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.
A chicken all to yourself
To this day, Rocio can barely look at her childhood photos. She’s 3 or 4 in one of them, wearing a frayed poncho and clutching an equally sad-looking mutt. By 12, she was a sixth-grade dropout, on the gang-infested streets of Mexico City. When her parents split earlier that year, her mother abandoned the kids, and her father started a second family of his own.
Gallery
Courtesy of Rocio Ortiz
Rocio Ortiz is 3 or 4 in this family snapshot. She dropped out of school in sixth grade. “It makes me so sad to look at them,” she says of photos from her Mexico City childhood.
Ask her to explain what prompted her homelessness — both her parents were alive; her father owned a small chair factory — and she can’t. She stares into space, speechless for a minute, then sobs.
“They … didn’t … care about me,” she says.
The only person she could rely on was herself. At 13, Rocio mounted a suitcase onto the back of her bicycle and filled it with shoes, which she sold door to door for the equivalent of $3. She collected parental figures the way most little girls collect dolls.
The first one was her mother-in-law. Rocio was 15 when she met Carlos and became pregnant before long. Rather than a “quinceanera” — the elaborate coming-of-age ceremony held on a Hispanic girl’s 15th birthday — Rocio had a small wedding.
Carlos’ family embraced the newlyweds, giving them a room in their house. The room was tiny but Rocio managed to pack in a bed, table, stove and kitchen sink. When Roberto was born in 1988, the couple made a child’s seat out of an old cardboard box.
Rocio painted the walls to give the “apartment” a homey feel and complained when the in-laws in the next room crowded her space. She loved that she had a family now, especially a mother, but she wanted a house of her own and complained loudly to Carlos about it.
“If I hadn’t screamed, I’d still be there,” she says, looking at photographs. In one, precocious Roberto is sitting on an airplane he’d fashioned out of scrap wood, a rusty table and cinder blocks. “My brother-in-law is still in his room with his family, still living in his mother’s house.”
Then, as now, jobs were scarce: Carlos was lucky to make the equivalent of $5 a day. Roberto still has scars on his legs — from riding around the city on the back of his mom’s bike.
When Rocio dreamed of the United States, it was an unattainable place, somewhere past the end of a gleaming white street and over the top of a hill. In her dreams, she never made it to the other side.
In reality, a friend told her, he knew a way she could. He had made the trip himself with the help of a smuggler, returning home with stories of lip-smacking meals. And cash.
He told the couple, “In America, you can have a whole chicken, and you don’t even have to share. In America, you make more in one day than you make here in a week.”
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