Mexicans Working in U.S. Shower Gifts on Families on Annual Pilgrimage Home

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

TOLIMAN, Mexico -- Once a year, the mothers cry with happiness here as their sons and daughters tell tales of peeling shrimp in California, building split-levels in
Virginia and babysitting spoiled children in New York.

Christmas in Mexico is not just a religious holiday but a celebration of relatives returning from work in the United States, carrying cash, televisions and new ideas to
thousands of small towns like this one in the hot, rocky foothills of the Sierra Gorda mountains.

Mexico's airports and bus stations are teeming with returnees -- Christmas pilgrims outfitted in Levis and bearing gifts of Sony Walkmans. Every day, air-conditioned
buses drive to the outskirts of towns, unloading sons and daughters, fathers and cousins.

No one is exactly sure how many Mexicans come back. But the National Immigration Institute, which registers people entering at land and air entry points, said the
numbers increase dramatically at the end of the year, with nearly 400,000 counted last December. Then in January, the flow starts north again.

The Christmas buses stop at the entrance to this town, where a welcome sign boasts that Toliman has 21,000 residents. But it really doesn't. Maybe 1,500 people
have a salaried job, the mayor's office reckons. Thousands leave for most of the year, many to the United States. As Christmas approaches, the population swells.
The mayor, Alejandro Martinez Guerrero, estimates that 2,500 residents working in the United States will return before Dec. 25.

"This is a small place," he said. "We know every face. . . . You can see 'Juan' and 'Miguel' and 'Jose' are back."

So many people have returned, there are no longer enough pews inside St. Peter's, so an altar is set up outside for an open-air Mass. Pop your head into just about
any kitchen, and young men wearing Baltimore Orioles baseball caps and new U.S.-bought Nikes are urging their mothers to make more homemade tortillas.

"Oh, the food -- that is what I miss. Even Corona beer tastes better here," said Octavio Chavez, a gardener in North Carolina who just arrived. "Why do we come?
It's tradition."

Like the overwhelming majority of these Christmas arrivals, Chavez will return to the United States in a few weeks. Many of the those coming home are living legally
in the United States, but others, like Chavez, are not. That means they will have to pay a smuggler $1,500 to $2,000 to slide them back across the border. Because
the border has been fortified with more guards since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many smugglers have raised their prices.

Most of those interviewed in this town who came home for Christmas are illegally working in the United States and plan to return to their jobs in January. They said
they spend 10 percent or more of their yearly salaries on the trip.

Even though layoffs are growing in the United States, Chavez and others here said that job prospects in Mexico are dim. New government statistics show that
unemployment in Mexico is rising. This is particularly true among the most educated, forcing even those with college degrees, like Miguel Angel Aguilar, to sneak
across the border. Aguilar studied at a teachers' college for four years, but he has been peeling shrimp in Oakland, Calif., eight hours a day.

"It's degrading," he said, to work as an illegal. But making neat piles of shrimp pays two to three times more than the best teaching job here. "In the United States, a
TV costs $250 and you can buy it with three weeks' work. Here it costs $500 and you have to work all year to afford it."

Daniel Morales Santiago, who arrived days earlier from Los Angeles, is already plotting his trek back across the border. The skinny 16-year-old has been working in
a Korean-owned factory sewing clothes since he was 14. "Depending on my speed I can make $400 a week," he said, showing off the $500 stereo he lugged 1,600
miles to his family.

Electronics, often twice as expensive in Mexico as in the United States, are favorite Christmas presents. Tucked in a corner of Daniel's bedroom was another stereo,
an Oster blender and an Aiwa personal stereo.

"My son sewed 3,000 skirts one day!" said Daniel's mother, Maria Concepcion Santiago Morales, who spent hours sitting on the plastic chair in their cement-floor
kitchen talking with her son. As they talked, more cousins who had just arrived from North Carolina filed into her kitchen famous for pots of pozole, a spicy stew.
Among all the happy commotion, Santiago cried, laughed and cried again, depending on whether she was thinking about her Daniel being back, or that he would
leave again.

For towns like Toliman, remittances from workers in the United States account for the majority of money people spend. There is no infusion of money quite like the
one every December. Poor towns are electrified by the presents and money. Suddenly the little lunch places on Independence Plaza are packed, the food orders
bigger, the hours extended. The new money means paint on the parents' home, electricity, a new roof, a shopping trip to a big city.

The major obstacle for the Christmas pilgrims is avoiding getting robbed by a Mexican police officer. This is such a problem that President Vicente Fox has
inaugurated a "super vigilance" program with special officers dispatched to greet and guard the Christmas returnees as they file home. Fox is scheduled to fly to the
border today to greet returning Mexicans and has put up "welcoming" kiosks in border areas and along busy highways. People hit up for a bribe or threatened by
police unless they hand over a new toaster or other U.S.-bought presents are to register their complaints there.

Cartoons in newspapers these days depict Mexicans carrying bundles of cash from the United States, running from the Mexican highway police to their home towns.

                                               © 2001