Inside the Life of the Migrants Next Door

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As part of their return plan, Julio and Carlos' parents have built their dream house just outside Tuxpan. It is a grand two-story affair with granite counters in the kitchen and views of the mountains from the boys' bedrooms. But cash is tight. In the U.S., Yadira had moved up from cleaning houses to working as a manicurist for an upscale spa in Bridgehampton. With tips from her wealthy clients, she made up to $200 a day. But returning to Tuxpan, she quickly found out that sustainable income is hard to come by in small-town Mexico. Yadira tried running a small convenience store--selling sodas, lollipops, toilet paper--from the ground floor of her house. Those abarrotes can be found, it seems, in every other house in Tuxpan, and nobody appears to sell much of anything. After nine months, Yadira shut hers down. She now operates a clothing store. It is doing better than the convenience store, although on a typical afternoon, a few teenage girls stop in after school but don't have any money to buy anything. An elderly woman comes by to call a relative in Mexico City from one of the row of telephones in back. Yadira collects 20¢ for the call. To supplement her income, Yadira does manicures and facials when she can. She has also started to think about returning to New York, not solely for the money but because, like her sons, she has in many ways simply outgrown the town where cockfighting is the major pastime. "I thought it would be different coming back," she says with a sigh. "It can be so boring in this town."

AN ENDLESS CYCLE

A QUICK GLANCE AT THE ECONOMY OF A SMALL Mexican town like Tuxpan makes it clear why undocumented workers continue to head north. Tuxpan's heyday was in the 1950s and '60s, when it gained fame throughout Mexico for its gladiolus. But overproduction slowly poisoned the soil, leaving Tuxpan in a slow decline. In the past decade, flowers have made a comeback, but the salary for working in the greenhouses or out in the field still averages only $10 a day. At the same time, the cost of living is comparatively high in Tuxpan. As in much of small-town Mexico, the large influx of cash from the U.S. has thrown the economy out of balance. According to Pew Hispanic Center estimates, almost half the 10.6 million adult Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. sent at least some money back to their relatives last year, for a 2005 total of $20 billion.