In the coffee-growing community of Belisario Domínguez, in northern Chiapas, Mexico, the contrast between homes is striking. On one side of the street, stands the home of Octadicio Ramírez, a large yellow house with an electric gate and a shiny red pick-up truck parked in front. Across the street, his neighbor Maura Romeo, 35, lives in a small wooden house with a fence made of boards and wire that is falling down. Ramírez returned in January from a year's stint working illegally el norte, in the United States. Romeo chose to stay in the community and earn a living the way generations of her neighbors have, growing coffee.
Ramírez, 25, went to the United States in 2006 in search of the "American Dream" and he says he found it. After a year of planting trees in California, he returned to his community in January with $6,000, about 60,000 pesos, enough to buy his father a new truck and repair the damages their home suffered during Hurricane Stan in 2005. Stan destroyed 170,000 of the 229,000 hectares of coffee fields in the state, according to a December 2005 article in Contralinea, a Chiapas current-affairs magazine. The coffee growers of Belisario Domínguez, including Ramírez, lost a great deal of their harvest during the storm.
Remittances, the money that Mexicans like Ramírez who work in the U.S. send or bring to their families at home, are an increasingly important part of the Chiapan economy. A February 2007 article in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, found that Chiapanecos working in the U.S. sent $800 million to their families in 2006, an astronomical leap from the $13.9 million they sent in 2000.
Chiapas has not traditionally been among the states in Mexico that has a high number of citizens working in the U.S., according to the State Population Council (COESPO). However, Chiapas is now ranked 11th among Mexican states in terms of immigration.
The causes of migration are many, says Miguel Pickard, migration specialist at the Center for Political and Economic Research for Community Action (CIEPAC) in San Cristóbal. Pickard says the lingering devastation from natural disasters such as Hurricane Stan, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which, according to CIEPAC, caused the minimum wage, about $4 a day in Chiapas, to lose 20 percent of its purchasing power in the first 10 years since its signing, have contributed the rising number of Chiapans who immigrate to the United States every year.
At least 9.9 million foreign-born Mexicans live in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2002 Community Survey. At least six million of these people were working illegally in the U.S. in 2004, according to the Migration Information Source, published by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
Ramírez fits the profile of a typical Chiapan immigrant to the US. He is male, young, between 15 and 34 years and, like 65 percent of his statesmen who immigrate, he is a campesino, or peasant farmer, according to COESPO.
“The first chance I got, I went north. I didn’t even know what I was going to do for work,” says Ramírez, who made the journey with a neighbor’s cousin as his only contact on the other side. “With just the clothes on my back, I left my community one Tuesday, looking for something better,” he adds.
Ramírez says he couldn’t see any reason to stay and struggle to scrape out a living as a coffee grower. He found work in San Diego, California, working in reforestation. To get there, he took a bus from his community to Tijuana where a coyote led him and a group of other Mexicans, Guatemalans, and El Salvadorans into the desert where a truck was waiting to take them to Los Angeles.
Planting trees in San Diego, Ramírez earned $9 an hour. Growing coffee back home, he made $136, about 1360 pesos, per 65 kilogram sack of beans. He harvested 15 sacks a year, for an annual income of 20,400 pesos, about $2,040.
But while individuals who decide to immigrate often reap economic benefits, it can be harmful for the communities they leave behind. “Migration in Chiapas is a serious problem because it doesn’t help local development, and leaves the countryside empty,” says Joaquín Peña, a migrations specialist who works at the Intercultural University of Chiapas and the College of the Southern Border (ECOSUR). As more people leave the state in search better-paying work, he says, traditional cultural practices are lost.
Ramírez was the first in his family to go to the U.S. in search of work. His father and grandparents were coffee-growers, but Ramírez says that times have changed and the family business is no longer profitable. “[Coffee growing] is our tradition, but if we don’t have anything to eat, we have nothing,” he adds.
Others, like Romeo, choose to stay in their communities, even though earning a living is hard. Romeo, who grows coffee land she inherited from her parents, harvested up to four 65-kilogram sacks of coffee a year before Hurricane Stan. In 2006, she harvested 75 percent less coffee, just one sack.
Before Stan, the Belisario Domínguez community produced a substantial amount of high-quality coffee. “We used to all work together to better our coffee harvests, but now many have lost hope,” says Pedro Vargas, director of the Association of the Sierra of Chiapas, which administers coffee cooperatives in the region.
But Romeo is still trying. She says she doesn’t want her three children to immigrate to the U.S., so she works hard to give them the best standard of life she can in Belisario Domínguez. Romeo participated in cooperative coffee projects to get a better price for her product. Still, there are times of struggle. “Sometimes we have [money]. Other times we don’t even have enough to eat,” she says.
Meanwhile, Ramírez says he plans to go back to the U.S. next year to work illegally again and send more money to his parents and sister.
For now, Romeo says she is getting by and waiting for the economic situation in Chiapas to improve so that she can buy things for her children and live with more dignity. But remittances have become the lifeblood of many of her neighbors’ households.
Vargas says despite the luxuries that some families are able to buy from the remittances, the situation, both for the immigrant and the family, is grave, “They get on the bus and they go. Some come back, but not all. Some come back with vices or they only come back to pick up their wife or other family member and bring them with them [to the other side].”
Originally published 2006 PIWDW
