An Exploration of a Misunderstood ‘Migrant Culture’

Struggling writers will like Ruben Martinez the minute they learn a certain, small detail about his book “Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail” (Metropolitan, $26). Martinez missed his deadline by two years. “I did the romantic thing and got a house in the desert,” he says. “But the words didn’t come.”

He makes this confession without apologies as he walks along Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. Past the Million Dollar Theatre, into the Grand Central Market, he takes it all in with quick glances, just enough to update his personal database. A lamp with a waterfall gushing through it reminds him of a beer ad in the L.A. restaurant his grandparents used to own.

Dressed in a black shirt and jeans with a gold chain around his neck, he doesn’t stand out in this crowd. Martinez, 39, lives in Los Angeles and has made a career of studying Latino culture. As a features writer for L.A. Weekly in the ‘80s, covering news for KCET’s “Life & Times Tonight” in the ‘90s and, most recently, as associate editor for the Pacific News Service, he has pursued topics ranging from lowrider culture to L.A.’s Latin jazz scene.

Martinez’s new book is a portrait of Cheran, a town in Michoacan, Mexico. Many from the town live part of the year in U.S. cities, where they earn about $6 an hour, twice the day rate they would earn in Mexico. Martinez follows these migrant workers to places like Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Reviewers for major newspapers, including the Washington Post, Newsday and the Chicago Tribune, have called “Crossing Over” a major achievement for the way it gives voice to a vast subculture. The book goes beyond others on similar topics, they note, in its treatment of the impact migrant communities are having on the Midwest and Southeast.

Martinez got the idea for his book after reading news reports about the death of three brothers. In April 1996, Benjamin, Jamie and Salvador Chavez were killed on a mountain road in Temecula, Calif., when the truck they were riding in overturned. Benjamin, the oldest, was 30. They had entered the U.S. illegally, led by a “coyote,” a Mexican smuggler of undocumented immigrants, who was speeding away from Border Patrol police when he lost control of the truck. It was not the first illegal crossing for any of the Chavez brothers.

“I’d known about migrant culture,” says Martinez. “I knew it was a world of its own. But never in my wildest vision did I imagine how much there is to it.” He uses the term “migrant culture” to define a way of life that thousands of Mexicans live. Curious to know more, he spent months in Cheran and the U.S. cities where the town’s residents go for work.

From a migrant’s perspective, Martinez explains in his book, the undocumented workers who have died crossing the border--in car wrecks and drownings and from overexposure in the desert--are martyrs to the cause of freedom. “Freedom to move,” he writes, “or at least get the hell out of provincial towns like Cheran, whose timber-based economy is in tatters.” He points out that an estimated 3,000 migrants died between 1994 and 1998, according to a study by the University of Houston.

In Michoacan, Martinez spent most of his time with the Chavez family matriarch, Marie Elena, and her 19-year-old daughter, Rosa, one of three surviving Chavez children. But he also got to know the rest of the town. The local sorceress told his fortune and advised him to get rid of the married girlfriend, she’s nothing but trouble, he recounts in the book.

Teenage boys let him cruise the night with them, allowing him to listen as they argued about who shot Tupac Shakur, their hip-hop idol, and planned their gang wars. “No guns,” Martinez says of street fighting in Cheran. “Mexican kids are assimilating American culture, but by and large they are innocent.”

Encounters with the town’s flamboyant residents helped confirm his earlier impressions. “I knew from my travels that Mexico has been undergoing dramatic transformations,” Martinez says. Undocumented workers pump about $5 billion a year into Michoacan alone. Beyond that, he explains in the book, U.S. government figures from 1998 show that nearly 9,000 workers once legally employed in the U.S and now retired back in Mexico received a total of nearly $3 million a month from Social Security and pension funds.

These days, along with U.S. dollars, massive supplies of American culture are being carried across the border. Martinez saw workers travel home to Michoacan lugging microwave ovens, food processors, pop music CDs and gold jewelry. “I was shocked to see how much Cheran is like East Los Angeles, or South Los Angeles,” he says.

Immigrants’ Influence Hits the Heartland

The American Midwest is new to this sort of cultural exchange, but even in Wisconsin and Missouri, Martinez found stores with Mexican food sections and Spanish-language videos for rent. “The elders in Cheran see change as inevitable, and for the most part they don’t like it,” Martinez says. “But I tend to celebrate blended cultures.” Indeed, raised in Silver Lake by a Mexican American father and Salvadoran-born mother, Martinez’s youth was filled with holiday parties where neighbors brought everything from enchiladas to Swedish meatballs.

The deeper the writer traveled inside Cheran’s rich culture, the more he uncovered of the town’s baroque soul. Layers of pre-Columbian, Spanish colonial and modern ways have made for spectacular effects. There are the mangy bullfighters who come to Cheran for the fall festival, and the senior citizens who mix broken Spanish with the native Purepecha. Religion is a sort of magic--Catholicism with Spanish gothic Passion plays performed during Holy Week, and statues of folk heroes placed beside canonized saints on home altars. During the annual procession to honor St. Francis of Assisi, people cover a statue of the saint with pesos and dollars.

“Mexico made Christianity sensual,” Martinez says. “Spirit and flesh are celebrated alongside each other. You really see it at the festival.” With so much to live for in Cheran, the town seems too good to leave behind. And yet, “Purepecha” loosely translates to, “the people who travel.” It seems to be in the blood. “Migrants are Mexico’s road culture,” says Martinez of the men and women who can’t stay in Cheran but can’t stay away from it, either. “If your earliest memories are of the men of your town talking about the tobacco fields in the north, the Greyhound bus stations and cantinas filled with Mexicans, there is a romance about the life.”

Dreams of fancy cars, better educations and big houses have moved the romance through the generations. “There’s an economic reality behind the myths,” Martinez says. “It’s not that people say, ‘I want to be on the road ‘til I die.’ They’ll say, ‘It’s only until I can afford to build a mansion in Mexico.”’ The fact, however, is that many migrants settle in the U.S.

Their main link to the north, the notorious coyotes, might be expected to be outcasts, but in Cheran, “Mr. Charlie,” the resident coyote, is a professional businessman who never makes the crossings himself. He only arranges them--booking motels and buses, paying bribes to ease the way past border guards, signing up customers enough to cover his costs. Others lead the migrants across the walls and fences they aren’t supposed to cross--and in some cases they rob their charges or even abandon them.

Martinez tried to join a group when Rosa Chavez arranged to join her husband, Wense, in Missouri. Mr. Charlie was not willing to trust a stranger with a notebook. Martinez told Rosa’s story based on her memories. Her husband sent her money for the $1,000 fee to transport her and her 2-year-old daughter, Yeni. Five times the group tried to cross but each time was caught by police and sent back to Mexico. Each time the group waited a few days, then set out again. “Operation Gatekeeper is in full force,” Martinez says of the tighter border control law passed in 1994. “People are feeling the real impact.”

Terror attacks in the U.S. this fall have made illegal crossings even riskier. Wense Cortez used to fly home to Mexico on commercial airlines, getting by with just a fake I.D. “Since Sept. 11, Wense says, ‘No more flying,”’ Martinez says. “They’re checking too closely; he’s afraid he’ll get deported.”

Problems Compounded by Terrorist Attacks

In recent weeks Martinez has talked with migrants in Manhattan who lost their jobs in the layoffs after Sept 11. Many planned to return to Mexico. “It’s poignant, the invisibility of migrant workers,” he says. “In New York, they lose their jobs in the service sectors, restaurants and hotels and can’t get help from the victims relief funds. Their employers refuse to give them a letter verifying that they ever even had a job.”

His views on border control laws changed as he wrote his book. “I had innocent ideas about how to solve the problem,” he says. “I just wanted to bring the walls down. But after several years of watching the migrant trail, seeing the effects, I think more about policies that could alleviate the suffering of the migrant worker.”

He says he supports the proposed guest worker program that President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox have discussed, which would allow Mexicans to work legally in the U.S. for limited periods of time. “At least it would show how the program we have now doesn’t work.”

One of the worst things about the system now, he says, is the double standard it supports. “Undocumented Mexican workers are breaking the law, but so are their U.S. employers. We need to find solutions that honestly recognize how the two economies are tied to each other.”