Land of Opportunity

In cities and towns across Mexico, this is reality for the masses: If you have a house with tile floors instead of dirt, if you have an indoor bathroom, if you wear tennis shoes instead of flip-flops or sandals — chances are, people in your family have gone north to pay for it.

If they haven’t, this is the challenge: In Sauta, living expenses run the equivalent of $75 a month for utilities.

There are no mortgages for the working poor; it’s all pay-as-you-build. There’s food to be put on the table, too, which explains why chickens run around in dirt yards and along the rutted, red-clay roads.

To send one child to school, the average parent pays $42 a semester in school fees, plus $40 for uniforms, socks and shoes. If the student is lucky enough to make it beyond junior high — only 20 percent are — tack on another $100 a month for transportation because there’s no high school in the village.

With a minimal food budget and just one child in high school, that’s a monthly average of $250 in expenses. The average fieldworker in Sauta earns $30 less than that.
Some families supplement their incomes through piecework: On Inocencia Guzman Alcala’s block, the women and children spend evenings gleaning the remnants of a peanut harvest. For each 5-gallon bucket they fill with peanuts, they get 90 cents. The next morning, they rise at 5 a.m. and climb into the back of a farm pickup truck and do it all over again.

These are the women, young and old, who do the grunt work of the global economy as it plays out in this corner of Mexico:

They work on locally owned hejidos, or small farms, which are rented out to bigger companies based out of nearby Tepic, the Nayarit state capital. Those companies operate small plants that freeze and package the produce, then sell it to bigger companies for distribution.

The Chinese beans picked by the women of Sauta typically end up on the plates of Asians living in California — which is, incidentally, also the place where most of the husbands who leave Sauta end up.

“Here, if a man doesn’t think about the U.S., his family won’t make it,” says Gloria Castellon, the wife of one of the village’s rare legal guest workers. Her husband, Adrian, has worked on a Franklin County tobacco farm for 17 years, a position envied by villagers, many of whom beg Adrian to help them find work there, too.

So desperate are people for the opportunity to work legally in the United States that this spring 240 residents of Sauta and neighboring Santiago Ixcuintla were taken in by a man claiming to be a guest-worker recruiter. He said he would legally line them up with jobs as U.S. housekeepers, gardeners, dishwashers and hotel maids — for an application fee of $650.

Cecelia Orozco Partida, a secretary for state affairs in Santiago, says the government is investigating the case. “We’re trying to prosecute him,” she says, but his lawyers claim he was only the middleman, a victim himself of a fraudulent Texas company.

Lucilla Martina Alvarado, a 30-year-old single mom who works in the Chinese bean fields, doubts the Mexican government can help her reclaim the money she lost. She and her sister thought they were signing on to become housekeepers in Atlanta, paying the application fees with the help of their mother, Ramona Alvarado Burgara — who got the cash by pawning the family home.

Now, Ramona’s only hope for paying off the debt is through her two sons, who work illegally in Kentucky and California. “Whenever they can, they send money,” says Ramona, a 48-year-old fieldworker.

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