n increasing numbers, Hispanic immigrants are putting down roots in the Roanoke Valley. They're pouring concrete, opening hair salons and filling classrooms. Some employers, meanwhile, are attributing their success to this new labor pool. In this occasional series, The Roanoke Times explores the local impact of the national debate about immigration.
During a busy Friday night dinner waiter Jesus Malaga serves an armload of food to their Anglo customers. Malaga came to America four years ago from Mexico and, like many Mexican immigrants in Roanoke, first landed a job at El Rodeo.
21st century 'Odyssey'
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With her 15-year-old daughter, Vanessa, still asleep, Nohemi has to awaken 3-year-old Jessica at 6 a.m. so she can drop her off at the baby-sitter’s house on her way to work at a Roanoke food production facility. Vanessa helps get the other two children off to school.
Faith has long been Nohemi’s lodestar. Since the day she left her Honduran village in 2000, Nohemi (pronounced No-AY-me) has trusted God to guide her as she put her life — and her family’s lives — at stake.
Migrating to the United States was a risk worth taking, she decided, even if her children did wail their goodbyes , follow her down the dirt road and beg her not to go.
“Take the children away,” Nohemi told her mother as she steeled herself for the 44-day journey to Roanoke.
“I’m afraid I’ll change my mind.”
Food was scarce in Santa Elena, their small Honduran village. Nohemi fed her children from the money she made raising two milk cows. She’d dropped out of school in the fifth grade, as did most of her nine siblings, to help feed the family.
Married at 16, she divorced not long after and spent several years as a single mom.
While doing their homework, Nohemi’s daughters, Vanessa Molina-Cedillo (center) and Julissa Serrano-Cedillo (right), try to help their mother learn English. In six years of living in Roanoke, Nohemi has only learned a little English, and her daughters, like many immigrant children, will soon outpace her with their language studies.
“For years, she did it all by herself — working hard, working all the time,” recalled her niece, Elizabeth Cedillo. When Nohemi married again, to Roberto Serrano, the couple sold milk to a local cheese company and grew vegetables on borrowed land.
Subsistence living was the norm all over Honduras in the wake of 1998’s Hurricane Mitch: 85 percent of Hondurans didn’t have enough to eat or potable water. The few who could find work were making the equivalent of $1, maybe $2 a day.
“I know people who were living in shacks with cardboard roofs,” said Kris Tilley-Lubbs, a Virginia Tech professor who has both helped and researched Roanoke’s Hispanic families since 1999.
“Family members came here to work simply to send money back so their relatives didn’t starve to death while they were getting back on their feet. Many left children behind with relatives not knowing if they’d ever see them again.”
Some of the earliest migrants were granted U.S.-sponsored Temporary Protected Status, a renewable work visa prompted by the hurricane. But many of the relatives following in their paths have missed that window. They migrate illegally, usually with the help of “coyotes,” as the people smugglers are called, at a cost from $3,000 to $12,000.
For weeks, sometimes months, they navigate by the arc of the sun in a journey many social observers have described as the 21st century “Odyssey.”
“One of the women in my program was gang-raped in Mexico,” Tilley-Lubbs said. “She was coming here with the goal of working to replace her cardboard roof in Honduras with a tin roof. She wanted glass in her windows instead of just holes.”
Nohemi wanted to nurture both her children’s minds and their rumbling stomachs. Laborers in the United States made $10 an hour, she’d heard from her sister, Rosa. The first in the family to migrate to the United States, Rosa settled in Atlanta but moved after a friend told her she knew of a better job and cheaper housing in Roanoke.
What Nohemi didn’t realize was how long and hard Rosa worked, first in a Chinese restaurant, then for a meat-packing plant. Two jobs and 70-hour workweeks were common, and Rosa made tamales to sell to friends from the kitchen of the Old Southwest apartment she shared with nine other Hondurans.
“Their family came from the outback of Honduras, and they were completely lost,” recalled Tilley-Lubbs, who met Rosa in 1999.
Rosa’s goal was to save money to pay to bring her siblings and children to America, which she did methodically over the next several years — one at a time. When a new family member arrived, that person worked to help bring in the next relative.
By 2000, it was Nohemi’s turn, and she was charged with accompanying her niece, Elizabeth, then 15, on the 3,000-mile journey. Her sisters in Roanoke lent her $4,300 for the coyote fee.
She left behind her husband, Roberto; daughters Diana, Julissa, Vanessa and Wendy, ages 2 to 13; and son, Melvin, 11.
“I was told you would suffer on the trip, but I never imagined it would be so bad,” Nohemi said. “If I had known how hard it would be, I would have stayed home.”
She couldn’t imagine her young children traversing the same perilous path.
As she walked the first leg of her trip, she prayed: “Por favor Dios, dejame ver mis hijos otra vez.”
Please God, let me see my children again.
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