Land of Opportunity

In small towns and cities across Mexico, it’s homecoming time.

In Sauta (population: 2,000), the rainy season is past, and most of the laborers are back in the fields planting beans and harvesting peanuts — for $9 a day. Christmas is coming, and so is El Dia de la Revolucion, or Revolution Day fiesta, a sunup to midnight celebration of parades, live music, rodeos and dancing Nov. 20.

But the biggest change in civic life is the annual year-end return of the Norteños : the people, mostly men, who have gone north to work.

Like Adrian and his tobacco crew, they have come home to share — and show off — their new belongings.

They’re bringing the dollars they’ve earned hanging drywall and stripping tobacco back to Mexico, where their money can buy three to five times what it buys in the United States. They’re adding rooms onto houses, taking their children to see doctors and dentists, turning old dirt floors into new tile.

Before they arrive — indeed, for most of the year — the town is dead, family members and town officials say.

“When the guys come home, there are barbecues and beer-drinking, and you see it right away. But when they’re gone, it’s nothing,” says Norberta Castellon, whose husband, Chava, is Adrian’s older brother and a co-worker on the Franklin County farm.

Two years ago, Chava wired home most of the $15,000 he made in Virginia to pay for an indoor bathroom and for the ovarian surgery Norberta needed to correct a fertility problem. Last year, his earnings bought a pickup truck, which helped him earn extra money doing wintertime construction in Sauta — working on other Norteños’ houses.

Not long after his return last year, Norberta had happy news: She was pregnant with their first child. But her due date was Sept. 1 — two months before Chava could come home.

Married now for eight years, she says, “In the beginning, it was very hard. He’d leave, and I’d look at other couples and ask, 'Why did I fall into this type of marriage?’

“But after a while, I guess I just got used to it.”

Alone for most of the pregnancy, Norberta lived with her parents for emotional support before and after giving birth to Valeria, now 3 months old.

Meanwhile, Chava and the others were putting in 60-hour workweeks on Johnny and Sharon Angell’s Penhook tobacco farm. Following federal guidelines, the guest workers make $8.54 an hour and sleep in Department of Labor-inspected housing, which translated to bunk beds in one cement-floor room — except for crew chief Adrian, who got the lone double bed.

The men shopped and cooked in small groups and argued over whether to watch soccer or Spanish soap operas on TV, although generally they all got along. They called their wives and mothers on the cordless phone, which they carried outside so they could talk privately inside an old farm truck.

About every 10 days, they left the farm, usually when it rained. Sharon Angell drove them to Rocky Mount, where they spent the day wiring money home, eating a meal out and shopping. They routinely wandered the aisles of Wal-Mart and Goodwill for hours at a stretch, sometimes buying and sometimes just looking around.

When they returned to their bunkhouse — the “Mexican casa,” as the Spanglish-savvy Angells call it — Brenda, the blue-tick hound, greeted them at the door.

“Brenda is named for one of Baby’s girlfriends,” Sharon Angell explained, referring to 21-year-old Edgardo “Baby” Cardenas, who is Chava and Adrian’s nephew — and the resident wild man.

Baby first came to the farm two years ago, when he was 20 and the youngest of the crew. Like most in Sauta, he dropped out of school at 13 to work in the fields.

There’s an expression in Mexico that applies to guys like Baby. It translates loosely to this:
When you never had money before and now you do, you go crazy with it.

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