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| ALL ABOARD: Two hundred and fifty thousand Guanajuatenses and their children live in Dallas-Fort Worth. The trip between Guanajuato, Mexico, and Dallas takes 24 hours by bus, and thousands make it every year. Their journey ends in Dallas at a bus station on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff. |
Just
past 6:30 in the evening, I sit in a folding chair outside one of the
half-dozen bus stations on Jefferson Boulevard, in the heart of Oak
Cliff, waiting for a bus that will take me 1,000 miles south. A paletero—an
older man selling ice cream, sodas, and salty snacks from a rolling
cart—picks up a Spanish-language paper and plops into a nearby chair.
He knows people will soon arrive to catch the 7 o’clock to Mexico.
The
buses come and go every day, carting hundreds of people between Dallas
and Mexican states such as San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Michoacán, and
Jalisco. But by far, the heaviest traffic runs between here and the
state of Guanajuato. In fact, Dallas is home to the oldest and largest
U.S. enclave of people from Guanajuato. The numbers describe the
dramatic shift that will soon push Anglos out of the majority in Texas.
There are about 500,000 Mexican immigrants and their children living in
the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Of those, about 250,000—half—come
from Guanajuato, which is not much larger than Maryland. If these
Guanajuatenses (gwah-nah-wha-TEN-sez) all lived in the city limits, one
of every five Dallas residents would come from that Mexican state alone.
I
met an anthropologist at UT Dallas named Laura González, who told me
she knows of small towns in Guanajuato where there are fewer people
left than have come to Dallas. There are only four cities in Guanajuato
that have more Guanajuatenses than Dallas does. I told Dennis Cordell,
an SMU history professor who studies immigration, that I had a hard
time believing the numbers—that a half million Mexican immigrants live
here. Dallas is a car city, he said. If this were Paris or New York—a
walking city—you’d see it on the street.
At the bus stop, Guadalupe Vázquez climbs out of a friend’s car. “Hola,” she calls to me. “Listo? Are you ready?”
Vázquez
oversees Casa Guanajuato, a social and recreational center in Oak Cliff
that also acts as a sort of informal state embassy. Opened in 1997 and
funded by the state of Guanajuato, the center helps Guanajuatenses with
travel arrangements, family reunifications, legal problems, and the
transporting of bodies back to Mexico for burial.
Tonight,
Vázquez is helping me. She’s taking me to Guanajuato to visit families,
to talk to government officials about the exodus, to find out why so
many Guanajuatenses have come to Dallas. It’s very simple, she says.
People come to the United States looking for a better life. Sure, but
why Dallas? Maybe, she says, part of the answer lies in Guanajuato.
The
bus, with about 14 passengers onboard, pulls out on time at 7 p.m.
We’ll drive all night and through the day to Laredo, cross the border,
swing by Monterrey, and then to San Luis Potosí. There, we’ll take
another bus to León. We’ll reach Guanajuato more than 24 hours after
leaving Dallas.
I stay awake through most of the night, snacking on miniature Mexican empanadas from a taqueria-slash-bus
depot in San Marcos. We’re one of three bus loads, all from Dallas,
that stopped there, all of us heading for Mexico. Several hours later,
just before sunrise, we’re crossing the international bridge at Laredo.
After getting cleared by Mexican immigration, the bus rattles over the
streets of Nuevo Laredo then merges onto a modern four-lane highway
that leads into the heart of Mexico.
Eighteen-wheelers zoom past
us toward the U.S. border, an obvious result of free trade agreements
that have knocked down economic barriers between Mexico and the United
States. But then I see a bus just like mine heading north.
Moments later, another zips by. Then another. I start keeping track in my notebook.
Bus at 7:15 a.m.
Bus at 7:22 a.m.
7:23 a.m.
7:26 a.m.
7:27 a.m.
They
keep coming. It might have been built for big rigs carrying cars and
other goods to the United States, but this highway works just as well
for transporting Mexico’s most important export: people.
Then,
like a swinging pocket watch, the passing traffic lulls me to sleep.
It’s still another 12 hours before we reach Guanajuato.
Downtown Silao is bustling.
Pop music blares from passing cars. Avril Lavigne. Radiohead. Red Hot
Chili Peppers. Take away the aged scenery—cities around here date to
the 1500s—and the people in Silao, in the Bajío region of Guanajuato,
look surprisingly American. In this part of the country, farmers grow
wheat, maize, and sorghum. But in Silao, in a covered marketplace two
blocks from my hotel, it seems every fourth vendor is selling American
culture: sweatshirts, t-shirts, and baseball caps emblazoned with logos
for the Washington Redskins, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago Bulls. In
the main plaza, a worker wearing a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap sweeps
the brick streets.
A group of young men on the gazebo strums guitars and sings a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
I want to know, have you ever seen the rain?
Coming down on a sunny day?
The
teens, who wouldn’t look out of place if they were plopped down in the
middle of Town East Mall, like to gather here and sing English songs,
though they really don’t know what the words mean.
Christian
says he will finish school soon, and, after that, he wants to go to the
United States. “To work and study music,” he says.
Jorge knows a
lot of people who’ve moved to the United States. “People leave to earn
money, to buy clothes and shoes,” he says. “Here, there is no work.”
The
young men list U.S. states, places they plan to go, places where
relatives already live. Wisconsin. New York. Pennsylvania. Texas.
“Cowboys, Mavericks,” Christian says, smiling, when asked about Dallas.
“I
hear Dallas is beautiful,” says Felipe, a carpenter’s assistant who
wears a San Jose Sharks baseball cap. “I’ve heard there’s work there.”
Guadalupe
Vázquez, my guide from Casa Guanajuato, says talk like this is common
among young men. They plan to leave for the United States like the
typical high school student in the United States plans to head to
college—it’s just what you do. On this afternoon, she’s taking me to
Trejo, a farming village near Silao, where a large number of families
have sons, daughters, and grandchildren living in Texas.
It doesn’t take long to find a little piece of Dallas in Trejo.
On
a dresser in Irene and Federico Báez’s mud-brick home sits a small
plaster angel. Federico, 69, points out other items—a television stand,
a sofa, a bed frame—all brought here by his three sons who live in the
Dallas area. Federico shows off framed snapshots of his Texas-reared
grandchildren, some playing soccer, others posing in
turn-of-the-century clothing for “antique” photos.
Federico is a
slight man with a thin mustache. He went to Texas with friends to find
work more than 20 years ago. But he didn’t like it. He was
uncomfortable with the way of life. “I went and did some farm work, but
I came back real quick, and I’ve never returned,” says Federico, who
prefers Trejo, where he says it’s peaceful and he can work the land.
Federico’s
oldest son, Victor, now 50, left for Texas shortly after his father
returned. “He first went to Austin where we have relatives,” Federico
says. “From there, he made friends with people who worked at a factory
near Dallas.” His two brothers were soon in Texas, too, one of them
working in the same factory with Victor. The latest news is that Victor
has bought a home.
“They say life is very tranquil, that there are no cholos
(gang members) where they live,” Federico says. “They all get together
for parties, for baptisms. We have 12 grandchildren in Texas.”
“They
come visit us every summer with their children,” says Irene, 68. She
sits husking maize just outside their home. Nearby, chickens peck at
the ground. Colorful caged parakeets flutter and sing. “I’m sad that
they are not here with us,” Irene says, “but it’s their lives they are
making. I know they will come to visit, but I don’t live under the
illusion that they will come to stay.”
José and Amelia Velazquez
live nearby. They are empty-nesters. Their children live in California.
Amelia’s three brothers left for Texas more than 10 years ago. “They
like it there,” says Amelia, 48. “They say it’s very quiet, very
pretty, more peaceful than California.”
Every Christmas, the
brothers drive the 1,000 miles from Dallas to Trejo, bringing furniture
and clothing. “When men come back,” says José, 52, “they influence lots
of other young men with their nice cars and nice clothes. They think if
they go there, they will do well, too. There’s not enough money, not
enough work to keep them here, so they leave. There are a lot of empty
houses here.”
But José and Amelia are settled. They like their
home and don’t plan to leave. They’ll spend the rest of their lives
here, they say. Their children and siblings, when they can, send money
from the United States. They’ve used some of the money to renovate
their simple home. José points to the entrance and says his children
actually brought the door on one of their trips to Trejo. “Home Depot,”
he says, the only English phrase he utters during my visit.
What else? “The light fixtures,” he says, pointing to the ceiling. “The refrigerator,” he says, motioning to the kitchen.
“This whole house,” Amelia says, sitting on a nice couch, flashing a broad smile as she tugs her apron dress.
José
went to Texas briefly in 1978. He also spent some time in California
before returning to Trejo. While he was away, his 13-year-old son,
Israel, considered himself the man of the house, José says, explaining
a photo that hangs on a wall. “We had cows, and he would go out and cut
hay for the cows. When he was bringing the hay back, something
happened, and the wagon tipped over, and it fell on him, and it killed
him.” José strokes his chin, showing little emotion. “All this happens
because we are working,” he says. “Families disperse, men leave women
behind. Women stay here alone, and sometimes they don’t get money sent
back, and sometimes they go looking for their men.”
Sometimes,
things don’t turn out so well. “Three weeks ago,” José says, “a young
man was shot dead in Los Angeles, and he was returned here. He was 17
or 18 years old.
“There is lots of death.”
On our way back to the city, we drive past vast green fields.
The land is good, but farming no longer keeps men here, especially the
younger men. “A lot of fathers do farming,” Vázquez says, “but the
children don’t want to.”
About 40 percent of Mexico’s 105
million people live in poverty. Guanajuato’s industries—mining,
tanneries and leather factories, cotton and wool mills, distilleries
and foundries—have not created enough jobs to keep people here. As a
result, many towns in the Mexican countryside, especially in northern
Guanajuato, are nearly empty. At town dances, it’s common for women to
outnumber men by a wide margin. In many cases, when husbands, fathers,
and brothers living in the United States have saved enough money to pay
for the passage north, they send for their wives, mothers, and sisters.
But while they are away, they send home money—$100, $200, maybe $300 a
month. Combined, these remittances total $14 billion annually, placing
Mexican muscle among Mexico’s top industries, with oil and tourism.
In
the state capital of Guanajuato, the Office of the Secretary of Social
Development is officially charged with the welfare of these wage
earners and their families. Here, you’ll find brochures that warn
emigrants of the dangers they face on their journey. On one pamphlet,
two wavy lines cross the chest of a geometric figure of a man.
“Dangerous currents,” the brochure says. “In times of rain, rivers can
be very dangerous. Be careful because you may get hurt or drown.”
Travelers are also warned of poisonous insects and animals, the danger
of riding inside railroad cars, and the extreme temperatures of desert
and mountain regions.
Nearby, staffer Mikal Susana Pacheco’s
computer shows telephone calls and letters from people in
municipalities such as Jerécuaro, Acámbaro, Yuriria, and San Felipe.
They all have family members or friends in the United States, and
they’ve contacted the secretary’s office seeking help. Pacheco calls up
a case.
A letter received November 3, 2003, is from a woman in
San Luis de la Paz. Until recently, the woman writes, she lived in
Dallas, where her two children attend high school. “Family members here
told her a loved one was very sick, and she had to come back,” Pacheco
says. “When she got here, she realized it was a trick. No one was sick,
and now they don’t let her go back to Dallas. Her children are staying
with a grandmother, but she’s worried, and she can’t get back because
she does not have papers.”
Susana Guerra, who runs the Secretary
of Social Development’s emigrant division, acknowledges that Texas is a
popular destination. The agency’s first two Casas Guanajuato opened in
Dallas and in Houston in 1997. Today, there are 47 centers in 20 U.S.
states. Proximity plays a factor, she says. But there’s also a
perception among Mexicans that leaders in Texas and Mexico are
friendly. When Mexican President Vicente Fox was governor of Guanajuato
from 1995 to 1999, he often visited then Governor George W. Bush. These
meetings were covered extensively by Mexican media.
Guanajuatenses
also know what to expect when they arrive in Texas. Thanks to a vastly
improved telephone system in Mexico, they’ve frequently heard from
friends and family what it’s like, that people speak Spanish, that you
don’t need to know English to find a good meal or a place to stay. And
there are plenty of Mexican-American politicians.
“There is more
confidence in talking to a Mexican than an Anglo,” Guerra says. “But
it’s not everything. People don’t go to a place just because the
sheriff is Mexican-American or because there’s a Spanish newspaper.
It’s the contradiction of Texas. It seems friendly, but there’s also a
lot of discrimination against immigrants, a lot of human rights being
violated, a lot of people being exploited.”
Texas, she says, “te ayuda y te asusta“—it helps you, and it scares you.
“You see where Wal-Mart is? That’s where our village used to be.”
Henry
Martinez’s truck is parked by a Taco Cabana in far West Dallas, near
Cockrell Hill Road and Interstate 30. In the early 1900s, this is where
you could find the Trinity Portland Cement Co. This is where Martinez’s
father José found a job after coming to Dallas from Guanajuato in 1915.
From my research, trying to understand the connection between Dallas
and Guanajuato, every sign points to the Martinez family. As best
anyone can tell, they started it all.
Henry, 75, isn’t sure why
his father chose Dallas. “He just followed the railroad tracks north,”
he says. But he knows José left, in part, to escape the anarchy of the
Mexican revolution. “He came because he was looking to find a new life.”
José
Martinez was 18 when he moved to Dallas. He worked in the rail yards
for a short time. Then he heard that Trinity Portland was hiring. The
city was growing, and cement was in high demand. The plant needed to
fill jobs. But the work was dangerous, so to make the jobs more
attractive, Trinity Portland provided free employee housing, just half
a mile from the plant’s front doors. After a while, José sent for his
wife, Maria, who’d stayed in Guanajuato. Henry and his siblings were
born in the company village.
The Martinezes were not the first
immigrants from Guanajuato. Mexicans began arriving in Dallas in
sizable numbers during the 1870s, with the city listing numerous
Mexican merchants, clerks, and physicians by 1875. But public records
at the time were not kept for non-Anglos, so it’s hard to say exactly
where Mexicans were coming from. A small piece of evidence shows that
in 1907—eight years before José arrived—a man listing Guanajuato as his
birthplace died in Dallas. Still, when you ask Vázquez about the
history of Guanajuatenses in Dallas, she produces a history of the
Martinez family. “They are among the first documented families in
Dallas from Guanajuato,” she says.
The Dallas they found was a
booming city. In 1910, the population of Dallas was roughly 92,000. By
1920, five years after José walked into town, the population had grown
to nearly 160,000. Dallas had entered the ranks of the nation’s 50
largest cities.
With that growth came opportunity and jobs. The
one José found was in the most dangerous part of the manufacturing
process: burning raw materials in a kiln before final grinding and
sacking. “It was red-hot conditions. Workers got burned,” Henry says.
Anglos “didn’t work as laborers. They all had titles. Mexicans were the
laborers.”
Family history spills from Henry—almost urgently—as
we drive through the part of town where the cement company once stood.
An old injury from his time served in the Army keeps him from walking
too much, so he drives most places, even short distances. Papers and
old photos are stacked on the dash and console of his red Ford Ranger.
“That
area over there is where all the cement workers lived,” he says,
pointing across a parking lot, past a collection of Wal-Mart shopping
carts. “The company had their own power plant so everyone had free
electricity. We grew tea. We had chickens. We had a little ranch. There
were goats and cattle.”
He points to a building on a hill, on
Chalk Hill Road. “You see that little schoolhouse? I went to school
there. There was a dairy near there, behind the school. We had a
drive-in theater on top of the hill.
“My father had some hogs.
He had a Model T, too. He had these 5-gallon cans, and he’d drive to
this Mexican food restaurant to pick up slop for the hogs. Every
winter, we killed a pig. We made butter. My mother made soap. Have you
ever eaten huevos do toro? They were good. That was during the Depression.”
Even in bad times, it seems, the Martinezes were living a good life. “Better than a lot of others,” Henry says.
We
drive to Eladio R. Martinez Park on Jim Street. Then he swings by the
Eladio R. Martinez Learning Center, an elementary school dedicated in
1986. Eladio was Henry’s older brother. He served in the 33rd Infantry
Division and died a hero in 1945, taken down by a sniper’s bullet while
clearing Japanese soldiers out of island caves in the South Pacific. “I
remember when World War II started,” Henry says. “My dad asked us boys
if we wanted to go back to Mexico. We said no. We told him we wanted to
stay here and fight for our country.”
From a stack of papers on
the dash, Henry pulls a black-and-white photo. It’s a group shot of
Trinity Portland employees at a company picnic on July 4, 1929. More
than 75 faces, including his father’s, stare at the camera. Most are
Mexican.
“After my father got here and started working at the
cement company, my mother joined him and then his brother. Then more
relatives came, and they all got jobs at Trinity Portland. The majority
of people in this picture,” Martinez says, “were relatives of ours,
from Guanajuato.” They came at José’s urging—the same reason
Guanajuatenses come to Dallas today.
If the Martinez family can be considered the progenitors
of the Guanajuato-to-Dallas connection, then Raúl Velazquez is their
offspring—in spirit if not blood. I met his mother in Guanajuato. Her
son, she said, works in Dallas, at a restaurant in Oak Lawn. She said
she hopes to join her son one day, though she’s comfortable in
Guanajuato, thanks to the money he sends her.
I call la Madeleine and ask for Raúl Velazquez.
Over
the din of clanking plates and utensils in the kitchen, Velazquez tells
me he’s very busy. But he makes time to listen when I say I’ve just
returned from Guanajuato where I met his mother. He agrees to meet me a
few days later at his Las Colinas apartment to tell me why he came to
Dallas.
It was 3 o’clock in the morning when Velazquez first saw
Dallas. He was in a car, heading north on I-35. “The first thing I
remember were the buildings downtown all lit up. The green building, it
looked like a dream. It looked unreal.”
After a good night’s
sleep, he began exploring his new home. “Everything looked real nice,
real clean. There were street signs everywhere, and everyone was
respecting the signs. I’d never seen black people before. I’d never
seen Asian people before.”
At the time, Velazquez was 20. He had
come to Dallas because his father already lived here. It was a shaky
start for him, first working for a cleaning service and then returning
to Mexico for 10 months. But when he came back to Dallas in 1991, he
came to stay. Today, Velazquez, 35, is a legal resident and a manager
at la Madeleine.
Life is good, he says. “Here, it’s easier to
make a living, to have a car, to have clothes, to have your own place.”
He tells this to friends in Guanajuato. Some come to Dallas and stay.
Some go back.
His one-bedroom apartment overlooks a wooded creek. A Diego Rivera print hangs over the fireplace. There’s a GQ en Español
magazine on his coffee table. Maya and Aztec figures look down from a
bookshelf. There are photos of him visiting family in Silao. In his
kitchen is a bottle of Tequila Corralejo. “It’s made in Guanajuato,” he
says. “It’s very popular right now.”
He says he misses Mexico.
“The bricks on McKinney Avenue remind me of Guanajuato,” Velazquez
says. But he knows he’ll probably never call it home again. “I’d like
to own a home, definitely get married and have children. The
opportunity to have a better life is the reason I’ll stay. The
opportunity is there. All you have to do is take it.”
Dallas-based freelance writer Hector Cantú wrote a nationally
distributed newspaper column that examined Hispanic business issues in
America.
