Photo gallery A street light illuminates Leonardo’s face as he sits alone in his room watching a Spanish program on television. Leonardo moved to Roanoke illegally four years ago to help support his family in Mexico.

It’s a Friday morning in mid-June.

There aren’t a lot of people. Maybe 30. But he’s waiting.

When will his number be called?

Leonardo’s dressed neatly in black jean shorts and a tucked-in white T-shirt. He’s boxy and built like a linebacker. His hair is thick like a dried paintbrush.

But not this one. This one is clean. He wants to look good.

Leonardo is at the DMV to see if he can get license plates for his car, even though he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and even though he is not in the country legally.

Other Hispanics in the Roanoke Valley pay strangers hundreds of dollars to help them get fake Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. Leonardo has seen others get license plates some way, somehow. Usually through someone in Rocky Mount, he’s been told.

But he has already spent almost $600 on license plates that didn’t arrive.

Leonardo’s at the DMV in Crossroads Mall because he wants to do it right, or as right as he can under the circumstances.

Leonardo paces near the entrance, looking at the vanity plates on the wall. Man, he thinks, do those vanity plates look good. How about one of those?

Nah, he decides, just something simple. He just needs the plates. Until Christmastime 2008.

By then, he’ll be done working in the United States. By then, he’ll be home. With his wife and daughter in Mexico. With a new truck and a new home.

Minutes pass. Leonardo’s nervous.

A woman’s voice speaks over the loudspeaker.

It’s Leonardo turn.

Leonardo is 33 — though he likes to say he’s 30 — and he’s a long way from home.

He came to the Roanoke Valley illegally almost four years ago. To work, he says. To work. He needs a car to get to work.

Leonardo earns about $500 a week hanging drywall. He travels from Allegheny County to Franklin County, wherever he can find work. Every few weeks, he sends $300 home to pay for his new house in San Luis Potosi.

The money he earns here is worth 10 times as much in Mexico. Leonardo keeps about $200 of his weekly paycheck to cover rent, buy food and get phone calling cards. He calls his family almost every day.

He has few friends in Roanoke. The friends he had would give him rides to work, but they soon grew tired of his humorless moods and his refusals to join their partying.

Before long, they didn’t invite him to ride to work anymore. Leonardo realized he would need his own car to drive to work. And soon.

“People think I’m a fool or an idiot because my hair is not combed right or I don’t go out,” he said one day last summer. A group of Hispanic men were chatting near a van outside his apartment. He wasn’t asked to join.

“I wear torn-up jeans and do not look good,” he continued. “But I keep track of my money. I don’t waste it. I send it home.”

Leonardo bought a 1992 dark blue Saturn two-and-a-half years ago. The person who sold it lent him the license plates. Leonardo didn’t want to know when the tags would expire because he didn’t want to give them back.

He was driving fine until August 2005, when police approached him at an apartment complex before dawn. Leonardo was honking his horn. It was his way of telling his friends — his co-workers — to come out and go to work.

Photo gallery Leonardo focuses on a windy road while driving to Virginia Tech where he worked for several weeks, finishing drywall in a renovated banquet room. He works nearly seven days a week, hoping to save enough money to move back to Mexico by the end of 2008.

A Roanoke police officer told him he couldn’t honk his horn like that. Leonardo said the officer told him he had received complaints from neighbors. He asked to see Leonardo’s driver’s license.

He didn’t have one. Insurance? Nope.

Leonardo got three tickets totaling $128 and was told not to drive. But he continued anyhow. It’s the only reliable way to get to work, he said.

In April, the law caught up to him again. This time, it was on U.S. 460 after work.

La policia often watch Hispanics suspiciously, Leonardo said, and he had seen them looking at him days earlier when he drove the same route.

Leonardo was arrested for driving without a license and spent a few hours in jail. He went to court a few days later, paid fines of $201 and got his car back.

But not the license plates.

He hasn’t driven the car since. Without the plates, he doesn’t think it’s right to drive. The cops are also likely to pull him over.

For a while, Leonardo hitchhiked. The few friends he had would drive him to construction sites in places as distant as Bedford County, and he would seek out rides from strangers to Roanoke when the day grew dark. He can’t read the signs — he can’t read Spanish or English — and doesn’t know where he is on the roads. But he knows where to tell the driver to make a left, right or keep going straight.

In May, Leonardo paid a stranger $650 to help him get a pair of license plates. The man took the money and Leonardo waited to hear back from him.

Leonardo walks to window No. 10.

The DMV clerk smiles and asks how she can help him.

Do you have a driver’s license? the clerk asks.

“No,” he says.

“A Social Security number?”

No, again.

The clerk takes his application and taps some keys on the computer.

Leonardo has a title to his car with his name on it, something the previous owner gave him. It shows that he owns the car. In Virginia — unlike some states — you don’t need to show identification to get a title.

The clerk looks at Leonardo’s title. She talks to her supervisor.

Leonardo looks down at his hands. They are sweaty.

“What if I don’t get my plates?” he says under his breath.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late May. He’s calling his family.

“Hello? Hello?” he says. “Juana Maria Lopez Perez. Is she there?”

His only daughter, Norma, is on the other end. She tells him his wife, Juanita, as he likes to call her, is not at home.

“She’s not there?” he says, loud but joking. “Where is the lady of the house? Who gave her permission to go?”

She laughs.

Norma is 15 and tall for her age. Her hair is black and long like her mother’s. The two are best friends and cried in July when Norma celebrated her 15th birthday — her quinceanera — and her father wasn’t there.

Leonardo jokes with his daughter on the phone to keep her from asking this question: “When are you coming home?”

Photo gallery Used to having his wife prepare meals for him, Leonardo had to teach himself how to cook. He eats a late-night meal of pork and beans.

“Soon,” he usually says. “I’ll be coming home in a short while.”

But Leonardo knows it’s a white lie at best.

His family lives about a six hours’ drive from the Texas border, in a two-bedroom apartment that Leonardo thinks is OK.

But he wants something bigger: a mansion, as he imagines it, with two stories and stucco walls. A big Ford truck — preferably black — parked in front and money to open a grocery store or similar business.

“Working hard” is the portrait Leonardo likes to paint when he describes himself. He doesn’t like to talk about his family. When he does, his face turns hard and freezes in time, like the memories are rushing back to his mind through an electric current.

In a small shoebox inside Leonardo’s dresser is a receipt for a DVD player he ordered by mail. He shows it to people when they ask him what documents he has in the U.S. with his name on them.

The only identification document Leonardo possesses is a Mexican voter card with a mugshot of him taken 12 years ago. His rectangular, bronze-skinned face is serious, belying the playful nature he has when he watches Disney movies in Spanish on Sunday nights.

He shows strangers and friends photographs of the new house he is paying to have built and of his family. He takes pride in saying that he spends most of his time away from work in a constant slumber, sleeping or lying half-awake on a two-mattress bed propped up by white plastic drywall buckets.

He often looks at his five roommates and where they sleep — soiled mattresses on the floor, dirty couches — and thinks he lives better than they do. His bed is comfy. It’s a small thing, but it reminds him of what he wants to feel like when he returns to Mexico.

Comfortable.

He expects to return to Mexico in two more years. That’s how long, he says, it will take to save up enough money.

He wishes he could understand what the clerk is thinking.

The clerk at the DMV hasn’t said a word. She continues to type. Behind the clerk, Leonardo can see the portrait of a firefighter on the wall.

A tired and resigned man is sitting next to wreckage at Ground Zero on Sept. 11. His work boots are off to the side. He looks like Leonardo after a long day of work.

What’s taking so long? Leonardo wonders. The clerk stops typing.

She says there’s a hold on Leonardo’s driving privileges at the Roanoke City Courthouse.

Driving privileges? Who knew Leonardo had any, considering he doesn’t have a driver’s license?

He has unpaid traffic tickets, the clerk adds.

She says Leonardo has to go to the courthouse to pay about $130 to remove the hold on his record. Then he can get his license plates.

Leonardo is confused. Unpaid traffic tickets?

But then he remembers: The tickets he got in August last year at the apartment complex when he was honking his horn. He never went to court. He didn’t pay the fines.

Leonardo taps the counter. He smiles at the clerk and walks out of the DMV. He’s on his way to the courthouse.

His Sunday night habit is to watch American movies in Spanish, usually, kids’ movies.

One Sunday night in early June, Leonardo is watching Disney’s “White Fang” in Spanish.

His roommate, Gustavo, is holding a Bud Light and sits next to him on a blue air mattress, recovering from a weekend of parties and beers.

Gustavo’s wearing a white tank top, his muscles showing, and hip-hugging black jean shorts. His head is shaved and his smile makes you think he’s up to no good. He keeps his wife’s love letters in a small backpack hanging on the wall in his bedroom. He doesn’t talk about her much.

Like their three other roommates, Gustavo and Leonardo have a common goal of working and sending money back to families in Mexico.

But they have different views of the United States – and Iraq.

“People are going to Iraq to fight for democracy, but here there’s prejudice,” Gustavo said last spring. “This place should not just be for Americans. It should be for everyone living in it.”

Leonardo doesn’t agree. Why couldn’t the U.S. treat immigrants like parolees, he says, where they can be monitored throughout the week to make sure they are working? Then those who don’t work could be sent home, and the workers could stay.

During a commercial, Leonardo discusses a dream he has with Gustavo.

“Imagine taking your family to Disneyland,” he says, his head propped up against a pillow on his bed.

“It’s a dream that only happens on television,” Gustavo says. “On the Disney Channel.”

Gustavo then brags about an afternoon fling he had in his gray Astro van with a woman, an American, he adds.

Leonardo lies down with his arms on his stomach, barely lifting his head. He looks at Gustavo but doesn’t listen. Gustavo’s now telling raunchy jokes.

Leonardo’s mind is elsewhere.

He’s thinking about a conversation he had earlier that day with his daughter.

She begged him again to come home.

Leonardo arrives at the Roanoke City Courthouse about noon Friday.

He takes out his wallet and a white envelope filled with $20 bills — the week’s pay — and places it on a conveyor belt.

As he walks through the metal detector, a couple of bills fall onto the floor.

Leonardo doesn’t notice. He walks upstairs to the clerk’s office.

The clerk looks up his records and gives him a slip of paper with a brief description of the tickets he got in August last year: driving without a license, driving without insurance and driving without a registration sticker.

Leonardo can’t read the tickets. He wants to know how much they will cost.

Photo gallery At just after 5 a.m., Leonardo's roommate Fernando (standing) makes his bed where he sleeps on the floor behind the couch. Another man sleeps on the couch, and will get up shortly for work. The men, all here illegally, keep a candle of the Virgin Mary burning in their apartment for safety and protection.

As he hurries out the front door, a security guard yells for him to stop.

Leonardo turns around and walks back silently. He stands up straight.

“What could they do?” he thinks. Toss him in jail or deport him? He doesn’t know or want to know.

“You forgot your money,” the guard says. He hands Leonardo the $20 bills he dropped earlier.
Leonardo can’t believe it. He looks down at the money in his hands and thinks:

“This money is why I came to the United States. And here a guard returned money I didn’t know was missing.”

In Mexico, Leonardo said, the police would most likely have kept it. There, cops pull you over and let you go if you give them $5 or so as a small bribe.

But in the U.S., there is order and laws.

For the next half hour, Leonardo relives the memory, amazed at what just happened. He can’t let it go, won’t let it go.

His words are fast and his eyes, they are alight.

Gustavo’s in the living room using a prepaid cellphone to call his family. Leonardo turns off the television and gets ready for bed.

“White Fang” is over. Leonardo wasn’t really paying attention to the movie after Gustavo showed up.

It’s just after 11 p.m. In the morning, the workweek begins.

For most of June, Leonardo was lucky. He spent four days working at the posh Homestead resort in Bath County with other Hispanic construction workers, staying overnight at a cabana.

He didn’t have to worry about rides to work. He could sleep well.

Leonardo turns off the light in his room and goes to bed. More than six hours pass.
The first to get up, Leonardo washes his face with warm water and walks into the living room and finishes packing his clothes and food for the week — chicken drumsticks and flour tortillas — in a pair of white trash bags.

The living room is bare and mostly dark. It’s illuminated by a small, white candle that has been burning all night.

Six unlit religious candles surround it. The one that is lit is printed with a prayer to a saint, Our Lady of San Juan de Los Lagos, whose shrine is said to be the second-most visited in Mexico.

Leonardo hasn’t been to the shrine, though he’d like to go someday. He was a regular churchgoer in Mexico. But not in Roanoke. He’s usually at work during Mass.

The candles are there to remind him, and his roommates, that there is a God who is watching over them. Perhaps, to protect them from the people who prey on them — people who say they can help Leonardo and his roommates with their services: store clerks, friends, their boss and other Hispanics.

Leonardo’s paid hundreds of dollars for documents other Hispanics told him he needed, such as fake Social Security numbers. He remembers being asked questions to fill out tax paperwork by his patron, his boss. He thinks he pays taxes but doesn’t know how.

Some days — usually when the rent is due — his boss doesn’t answer the phone where he lives in Southeast Roanoke to let Leonardo come over and pick up his paycheck. Leonardo has to ask Gustavo for a ride to visit his boss — who isn’t always there — to tell him how many hours he worked that week.

The boss writes down the hours and gives Leonardo a check he has to take to a Hispanic grocer to cash. The grocer usually takes a percentage away from the paycheck. Leonardo feels he’s being cheated, but who is he going to tell?

A week earlier, two days before rent was due, Leonardo and Gustavo had to hassle their boss for paychecks. They also lost a full day of work after a co-worker told them la migra — immigration officers — were patrolling Interstate 81. It wasn’t true. But Leonardo and Gustavo didn’t want to take the risk.

When they showed up at their boss’ home in the afternoon, Leonardo was called an “idiot” in Spanish so quick and so loud that Gustavo’s eyes turned red and wet. They want the money but they hate getting paid.

Leonardo looks at the candle as he’s tying his boot laces. He puts on his University of Virginia baseball cap and walks outside. A few minutes pass, and a friend arrives. He helps Leonardo load up his bags of clothes and tools.

“What did the guy say about the plates?” he asks Leonardo, referring to the man Leonardo paid $650 to get him license plates.

“Nothing,” Leonardo says. “He hasn’t come by.”

At the DMV, the same clerk from the morning looks at Leonardo’s receipts from the courthouse and checks his driving records on a computer.

Will it show that he paid his tickets? He’s not sure, not after his string of bad luck. The week began badly when the man Leonardo paid $650 for license plates showed up at his apartment Sunday with only $80 — and no plates.

He said it couldn’t be done, then left.

Next, Leonardo visited a woman, another immigrant who came to Roanoke from Houston. She said she got it all — the driver’s license, the car insurance and a city sticker — from a guy named Miguel who lives in Rocky Mount. She called Miguel and he said he could help Leonardo for $500.

Not again, Leonardo thought. That’s when he seriously began considering what seemed like a risky trip to the DMV.

What did he have to lose? He needed to work. Still, when he first arrived in Roanoke it took him a year and a half to feel comfortable enough to shop at Wal-Mart.

The clerk looks at Leonardo and says his driving records check out.

All paid. No holds.

All that’s left is to pay a reinstatement fee of $85 to restore Leonardo’s driving privileges and about $60 for a pair of license plates.

Leonardo pulls out his white envelope and takes out eight $20 bills.

The clerk disappears and comes back with a pair of license plates.

Leonardo’s journey for the plates is almost over. He is leaving the DMV and looks at the vanity plates on the wall. Maybe, next time.

A few hours later, Leonardo is in his apartment’s parking lot with a screwdriver.

He has license plates but still, no driver’s license. Maybe, next time, he thinks. If the laws change.

He screws in the plates between plastic covers and stands back, admiring them.

The license plates will expire in 2008.

He hopes to be home by then.

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.”

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.

Photo gallery Brenda Seguar, 7, (left) and Averado Montes, 6, (right) both students at the elementary school in Sauta, wear traditional clothes as they await the start of a parade honoring the Mexican Revolution Day holiday on Nov. 20th.

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.

Through a classroom window, Erica Lopez flirts with William Mesa while on break between classes at the secondary (middle) school in Sauta, Mexico. Twenty percent of Sauta's children will go to high school because they can’t afford the cost of books, uniforms, fees and transportation.

“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.

Shortly after the 10-year-old committed suicide, elementary school teacher Manuel Mangera Viera asked the 26 kids in his class if anyone else had entertained suicidal thoughts. Nine hands went up. More than half of the 279 children in his school have parents living in the United States, and not just their fathers.

“The biggest problem we have is the children who’ve been abandoned by both parents,” says Viera, who was working double time at the school — teaching and, between the morning and afternoon sessions, painting its exterior. Many students live with elderly grandmothers, some of whom are sick, and haven’t seen their parents in three or four years.

“If more of our parents could go to work legally as guest workers, our students would do better; they’d stay in school longer,” Viera adds. “They wouldn’t worry so much about when their parents are coming back.”

Photo gallery Karla Benitez, 14, cries as she tells the story of how she ended up in Sauta, Mexico. An American citizen born in Los Angeles, she was sent back to live with step-grandparents in Sauta. A victim of incest, Benitez has moved in with a friend and hopes to move to the U.S., but doesn't know how or where to move to. Her drug-addict mother was last seen sleeping on a Los Angeles park bench, she says.

As Viera talks, 8-year-old Brayan de la Cruz walks up, asking for a paintbrush. He attends school during the afternoon shift but has been arriving early to help the teachers paint. The principal pays him out of his own pocket — by buying him a bottle of Coke. At the Nov. 20 Revolution Day parade, Brayan was the only kid in his group who wasn’t wearing a $6 school-uniform shirt.

Brayan’s parents left when he was a baby, and he said he doesn’t know which state they’re in now. He lives with his grandmother, who works in the bean fields. “They send money for clothes and things sometimes,” he says.

“Last year, they came for a visit and took my brother back with them, but they didn’t take me. They keep saying they’ll come back for me, but then they don’t come.”

Ask Brayan what he wants to be when he grows up, and he gives what the teachers say is the typical response: “I want to go to the U.S.”

As the lone police officer in the village, Elisio Rocha Figueroa deals mainly with petty thefts and drug- and alcohol-related offenses. Most involve the Nortenos — men who have gone to the United States and return home for the holidays. “They come back with a lot of money and big trucks,” he says.

“Sometimes they get drunk and run over the old people and little kids.”

Elisio sneaked into the United States once 16 years ago, but had to come back when his oldest daughter fell fatally ill. He and his wife, who works as a Santiago garbage inspector, spend all their energy and money trying to give their remaining daughter the thing they never had: an education.

Photo gallery Vivian Reyes, 5, a kindergarten student, picks peanuts in the back of a pickup truck after school to help her family make extra money. She earns 90 cents a five-gallon bucket for the work.

Their 16-year-old, Anjelica, wants to go to college in Tepic to become a lawyer, Elisio says proudly, putting on a pair of broken bifocals so he can find a photo to show some visitors — a picture of Anjelica receiving a school-achievement award.

But at 57, he doubts his ability to make that happen. His knees give him trouble, and the town doesn’t own a police cruiser. So Elisio is left to patrol the stony streets on foot.

He wants to return to the U.S. illegally, work for a year or so, then return home with enough cash to help with Anjelica’s school expenses — and to buy a police motorcycle for the village.

“But at my age, I’m afraid I wouldn’t make it through the desert,” he says.

Father Roberto Antonio Chavez hopes he doesn’t attempt the journey.

No matter how often he preaches against it, the priest says parishioners in his Catholic church continue fleeing Sauta for the north. That was one reason why, during a recent Sunday Mass, women outnumbered men three to one.

“I tell everybody, 'It’s better to stay together,’ but they don’t listen to me,” the priest says. “The money might help families, but in the long run you see a lot of conflicts.

“In the beginning, the men send money back. But sometimes they make another family in the U.S. and don’t come back again. It’s very sad.”

He blames Mexico’s economic woes on free trade-spawned foreign competition: the Mexican tobacco that used to green the countryside of Nayarit but is now grown in Brazil, for instance.

“We need new ideas for agriculture,” he says. “Instead of building walls, we need more work programs so the men can legally come and go.”

On the outskirts of town, in a large rambling ranch house, Flora Carillo names a host of reasons why she’s the rare person who experienced life in the United States — and then chose to return to Sauta.

Flora grew up bilingual in La Habra, Calif. — a town so full of Mexicans from Guadalajara that its nickname is “Guadalahabra.” Her father emigrated illegally from Sauta when she was a baby, then sent for his wife and kids. The family received legal residency in 1986, but all along her parents’ goal was to build a home they could retire to in Sauta.

Every summer as a kid, Flora visited relatives here. She remembers crying when it came time to go and her mom made her leave her favorite clothes behind for her cousins.

Photo gallery Elpedio Lopez (from left), Maximiliano Valenzuela and Rutilo Diaz play dominos at twilight as Valenzuela's son Valentin carries a load of peanuts for storage. The men work long days picking vegetables or peanuts in the fields.

While everyone else was scrambling to get out of the village, Flora’s parents put every spare penny toward returning, which they did last year. Flora’s dad even opened a small hardware store to cash in on returning Nortenos’ zest for home improvement. Four months ago, Flora and her husband and children followed her parents home to Sauta.

She knows the payoffs of Third World living are harder for the average person in Sauta to see: Everyone knows everyone. There are more kids for her son to play with, and no one spends the day indoors watching TV or worrying about credit-card debt. Neighbors regularly congregate outside, and parents routinely pitch in with craft projects and meals in the schools.

“I tell my friends who are thinking of going north: 'Never leave your kids behind; it’s just not worth it,’ ” she says. “But then, I’ve always had all the necessities, haven’t I?”

Flora knows she might react differently had she grown up like her fellow villager, Emerita Salamantes Lamas, who is only a few years older than her but already has nine children. A junior-high dropout, Emerita and a small group of middle-aged women take weekly night classes offered at the elementary school.

She can read and write a little, but Emerita says she wants to learn to add and subtract.

It has become a rite of passage in Mexico that a boy who reaches a certain age says goodbye to his mother and, with the money he borrowed to hire a smuggler, finds his way into the United States.

“All four of my boys will go to the U.S,” Emerita says, determined.

“Hopefully, one day when the little kids are older, I will go and be with them, too.”

In early January, her oldest son, who’s 21, will begin the arduous journey to Texas. Jose says he already has an electrician’s job waiting for him there, where he’ll earn $200 a day. Right now, he’s doing similar work in nearby Mazatlan, making $200 every 10 days.

For months now, in preparation for the journey, mother and son have prayed to the Patron Saint of Mercy. During his two-week trek to Texas, they plan to recite a prayer dedicated to that saint daily — Emerita on her knees in Sauta; her son, wherever he is.

… I come from the world
I come from combat
Tired of suffering and fighting …
My soul is thirsty …

Not long ago, Emerita bought Jose a medal of the saint to wear on the trip. For added protection, she copied the lengthy prayer down for him to carry.

He already knows it by heart, though. They’ve been practicing the prayer since he was little, she says, with this journey in mind.

Jose Juan Espinoza Segura translated interviews for this story.