The Busboys of San Miguel

Martin Garcia runs a full tub of beer glasses, greasy napkins and gnawed rib bones to he restaurant’s kitchen. Table 41 needs plates cleared. Table 43 needs more water, coffee and two extra forks for mud pie. Three vacant tables need setting.

Garcia needs sleep. But he has six more hours of a two-job, 16-hour workday before he finally maneuvers around a darkened living room, feeling for an empty couch in the house he shares with five other men.

Garcia figures he has two more years of these relentless hours before he permanently rejoins his new bride, Cecilia, in the hand-carved, king-sized bed in the master bedroom of their new two-story house.

Other busboys--stacking glasses, mopping up a spilled bowl of ranch dressing--also own houses. Some own farms and ranches. Enrique “Chato” Franco, the youngest at 25, the one who keeps pushing an unruly lock of black hair out of his eyes, just bought a Chevy pickup to pull his jet ski. He has a snapshot of the shiny red truck tucked into his apron pocket.

But that life is some 1,700 miles away in San Miguel el Alto, Jalisco, a small Mexican town about an hour and a half east of Guadalajara. Here in Palm Springs, land of velvet golf greens and early-bird dinners, the task at hand is caring for the snowbirds who charge the $8.95 prime rib special on their gold cards.

“Con permiso! Con permiso!” waiters yell as they slam bodies to get to the soup crackers or a can of whipped cream. “Coming through! Hot soup! Hot soup!” shouts a cook. Garcia, 27, a mustache emphasizing his shy smile and dimples, moves through the mayhem with quiet intensity. He blends into the background as customers in booths make dinner conversation and pour another glass of Merlot. This is the invisible side of his double life: north of the border, a mere busboy; south of it, a baron.

*

If it hadn’t been for the t-shirt, Richard Murray wouldn’t be getting on this plane to central Mexico. The shirt had been a gift from Martin Franco Campos, a prep cook and busboy at Jeremiah’s Steak House, where Murray is assistant manager.

Each time Murray wore the shirt, with its Spanish Colonial skyline, a homesick Campos would reminisce about San Miguel el Alto. The buildings are made of cantera, a pinkish-gray stone quarried in his town. The hills are green. The girls beautiful.

The two men started talking houses. Murray grew up in San Diego, where a kid could ride his bike to the beach and fall asleep to ocean sounds. It ate at him that even with a college degree, Murray could not afford the kind of house his father had bought at the same age.

Instead, he took a 30-year loan and bought a small house from an old woman who had homesteaded a piece of brush-covered desert in Morongo Valley. Murray, 34, spent much of his free time refinishing wood floors, installing sprinklers and, he hoped, building equity.

Franco Campos, 31, had more extensive projects in San Miguel. He had workers installing hand-painted tile in three bathrooms and finishing a 12-car garage where he could restore classic cars.

When Martin Garcia invited Murray to his August wedding in San Miguel, Murray immediately accepted. He had to see this rose-colored town where busboys built mansions.

*

San Miguel El Alto, a tidy mosaic of pastel-colored buildings, rose gardens and citrus trees, rises from an unending sprawl of pastures and empty fields. A tall, ornate cathedral built in 1612 anchors the plaza in the town of about 10,000 people.

Every afternoon, the plaza is empty but for a group of old men playing dominoes. Don Venencio always slams his dominoes down harder than anyone else, making a loud crack that ricochets around the square--he’s a little hard of hearing from ringing the church bells for Mass. In the summer, there seems to be a Mass every hour, for in this season the men of San Miguel return to marry their sweethearts.

The rest of the year, says Refugio de Alba Sanchez, pushing back his big white sombrero, “it is here like it was in the States during the war: all women and old men.”

Locals estimate that 90% of San Miguel’s men have seasonal jobs in the United States. For generations, they had worked the fields of the Coachella Valley and the California coast. Then, in the early 1960s,

Lupe Loza and his friends discovered Palm Springs. It was the resort town’s celebrity-laden, gin-soaked heyday, and the San Miguel men found they could make more money wearing an apron than picking crops.

Now almost every Palm Springs-area hotel, restaurant and golf course employs San Miguel natives who have green cards and reputations as “monster” busboys, waiters and cooks. Loza’s son cooks at Billy Reed’s, the same restaurant where his father worked until he retired.

“So many have gone between Palm Springs and San Miguel that if you look at a map, you see a little dotted line,” says Sanchez, 71, who recalls turning the heads of local women years ago when he returned from the States with new cowboy boots and a car. He waves at the shops around the plaza, all founded with money the owners earned selling sodas on the 14th hole at PGA West golf course or cooking at El Pollo Loco. “It’s good. They put money into the town.”

But Ignacio Ramirez, 13, sweeping the cathedral floors after school, says he has no intention of going north: “I don’t want to go to the U.S. I want to be a teacher. I just want to have a nice life. I don’t want to be rich. I don’t want to be poor.”

People in the plaza note a stranger talking to Ignacio, and within minutes, quicker than if he’d been summoned by cell phone, his father, Jose Ramirez, peddles up on a bicycle. Jose, 42, has one son across the border and is determined Ignacio won’t follow.

“Our kids go over there with roots and traditions, and when they come back they’ve changed. I tell my son: ‘Observe closely how the guys are who come back, and instead of being full of glory at their clothes and money, be saddened by the fact that they are not who they used to be.’ ”

*

Murray is met at the guadalajara airport by francisco Galindo. A walking definition of tall, dark and handsome, Galindo, a Jeremiah’s busboy, sports expensive sunglasses and a stylish haircut.

Gunning his Oldsmobile through criss-crossing traffic, Galindo, 27, heads to a restaurant with a 14-piece mariachi band, pricey seafood and three waiters per table. One later presents the bill to Galindo, an obvious prearrangement. Murray raises his eyebrows. In another world, Galindo is among his lowest-paid employees.

Galindo laughs: “Over there I’m a busboy. Here I live like a king.”

Both are anxious to see Martin Garcia’s new house. “Maybe you won’t think it’s much,” Garcia has repeatedly told Murray.

“I hear it’s pretty nice,” offers Galindo.

Indeed. A spiral staircase, 18-foot ceilings on the first floor, carved wood doors, patios and more. A cousin who is an architect helped design the curved walls, the modern lines and angled skylights. But Garcia got many of the ideas--the arches dividing the double living room, the atrium in the kitchen--from free Palm Springs real estate magazines that feature glossy pictures of country club mansions.

In a kitchen filled with gleaming new appliances, Garcia mimes wiping a table: “This is how I built my house.”

He has always worked a day job--fry cook, golf cart mechanic, whatever he could find--to cover his expenses in California. But every dollar from busing tables at Jeremiah’s was ear-marked for buying land and building the house. It took two years to save about $4,500 for the land. Then he would periodically return to buy materials and hire men to work until the materials ran out. Between the saving and the building, it took eight years to finish the house, which he estimates is worth $100,000.

Looking at the creative architecture and open space, Murray can only think of two words: “No mortgage.”

*

This year, the sun was warm and the rain fell at the right time for Francisco Galindo’s 14 acres of sugar cane. When combined with his family’s corn fields (which Galindo also manages), he expects the crops will bring in 50,000 pesos--about $6,300. Last year, he made almost twice that--about $11,000--in four months busing tables at two different jobs in Palm Springs.

But it’s not quite that simple. The value of money increases as it crosses the border in a way that can never be explained by an exchange rate or economist. Still, it only works for the few who hold on to the dollars long enough to come back and invest.

“So many come back with nothing,” says Martin Garcia. “I see them in my nightmares.”

Or they come back with worse than nothing, as alcoholics, drug addicts, gang members. Some just come back broke, grown men running for home.

“Not everyone has the same strengths,” Martin Franco Campos explains. “When you come over, you’re 18. You don’t know the language. You don’t have a car. Everyone looks at you as ‘just a Mexican.’ I understand it, we’re strangers here--but it’s still hard. Some can’t take it.”

Franco Campos crossed at 18, working one job from 4 a.m. to 1 p.m. and another from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. He slept four hours a day, and his mom wrote letters telling him to come home. “I was so tired all the time. But I was young. I could take anything,” he recalls. “The ones who make it see it as a challenge. Between pride and a sense of adventure, we take it.”

To watch any of the seven San Miguel busboys at Jeremiah’s count their tips is to watch a ritual--a cry for protection, like making the sign of the cross.

First, each bill is groomed--folded vertically and smoothed, flattened and smoothed again--then joined with others of its kind (ones, fives, tens and twenties). The stacks are patted ruler-edge straight. A few chosen dollars go into one pocket--for gas or buying a beer for a friend. The others are slipped into a money clip, then slid into a wallet.

The slap of the wallet’s closing is as final as a bank vault slamming shut.

*

Galindo strides through his sugar cane fields in the early morning, the lush green towering well over his head. He grabs a stalk and breaks the thick cane over his knee. He chomps into a three-foot piece with strong teeth and undisguised glee.

This is his favorite kind of day. He carries a bag of his sister’s homemade tortillas and carnitas. He will find a spot where the wild grass grows thick, flop down and gaze at the sky. Galindo defines freedom as time that’s your own, the choice to wake up and think: “What do I want to do today? I want to watch clouds.”

He never notices the clouds in Palm Springs. He must be at his first job at Las Casuelas Nuevas in Rancho Mirage by 10 a.m., where he buses tables at the busy Mexican eatery until 4:30 p.m. He starts at Jeremiah’s at 5, working another half-dozen hours. He falls into a rote, wooden persona, startlingly different from the whistling, smiling man munching cane from the field he bought with his busboy tips.

Galindo could have gone to college in Mexico like some of his friends. “But I watched engineers struggling and poor, and others who worked as busboys across the border came back with money,” he says. “If you have no money, life is sad here. Really sad.”

He pays his field workers 300 pesos a week--about $40, or his tip money for one decent night at Jeremiah’s. He knows it’s not enough to feed a family. He spends 1,000 pesos a week just on himself, eating out and catching comedy shows in Guadalajara. But he feels cornered. If he pays more, Galindo says, workers will swarm his fields looking for higher wages and he doesn’t have enough jobs for them.

Galindo will stay until Christmas to supervise the corn harvest and the burning of the sugar cane fields. He likes to watch the billowing clouds of smoke that mean a new start for the fields. Then, while the earth is quiet and renewing itself, he’ll go back to Palm Springs to replenish his bank account.

*

Martin Garcia points to a pile on the floor: “Those are my clothes.” The couch he’s been sleeping on is one of three in the living room.

Garcia calls it “San Miguel economics,” which means, “I don’t have any money, but I have a lot of friends.” Split six ways, the rent on this two-bedroom house in a Cathedral City neighborhood is $150 each. In the driveway, two of his five housemates, all from San Miguel but none of whom work at Jeremiah’s, are tinkering with a dinged brown Toyota that will get Garcia to his jobs.

There’s a palm tree in the front yard and the sun is shining on this clear fall day; the warmth is already packing in snowbirds. During the next eight or nine months, the men in this house will each work two, sometimes three, jobs. Then, when the Europeans and the East-Coasters and the weekenders from L.A. go home, so will the busboys. For while Palm Springs is silently baking, balmy San Miguel el Alto will be alive. Each night, couples will hold hands and sit on plaza benches, new stores will open and Martin hopes that that he and Cecilia will be together again.

There’s a saying in Mexico, where the value of money constantly fluctuates: “He who has is he who spends.” This year, Garcia spent all his money on his honeymoon and new house. Now he’s back in Palm Springs to bankroll an auto parts business that might support him at home.

He left San Miguel before the sun was up. Cecilia kissed him that October morning but didn’t say goodbye; she was crying too hard. On the last day of their two-week honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, she told him that she was staying, that she and his sister were planning to design and make bedroom ensembles in their hometown. If she can make money too, Cecilia thinks, Martin can come home sooner.

He hopes she will visit at Christmas and has warned her not to say she’s married when applying for a visa. She’ll have a better chance, Martin tells her, if she says she’s going to Disneyland.

He remembers their wedding day as the best San Miguel el Alto--no, the best life--has to offer:

A citrus-scented breeze has scrubbed the sky blue. After the ceremony, Martin, in a well-cut tuxedo, stands on the cathedral steps holding Cecilia’s hand, looking out at a sea of 500 well-wishers, most of whom he’s known all his life. Shoulders square, chin high, a man of standing.

He’s startled to find he can’t stop crying as aunts, uncles and cousins offer hugs and kisses: “Look at this, I’m bawling,” he says. “I don’t cry.”

His eyes water again the following day when a friend asks if Martin has always known the long hours, hard work and years away from his family would be worth it.

“I do now,” he says, “I do now.”

Back at Jeremiah’s, he looks at a busy restaurant with the same posture he held on the cathedral steps. His khaki pants and white shirt are carefully pressed, even though he had just a half hour between busing tables at a hotel down the street and his job here.

In the back, the dishwashers are singing an old ranchero song:

Con dinero

o sin dinero

sigo siendo rey

With money, or without money, I am still king.