Sebastian Medina-Tayac Photos
First in a series.
San Francisco Tetlanohcan, Mexico — New Haven’s sister city south of the border shares about 10 to 15 percent of its population with us, and little else.
“You always say hello to people here in Tetlanohcan, whether they’re family or not,” said Bernardo Mendieta (pictured above) as he walked down a sun-bleached street crowded by cornstalks and stray dogs in the central Mexican highlands.
But most of the people he greeted were indeed family.
“Que onda, carnal?” (“What’s new, man?”)
He extended a rough mitt into his cousin’s pickup, lagging behind his clan — two daughters, two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a new grandson — on the chilly walk to their aunt’s birthday party (Rosie, left; Jacquelin, center; Aldo, right).
But that was only half the clan. Three other sons and one daughter left Tetlanohcan over a decade ago and have yet to return.
Mendieta hasn’t seen his eldest son since he moved to New Haven 16 years ago, at age 16.
After the birthday party, mole, mescal, and colorful language flowed at a cousin’s wedding party, cumbia shaking from a sound system and a light show to rival any New Haven nightclub. The party was populated entirely by Mendieta’s wife’s family.
Family is everything in Tetlanohcan, but everyone seems to be missing a lot of it.
A quarter of Tetlanoquences live and work over 2,000 miles away, concentrated in New Haven, according to Marco Castillo, director of the Popular Assembly of Migrant Families (APOFAM) and former resident of both New Haven and Tetlanohcan.
Our city evokes complicated feelings in those they left behind: Their families have much they lacked before. But they had to trade their parents, siblings, and children. Many migrants don’t, or can’t, come back.
The Consumers
Mendieta’s son, Aldo, 18, zealously scrubbed a pair of black Pumas in the stone basin (below) outside his humble concrete house where the family of eight lives. His brother, whom he’s barely met, sent them to him from New Haven.
“They sell them here but the quality doesn’t really compare,” he said. After the sneakers dried in the sun, he displayed the gleaming white Puma logos over the cuffs of his baggy jeans. “What do you think?”
His sister-in-law drew water from the well to fill a metal sink where she will start the long process of washing their clothes. There is no running water in the house.
Aside from the direct needs of sending communities, migration is a product of changing material expectations that a globalizing economy forces on people, Castillo said.
The Mendieta family is not unusual in having smartphones, Wi-Fi, and a TV that is almost always on — while lacking running water.
But the technology is not superfluous. When Jacquelin Mendieta’s brother picked her up from the airport during a New Haven visit, she embraced him “not as a stranger, but a brother,” despite not having seen him since she was 3 years old, thanks to their constant communication on Facetime, Skype and Facebook.
The direct Tlaxcalan sun shone off the glossy leaves of the blue corn stalks rubbing against the living room window, casting a glare into the living room where Spanish-dubbed Happy Gilmore played on the television hooked up to Netflix.
“Close the blinds,” Mendieta ordered in his leathery baritone, between bites of a tamale prepared from the family’s corn plot. Most families in Tetlanohcan subsist off of their own crops, principally corn, which overflows onto the streets from every family plot.
“The corn tickles you when you run through it,” Jacquelin said. “But only during the day. At night it makes me nervous because robbers hide between the stalks along the road.”
The Producers
Tetlanohcan is watched over by the mountain La Malintzin and their adored parochial church of San Francisco de Aziz. Tlaxcaltecan gods hide in the ancient myths, folk medicine, and sweat lodges (temazcales) in most residents’ backyards. Older Tetlanohquences greet everyone in Nahuatl, which they call “Mexican” — even the guero with only two hopelessly colonized tongues.
“Panoltzino, guero.” (“Good evening, white boy.”)
Every Monday, the central plaza blossoms into a farmer’s market, where locals sell and trade every fruit or vegetable imaginable, except one: corn. Calling it a staple doesn’t quite capture the centrality of corn to the Tetlanohcan diet — not one meal is served without a hot stack of fragrant tortillas, crispy and smoky black spots seasoning a chewy and filling body. (In above photo, Patricia Rodriguez Mendoza grinds the corn, in below photo, she presses the dough, and cooks the tortillas over a wood-fired comal.)
Corn is not a vegetable in Tetlanohcan. It’s currency. Residents gather early Thursday mornings to trade sacks of the life-giving grain for vegetables, livestock, and other products.
Having family members in the United States allows the Mendieta family to hold on to its agricultural way of life, which is devalued by an economy increasingly relying on wage labor. The Mexican farmer is compensated only about ten dollars a day by the government.
“You invest a lot and gain little in the campesino life,” Mendieta said. “The remittances my children send help us maintain the farm.”
Mendieta’s parents were able to devote all their time to the farm, but in order to provide an education and a healthy diet to his family of eight, he needed some cash.
The remittances allowed him to invest in a small side business that helps them “keep up.” The Mendieta family, like many Tetlanohcan families on both sides of the border, operates a small flooring and interior decorating business. A sign on the front of their house advertises their services (above).
Oscar De La Rosa, a New Haven resident of 25 years who is from San Pedro Muñoztla, a town adjacent to Tetlanohcan, said flooring and carpet installation has been the region’s trade for as long as anyone can remember.
His business in New Haven, like the Mendietas’ in Tetlanohcan, took a serious hit during the recession in 2008. Both are struggling to recover.
The Cost
For many families in Tetlanohcan, the remittances migrants send that help them improve their homes, education, and nutrition come at a high cost.
Since most migrants from Tetlanohcan come to New Haven without papers, they are unable to visit home, as migrants do not want to relive the perilous and expensive horror of crossing the border. Two migrants from Tetlanohcan have died trying to cross the Sonora desert in recent memory, according to Mendieta’s son Daniel, who is looking for options to work a short time legally in New Haven.
Parents aspiring to provide more opportunities for their children sometimes do them more harm than good by leaving them in the care of grandparents and other relatives for long periods of time, said Lucia Rosette, whose daughter and grandchildren live in New Haven.
Along with an influx of cash from remittances, family separation has given rise to problems with drugs and delinquency among the millennial generation, she said.
“At a young age, these kids look for someone to care for them, and the most easy way is in the street,” Rosette said. “Drug addiction, alcoholism, violence — that hurts us a lot. The Mexican government is responsible because it’s not opening enough bridges to jobs.”
The town’s concrete walls announce Tetlanohcan’s rival gangs. In the Mendietas’ corner of town, La Mafia is the most prolific vandal.
Migrants are well aware of the consequences of leaving their families behind, and spend a long time calculating the costs and benefits of leaving. For Guadalupe Juarez, who is 37, the choice was clear and the cost great.
In order to pay for their son’s hospital bills, Juarez’s husband crossed the border six times over the course of a decade to work at Fairway in Manhattan. If he hadn’t gone, she said, her son would probably not be alive today, the family said.
Though he always returned to Tetlanohcan within the year, on his last trip he got into an auto accident and ended up in a detention center, deep in debt.
It took him five more years working in the U.S. to pay the debts, hospital bills and house bills. Juarez had never been apart from her husband for that long, and was left behind to support herself and four children with their small store.
A few months ago, he finally returned, though their marriage and his relationship with his children has yet to recover.
“The family disintegrates,” she said. “He tried to be present in our lives over the phone, but my youngest son doesn’t even recognize him as his father and the others don’t trust him because he was gone for so long.”
But like many other returned migrants, Juarez’s husband has had trouble finding work. Benjamin Cuapio, who lived in New Haven for 14 years, said many migrants learn trades in the U.S. such as food service that cannot be applied in the Tetlanohcan campo, and have no choice but to return.
Working in New Haven is its own struggle. However exciting the high exchange rate of dollars to pesos, he recited a popular expression: ”You gain in dollars, but you spend in dollars too.”
The lack of a bank account, the cost of lawyer’s fees for immigration cases, and all-too-common exploitation, coupled with high rent and cost of living in New Haven, leaves little to send home. Still, that little goes a long way in Mexico and he was able to pay for his children’s education.
When he was working construction downtown in 1997, Cuapio’s employer assigned him and several other immigrant workers, including several from Tetlanohcan, to tear asbestos out of the walls, without notifying them what the substance was or giving them any protection.
The eventual criminal case against his employer galvanized his push to unionize immigrant construction workers to improve pay and conditions.
His work with the union and other city organizations such as Santa Rosa de Lima Church and Unidad Latina en Accion helped consolidate the burgeoning Tetlanohcan community in New Haven, which still meets regularly and hosts an annual carnival for their parochial San Francisco.
A Connection
Their agricultural lifestyle, traditional culture, and indigenous language are devalued by a consumerist worldview, but offer a connection to their migrant relatives, Jacquelin said.
Women had been organizing for years to enable Mendieta’s tearful reunion with her brother and her month-long stay in New Haven.
Their solution to family separation was to relearn their parents’ embroidery, herbal medicine, and folk dance to take as cultural ambassadors to cultural and educational institutions in the U.S., which allowed them to get visas to visit.
With the help of Castillo and other organizers from across the country, women in Tetlanohcan coalesced into a group called the Migrant Indigenous Family Support Center (CAFAMI) and managed to take groups of women to New Haven in 2008, 2010, and 2012. Their building (above) is in the outskirts of Tetlanohcan on a plot of land Cuapio donated.
Their pretext was to share their culture and perform an original play about the migrant family’s experience in Tetlanohcan. Their goal was to see their children, husbands, and siblings.
Jacquelin was the youngest woman on the third trip, at age 15. She spent a month with her family in New Haven, working with her sister under the table as a waitress for a week. Her sister gave her all the tips so she could go shopping and bring things home with her.
“Spending time with my brothers and sister actually made me miss them more,” she said. “I always thought they would be the ones to visit, not me. That’s why I’m going to work so hard when I start college [in two weeks], to find another path, a legal path, to see my brothers and sister.”
The Mendietas in New Haven and New York are currently with their mother, who obtained a ten-year visa from an earlier CAFAMI trip. This is the second time she’s seen her children in over a decade.
Her husband’s repeated attempts to get a visa to visit his children have been denied because he, like many Tetlanohcan residents, worked in the US with false documents and has been recorded in an ICE database. Until he can find a way, he has to enjoy it vicariously through his wife.
“I keep telling her to enjoy every moment and I call all the time,” Jacquelin said. “In New Haven, the days feel like decades but the weeks fly by.”