Standing on a dusty hilltop, Manuel Tejeda is a man with a foot in two countries, though he lives far south of the U.S. border.
For seven years he lived in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and he may go back there again to live someday. But he was born here in Huitzuco, and he now feels torn between lifestyles and cultures. In the 1980s, when rural Huitzuco offered Tejeda few prospects for employment, he traveled 2,000 miles to Chicago’s booming job market, yet the economic security he found there brought him little of the peace he associates with home.
In the U.S., “one feels closed in, like in jail,” Tejeda says of the traffic jams and apartment blocks he recalls in el norte. “If one doesn’t own a car, one can’t go anywhere. But here, one roams free. That’s why people despair so much up there.”
From 1986 to 1992, Tejeda lived in Rolling Meadows and nearby towns but then came home to Huitzuco, building a house and buying a dozen cattle with his savings. Now, like many others, he is not sure where he belongs — or where his life will end up.
Although the Chicago area attracts Mexican emigrants by offering jobs and a lack of strict immigration enforcement so far from the border, attachment to the homeland remains strong, says Dante Gomez of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. “The sense of nationhood, of family — all of that converges in causing the Mexican to always wish for return,” Gomez says.
Tejeda has three brothers who still live in the Rolling Meadows area. His mother is currently visiting sisters in Houston, though his father, a soft-voiced cowpoke, doesn’t like to fly and stayed home. Tejeda’s nephew, Marcos, 12, was born in Illinois but disliked being cooped up in an apartment in the winter. Marcos now lives with his grandfather, preferring to roam among Huitzuco’s burros and cobblestones. The house they occupy, with orange roof tiles and a shady courtyard on a narrow, sleepy street near Huitzuco’s town plaza, was built with money Manuel Tejeda brought home from Rolling Meadows.
Manuel’s brother Adrian still lives in Rolling Meadows, in an apartment with photos of the cowboy life in Huitzuco on the walls.
“I would like to be in Mexico,” Adrian says, “but if I have no way to work there, I can’t.” Expatriate workers send home to Mexico about $6 billion annually, spurring construction in rural Mexican towns despite Mexico’s deeply depressed economy.
In Huitzuco, Mauro Tejeda, the father of Manuel and Adrian, takes note of his hometown’s building boom. “It has happened because of the people who went to the United States and saved their money,” he says. “They have built many houses here, many houses.” He can tick off the names of local neighborhoods where immigrant dollars have brought new vitality. “In all of those, there are very pretty houses. Very good ones,” he says.
Some experts say that were it not for “immigrant remittances” from the United States, Mexico’s population- and corruption-burdened social structure might by now have descended into chaos.
When Manuel Tejeda lived in Rolling Meadows, he would pause at times in his restaurant work to daydream of home, as his mind filled with pastoral images: a wooden saddle creaking under him on cattle drives to the mountains as the rainy season began; the surge of adrenalin as he unfurled a rainbow-hued serape from his saddleback, waving the fabric in the face of a charging bull. In the southern Mexican mountains where Huitzuco’s 80,000 or so people live, bullfighting is a practical matter, conducted on horseback in the course of ordinary work.
A visit to Huitzuco makes clear a larger reality that sometimes even immigrants themselves are hard put to articulate. When they say that Chicago is “pressured” or “a treadmill” — a place of opportunities and gangs, success and crime, excitement and claustrophobia — they are describing not just the transition from Mexico to the United States but a much greater transformation of the 20th Century world: the global shift from an agricultural to an urban form of existence. Even within Mexico itself, the great movement of recent decades has been from countryside to city (though in the 1990s, a new boomlet has grown, of Mexican flight from city to suburbs).
Few of the Chicago area’s 1 million or more Hispanic residents have roots in Mexico City. The great majority of Mexican-born residents of the Chicago area come from farming areas, where life is slow and intimate — and offers few jobs.
Walking with Manuel Tejeda up and down steep hills to a cattle pen at the edge of Huitzuco, his father-in-law, Pedro Mateos, tries to explain that the rural-urban movement is not the stereotype often depicted. The stereotype says simply that with Mexico’s exploding population, there is not enough land left in the rocky, arid countryside to divide among multiplying heirs. Mateos doesn’t deny this but feels, like many, that the main driver is not scarcity of land but the mounting economic odds against small farmers — as with small farmers anywhere, including in the United States.
“There is land,” Mateos says as a tortolito dove coos softly among tiled roofs and huizache trees, “but no one wants to plant it. It’s too expensive.”
The high cost of fertilizer in Mexico — indispensable for even subsistence crops — is a frequent lament among Mexican nationals in Chicago when they speak of their homeland.
Seated on a water trough, Manuel Tejeda calls out the names of each surrounding brushy mountain, as familiar as relatives at a barbecue: “That hill is Cerro de la Laguna, then there is Cerro Gordo, and where you see that big rock there, that is Devil’s Cave. And way over there is Cerro del Picado.” Another is Bald Hill. Another is Deer Hill.
The back of his T-shirt displays a green cartoon parrot, saying, “Laser Karaoke.”
“I lived in Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg, Arlington (Heights),” Manuel Tejeda recites, beginning to sound like a gazeteer. “I lived in Mt. Prospect.”
He takes off his hat in the hot wind. “Up there in the mountains, it is cool,” he explains. In the trough behind, hand-wide green frogs with yellow spots sit solemnly. The rainy season is late this year. Children far below swim and shriek in the stock pond, tucked away in a ravine. Brilliant jets of orange and lavender streak the brown hills. Jacaranda and acacia trees are blooming, though leafless in their wait for rain.
In Rolling Meadows, Adrian Tejeda says that when he returns to Huitzuco it takes him a month to get used to wearing sandals and enduring the heat again. The flight from O’Hare International Airport to Mexico City is about four hours. From there, a new superhighway comes within half an hour of Huitzuco, though the toll road is a lonely road, patrolled by police pickups bristling with automatic rifles and by olive-drab troop trucks, as Mexico uneasily speeds toward its millennium.
“Here,” jokes Mateos gently on the hilltop, when talk turns to the nation’s ancient ills, “the police are worse wrongdoers than the wrongdoers.”
The rural lifestyle — with all its peace, injustice, harmony, violence, narrowness and stability — is dissolving even here, by slow stages. Just beyond the horizon is Chicago.
