Distance Puts a Strain on Salvadoran Family Ties

Crowing roosters awaken Silvia Ramirez for her daily chores. First, the sturdy, dimple-cheeked 10-year-old trudges round and round, pushing the heavy wooden wheel that draws water from the well behind her house. Then she lugs the dripping bucket into the dirt-floored kitchen, where her aunt prepares a breakfast of tortillas and beans over a log fire.

While Silvia eats, her mother is getting ready for work--2,300 miles away.

Ana Ramirez dresses to the sound of traffic from the Hollywood Freeway. She rushes out of her North Hollywood apartment before dawn. After changing buses three times, she gets to Chatsworth and a $5-an-hour job, twisting caps onto cosmetic bottles. If she arrives before the shift starts at 7, she has time to buy a doughnut.

Ana Ramirez and her daughter have not seen each other in nine years. Separated first by war and now by economic necessity, the Ramirezes are typical of tens of thousands of families divided between Central America and the United States, families awaiting a decision on the fate of those who fled to the United States during the civil wars of the 1980s.

Congress is considering a deal that would give amnesty to some, but not all, of the immigrants. The lucky ones would have a chance to become legal residents, eligible for U.S. citizenship. The unlucky would face deportation.

Since Central America refugees began arriving in the United States more than a decade ago, the long-distance family has become part of the Southern California mosaic. They are divided by immigration laws as well as economic necessity. Though separated by distance and international borders, they still advise and rely on each other.

The High Price of a Visit Home

However, visits to the Ramirez family here in Concepcion Batres, a low-lying village along the coastal highway, and in a nondescript apartment block in North Hollywood show just how difficult it is for long-distance families to hold themselves together.

Ana and her husband, Juan, left El Salvador in 1988 after receiving death threats. They left behind two children--Silvia, then 1, and Elsa, then 5. Ana also left two children from a previous marriage--Antonio and Carlos, then 10 and 8, respectively. Ana and Juan had their third child, Humberto, soon after arriving in Los Angeles.

At first, Ana feared that she would be killed if she went back to El Salvador. Now she fears that even a short visit could cost her the U.S. document that allows her to work in California.

The money that Ana and Juan manage to send back home--to family members who are raising Silvia, Elsa and Carlos--is enough to keep the children in school, a major accomplishment in rural El Salvador.

In Los Angeles, Juan makes enough working at a factory to buy the couple’s groceries and pay rent on their apartment. But Ana’s job is only temporary, and she must moonlight to have enough left over to send to El Salvador.

Ana raises money by selling towels and sheets that she buys in bulk and sells to friends at a profit. Stocks of the linens cover the three chintz sofas in their small living room and clog the hallway.

In addition, Ana cleans houses after work and on weekends. She has learned enough English to make appointments and follow directions.

“If I do not work here, they [the children in El Salvador] do not study--it’s as simple as that,” Ana said recently as she sipped coffee and sampled a homemade cake sent to her by the family in El Salvador. “People think that the war is over, so everything is back to normal. But it is not. The country is still in upheaval. There are no jobs, and rebuilding the economy will take time.”

Yet she also worries about rebuilding her family, now scattered across three countries. Silvia and Elsa live with Ana’s elderly mother and cousin in Concepcion Batres. Humberto is growing up with Ana and Juan in Los Angeles. Carlos, now 17, lives with family friends not far from Concepcion Batres, and Antonio, now 19, is in Canada with his father.

While most families separated by jobs and distance have at least the possibility of occasional visits, that is not true with many Central American immigrants. And the strains of that are showing on Ana Ramirez.

U.S. Immigration officials have twice refused Ana permission to visit her family, saying that she could leave the United States but could not be guaranteed the right to return. “It does not make sense to go visit a place where you fear for your life,” said an immigration attorney, explaining the logic behind the denials.

Back in the 1980s, Ana and Juan were not political activists. They owned a dry goods store that sold--and sometimes gave--water and cookies to passing soldiers, whether army troops or guerrillas. So each side accused them of collaborating with the other. A week after they left El Salvador, armed men came looking for Juan and a neighbor. The next morning, the neighbor was found dead.

“Had they stayed, they would be dead too,” said Mariclaire Ramirez, Ana’s sister. When Mariclaire began receiving death threats a few years later, she joined Ana in California.

The price of survival for these families is separation, and that can be heartbreaking. Ana cried when she saw a recent photo of her mother. “She looks so frail,” Ana told her sister. “Will we ever see her again?”

Ana’s eldest child, Antonio, came from Canada to spend a month with her recently, and she proudly shows photographs of the tall, thin young man boarding rides at Disneyland. Now they talk frequently, as her large telephone bill attests.

Ana’s middle son, Carlos, goes to school during the week in Santa Elena, and he spends weekends with his half-sisters, aunt and grandmother.

Since he is the only relative in El Salvador with a telephone, Ana calls him often for family news and to leave messages for other family members.

Even so, Carlos has no concrete memories of his mother. He cannot say what colors or music she likes, whether she is quiet or chatty. Asked what he recalls of her, Carlos said only: “My mother is very hard-working and always struggled to help us.”

‘She Needs a Mother’s Advice’

At these distances, Ana is more inclined to provide gifts than discipline. So when Carlos took apart the family’s 13-inch television set last year, she did not punish him. Instead, she sent them a new, 26-inch set.

Ana writes her daughters every week and sends between $250 and $300 a month to El Salvador. But staying close is hard.

Elsa, a slim teenager with waist-length hair, has not written her mother for a year and a half. She refuses to go to a public telephone to call her mother.

“She is getting to the age when she needs a mother’s advice, and I worry about her,” Ana said. Back in El Salvador, when asked about her relationship with her mother, Elsa turned her attention to a cartoon show on the new television.

On the other hand, Silvia often writes Ana. In those letters, Silvia says she wants to learn English and then, some day, come live with her mother in the United States and attend college.

Silvia’s daily life could hardly be more different from that of Humberto, the brother she has never seen. He was born eight months after Ana and Juan arrived in Los Angeles.

Clad in her school uniform, a white blouse and plaid skirt, Silvia, now a fourth-grader, walks unescorted every day to her three-room school, a concrete-block structure on a dirt road.

Humberto wears jeans and a T-shirt to his North Hollywood school. His father always guides him through rush-hour traffic in the neighborhood.

Humberto runs in and out of the family apartment, playing Power Rangers with neighborhood children. His sister seemed puzzled when asked her favorite games. Leaning on the bucket she had just pulled from the well, she replied, “I have a lot of chores and homework. I really do not have time for play.”

Silvia dreams of an academic life, earning one college degree after another. Ana can barely force Humberto to finish his second-grade homework.

Silvia seems resigned to her mother’s absence. Filling banana leaves with cornmeal to make tamales for sale--a family enterprise--Silvia explained in her serious young voice: “My mother left me when I was too little to remember, so I call my aunt Mommy.”

The “aunt” is Ana’s cousin, Rosalia Ramirez, 42. Rosalia knows what it is like to be raised by an aunt. Her mother died when she was 2, and she was brought up by her mother’s sister, Ana’s 73-year-old mother, Edelmina. Rosalia helped raise Ana as well as Edelmina’s other two daughters.

Rosalia takes her child-rearing duties seriously.

“I try to keep them busy because, if they are out in the street, other children will teach them things they don’t need to know,” Rosalia said.

The money Ana sends home “has been well spent,” Rosalia said. “Poor people are not used to wasting money.” Among other things, the money was used to improve the family home, adding a brick living room with a tile floor.

Despite the affection and feeling of unity that the Ramirezes feel, the separation has clearly strained relations between Ana and her cousin.

“It is not the same to work and send a little money home, to come home at night and think a few minutes about your children before you go to bed, as it is to always be aware of where they are and what they are doing,” Rosalia said. “I think my sacrifice is greater.”

Ana also knows about sacrifice. But she believes that, back in El Salvador, her money goes further.

“If I had them with me, I would need a bigger place,” she said. “I could not afford to support them.”

But, she added, “if I were with them [in El Salvador], I could not afford to send them to school.”