A crowd of mostly young men and boys gathers at the church to play pickup volleyball in El Salto, Mexico, in March. El Salto is one of many poor villages that send scores of people to work in the United States, both legally and illegally. Nearly everyone in the town now has at least one relative in St. Louis. (Huy Richard Mach/P-D)

EL SALTO, Mexico - The burro next door is braying. The roosters, pumped with steroids for the next cockfight, compete this morning with their crowing. But it is the sound of the first announcement crackling from the loudspeakers atop the Carrillo grocery that truly alerts this town of 700 that a new day has dawned.

"Senora --," Elvia Carrillo sounds out the name of the first housewife of the day to receive a call from the United States. "It's your husband, and he's holding on the line."

From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., wives and parents and children in El Salto cock their heads at the speakers' crackle, hoping their names will be called. Those with loved ones on the line will race down the rocky dirt roads, past the canned goods at Carrillo's to another type of sustenance: the conversations between relatives during the months, and even years, spent apart.

El Salto is just one among many poor towns in Mexico that send scores of people to work in the United States, both legally and illegally. For decades, such towns have been a migration source for cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. Now they are forging chains of migration to less-traditional destinations, including St. Louis.

Here in El Salto, nearly everyone has at least one relative in St. Louis.

Carrillo says 40 percent of the calls from abroad made to her grocery's phone booths now come from the St. Louis area. When boys gather to play volleyball in front of the crumbling church each afternoon, it's not rare to see one wearing a T-shirt with a St. Louis company's logo emblazoned on the back.

The money that workers send from St. Louis is much in evidence.

Guadalupe, 63, is a retiree who lives a life of relative luxury here, thanks to the $600 he gets each month from his three sons in Fairmont City. His sons - two of whom are undocumented workers - have been working in Fairmont City, along the northern edge of East St. Louis, for more than a decade. They paid to install a telephone line in their father's home, a rare sight in a town that relies heavily on grocery phone lines for access to the outside world.

Guadalupe also has two vans and a pickup in a place where a car is an extravagance. His sons bought them in the St. Louis area, then drove them down to their father, who used one van to earn a living providing El Salto with a shuttle service to the closest big town, Villanueva. And with the sons' help, Guadalupe left that job three years ago for another rare luxury: retirement.

The home of Chuy Carrillo, 40, shows the benefits reaped from eight illegal border crossings to work in the United States. While the neighbors' bony cows ramble unencumbered through the streets of El Salto, he keeps his robust Charolais bull and sleek Swiss cows penned in his front yard.

"That Charolais bull, I bought it a year ago for a thousand U.S. dollars, and I paid a thousand dollars for that Swiss cow, too," said Carrillo, who packed produce in St. Louis 80 hours a week for a $500 salary to buy the prized cattle and to provide for his wife and four children.

Those dollars are running low since Carrillo brought his last paycheck home from St. Louis almost a year ago. He's made do by helping build additions to the homes of those who have gone abroad. But that work pays little, so Carrillo is preparing for another crossing through the Arizona desert to reach St. Louis. And he plans to take others from El Salto when he goes.

"I usually go with about three or four other people from here," Carrillo said. "I'll stay there a year or more and then come back. You have to feed your kids. Here, I earn 1,300 pesos a week." That's less than $130.














While the dollars earned abroad can provide for some luxury items, many families here say the money cabled from family in the United States rarely pays for more than the basics: food, housing and school fees.

Leticia Betancourt, 40, said her husband sends $100 a week from his earnings at a St. Louis ice factory - far more than he made sowing corn and beans in El Salto.

"He's been working in St. Louis for seven months, and he's gone to work two or three times before on a tourist visa," says Betancourt, after emerging from a phone booth at another grocery in town, to take a weekly call from her husband. "He does it for our basic necessities. For two years, we've wanted to build a bathroom in our house, but we still can't afford that. Because we have two of our children studying in Villanueva, we use the money for them."

Public schools are "free" here, but for poor families in rural towns, the costs associated with them can be prohibitive. For the bare-bones elementary school in El Salto, the costs are minimal. Parents pitch in about $10 a year to help pay for upkeep; they take turns cleaning and painting the classrooms when needed; and, each day at lunchtime, mothers walk to the school with buckets of tortillas and beans.

The price of attending better-equipped public schools in Villanueva is much higher. Registration fees are about $25 a year, but the costs soar from there. The parents, not the government, must find a way to get their children to town. It's less than five miles away, but it takes a bumpy 20-minute ride on deeply rutted roads to get there. (The government is preparing to pave the roads, with the help of money from migrants abroad.)

Most families don't have cars, so they must pay for someone else to drive their children to school. Then they also must pay for their children's meals while in town. Computer fees are extra. And once they enter junior high school, they must pay for textbooks, too.

So it's rare for El Salto natives to have much more than an elementary education. If they stay in El Salto, their lot in life usually boils down to three choices: farming a small plot of nonirrigated land, working construction or competing for the unskilled work available in Villanueva.

For many, the idea of working just as hard but for at least five times the pay abroad is often an irresistible option.

The urge hit Guadalupe's son Hector when he was 18. He first crossed into the United States to work in California vineyards and hotels. He returned home, where he found work as a furniture deliveryman in Villanueva. But the urge hit again in 1994. He left for a job packing produce in St. Louis and became one of a growing chain of workers who were leaving El Salto and making their home in Fairmont City. Hector and his brother followed an older brother, who had crossed over the year before at the urging of another relative.

"One of my brothers came to Fairmont City and he told me to come here, because in California, you pay a lot of rent and there aren't a lot of jobs," said Hector, now 34, in an interview in Fairmont City, where he has lived for a decade. "A lot of people have come here from California."

The cycle has repeated among siblings, cousins and in-laws in El Salto. Those who first arrive in the St. Louis area herald the abundance of jobs, as well as the lower cost of living and lower crime rates - especially in Fairmont City - compared with big-city migration destinations such as Chicago or Los Angeles.

The demand in St. Louis for low-skilled workers willing to work for minimum wage or just above is great and widespread. Jobs are available in big and small companies: cleaning hotel rooms, working in restaurants, packing everything from produce to dish soap, hauling scrap metal, tending to trees in nurseries, mowing lawns and spreading mulch for landscapers.






El Salto homes, St. Louis money







Some of the workers are undocumented and pay for false Social Security cards and visas that enable them to get jobs. But in recent years, many men from El Salto and neighboring towns are securing seasonal visas mainly to work with local landscapers in the St. Louis area.

One is Alfredo Hernandez, 28, whose truck is plastered with St. Louis Cardinals emblems. Like the undocumented workers who have gone to St. Louis, he, too, is following in the footsteps of a relative.

"I've been going for four years," Hernandez said in an interview in March as he was preparing to leave El Salto for another nine-month stint in St. Louis. "An uncle of mine works there. He was in California, but went to St. Louis because the rent is a lot cheaper, and there's more work to go around. There's about 70 of us going back soon from all over."

Rito Arjon, 48, earned $8.50 an hour last year as a landscaper with Baxter Gardens of Chesterfield. He was getting ready to go back, but when a local recruiter showed up in early March with Baxter's list of seasonal-visa workers for this year, Arjon's name wasn't on it. It was an enormous blow - one that had him wondering whether he should listen to neighbors' advice and cross illegally to find other work.

"I used that money to send my children to school in Villanueva, and for food," said Arjon, who has four children. "Here, I just work on people's houses for (less than $80 or $90 a week). It's so little. People keep telling me I should cross over illegally."

Ruben Marquez, 53, built an addition to his home with the $7-an-hour wages he earned cutting lawns and planting trees for Top Care Lawn Service in St. Louis. He, too, didn't make a recruiter's list and anticipates a hard year of getting by on whatever job is available to care for his wife and seven children.

"We'll have to suffer here," Marquez said dejectedly. "Going there helps out a lot. We built a room with last year's money."

Jesus Carrillo Carrera, 54, has been building other people's homes in El Salto for many years. He is working on an enormous expansion of the home of Baudelio Martinez, whose son in Chicago is helping pay for the addition of three rooms and a hallway.

Like many of his neighbors, Carrillo grumbles about the pay - less than $100 a week. But unlike most of the men in El Salto, Carrillo has never crossed over the border. He may not be able to own his own home here, but he believes it would be far worse to live in hiding as an undocumented worker in the United States.

"I've never gone. Why should I even try? Why should I be out there, hiding as if I'd murdered someone?" Carrillo said, as he walked one lovely morning in El Salto, where man and beast - pigs, dogs, horses, cows and an occasional burro - amble the streets. "They treat working there as if it were a crime. I don't have enough to build a house here, but at least I can walk freely in the streets."







The magnet of jobs







The small-town freedom is a powerful draw in El Salto, but just as powerful is the magnet of better-paying jobs elsewhere. It's been that way for as long as Juanita Galvan, 63, can remember.

She is a native of El Salto but left for Mexico City when she was a teen. At the time, many of El Salto's men were being lured north by the Bracero Program, an agricultural guest-worker accord between the United States and Mexico that had been launched at the onset of World War II.

"I left here in 1957 for Mexico City because there was no work here," said Galvan, who returned to El Salto to retire 30 years later. "Then, the Bracero Program was the only help we had. There was no help from the government, so we went elsewhere."

Today, Galvan says, the Mexican government offers more in Social Security payments and programs for the poor. But good jobs are just as scarce. Her son left El Salto 12 years ago and has worked illegally in Denver ever since. His status has kept him from returning, she says. But his four children, all born in the United States and citizens there, can travel freely.

"They'll come for a month during the summer," she says happily.

The children, like the adults, revel in the small-town freedom to wander about unchecked. Elvia Carrillo, whose family owns the grocery of the same name, has two teenagers living in the United States and her 5-year-old son in El Salto.

"My youngest, he was born in Las Vegas, but he loves El Salto," Carrillo said. "He only wants to leave (to go to the United States) at Christmastime, because there, he gets gifts. He doesn't get any here."






"You want to be with them, but you can't"







For many children in El Salto, the Christmas season brings another type of gift: time with their fathers, who have spent most of the year abroad.

That is the case for the children of Jose Belmontes, 35. He and his brothers Andres and Alejandro work on seasonal visas with Loyet Landscape Maintenance for nine months, when they save money by living with their sister's family in a cramped mobile home in Fairmont City.

All three cable money to their wives for living expenses, and then return home in December with more to buy bricks and cement to expand their homes to accommodate their expanding families.

They endured a tearful parting from their families one Sunday night in late February as they prepared to get on a bus that would take them on the first leg of their trip back to St. Louis.

"You want to be with them, but you can't," Jose Belmontes said as he prepared to board the bus headed north. "You have to make a life for them."

The next day, Jose's son, Cuco, 5, described the goodbye scene at home: "My mother cried last night, because my father left."

This year, Maricela, Jose's wife, will find his absence even harder to take.

"I'm going to have another baby in late May or June. When Lulu was born (two years ago), he came home early to see her birth in late August," said Maricela, 30, whose voice trails into quiet sobs because she knows the timing of this pregnancy won't allow Jose to return for the birth of their child this year.

So until next December, Maricela will anxiously cock her head toward each crackle from the loudspeakers atop Carrillo's grocery. That's what she did from the moment her husband left that night in late February. Two nights later, Elvia Carrillo picked up the microphone at the cashier's stand and her voice carried throughout El Salto:

"Senora Maricela Tovar . . . You have a call and they're holding on the line."

Maricela bolted, beaming, from her dinner of beans and tortillas to the store. A brief seven-minute phone call from Fairmont City, like the wired $100 that would follow from Jose's first paycheck, helped fill one more void in El Salto.



Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso
E-mail: kbranch@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 202-298-6880