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.
Dashed dreams
AUTA, MEXICO – Every morning when she leaves for work, Inocencia Guzman Alcala stares at the skeleton of her dream home: a roofless cinder-block shell with metal beams strewn on the ground and a bare light bulb dangling from a cord.
Audio gallery
On a mid-November afternoon, children head home by horse, bike and foot from Escuadron 201, the elementary school in Sauta, Mexico.She was supposed to be living in it by now, this shell. But instead, it mocks her as she leaves the rental shack next door, where she lives with her husband and five children.
Eight years ago, her husband, Reis, left this small village in western Mexico for an electrical-wiring job in North Carolina. He entered the U.S. illegally , the way many migrants do, with the help of a smuggler, called a coyote. Every week, he wired home $200, money that was supposed to result in a three-bedroom house with indoor plumbing.
But after seven years of not seeing his children — of hearing their voices change on the phone — he could take it no more. He returned to Sauta, a place that in many ways is also a shell of desperate hopes and unrequited dreams.
Photo gallery
Lucilla Martina Alvarado, a 30-year-old single mom, rests on a hoe after working all day picking vegetables. Her family lost money to a man claiming to be a guest-worker recruiter.Half the adults in the village have fled north, leaving broken families behind — mainly women, children and the elderly. Many labor in the fields seven days a week for the equivalent of $9 a day.
“In some ways, the men who leave are like warriors going off to fight for something, and then they return home like heroes,” says Jorge Navarro Lucio, a counselor for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. “They’re fighting for the only thing that can help them improve the lives of their families — money.”
But the battle ended early for Reis Alcala, when his youngest son called last spring and begged him to come home. The unthinkable had just happened: A friend of the boy’s — depressed about both his parents’ migrating north, abandoned to live with a grandmother— hanged himself.
His name was William Lopez Santa, and he was 10 years old.
Reis caught a bus home to Mexico.
Though he found work in a local machine shop, the pay was one-sixth of what he was earning in the United States. Before long, his 13-year-old daughter dropped out of school to go to work picking Chinese vegetables in the fields.
“All I could say was, 'Let’s get to work,’ ” Inocencia says. “We don’t eat well, and today we ran out of gas for cooking, but at least we are together now.”
Recent comments
Share your thoughtsRead all comments