Hundreds in O.C. Return Home to Mexican Village for Holidays

Just about everything important here happens in December.

Weddings, confirmations, first communions. The crowning of the town queen. The parade of princesses and clowns through town and into the rodeo grounds.

And of course, the posadas--nightly candle-lit processions leading up to Christmas that wind through the unnamed streets and end with children bashing a pinata.

In December, this lonely farming outpost at the end of a dirt road in Michoacan state--abandoned for jobs and opportunity in Orange County--comes to life as thousands of its sons and daughters return for the holidays.

They open padlocked family homes, catch up on a year’s worth of gossip and pack their days and nights with parties and sports.

Romances blossom. Friendships are cemented. For a few weeks, the expatriates leave behind the stress and alienation of life in the north for what amounts to a giant family reunion.

“Sleep? It’s impossible,” said Maria Lopez, a 32-year-old factory supervisor from Santa Ana. She pulled a small bag of earplugs from her purse and winked. “That’s why I carry these.”

From a few hundred year-round residents, the population here explodes each December to at least 3,000. “It makes us so happy because everyone is together,” said Joel Lopez Guillen, Granjenal’s ranking official, whose five sons had just arrived from Santa Ana. “And to be honest, we couldn’t survive without the money they bring us. This is a very humble town.”

Throughout west-central Mexico, a rural, impoverished region with a decades-long tradition of sending workers north, similar homecomings are taking place.

Mexican consular officials in Los Angeles estimated that a million immigrants and family members--more than a third of them from Southern California--would travel to Mexico for the holidays, jamming airports and highways and bringing enough cash to keep small towns solvent for another year.

The volume of visitors is so great, and so economically significant, that each December the Mexican government intensifies its protective “Paisano Program,” which posts agents at airports and bus stations to answer questions and help returning migrants pass smoothly through historically corrupt customs checks.

Travel agents are well aware of the phenomenon: Most Mexico-bound flights from Los Angeles in mid-December were booked months in advance, said Fernando Arrenado of Acapulco Travel Corp., which has 26 agencies throughout the Southland and caters to Latino clients. Arrenado said more than half the company’s business comes from travel to Mexico during the Christmas season.

“A lot of these people don’t take summer vacations,” he said. “They save all their vacation time for Christmas. It’s predictable. We’ve had people book the next year’s flight as soon as they get home.”

Caravans of cars and vans--such as the one that took 18-year-old Santa Ana College student Araceli Maldonado, her parents and dozens of cousins on a 40-hour trip down new four-lane toll roads to Granjenal--also head south in December.

“We stopped to eat, and that was about it,” said Maldonado, who was born in Santa Ana but enjoys the annual trek to the laid-back, hassle-free home of her grandparents. “We’re here for a month, so it’s worth the drive.”

As rural Mexico filled with holiday visitors, California’s Spanish-speaking immigrant neighborhoods began to feel their absence. Several Santa Ana apartment managers said they count on high December vacancies. Nora Garcia, an assistant principal at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim and herself a native of Granjenal, said that absenteeism rose noticeably this month at her school and others throughout Orange County.

And some Catholic priests who deliver sermons in Spanish said their congregations have dwindled during a season when most churches become packed. “It really gets obvious this time of year,” said Father Chris Smith of St. Joseph’s Church in Santa Ana, who blessed at least a dozen parishioners before they traveled to Mexico this season. “It’s an odd phenomenon. The first year I looked out and saw empty seats, I wondered what I was doing wrong.”

The tradition of December homecomings dates back at least five decades, to the U.S.-sponsored bracero program that brought hundreds of thousands of seasonal laborers north from Mexico. Most of those early travelers picked crops across the U.S. Southwest and returned home to their families for several months in winter.

As the years passed, Granjenal’s workers--led by a few pioneers--found more stable and better-paying jobs in Orange County’s booming construction trade. The move north was accelerated by the 1986 U.S. amnesty law that granted legal status to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, including hundreds from Granjenal.

Once legal, many took their families north, settling in a densely populated immigrant neighborhood in central Santa Ana and holding on as best they could to the values and beliefs of rural Mexico.

The children of Granjenal’s pioneers have gone on to become teachers, court translators, police officers, attorneys and business owners. At least two are doctors. Some have moved out to the very suburbs their fathers helped build a generation ago.

Still, though it means squeezing a visit into school breaks or job vacation schedules, most try to keep alive the ritual of going “home” for the holidays.

Much has changed since the first adventurers left to take their chances in the north. “There were no roads to Granjenal then,” said Armando Lopez, 33, who recalled riding horseback with his father for a full day to meet the nearest northbound train.

There is now, of course, not only a road but a nearby airport, shortening the trip from Granjenal to Santa Ana from a week to an afternoon. And whereas early braceros were once humiliated at the border, where they arrived packed in trains to be deloused en masse, their children now travel with U.S. passports, some flying first class.

Lopez, who joined his father in Santa Ana 16 years ago and went on to become an engineer whose work takes him to Europe and South America, tries to visit Granjenal for at least two weeks every December.

The quiet town, with its single telephone and preponderance of horses over cars, is a refreshing antidote to the bustle and stress of modern U.S. living, he said. And in a life that often seems transient and fleeting, the dense network of cousins and generations-old familiarity is comforting.

“Look at all these people,” Lopez said, scanning a crowd of hundreds outside the church following an evening Mass. “I know every person here, except the very young children. And it’s mandatory that every time I see someone for the first time on this trip, I shake his hand. That is how we stay connected.”

On a weekend when Southern Californians filled shopping malls in a frantic search for last-minute gifts, the people of Granjenal calmly strolled from house to house, greeting distant cousins, admiring their children and paying respect to the town elders.

Among the patriarchs was Alejandro Garcia, known affectionately as Alejito. Now 94, Garcia began crossing the border as a teenager and was known for bringing back novel ideas and customs, including the papier-mache Halloween-inspired characters he called mojigangas, which became an indispensable part of the town’s December parade.

Garcia, who is cared for by a large extended family, could no longer walk out of his bedroom, let alone watch the parades, fireworks and rodeo tricks that were such an important part of his life. Hearing the laughter of winter visitors outside his door, the old man wept from the memory.

“It’s all right, Grandfather,” Lupe Lopez said, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s December. You know this happens every year.”

For 35 years, the December season has been kicked off by a three-day party to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe, the town’s adopted patroness, whose feast day is Dec. 12. Along with a predawn Mass that gets most visitors out of bed by 4:30, there is an outdoor ball, the crowning of the year’s beauty queen, fireworks, a parade, a soccer match and a rodeo.

Dozens of Orange County children also line up for first communions and confirmations in the same church, their parents preferring the simplicity--and lower cost--of ceremonies in Mexico.

Coordinating it all is a five-member committee, whose members collect $50 from each of about 500 expatriate families and make deals with beer and food concessionaires. The festival is meant to be a moneymaker--in fact, it usually provides the entire annual budget for Granjenal.

Two years ago, for example, the town netted about $20,000, said Armando Lopez, who sat on that year’s committee. Most of it still sits in a bank account, he said, waiting for a popular vote on how to use it.

But as much as the town depends on the annual visits, the holiday in some ways is even more significant for those who come south. A few days or weeks in Granjenal reconnects the emigrants to their roots, and provides a break from the difficult job of integrating into a new society.

And, as several pointed out during a recent visit, Granjenal reminds them of the deeper meaning of Christmas, the importance of family and friends.

“When we stay in Santa Ana for Christmas, we exchange presents, and there is so much pressure to buy, spend money, use credit cards. There’s a lot of stress,” Maria Lopez said. “Here, you don’t see a single present at Christmas. We go to church, spend time with the family, have a big dinner of tamales.”

Traditionally in Mexico, seasonal gifts are given only to children, and they are usually exchanged on the Epiphany, Jan. 6, rather than Christmas.

Family commitments in Orange County, as well as the desire of some U.S.-born children for an American-style Christmas, have made long stays difficult for an increasing number of Granjenal expatriates. But still, the pull south is strong.

“I make time to come here because it’s the only time I get to see all these people in one place,” said Raul Maldonado, 32, a sales representative for an equipment manufacturer who squeezed a weekend visit in between business trips to Miami and Dallas but who planned to spend Christmas with his family in Rancho Santa Margarita.

Maldonado’s father, Epitacio, was one of the first from Granjenal to settle in Orange County, and he helped hundreds more follow. For a while, Maldonado said, newcomers stayed in close contact in central Santa Ana.

But the Orange County expatriates, who now number in the thousands, have started to spread out, and even those who live within a few blocks of each other don’t always find time to spend together.

“I hardly get a chance to see these people anymore,” Maldonado said as he briskly backslapped his way through a crowd gathered at the traditional December soccer match. “But here they all are.”

On the sidelines, half a dozen visitors scanned the game with video cameras.

“We have a library at home, one for every year,” laughed Isabel Valencia, who met her husband, Armando Maldonado, at such a gathering 10 years ago and married him in the Granjenal church three years later.

This year, two of Valencia’s sisters were to be married in the same church, vying for precious space with five other weddings. “Of course, there’s a lot of competition this time of year,” said Patricia Valencia, a former Granjenal beauty queen who, like the other brides, her fiance and most members of her large wedding party, had moved to Orange County years ago.

By mid-January, the weddings will be over and most of the visitors will be gone. Their houses will again be locked up against the windblown dust, the church will fall quiet, barbed wire will be strung around the empty plaza to guard against wayward cows. Granjenal will go dormant for another 10 months--until next December.