Inside the Life of the Migrants Next Door

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The northern migration has taken its toll on nuclear family life in towns like Tuxpan. Countless men have girlfriends in the north, while their wives and children remain in the south. And the women left behind in Mexico are faced with the same temptations. Workers in the U.S. regard this threat with black humor. The idea that there's a guy who's back home in Mexico drinking your beer, sleeping with your wife and spending your hard-earned money looms large in their mythology. He has even been given a name: Sancho. Taking a break from sodding a lawn in the Hampton town of Springs, a worker named Neftalí jokes that he has to wire some money to Mexico that weekend because, he says with a grin, "Sancho needs new shoes."

The relentless separations put particular stress on children. When schoolteacher Claudia González's husband returned after a two-year stint as a farmworker in Texas, her young daughter chased her father out of the house, yelling, "You don't live here. Go back to Texas!" Says González: "No amount of money from up north can bring those years back."

TIGHTENING BORDERS

BEFORE THE U.S. BEGAN CRACKING DOWN on illegal immigration in the early 1990s, a push only accelerated by 9/11, many Tuxpeños flew back and forth easily on 10-year tourist visas. But as those visas expire, they're not being renewed under policies that seek to control more closely who gets into the U.S. The heightened border security has not, however, stopped undocumented Mexicans from getting in. The Pew Hispanic Center found that even though immigration is down since its peak in 2000, about 485,000 undocumented Mexicans were still crossing each year from 2000 to '04. In fact, the tougher restrictions have been a boon for the smugglers who sneak human traffic across the border. When Mario Coria's half-brother Fernando went to the U.S. in 1985, the trip from Tuxpan cost $200. Now the same trip costs more than $2,000.

For Pancho, the rising profitability of human smuggling is proving too tempting. He used to work as an enganchador, or wrangler, in Tuxpan, earning $200 for each would-be migrant he steered toward his friends who worked as coyotes, smuggling people across the Arizona border. Now, with the business plan for his greenhouses in disarray, he says he plans to move to Phoenix, Ariz., and work as a facilitator for the coyotes, watching over the newcomers and arranging bus or plane tickets for them to their final destination. Pancho estimates he could clear close to $1,000 a week. Working as a facilitator isn't as dangerous as sneaking through the desert with a group of immigrants as the coyotes do, but under the tough new laws aimed at traffickers, Pancho could face felony time of up to 20 years if he's caught. It's a stunning risk for a family man to take, but Pancho just shrugs. "I think it will be fine," he says. "And besides, where am I going to get that kind of money in Tuxpan?"