Poverty Propels Mother, Baby on a Deadly Journey to U.S.

Her husband had gone off to work in the United States, but in a year he had sent home less than $1,000 for her and her infant daughter.

Yolanda Gonzalez’s breasts ached trying to nourish an 18-month-old baby. She felt weak all the time.

There was no money for baby formula. Or clothes. Or toys.

Then she heard that her husband, Hermilo Hernandez Velasco, was sending money to other family members in Mexico. She heard he was spending money on lovers in the United States.

Every week, she would ride in the back of a pickup or walk 8 miles from her destitute village in southern Mexico to the nearest phone in the regional city of Santiago Juxtlahuaca. She would talk to her husband in Portland, Ore., and plead for money.

Finally, one of Yolanda’s brothers, who also was living illegally in the Portland area, told her he had saved enough money, about $2,500, to get her and her baby, Elizama, out. They would ride a bus for four days to the border, where a coyote, a smuggler of illegal immigrants, would bring them across the Arizona desert.

“Que milagro!” What a miracle, Yolanda’s mother remembers thinking. Only a handful of the village’s women had ever gotten the chance to live in the United States. And Yolanda would be reunited with her husband.

Yolanda and her family thought she would be traveling through the hills of Tijuana and San Ysidro, Calif., where many others from San Pedro Chayuco had crossed. About half the men from Yolanda’s village of 200 have made that trip and then traveled on to Portland to pick crops, work in restaurants or do other labor.

But the coyotes who usually led the immigrants from her village balked at taking Yolanda’s baby along. They turned to a rogue smuggler, who promised them streets of gold and gave them the overheated caldron of the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Then he abandoned them on a cow trail on a burning, 110-degree day in late May.

The only miracle was that baby Elizama lived, an ounce of water left in her bottle, her dead mother’s arms wrapped around her.

Yolanda’s village, San Pedro Chayuco, is situated in a narrow valley with alternating patches of forests and farm fields along slopes that climb 2,000 feet. In the early morning, roosters crow and strands of cotton-puff clouds cling to the hillsides.

But the natural beauty masks a grinding poverty that seems to worsen with every passing year.

Still, in the way of all mothers, Paula Galindo Flores believed life would be better for her daughter than it was for her.

There would be no getting married at age 15, no household of kids to raise by age 20.

Her daughter would get more than six grades of education--maybe enough even to become a teacher. She would have indoor plumbing, not an outhouse draining into the pigsty.

Galindo had married shortly after her quincean~era, or coming out. She had met a good, hard-working man who owned land high above the village. Although only 200 yards above, the people on the hill spoke Spanish rather than the Mixtec dialect of the lowlanders.

The young couple started married life in a shack made of discarded shipping crates and cardboard.

Luck soon visited them. Some wealthy vegetable growers from Baja California came around in the mid-1980s trumpeting how much money people could make picking tomatoes and strawberries in northwest Mexico.

Lured by wages double the $3 a day they were making in Oaxaca, Galindo and her husband--who now had tiny Yolanda--decided to go.

For three years they picked crops and saved their money. Then they returned to San Pedro Chayuco and built a two-room house of brick.

Coming back was a big mistake, Galindo now says. Work was hard to get, and she began to see the patterns of her life repeating in Yolanda’s.

Yolanda was a headstrong girl with a pleasing personality and strong love of family. She fell into a depression over her grandmother’s death and missed most of her second-grade year. But she repeated the grade and began pulling in A’s, especially in mathematics. She had dreams of being a secretary, maybe even a teacher.

But free education in this part of rural Mexico stops at the end of sixth grade. And that meant that 13-year-old Yolanda would stay home.

She kept busy feeding the chickens, pigs and horses. She washed dishes in the outdoor sink and endlessly swept the floor of the home.

Then she met Hernandez, a handsome boy of 18 from a family in the valley below with a gift of gab and dreams of a better life.

Galindo saw it differently: He was, she said, “the biggest liar of a family of liars.”

Yolanda and Hernandez had been dating for two months when Hernandez, accompanied by his father, came up the hill one night in 1996 to ask for Yolanda’s hand in marriage. Galindo was devastated, but Yolanda was insistent.

“She was already 15 years old. What could I say?” Galindo said.

The two got married in a Pentecostal church in a nearby village. No photos were taken because neither family had a camera or the money to hire a photographer.

Life instantly got much tougher for Yolanda, according to her family.

Hernandez was the third of five boys to marry, and all three married couples lived under the same roof with his father and mother. Yolanda became pregnant almost immediately but suffered a miscarriage. Hernandez worked as a day laborer, picking crops.

“She didn’t get a new piece of clothing for three years,” said Augustina Velasco, Yolanda’s best friend. “She was like a slave to all those people in that house. Hernandez also was seeing another woman and hit Yolanda real hard in the back one night when she confronted him about it, leaving a big mark. The only happiness she had was listening to the cassettes of her evangelical music.”

Then Yolanda became pregnant again, this time with Elizama. But before the baby was 6 months old, Hernandez was gone. His relatives living in Oregon had put enough money together for him to make the trip.

He left in May of last year, promising to send his wife $200 a month, promising her that he would send for her and the baby. It was the last time he would see his wife alive.

Yolanda moved back to her mother’s house and waited.

Hernandez, who returned to Oaxaca after learning of his wife’s death, said he sent his wife the money he had promised. He said he had no idea she was coming north to find him. He never sent for her, he said.

Augustina Velasco scoffed at that story as she made tortillas over wood embers in a shed outside Galindo’s house, rays of sunlight filtering through the unevenly spaced boards.

“He [Hernandez] came in this room on the night of Yolanda’s funeral and said, ‘I killed my wife,’ ” Velasco said. “Then he started weeping.”

The numerous Mixtec villages that dot western Oaxaca are some of the poorest in Mexico.

Poor cultivation practices over the years led to massive amounts of erosion on the steep mountain slopes. Production of staples like corn and beans lags far behind the rest of the country, according to Oaxacan state agricultural statistics.

And although the ideals of the Mexican Revolution of the early 1900s--breaking up large privately owned haciendas and redistributing land to peasants--were popular, there was little follow-through in the Santiago Juxtlahuaca area of Oaxaca.

“There were eight prominent landowners in this area, and they angrily resisted any change,” said Candido Beristain Romero, director of art and culture for the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca. “The only reform that came about was the creation of one small ejido [an area of land redistributed to peasants] in all of this area.”

The poor families divided the little land they got into ever smaller parcels for their children and their children’s children, and they grew ever poorer.

Paula Galindo Flores and her family live on slightly less than 5 acres of land. Hermilo Hernandez Velasco and his family have a little more than 2 acres.

The best months are April and May, when Galindo’s corn ripens. Recently she cut eight dozen flowers from her land and sold them at Santiago’s central market for $5.

For the other nine months of the year, Galindo is at the mercy of her husband, who tired of the hand-to-mouth existence and illegally emigrated to Oregon about four years ago to work in a restaurant.

“My husband sends $300 to $400 a month,” Galindo said. “Without that, I don’t know what we would do to survive.”

The large number of men living in El Norte has created social problems at home, said Susana Carrasco, who owns a Juxtlahuaca shoe store.

“They come back for Christmas. The wife gets pregnant again. They come back for the baptism of the child. The wife gets pregnant again,” Carrasco said. “There’s just more and more children without their fathers around.”

Still, the men leave. Survival is just too difficult in a country where the price of corn and beans is five times higher than a decade ago, where eggs and milk cost 50% more than in an American supermarket.

Galindo and her son, Aureliano, 24, are reduced to catching rainwater in a tarp to drink. They pay to ride in the back of a pickup to get to Santiago.

A van with Oregon license plates is parked in front of Galindo’s house; Aureliano’s uncle brought it back from the United States a year ago. But it needs at least $750 in repairs for new brakes, a battery and electrical work.

There are a few signs of progress in Oaxaca: A pipe was laid to bring water down from the mountains. The houses now have electricity.

But it’s not enough to keep Galindo’s husband at home. It wasn’t enough for her daughter or her son-in-law. Galindo worries that it won’t be enough for little Elizama, who now lives with her grandmother in the two-room house.

It is a valid worry, said Beristain, the local cultural official in Juxtlahuaca. He sat and listened to another bus rev its engine on the street behind his home.

“There are five buses a week that go directly from here to the U.S. border,” Beristain said. “I’ve never seen one that wasn’t full.”