Mexican Town Left Behind

GRANJENAL, Mexico — To remind himself that he is not forgotten, parish priest Javier Castro keeps a 3-foot-tall trophy from the Orange County Soccer League at the foot of his desk.

His boys won the championship in 1992. They carried their prize 1,500 miles back to this picturesque farming town in northern Michoacan state, handed it to Castro and celebrated for a week.

Then they returned to Santa Ana, where so many of Granjenal’s people have gone.

The priest pats his memento and sighs. His town is empty and silent these days, the streets overrun with cows, the brightly colored houses vacant and padlocked. Nearly everyone--man, woman and child--has moved to Santa Ana.

In the last decade, the elementary school has lost three-fourths of its children and half of its teachers. Businesses that once thrived on dollars sent home from California have withered as customers joined relatives in the north.

Castro’s dwindling congregation barely justifies a full-time priest: He baptized only six children last year and hasn’t performed a wedding in five months.

From a village of several thousand, Granjenal (pronounced Gran-HEY-nal) has shrunk to a few hundred residents. Even in Michoacan, a state notorious for its rural poverty, lack of development and political repression, that rate of desertion is exceptional.

“In all my research in many towns, and I have been doing this more than 10 years, I have never seen a town as lonely as Granjenal,” says Gustavo Lopez Castro, who directs a migration research center at the Colegio de Michoacan in Zamora.

An hour’s drive up winding dirt roads from the nearest highway, Granjenal lies in a dry valley surrounded by scrub-covered hills and parched farmland. The town has struggled since it was founded near the turn of the century.

Almost from the beginning, Lopez says, workers have immigrated to California. Over the years, they came and went in waves that coincided with U.S. economic fortunes, immigration laws and Mexican agricultural policies.

Migration researcher Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara says Granjenal, like other rural farming communities, probably would have died years ago if not for the dollars sent home from migrant workers.

“Migration allowed many of these towns to survive” because of money sent from the U.S., he says. “But now you could say that they are dying because of the same migration.”

What changed the balance was a 1986 law that granted amnesty to about 3 million undocumented workers, including hundreds from Granjenal. Once legal, many sent for the families they had been maintaining in Mexico. The exodus gained momentum in recent years when Mexican corn prices plunged under the North American Free Trade Agreement, wiping out scores of small farmers.

Nearly everyone from Granjenal went to Santa Ana, a base for the town’s migrant workers since the 1960s. There, the Laborers Union local at Grand and Chestnut avenues found low-skilled construction jobs for nearly all comers. Now the two places are irrevocably linked--economically and culturally.

While tightened border security has made it harder for others to follow the path to Santa Ana, the urge to migrate is not easily changed among people whose survival has long depended on American jobs.

“All the young ones want to go,” says Elva Chavez, a first-grade teacher who has watched her students leave for 20 years. “If they believe they have the slightest chance [to reach Santa Ana], they will fight until they get there.”

In Father Castro’s opinion, the migration was a huge mistake. Granjenal’s people traded open space and innocence for crowded apartments, financial pressures, fear of crime and isolation in Santa Ana.

He knows this, he says, because every year he, too, packs his bags and heads north to visit his parishioners in Orange County.

But Castro’s assessment is a hard sell in a town with poor farmland dependent on unreliable rains, a shortage of jobs, a single telephone and a school that teaches only to the sixth grade.

Few who stayed have prospered, while many sons and daughters of those who went north have moved on to professional careers or office jobs that pay more in a week than a Mexican farm worker earns in six months.

“Of course, we would stay here if we could,” says Antonio Lopez, a portly man with a mass of gray hair who first went north 38 years ago.

As Granjenal’s honorary mayor and police chief this year, Lopez is stuck in town, but he plans to soon join his nine children in Santa Ana.

“We have suffered to go north all these years,” he says, referring to the separation of families, furtive border crossings and crowded living conditions in California. “We made many sacrifices. But what choice did we have? There is no work in Granjenal.”

Lopez is quick to point out that the link to Santa Ana has benefited the town in many ways.

Contributions helped build a school, bring in electricity and running water and pave two main roads with concrete. They also financed a small bullring for competition during the annual festival in December, rebuilt its only church and paid for a new central plaza with wrought iron benches.

Many of the yellow, pink, green and blue adobe houses, connected by a tangle of unnamed dirt roads, were upgraded, painted and furnished with dollars earned in Santa Ana and sent back.

But scores of the houses have been vacant for years, and aside from occasional visits during the holidays, most will never be inhabited again. The owners, who once dreamed of a tranquil retirement in Granjenal, prefer to face old age with their children and grandchildren, even if it means living--and dying--far from their homeland.

The town’s new plaza, of which Lopez is so proud, stands empty most afternoons. Infested with weeds and encircled by barbed wire to keep out hungry cows, it is a tribute to Granjenal’s fleeting taste of prosperity, and to its slow but inexorable death.

*

Granjenal was named for the gnarled, olive-like granjeno trees that were once abundant here.

Cut for firewood, the trees, like Granjenal’s people, have all but disappeared.

The town is dominated by three surnames--Lopez, Maldonado and Guillen--and just about everyone is related. Conversations about families in Santa Ana are routinely punctuated by exclamations of “Mi primo!” (My cousin!) or “Mi cunado!” (My brother-in-law!).

Visitors, who are rare this time of year, are greeted with an eagerness bordering on desperation, particularly when they bring news of Santa Ana.

“Ay, you can’t imagine how bored I am here,” sighs Rosa Guillen, a fair-skinned redhead who is married to the honorary mayor. Guillen tends a small grocery store facing the empty plaza, but for an hour she has no customers. She says she opened the business as a hobby.

“Something to do until I go back to Santa Ana to be with my children,” Guillen says, fanning herself with a scrap of brown wrapping paper. “If I didn’t have this, I would go crazy.”

Outside, in the sun-drenched afternoon, four middle-aged women stand under umbrellas and chat in the concrete street. The only traffic is a burro carrying a load of scavenged firewood, accompanied by three chortling men who trade turns on the animal’s back. Children giggle in the thin shade of a wall as the town drunk pontificates.

A block away, in the vacant town jail that doubles as an afternoon gathering spot, six of Granjenal’s more prosperous men play a friendly game of poker, their white cowboy hats pushed back on their heads.

Among them is Melchor Maldonado, an upbeat, smooth-talking pig trader whose negotiating skills have made him relatively wealthy. The only one of eight brothers to remain in Granjenal, Maldonado trades pigs in the morning, plays cards in the afternoon and watches the evening news on television--a schedule that gives him plenty of time to ponder Granjenal’s fate. He wonders, for example, what his town might have been like if most of its strongest, smartest and most ambitious men had stayed. And he worries that when the men and women of his generation die, the connection to Santa Ana will die with them.

“There were 20 or 30 good years,” he says, remembering when workers sent home monthly money orders and returned for a few months every winter. “There was a lot of money here, and we would have liked it to continue. But that ended with the amnesty.”

Each of the families in Santa Ana still contributes $50 to the December festival, and hundreds return every year for a few weeks of parades, parties and rodeo games, Maldonado says. But every year the crowd is smaller, and every year their stays are shorter. “This will only last until my generation is finished,” he says.

Not everyone remembers those prosperous days with fondness. It was a lonely life for the migrant workers, who spent most of the year separated from their families, crowded into cramped Santa Ana apartments.

The life was equally hard on the women left behind, who took on the roles of both parents in maintaining the home and raising the children.

For workers crossing the border illegally--the majority before amnesty--the journey was difficult and often dangerous. In 1985, a 23-year-old man from Granjenal was hit by a car and killed as he ran from Border Patrol agents near the San Diego border.

A year later, construction worker Elias Leon Chavez was robbed, beaten and left for dead during a nighttime crossing at the Tijuana River channel. The father of four never went north again.

These days, he scrapes together a living doing odd jobs and works, in painstakingly slow stages, on his concrete house. “I save for a few months, and I buy a bag of cement,” he says. “Then I can build a wall.”

In the last 20 years, two men left for the north and never returned, leaving their wives and children facing a lifetime of extreme poverty. Their disappearance into the enormous pool of Mexican migrants in California shocked the people of Granjenal, to whom obligations to family usually come first.

A few workers returned because they hated life in the north--the constant fear of deportation, the loneliness, the early mornings and long days of back-straining labor. Jorge Valencia is one of them.

Valencia worked in Santa Ana in the mid-’70s. Like most of his friends, he crossed the border illegally and quickly found a construction job through the Laborers Union in Santa Ana. But waking at 4 a.m. to make the long daily drive to the work site in southern Orange County wore on him, and after three years he decided to return to Mexico.

Now Valencia, whose eight brothers and sisters all live in Orange County, supports his wife and six children by running a grocery store and doing odd jobs when he can find them.

Late one morning, he is stacking blocks for the new wall of a neighbor’s house, across the street from the crumbling shell of a sister’s former home. He wears a Mighty Ducks cap and jokes with a friend that he misses the “greenery” of California--referring to dollars.

“There’s nothing here anymore,” he says. “No work. No people. No money.”

*

Though they lament the loss of so many friends and neighbors, those left behind understand why the exodus happened: poverty and despair at home, and an almost insatiable demand for workers in Santa Ana.

In this town where most adults have no more than a fourth-grade education, nearly everyone can explain the forces that have led up to Granjenal’s abandonment as well as researchers who have spent years studying the phenomenon.

They talk about the poor farmland doled out during Mexico’s agrarian reform in the 1930s, about their increasing dependency on expensive fertilizers, about the crash of international pork prices 10 years ago that eliminated a small but reliable source of income for many families.

They shake their heads over Mexico’s abrupt move to a free-market economy in the early ‘90s, when price supports for seeds and fertilizers were eliminated, along with government-backed loans and credits. Farmers at heart, the people of Granjenal feel abandoned by their own country.

The worst blow came under NAFTA, they say, when Mexico allowed the import of cheap U.S.-grown corn and prices plummeted.

Now, even in a year of generous rains, the proceeds from one family’s corn harvest might not cover the costs of production. There are few options: Workers either go north or migrate to Mexico’s overcrowded cities.

The people of Granjenal also speak with authority about fickle U.S. immigration laws and cycles of prosperity in the north.

Some recall parents who crossed the border during Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, only to be deported with trainloads of other immigrants during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

A new wave of immigration began at the start of World War II, when U.S. contractors came looking for seasonal laborers. Dozens of old men in town remember answering urgent radio ads for seasonal work under the bracero program, signing contracts in Mexico City and boarding northbound trains with thousands of other Mexicans.

“I was one of the first,” says Salvador Lopez, 81. His face is gaunt, his joints ache, and Lopez says his lungs have never recovered from years of mixing chemical fertilizers in a California plant.

“They made fools of us,” says Lopez, who lives on money his children send from Santa Ana. “All those years, we paid taxes and we never collected a pension.”

For 22 years, the bracero program took Lopez and dozens of other Granjenal men away for eight or nine months at a time, and set up an enduring pattern of lengthy separations and reunions at Christmas.

Long after the program ended in 1964, workers continued to lead double lives, maintaining families in Mexico while living and working--most illegally--for much of the year in California.

When amnesty made possible the legal emigration of entire families, few hesitated.

Census figures are unreliable, but researchers and former residents say nearly 3,000 people lived in Granjenal at its peak in the 1970s. Now there are fewer than 500. In their wake, Granjenal has become a town of the old and stranded, where retirees pass long, lonely afternoons in the shade, teenage girls plot ways to meet boys from other towns, and a few young men simmer after having been frustrated at the border.

“It’s too hard to cross now,” says Rafael Lopez, 27, who made his last border crossing attempt three years ago. He says 10 brothers and sisters live legally in Santa Ana. One recently became a U.S. citizen and is making arrangements for his parents to emigrate. Lopez says he hopes to be next in line. “That’s the only way now,” he says. “You have to know somebody who is a citizen.”

Those who try crossing illegally have found a border blocked by a phalanx of U.S. Border Patrol agents. The cost of a smuggler has soared, from $200 five years ago to $1,000 these days. And if caught twice, there is a heavy price to be paid: Two of the town’s young men are serving time in federal prison for trying to reenter after deportation.

In any case, Lopez says, without papers, there is no good work to be had.

Even as Santa Ana becomes more difficult to reach, its unwanted influences have gained a foothold in Granjenal.

Graffiti from the Lopers, a Santa Ana gang, is etched into the wall of an abandoned house. At a nearby reservoir, two teens with shaved heads and gang tattoos are leading a platoon of admiring youngsters.

“Just hangin’ with my homies,” says a 14-year-old boy whose two stepbrothers have been killed in gang shootings in Santa Ana and who was sent here by his family, in part, to escape the same fate.

His grinning face is just one more piece of evidence that, for better and for worse, Santa Ana and Granjenal have become irrevocably linked.

That joined history even permeates a nightly religious ritual started by Father Castro 10 years ago.

Neighbors gather for an hour of chanting and prayer before a flower-adorned altar of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the town’s patroness. The altar is moved every two days from house to house, until everyone remaining in Granjenal has hosted the event at least once. Then the cycle repeats.

On this night, as votive candles flicker, those seated in the darkened kitchen recite the rosary in a hypnotic murmur. They close with a song written by Father Castro to all those who have gone: “Morenita, mi morena, tu no te olvides de mi. En Granjenal o en Santa Ana, tu te has de acordar de mi.” (Dark Virgin, my dark one, you must not forget me. In Granjenal or in Santa Ana, you must remember me.)

Monday: Life in Santa Ana.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Passage to America

Residents of the Mexican village of Granjenal began settling in Orange County about 35 years ago. The movement of approximately 3,000 people to Santa Ana left behind a virtual ghost town in Mexico:

Latino Influence

The arrival of Granjenal immigrants coincided with a dramatic demographic shift locally and statewide, from predominantly white and U.S.-born to increasingly Latino and foreign-born:

Foreign-Born Residents

Santa Ana

1970: 9.0%

1980: 25.6

1990: 50.9

1995: 52.0

Orange County

1970: 6.0%

1980: 13.5

1990: 23.9

1995: 33.8

California

1970: 8.8%

1980: 13.0

1990: 16.2

1995: 24.4

Residents of Latino Origin

Santa Ana

1970: 19.0%

1980: 44.5

1990: 65.2

1995: 69.0

Orange County

1970: 8.0%

1980: 15.0

1990: 23.4

1995: 27.0

California

1970: 8.0%

1980: 19.2

1990: 25.8

1995: 27.0

Immigration Programs

During the past five decades, the U.S. government has created programs allowing immigrants to work in the U.S. or to become legal residents. Two programs that may have strongly affected the village of Granjenal:

* Braceros: From 1942 to 1964, the Bracero program brought up to 445,000 seasonal farm workers north per year under contracts sanctioned by the U.S. government.

* 1986 Amnesty: Granted legal residence to 3 million illegal immigrants nationwide as part of an immigration reform package. Many later brought family members north. Illegal immigrants granted amnesty:

Orange County: 143,000

California: 1.3 million

U.S.: 3 million

Sources: Immigration and Naturalization Service, County of Orange, City of Santa Ana, California Department of Finance, Office of Demographics, U.S. Department of Census; Researched by NANCY CLEELAND and APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times