Far North of the Border: Diana's Journey
by Diana Vazquez as told to Dorothy Dow Crane

My parents don't like to tell the story of how they crossed the border. My mother's voice trembles when she tells me how the coyote, the person they paid to bring us safely across to the United States, did the crossing. At the border, the coyote took my brother out of my mother's arms, took me by the hand, and left my parents behind as he crossed over with us. My parents didn't see us for three days. My brother was just a baby—my mother was still breastfeeding him. She had to hand us over to a stranger, to someone she had never seen before, in order to get a future for us. My brother and I were too young to remember any of it, but the worry still comes into my mother's face when I ask about the crossing.

Late last May, a week or so after my parents had watched me in my cap and gown receive my college diploma, I asked them what they thought our life would be like now if they had never left Mexico and come to New York. My father just looked at me and laughed, "What kind of question is that?"

He began to talk about how much he worked. When he was young he always had to work—he was the oldest and he was male, so a lot was expected of him. My father used to get up at 5:00 every morning to help his father work on his land before school. Then, after school, there was more work, either in the fields or helping his father deliver cattle to Matamoras. "Your younger brothers would be working in the fields. You would be married. If any of you wanted to continue school we—your mother and I—would have found a way somehow to send you and your brothers and sisters to college, even in Mexico."

My parents grew up in La Noria Hidalgo, a small village of less than 1,000 people in the Mexican state of Puebla. I've been back to visit my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins a couple of times in the last 20 years. It is a very poor place. My grandfather has land, but only enough to grow what his family needs for food—corn, beans, and peppers. He keeps a few pigs, some cattle, but not much has changed since my father worked the fields with his father. Even today the fields are still worked by hand. No one can afford farm machinery. A horse pulls the plow. My grandparents continue to live in the old fashioned way. At their house they do not have indoor plumbing. There is an outhouse. To take a shower, you must first heat some water.

In Newburgh, where Diana and her family now live, most of the Mexican families are from Puebla. Here, in Dutchess County where she attended college, many are from Oaxaca—not the Oaxaca of the carefully developed beaches of Huatulco, where tourists sit on soft sand and drink mescal beneath breathtaking cliffs, or Oaxaca City, where the massive stone cathedral on the zocalo has anchored the city through hundreds of years of complicated history and earthquakes. The Mexicans here in Dutchess County are mostly from small, poor villages like her grandfather's, hours away from the beaches and cities where tourists bring their money.

The two or three small stores in my grandfather's village are located in people's homes—they are not even as big as the Mexican grocery in Red Hook. A family has opened a food stand on the village plaza. A few women make money selling chips and juice to the school children at recess. Anyone who has a car becomes a taxi driver. When my father was in his late teens and wasn't busy working the farm with his father, he made a little extra money by giving people rides to the next town in the old car. There's nothing else. Only the stores, the primary school, the church, and the land.

I asked my mother what life would be like if we'd stayed in Mexico, but unlike my father, she did not laugh. She appeared unsettled, and thought for a long time before she answered. "We're better off living here. To live there is a struggle. It's a struggle here too, but there are more opportunities here. Here, you know that you'll get paid, that you can do your grocery shopping and your laundry. She looked at my younger brothers and sisters. "In Mexico, school is far away."

In the rural areas of Oaxaca most adults are able to complete only six years of school. More schooling requires money for children to travel to a city and money for fees and supplies. And there is an additional burden on the family—the child attending school is not available to help work the land or to watch the younger children so that the parents can work.

My mother was able to get three more years of education, but she had to go live with her aunt in a small nearby city. Somehow, my grandparents scraped together enough to pay for her tuition, her supplies, and to give some money to her aunt for upkeep. My mother helped her aunt with everything. She became like her daughter. Sometimes her aunt took in laundry to make some extra money. My mother would help her with the washing and the folding. My mother remembers that it was hard to be so far from home. The bus ride back to see her parents was expensive. She was only 14 and did not want to travel alone and sit in a bus for a long time.

As much as my father tries to reassure me that I and my brothers and sisters would have gotten a college education in Mexico, I'm not sure I can believe him.

Puebla and Oaxaca are among Mexico's poorest states. In many places, the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which displaced many small farmers in Mexico, has exacerbated rural poverty. According to the Mexican government, 80% of the families in villages like Diana's make less than a living wage. Ironically, the $6.00 chocolate bar labeled "Oaxaca," seasoned with chiles, on display in a local specialty shop here in Rhinebeck, costs more than the average daily wage of the rural Oaxaqueno worker back in Mexico. It's not that people won't work. There are no jobs. The rural Oaxaqueno or Poblano who wants to provide for his or her family must leave his family in order to support it. Many migrate to larger cities in Mexico. And despite the intense loneliness and danger, some come north to the United States, to California, to Texas, to Georgia, to Minnesota, and even to the Hudson Valley.

My father began to talk about how he would like to go back some day. He was thinking about how, if he lived in Mexico, he would have a home to call his own. My parents have lived here for 20 years. Only now that my siblings and I have begun to work is there enough money to think about the possibility of buying a home. My father was remembering what it was like to live in a village so small that there were no police—a community where, he said, people just looked out for each other, where the children could play on the village plaza late into the evening without worry.

According to Margaret Gray, a researcher who has studied farmworkers in the Hudson Valley, over three quarters of the workers she interviewed planned to return home and permanently reside in their home country. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent focus on increasing border security, unauthorized border crossing has become increasingly more dangerous and more expensive, forcing workers to choose between staying longterm in the US or returning permanently to the desperate poverty of rural Mexico.

My mother was clearly upset at this talk. She remembered what it was like when my brother and I were young, before we came north, and how she used to worry whenever we were sick because the local clinic was closed more often than it was open and she had to rely on the home remedies my grandmother fixed. The nearest medical specialist was five hours away by bus or car. I think my mom's afraid for me to know how hard it was. She wishes I wouldn't ask so many questions. I suppose that she, too, might want to go back to La Noria Hidalgo someday to live, but not until my brothers and sisters have safely reached adulthood.

Mexican census figures show that only 23% of Oaxaquenos have direct access to medical services. Oaxaca has the highest maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate in Mexico. It also has one of the highest rates of malnutrition. Beans and tortillas, the staples of the rural Mexican diet, do not provide adequate high quality protein for growing children.

My father first came north to the United States in the late 1970s, before he and my mother married. He came to Newburgh because he had friends there and knew that work was available. After a few years he went back to Mexico and married my mother. They lived with my grandparents. When I was almost two and my brother was just six months old my father brought us to Newburgh.

People wonder why Diana's parents and the other Mexicans in our area didn't come legally. The answer is complicated. For the average foreign worker, there are basically two lawful ways to enter the US. For an employment-based visa, you must be sponsored by an employer who can prove that there are no native workers qualified for the job. Most of the employment-based visa categories are for skilled labor. The US has only 5,000 permanent residence visas available for unskilled workers each year and is required to distribute them equally among all countries.

The second legal doorway into the United States for the Mexican worker is family-based immigration. If you are a lawful permanent resident of the US, you may petition for a visa for an immediate family member. For Mexican citizens, the current waiting time is 7–10 years for a spouse. Diana's father was the oldest child, the first in his family to come north, and although he knew there was work available in NY, he had no way to obtain a temporary visa for farm work or a family sponsored visa.

When my father first came to the Hudson Valley to pick corn, radishes, and lettuce, crossing the border was easier, and many workers returned home between seasons. But as the economy in Mexico worsened and border security became an issue after 9/11, it was safer to stay in the US. Migrant agricultural workers like my father began to move into non-agricultural jobs that offered more security than seasonal work. Undocumented workers do not take jobs from US citizens. Workers from Mexico traditionally do the jobs that are tough, low paying, and dangerous.They take on the work that no one else will do for that wage.

Since the beginning of the last century, an ever changing stream of Italians, unemployed mine workers from Pennsylvania, West Indians, conscientious objectors, patients from mental health institutions, Jamaicans, Chinese, Newfoundlanders, Southern migrants, and even more than ten thousand German and Italian prisoners of war have harvested New York state's crops. Mexicans are simply the latest wave in a labor stream that was initiated when slaves were brought to the New World. The relatively low cost of our food rests, in part, on the backs of some of the lowest paid, most vulnerable workers in America.

When we first came to the United States we shared an apartment with several other Mexicans from Puebla. It was crowded, but we all helped each other out. My parents never hired a babysitter for us. My mother cleaned houses, and she adjusted her schedule so that she or my father could be at home to watch us.

Now we are all legal residents. My father is a steel painter at an ironworks company. He painted every one of the gray steel beams for the St. Luke's Hospital parking garage in Newburgh. It's near our house. We drive by it all the time. He's very proud to contribute to our community.

While living at Bard as a student I realized how different Red Hook and Rhinebeck are from Newburgh, my hometown. As I walk through the streets of Red Hook I see only a small number of Latinos here compared to Newburgh. Perhaps they seem more visible here because people aren't used to them. I always say hello in Spanish and many times this begins a conversation. They make me feel welcome here, like I am a part of the community, not just a Bard student passing through. Many know Newburgh because they go there and to Poughkeepsie to spend time with other Latinos.

Although the immigrant issue has received much attention, only 10% of the population in the United States is foreign born and only about 20% of our population is either foreign born or first generation, the child of a parent who was foreign born. From 1890 through 1930, the percentage of our population who were foreign born or first generation was over 30%.

Now that my siblings and I are older, my father talks more often about going back to his hometown. He misses his parents. He had a close relationship with his father, and it was difficult to leave him behind. As the years go by and my grandparents grow older, my father worries about them more and more. He does not want to be so far away from them. My father has told me that he wants to go back to La Noria Hidalgo to retire and spend time with his parents. My mother always tells him that if he goes back he will not get used to the old way of living.

When I go out to dinner in Red Hook or Rhinebeck and see other Mexicans bussing tables or working in the kitchen, I try to imagine what their lives are like. I think to myself that they probably are working many long hours to support a family thousands of miles away, a family they may not have seen for years. I try to imagine what I would feel like if I had to be in their situation. What if I never got to see my dad while I was growing up? What if I never got to share with him all my accomplishments that were made possible by his hard work and support? What if, at my age, I hadn't had any of these opportunities? Would I have graduated from college or would I be working twelve-hour days assembling designer jeans in a maquiladora in Mexico? Would I be starting a professional job or would I, like my mother, have risked coming north illegally to clean houses? Would I have even learned English?

I met a crew of Mexican men working on one of Bard's construction sites and I said hello to them everyday that I passed by. One day, one of the workers said that I reminded him of his daughter. He talked about how he had not seen her for years, and that she was a few years younger than me. He told me how he was proud of me for going to college. (Not many Mexicans, especially the women, go to college.) He told me I should keep going and represent Latinos. These are the same words my father told me the day I graduated from college, a day that my parents and I will always be proud of. That day was worth every struggle my parents had to go through since the day, 20 years ago, they decided to come to this country. Mexican families come to the United States in search of this, the opportunity to offer their children a better education and a better life than the one back home in Mexico.