social security, making 400 pesos (slightly more than $55) a month.

“I feel very good, being next to my mother and father, who’ve suffered a lot because of me,” he said in a phone interview. How does Ameca compare to Los Angeles? “Life is very slow here. Over there it’s really fast.”

For the foreseeable future, the two brothers will be citizens of different countries.

Pedro understands his brother’s decision to become a U.S. citizen as a practical one, something he did for economic reasons above all else.

“He still thinks of himself as Mexican but he keeps that inside,” Pedro says. “Sometimes you have to be like that. You have to show another face to the gringos.”

On June 7 (he remembers the date because it’s when Oscar De La Hoya fought Julio Cesar Chavez) Jose went to the INS office for his citizenship interview. A few weeks later an official letter informed him: “Congratulations! Your application for naturalization has been approved.” In a few weeks, he’ll take the oath of allegiance to the United States.

Why did Jose prosper? Why did Pedro fall?

Jose pauses and thinks back to the day Pedro first arrived in Los Angeles. Jose, who had spent years struggling, now owned a new car.

“He thought that when I got here, I landed standing up,” Jose said. “He didn’t know I had spent years living on milk and tortillas.”

Instead, the older brother said, Pedro found a shortcut: the drug dealers who were hanging outside his front door.

“He didn’t know the difference between bad people and good.”