The Towns They Left Behind

By By Peter Katel/Tanque De Guadalupe With Reporting By Marion Lloyd/Veracruz

Watching the economy of Veracruz collapse in 1999, the family of Maria Isabel Prado saw at least one surefire business opportunity. They leased, one after another, a series of aging, second-class buses--reclining seats, no rest rooms--to run people 1,400 miles north to Ciudad Juarez once a week. Since then, seven other bus companies have started up in Veracruz, doing the same thing. Says Prado, 32: "There's no shortage of people who want to leave."

Village by village, Mexico is hollowing out. Fidel Guevara, 39, left his farming hamlet of Manlio Fabio Altamirano, 25 miles west of Veracruz city, five years ago and worked on a farm in New Era, Ore. He moved back last year only because he missed his wife and daughters. His son Hector, 18, is still in Oregon, making $7 an hour at a plant nursery. Guevara's return hasn't been perfect. He says he is lucky to make $6 a week in his butcher shop. His wife Matilde Diaz, 40, chokes back tears over her son's absence and says, "Mexico no longer gives us anything."

Only a few years ago, thousands of Veracruzanos worked as cane cutters, coffee pickers and laborers in a state-owned petrochemical complex. When those industries faltered, however, the exodus began.

Things are worse in hardscrabble Zacatecas state, whose population has grown a mere 6% in the 10 years in which that of Mexico has grown 20%. The village of Tanque de Guadalupe is typical. Virtually every male age 17 and older is gone, and the town's population--now 120--has been cut in half. "There is no sign that it is going to slow down," says veteran demographer Rodolfo Corona of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, the country's main border-issues research center. Zacatecans in the U.S. are so widespread--and so successful--that many band together to form clubs to pool their earnings and send cash back home to build roads, clinics and schools. Some of these clubs even have websites.

On a visit home to the village of El Cargadero, Enrique Saldivar Miranda, 49, who has a concrete-finishing business in Anaheim, Calif., marveled at the town's streets, newly paved thanks to a $100,000 investment by the migrants' club to which he belongs, matched 3 to 1 by the federal and state government. Eventually the club would like to create jobs to give people an alternative to leaving. But it is running out of time. Half the village's 300 homes are already empty.

--By Peter Katel/ Tanque de Guadalupe. With reporting by Marion Lloyd/Veracruz