Immigrants’ Ultimate Destination

Nothing quite illustrates some basic truths about immigration to the United States, in general, and Mexican emigration, in particular, like Jaripo and its houses.

Jaripo is a village in the northern part of Michoacan, a state in central Mexico that is a major supplier of immigrants to the United States, especially California. Emigration in this region is a well-established tradition. People have been leaving Jaripo in large numbers since the bracero program in the 1940s.

Entering the town, the houses are one of the first things you notice. Many are newly painted two-story structures, with marble floors, satellite dishes, sliding glass windows, tiled driveways, ornate arches and gates. Inside, there’s plush furniture. One house has an external winding staircase. These are the homes of people who work in the United States.

The next thing you notice is that more houses are under construction. Like hundreds of small Mexican villages in regions of heavy emigration to the United States, Jaripo has an unfinished look. Over the years, returning immigrants add on to their houses, while others lay foundations for new ones. But what’s most remarkable about these houses is that they remain vacant at least 10 months a year.

They are occupied only for a few weeks when Jaripo’s native children return from Chicago, Dallas, the San Fernando Valley and, primarily, Stockton, where, since the 1960s, they have formed the backbone of the state agriculture industry, working in the fields and canneries. The houses are, in effect, retirement homes, to which their owners believe they will return someday to live permanently. That’s their dream, anyway.

We like to believe that the immigrants’ dream is to go to the United States, make new lives for themselves, assimilate and become Americans. But judging from the Jaripo experience, this may be misleading. Jaripo, and thousands of Mexican villages like it, are standing proof that, for those immigrants who travel north seeking economic advancement, the real American dream is to earn money and return home to Mexico so they can show friends and family that they, too, made it in the U.S.A.

Most immigrants from around the world have always wanted to go home--rich. It’s quite natural. Mexicans are different only in that they are among the few groups in history who have been able to realize the immigrants’ American dream: They can go home again.

Unlike China, Vietnam, Italy, Russia and other sending countries, Mexico, during the time its people have emigrated to America, has combined geographic proximity with relative political peace and consistent poverty. For Mexicans, going home has always been quick, relatively safe and cheap. But it also has meant that, unlike other immigrants, Mexicans have never had to perform the excruciatingly emotional surgery of severing ties to their native land.

In some sense, this may be good. Jaripenos, for example, have done an admirable job of making sure their American-born children know Mexico and Spanish. Plus, taken together, immigrant families’ small investments in their home towns amount to a potent engine of private-sector urban renewal in much of depressed rural Mexico. In Michoacan, one scholar has estimated that immigrant investment in houses and businesses outstrips that of local, state and federal governments combined.

Without such investment, villages like Jaripo would have died years ago. Some permanent residents’ only consistent work is when the immigrants return and begin adding on to their homes. “You have to work while they’re all here,” says Enrique Yepes, a construction worker. “When they leave, there’s nothing.”

Yet, in many ways, this living connection to Mexico has impeded immigrants’ progress in America. It certainly has slowed their political integration into the United States, where they spend most of their lives and where their children go to school. Jaripenos only recently--and only when faced with the threat of Proposition 187 and the possibility of similar measures nationally--began to naturalize and earn the right to vote.

Their wages don’t allow them to invest in both the United States and Mexico. So the choice, for many, is obvious. In Stockton, many Jaripeno families rent houses in the city’s toughest neighborhoods--notorious for gangs, drugs and the worst schools--while maintaining stunning, but vacant houses back home.

Jaripo’s immigrants, and their American children, return to occupy these houses in December and January. The last week of every January, they throw themselves one of the best parties in Mexico, with fireworks, dances, bands in the town plaza and nightly pilgrimages to church.

Jaripo fills up. As it does, a subtle social competition becomes apparent. The houses get more elaborate every year. “It’s the most common thing we see in these villages,” says Gustavo Lopez Castro, a professor at the Colegio de Michoacan in the city of Zamora nearby, who has studied Michoacan immigration for 12 years. “The first investment is in the house in the village. They have to demonstrate that they’ve had success.”

But success also is reflected in the shiny cars and trucks, from which powerful stereos blast as they roll into town for the party. Some people even cart in sleek motorcycles that are virtually useless on Jaripo’s bumpy, narrow streets. Women come to the plaza each night in elegant evening gowns. Teenagers bring their best Nike gear and Starters jackets. Young couples return to get married, in weddings that cost thousands of dollars.

For most families, the return represents a year of hard work and sacrifice in the United States. Often, an entire year’s savings is spent in a month. No one wants to come home a miser. Omar Fonseca, a sociologist who co-wrote a book on Jaripo, remembers one farm-worker family who would not come home if they didn’t have at least $3,000 to spend. This same family, Fonseca says, would pull the children out of school in order to work the fields and make the nut for the trip every January. Thus, some Jaripeno youths are second-generation field workers in Stockton. Many others have avoided the fields, but have not gone to college.

The immigrants’ return also affects Jaripo. Many townspeople faintly resent their returning brethren. “Some of them come back with rented suits, so they can show off to those of us who don’t leave,” says one local businessman. They complain also that the children return from the United States disrespectful and brash. And while the town does continue on, its sole reason for existence seems more and more to be simply that of a stage for the January party.

The children who have yet to journey north see the returning immigrants wearing fancy clothes and tennis shoes and driving trucks with state-of-the-art stereos; they see houses going up; they see money flashed about. They hear stories about the United States--and they can’t wait to leave.

Enrique Anguiano, a teacher at the local elementary school, says “the students see school as a day-care center. They aren’t much interested in school. They pass time here until they grow up so they can go to the United States. This is their idea: leave for the U.S., work and buy a truck and return with some good clothes and money.”

Since Jaripo’s first emigrants are reaching retirement age, they soon will have the opportunity to act on their dream of returning home to a nice house, a quiet Mexican village and a dollar-dominated pension. Yet, their dream may, imperceptibly, have changed just as they are able, for the first time, to make a home of the house they labored so hard to build. Years of living in the United States have likely made Mexico more appealing to them as a tourist destination rather than as a final resting place. They may be hard-pressed to leave their grandchildren in the states.

And Jaripo will likely remain a town of extravagant ghost houses.