Inside the Life of the Migrants Next Door

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In Tuxpan, as in many other towns in Mexico, the money is rarely used for bettering the community. Instead, there seem to be two impulses competing for those hard-earned dollars: a deep love of one's own family and a desire to show up everyone else's. Everyone buys Mom a house. Everyone buys a truck. Many buy subwoofers and chrome packages for their truck. When the returning workers descend on Tuxpan for the holidays in December, the local Yamaha motorcycle dealer has a field day. Rents in Tuxpan now average around $250 a month; completed houses can cost well over $100,000. Nike shoes cost up to $200 a pair. Seafood restaurants in town charge $10 a plate. "In America, we could go to restaurants whenever we wanted to," says the teenager Carlos. "Here, we can't afford it anymore." And the cycle of migration is self-propelling. Bartender Alfonso Mayo López, 43, lost his job in the fall when the last bar in Tuxpan closed because all its customers had gone up north. López now sees fewer and fewer reasons not to leave his daughter and wife and join his brother in the Hamptons. "The more difficult it gets here," he says, "the more I think about going there."

Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, says the great irony of Mexican migration is that it often feeds the same problems that sent people north in the first place. "Many towns have lost the best of their labor force. There's money coming in [from the U.S.] but no job creation back home," he says. "It just shows that migration does not solve migration."

The governments of the U.S. and Mexico are trying to encourage people to put the remittances to better use. In 2004 the U.S. Agency for International Development began a five-year, $10 million program to help Mexican microlenders boost small businesses. And the Mexican government is proud of its 3x1 initiative, a project that aims to unite the federal, state and local governments in Mexico with immigrants in the U.S. to fund programs for improving life in Mexico. But Tuxpan's Mayor Gilberto Coria Gudiño (no relation to Mario) says he doesn't know of any 3x1 projects in the region. When asked if he has a plan for ensuring that the next generation of Tuxpeños won't be lost to the U.S., he says his administration has paid $20,000 for a gigantic Mexican flag to be placed on the highest peak above Tuxpan. "This will send a message to all those who are working up north that they should be proud to be Mexican, not ashamed," he says. "It will tell them that Tuxpan welcomes them home with open arms!"