BY RICHARD BRAND AND DANIEL A. GRECH
 dgrech@herald.com

 For 13 years, Claudio and Lupe Juárez packed their seven children in a pickup and toured America's migrant labor camps -- picking tomatoes in North Carolina, apples in
 Michigan, oranges in Florida.

 Today, the Mexican-American couple run a flea market taco stand and own a modest four-bedroom home in Florida City. Their youngest son, Alejandro, became the
 family's sixth college graduate in May. And their daughter, Leticia, rubs shoulders with the town elite as the wife of Homestead Councilman Eddie Berrones.

 The Juárez family is an example of a new middle class of Mexican American migrants who have slowly emerged in South Miami-Dade to rebuild the homes and
 businesses destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

 Professor Thomas Boswell, an expert on Hispanic immigration at the University of Miami, said South Miami-Dade's migrant farmworkers are sending their kids to college,
 buying homes and starting businesses.

 ``Their success is the best of the American dream,'' said Boswell, adding that Mexican-American migrants first came en masse to Homestead in the 1950s for the picking
 season. ``Those people in migrant agriculture are the ones with the greatest difficulty, with the greatest handicap. They are the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged
 in this country.''

 The 2000 Census figures show that South Miami-Dade's Hispanic populations are booming -- in Homestead they are now a majority -- while the white non-Hispanic
 population is decreasing.

 Hispanic homeownership in Homestead rose 141 percent from 1990, and today a Hispanic family in Homestead is 43 percent more likely to own their home than a decade
 ago, the figures show.

 ``It made me very proud to be the owner of a house,'' Lupe Juárez, 57, said in Spanish over the English chatter of her grandchildren. ``This was something I always thought
 about.''

 Before Andrew, the Juárezes lived in a trailer in the Everglades labor camp. Using money Claudio Juárez, 62, saved carting road gravel, the family took out a
 government-subsidized mortgage in 1993.

 The Juárezes and 230 other families in their development each committed 350 hours to building their homes, learning to lay ceramic tile and roof shingle, to install
 windows and doors, to grade and to landscape.

 Migrant trailer parks decimated by Andrew have been replaced by modest single-family homes that root migrants in the community. At the Everglades labor camp,
 hundreds of new homes and a day-care center have been built using government funds. In the works: two day-care centers, a credit union, a convenience store and a post
 office -- and more homes.

 In downtown Homestead, Mexican Americans, the city's largest Hispanic group, have all but taken over Washington Avenue, owning 28 of 33 shops in a tight, one-story
 pedestrian mall where a travel agency offering fares to Guadalajara is next to a record store playing the Mexican rock band Maná.

 Homestead's Chamber of Commerce doesn't keep statistics on Hispanic-owned businesses, but Luis Dilan of the Vision Council, a Homestead development organization,
 estimates 30 percent of local businesses are owned by Hispanics.

 Increasingly, migrant families initially attracted to South Dade by its nine-month growing season are now earning a measure of wealth -- and political clout.

 Take the Berroneses, one of the brightest examples of Mexican Americans' growing prominence in Homestead.

 Forty years ago the family left Texas for Homestead's tomato farms. In 1997, the youngest of 12 children, Eddie Berrones, now 39, was elected the city's first Hispanic
 councilman after gaining some recognition as the head of a minority child development center.

 Eddie's brother, David, owns a welding firm that services farm equipment. Sister Olga owns a beauty salon. Brother Julio is a developer. Other family members own a total
 of three restaurants, a banquet hall and a bridal boutique.

 ``We were migrant farmworkers; now we are becoming the mainstream,'' said Berrones, who is married to Claudio and Lupe Juárez's 33-year-old daughter, Leticia.

 Other migrant families have similar success stories. The Gallegos family, for example, bring Mexican entertainment to the town via a family-owned record store, nightclub
 and radio station. The Hernandez family used a tortilla machine bought in Mexico in 1972 to launch El Toro Taco, one of the city's most popular Mexican restaurants. The
 De Leon family, whose son served as a Florida City councilman, scraped together savings from farm work to start their own tree nursery.

 The one common theme to all these success stories: farm-working parents who endured back-breaking labor by day to push their children to finish their homework at
 night.

 Berrones credits his parents for motivating him to get ahead.

 ``My parents never made us feel poor,'' he said. ``They taught us how to work, how to mingle with the rich, with the who's who in this town. My mom said, `I want my kids
 to go to school.' ''

 Local schools offer special programs for migrants. The Miami-Dade school system's migrant education program has had some success, graduating 134 students last
 spring, up from 29 in 1985.

 But educators say there's still much to be done for migrant children who often feel suffocated by a strange culture, a foreign language and a desire to help their parents.

 ``My students feel there is no exit,'' said Catalina Tapia, 28, the only Mexican-American teacher at Laura C. Saunders Elementary School in Homestead and whose
 migrant parents formed a mariachi group to pull the family from poverty. ``Their parents don't speak English and have no education. They struggle just to fit into an
 American culture.''

 Experts warn the estimated 7,000 migrant farmworkers who toil in South Florida for a poverty-level wage of $7,500 a year still face significant barriers.

 Most of the community's gains have come in niche businesses, and South Miami-Dade's economy is still dominated by its non-migrant residents.

 For many migrant farmworkers, the road to middle class appears much longer than the road between migrant camps.

 Micaela Coronado, 32, of Tamilupas, Mexico, and husband Alberto Perez of Guatemala have rented the same one bedroom in the South Dade Center migrant camp for a
 decade.

 Their home survived Andrew, though its eaves are still water-damaged.

 The couple want to own a home. But their rent has gone from $132 a month to $200 while Perez's salary from planting palms has stayed the same. They are thinking of
 moving to Oklahoma.

 When told of migrant success stories like the Juárezes, Coronado looks at her hands and says she is thinking of the Saturdays and Sundays spent pulling tiny black
 spikes from her hands after a week in the cactus fields.

 ``Ay, no,'' she said, stopping the pain from returning. ``I don't want to remember anything.''

 Herald database editor Tim Henderson contributed to this report.
 
 
 
 

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