Dateline|Merrill

By Lisa Troshinsky

Chiquimitio, Mexico – Norma remembers her huge wedding when she wore a ruffled, white wedding gown and the entire town attended. Her husband left her and her children long ago, gone to the United States to find a job – something almost nonexistent in their own village. She hasn’t seen him in seven years and suspects she never will again.

Countless women throughout small-town Mexico share Norma’s plight. As more and more Mexicans emigrate to the United States and stay for longer time periods, their villages turn into ghost towns. Locals call them “cities without men.”

Despite Mexico’s high birth rate, its rural population is shrinking. National statistics show that from 2000 to 2005, the population in rural states dropped from 24.8 million to 24.3 million. In the decade before, the population in the same area expanded by 1.4 million people.

“Each Mexican who has emigrated represents one disintegrated home in Mexico,” said Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, deputy of Mexico’s Secretary of the Commission of Population, Border and Immigration Issues.

Norma lives in the small agricultural town of Chiquimitio in Mexico’s central state of Michoacan. Women now head about 80 percent of the families, compared to 20 percent 10 years ago, said the town’s elementary school principal, Pedro Ambriz Martinez.

Twenty thousand fewer people live in Michoacan than they did five years ago, according to Clara Ochoa Valdez, director of Michoacan’s Population Council. Out of a total of 32 Mexican states, Michoacan alone contributes 12 percent of Mexico’s immigration. By 2005, the equivalent of one-fourth of Michoacan’s population had left for the United States.

Some husbands send remittances — a portion of their earnings — to their Mexican families. Other husbands desert their wives entirely to start new families in the United States.

“The women feel insecure,” Norma said. “Sometimes the husbands forget about their families and don’t come back.”

Norma is shy and looks older than her 32 years. She supports her daughters, ages 6 and 10. Her husband went to California seven years ago while she was pregnant with her second child. At the time he begged her to join him, but she said the journey was too dangerous. Since he arrived in the United States as an illegal immigrant, he contacts her irregularly — sometimes with a phone call, sometimes by sending a $100 check from his job milking cows. This support doesn’t come close to the 600 pesos ($60) a week he earned doing construction in Mexico. Once, Norma didn’t hear from him for two years. He told her he used to have a woman in the United States, but says that he’s alone now.

Norma doesn’t believe him. “I called once and she picked up the phone,” she explained.

Chiquimitio’s school principal Martinez said he worries about the emotional health of the women left behind and the town’s decreasing student population.

“When families leave, they lose their origins, their culture, their roots,” he said. “The women who stay behind have to support the children, pay for their education. They work in the fields, take care of the cattle, and work as domestic workers and babysitters. They cope with loneliness and economic difficulties. Most get neurotic. They cry often but keep it to themselves because they feel ashamed. They are afraid.”

Seven years ago 400 students attended the town school. Today only 260 do. Teachers don’t refer to the students’ fathers names, but automatically use the mothers’ names because so many fathers are absent.

“I’ve seen a change in the children who stay,” said the principal. “Their social development is worse. Their moods change, they get more aggressive. They don’t respect their mothers as much when the fathers leave.”

The children don’t study and only think about going to the U.S, said teacher Jose Luis Macias Morillon. “Some don’t even wait until age 15 to go,” he added.

The school officials make up a small handful of the only visible men in town. In the zocalo, the town’s central square, young women with babies on their knees gather and children circle on bicycles. Only an occasional man passes through on a horse.

The town church holds another reminder of the absent. Migrants pray to a tiny statue of El Santo Niño (the Holy Boy) de Chiquimitio before they leave for the United States and bring him flowers when they return.

Is money worth the human cost?

Mexicans migrate to the United States for higher wages to send home to their families and for financial services they can’t access in Mexico, such as home mortgages.

Remittances rank second only to oil as an income source for Mexico. In 2006, U.S. Mexican immigrants sent a total of $20 billion in remittances back to Mexico. Immigrants send an average $300 a month, according to the U.S. Inter-American Development Bank.

However, the poorest Mexican households usually receive far less, only an average $71 a month, according to a Mexican government survey done for PROGRESSA, a Mexican welfare program.

Mexicans are divided on the ultimate value of remittances. Often they are used to pay back smugglers who help the men cross the border.

In small-town Mexico, remittance houses — built with money sent from relatives — dot the landscape. These houses of brick and cement are frequently an improvement over families’ stone huts and dirt floors. But often they sit vacant. The wives don’t consider them to be their property so they don’t move in, said Erika Cervantes, who works at CIMAC, a Mexican nonprofit that encourages the media to focus on Mexican women.

“The men send money to build houses in their home towns, but it’s artificial development because no one lives there,” said Steve Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.

Remittance money also built Chiquimitio’s roads, schools and the zocalo.

A government incentive program called “3 x 1″ contributes three dollars of federal, state and municipal money for every remittance dollar sent by an immigrant for town development.

Nationally, from 1992 to 2001, the program carried out 400 projects of which migrants contributed $5 million, for a total investment of $15 million, wrote Agustin Escobar Latapi, professor at CIESAS Occidente, Guadalajara, in a 2006 labor studies journal.

In nearby Charo, a small, desolate town in Michoacan, an enormous social hall built with remittances stands vacant. The lavish building was built with the intention of revitalizing the dying community. But the social hall was never even opened.

In Ixcateopan, a small town a few hours south of Mexico City, the “3 x 1″ program paved dirt roads and was mid-way through construction of a church. But so many residents deserted the town that officials closed the kindergarten for lack of students.

Wives prefer husbands to money

Wives said they would trade remittances to get their husbands back. On a Web site called Artesanas Campesinas (Rural Women Artists), women beg the U.S. government to “close the border and send our men home to us, even if you must deport them. Please close the border to illegal immigration - after all, it is the law.”

One woman writes, “Dear Pedro, how I miss you. You said you were only going to Arizona to get money for our house. But now you have been away and did not come back when your sister got married. Oh how I worry that you have another woman! Don’t you love me?”

Another excerpt: “Dear Ruben, please come home. The children have not seen you in three years and little Beto is a young man and Lupita asks about her papa. I know we agreed you should try your fortune in the U.S., but I didn’t know that it would be so lonely and that you would be gone for such a long time. Please return to us.”

Migration crisis worsens

Mexican politicians and population experts say the emigration crisis in Mexico is getting worse.

Eleven million Mexicans reside in the United States, 56 percent of whom are illegal, said Luis Acevedo Prieto, CONAPO’s (Mexico’s National Population Council) assistant director of socioeconomic studies and international migration.

About 400,000 Mexicans emigrate to the United States every year. The Mexican government projects that in six years, the number of annual immigrants could climb to 3.5 million, or the equivalent of one Mexican per minute.

Jeffrey Passel, an immigration researcher at the U.S. Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said migration has accelerated to the point where about 9 percent of the population born in Mexico now lives in the United States.

Intensified efforts by the United States to keep immigrants out, including a 500 percent increase in the Border Patrol budget and erection of a 76-mile fence along the border, have been unsuccessful, immigration experts say.

Deborah Myers, a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Migration Policy Institute, said U.S. anti-immigration policies have had the reverse of their intended effects: they have decreased the circular flow of immigration returning to Mexico. The militarized border pushes immigrants away from attempting to cross the border through large towns and into the desert, where it is more dangerous. The cost for a “coyote,” or smuggler, to illegally transport Mexicans across the border has risen to as much as $5,000 to $6,000 a person, said Martinez, Deputy of Mexico’s Secretary of the Population Commission. “Ten years ago the average Mexican stayed in the U.S. two years. Now the average length of stay is 10 years,” he said.

All of these factors have created a “locking-in effect’ of Mexicans in the United States, Myers says. “The average duration of stay in the U.S. has increased, while circular migration has been reduced.”

Women take over male roles but still powerless

Mexican women have become feminist out of necessity. They run the households and make all the decisions for their children.

But they have limited influence, experts said. Women temporarily take over men’s roles, but relinquish these roles when the men come back, said CIMAC’s Cervantes. If there is a man in the community who is not too elderly or sick, usually he makes the decisions.

Often the women are considered insignificant. Alejandro Diaz, deputy sheriff of Ixcateopan, said he doesn’t include the single women in the town’s population count because they don’t pay taxes.

Husbands usually send remittance money not to their wives, but to their mothers, who rule their daughters-in-laws, said Eva Albavera Viveros, who works for the state of Guerrero’s Commission on Women.

“Women are not recognized as owners of the family’s belongings,” Cervantes said. “The women can’t access programs like PROCAMPO (Farmers Direct Support Program), because they are not recognized as owners of their land. They can’t get mortgages because banks don’t view them as trusted individuals. Instead, they have to find agiotistas, people who lend money with no guarantees and high interest. Many women lose their goods in those transactions.”

The National Institute of Women, a Mexican organization that helps women receive government assistance, said 60 percent of Mexicans who live in extreme poverty are women.

Yet the federal government hasn’t recognized the vulnerability of abandoned women, contends Haydee Machua Montes, director of the National Institute of Woman. She says, “The immigration problem has been understood as a male phenomena — it has focused on the migrants, not their families left behind.”

Men find new spouses, wives don’t

Chiquimitio is a close-knit community where everyone knows each other and dating options are limited. Norma said she no longer misses her husband, but continues to be faithful to him, even if she thinks he has another family in the United States.

“I’m not interested in men now. They are ungrateful, they pay back badly,” she said.

Erlinda Torres Herrejed, a single mother in Morelia, Michoacan, said she feels lonely but doesn’t date “because a new man might not love my children as their real father could.”

Her children’s father stopped calling from the United States after three months. He has been gone 14 years. He recently contacted her, asking for a divorce to marry his new El Salvadoran girlfriend. Erlinda refused because he wouldn’t help their sons obtain immigration papers. They had to walk two days in the desert to reach U.S. soil.

Margarita Ocampo, a mother of five who lives on the outskirts of Taxco is another such immigration “widow.” She wouldn’t even consider dating in “a very small town where people talk.”

Norma one of the lucky ones

Norma is one of the lucky ones compared with other women in her situation. Although she struggles with poverty and loneliness, she has a job cleaning bathrooms at the elementary school and reaps the benefit of one of Mexico’s age-old traditions: the support of the extended family.

Her mother, Ernestine, an older, stout woman in a blue checkered apron and a white bun, provides a welcoming home and looks after Norma’s children while her daughter is at work.

Norma’s oldest daughter, a brooding girl quick to cry, has refused to talk to her father on the telephone for two years. Despite this, “he is still important because he is the father of my daughter’s children,” Ernestine said.

Ernestine said her son-in-law “deserves what he gets,” referring to his daughter’s rejection, yet she still protects him by declining to reveal his name, for fear of exposing his illegal immigrant identity.

Norma’s in-laws, who disapprove of the way her husband “does not fulfill his responsibility to his family,” have adopted her as one of their own and provide her with a stone hut. Norma’s kitchen has a concrete floor and a single light bulb hangs from the low ceiling.

She gestured proudly as she walked through the family property, pointing out the livestock, the birds and the stored corn. She said she can live there “as long as I want.”

She has no plans to go to the United States. “I’m quite fine in my town,” she said, although she’s never traveled more than three hours away.

Then she paused and in the silence stared out with tired eyes. “For me, immigration is bad,” she said. “The men want to go to the U.S., but they risk a lot. There are improvements in the town, but it is not enough. I prefer that my husband be with me here, with no improvements.

Sources

1. Despite Mexico’s high birth rate, its rural population is shrinking. National statistics show that from 2000 to 2005, the population in rural states dropped from 24.8 million to 24.3 million. In the decade before, the population in the same area expanded by 1.4 million people.

INEGI, Mexico’s National Institute of Statistic, Geography and Computer Science

2. Michoacan has 20,000 fewer inhabitants than it had five years ago. Out of 32 Mexican states, Michoacan alone contributes 12 percent of Mexico’s immigration to the U.S.

Clara Ochoa Verdez, Director, Michoacan Population Council

3. Remittances rank second only to oil as an income source for Mexico. In 2006, U.S. Mexican immigrants sent a total of $20 billion in remittances back to Mexico. Immigrants send an average $300 a month.

The U.S. Inter-American Development Bank

4. The poorest Mexican households usually receive only an average $71 a month.

A Mexican government survey done for PROGRESSA, a Mexican welfare program.

5. Nationally, from 1992 to 2001, the “3 x 1” program carried out 400 projects of which migrants contributed $5 million, for a total investment of $15 million.

Agustin Escobar Latapi, professor at CIESAS Occidente, Guadalajara, in a 2006 labor studies journal.

6. Eleven million Mexicans reside in the United States, 56 percent of who are illegal.

Luis Acevedo Prieto, CONAPO’s assistant director of socioeconomic studies and international migration.

7. About 400,000 Mexicans emigrate to the United States every year. The Mexican government projects that in six years, the number of annual immigrants could climb to 3.5 million, or the equivalent of one Mexican per minute.

Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, deputy of Mexico’s Secretary of the Commission of Population, Border and Immigration Issues.

8. Migration has accelerated to the point where about 9 percent of the population born in Mexico now lives in the United States.

Jeffrey Passel, an immigration researcher at the U.S. Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

9. Since President Bush took office in 2001, the Administration more than doubled funding for border security — from $4.6 billion in 2001 to $10.4 billion in 2007.

The White House April 9, 2007 New Release

10. Intensified efforts by the United States to keep immigrants out, including a 500 percent increase in the Border Patrol budget and erection of a 76-mile fence along the border, have been unsuccessful.

Deborah Myers, a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Migration Policy Institute

11. The cost for a “coyote,” or smuggler, to illegally transport Mexicans across the border has risen to as much as $5,000 to $6,000 a person.

Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, Deputy of Mexico’s Secretary of the Population Commission

12. Ten years ago the average Mexican stayed in the United States two years. Now the average length of stay is 10 years.

Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, Deputy of Mexico’s Secretary of the Population Commission

13. Sixty percent of Mexicans who live in extreme poverty are women.

Haydee Machua Montes, Director, National Institute of Women, Mexico City