Heriberto, who once lived and worked in Fairmont City, has run his family’s farm in Rancho La Purisima, Mexico, since returning home for what he thought would be a short visit in 2002.

RANCHO LA PURISIMA, Mexico - In a bedroom that doubles as the living room of this weathered-brick farmhouse, only a collage of photographs on the dresser can keep Dona Reyna's family together.

There is the grandson in Fairmont City, astride a wooden horse. The shots of grandchildren in nearby San Juan de los Lagos. The cheerleader at Collinsville High School. And the baby pictures of two grandchildren - no longer babies - in Chicago.

Just one photograph, taken at a daughter's debutante party 18 years ago, is there to remind Reyna of the time when her family was intact: her husband alive, all eight children at home.

Francisco "was the first to leave. He was just 15," Reyna said. "It was very sad." (Her son's name is a pseudonym; he is an undocumented worker in Fairmont City.)

Today, Reyna's voice betrays little of that emotion as she matter-of-factly details the departures, one by one, of three sons and a daughter to Illinois. For here in this central western Mexico community of small dairy farms and fallow cornfields, it is not surprising that they would go. At least 50 of the residents in this community of 250 have left for the United States.

Many more, including Reyna's other children, are itching to follow.

Her son Heriberto came back in 2002 for what he thought was a short family visit after four years in Fairmont City. But when his father died in a car crash that December, he felt duty-bound to stay, the only male left. Someone had to milk the dozen cows that provide the family's sustenance.

"What do I miss most? Those damned dollars," says Heriberto, 30, as he sat in a pen surrounded by calves. "We get 180 liters of milk a day from these cows, which brings in about 4,000 pesos (just over $350) every 10 days or so. That's not a lot. That's why I want to go back."

His older sister, Beatriz, crochets tablecloths at the rate of one a week for $22 to help pay for her own clothing. At 32, she has never lived anywhere else. But her eyes shine bright with plans to cross illegally and join her two brothers in Fairmont City or her sister in Chicago - maybe this spring.

Their cousin on the adjoining farm, Hugo, also yearns to leave. He wears a faded St. Louis Cardinals cap that a brother in Fairmont City bought for him. The first brother left over two decades ago, and five other brothers followed. Today, all six live in Fairmont City, and all but one have managed to legalize their status there.

"I want to go, too, but my brothers told me to wait until they arrange for my papers," Hugo says as he and his brother Gerardo take turns attaching milking machines to the family's 23 dairy cows. He repeats the job each morning at 5 and each afternoon at 4. "I'm looking for a better life than what we have here," he says.

The magnetic pull toward better lives and better salaries makes for a constant turnover among families here. In San Juan de los Lagos, Francisco's mother-in-law, Asuncion Martinez, has also lived with the grief of never-ending goodbyes.

Martinez, 53, grew up in a family of 11 children, of whom just three remain in Mexico; the rest are in the United States.

"They all went as illegals," she says. "All of them are now legal residents because of the 1986 amnesty. My children followed them."

Martinez has 11 children. Six live in Mexico, four of them with her in her two-bedroom home. The oldest five all left for the United States, including Maria, who is married to Francisco and lives with him in Fairmont City.

Maria remembers vividly her own pain when her younger brother Guadalupe became the first to leave in 1990 when his job as a carpenter's apprentice couldn't make ends meet for the family. Their father was a janitor at the cathedral in San Juan de los Lagos, which attracts Catholic pilgrims from across the world. He had died two years earlier in a fall from one of the bell towers he had been asked to grease that day.

The already poor family became destitute.

"Some days, we'd have nothing but beans to eat, so the oldest ones, we went to work. My brother at 15, the one younger than me, came to the United States," said Maria, 30, in the living room of her Fairmont City home. She bursts into tears at the memory. "He worked in the countryside, living in a trailer, picking apples."

A sister married and left that year. Then another brother in 1996. Then Maria, after she married Francisco that same year. Then a brother in 2002.

Such departures are so common, they are memorialized in lyrics by popular Mexican music groups, including the rock band Mana. When her third sibling left, Lorena, who stayed behind, put a compact disc into the family's stereo and made her brother listen to the words of a song titled "The Desert" as a reminder to return:

. . . Now I'm going away far from my hometown,

Packing my bags, putting away memories of love.

Now I'm going up North,

Leaving my girlfriend, my streets, my people

And my Mexico...

. . . I won't cry while I walk.

The desert and the moon will come with me.

Today I don't know where the train is going.

But I swear to you, my love, I will come back for you . . .

The song was an enormous hit when it came out in 1992. It's still popular in the Martinez household, where the older siblings abroad rarely return to visit. Most are married with children and don't want to risk an illegal return to the United States. Maria, with a 6-year-old son and an 18-month-old daughter born in Fairmont City, has never returned since leaving eight years ago.

But her oldest child, the boy astride the wooden horse in Dona Reyna's photo collage, has made the trip; as a U.S. citizen he could go back and forth freely.

"I sent him to visit his grandmothers when he was 2 years old," Maria says. He traveled with one of Francisco's cousins who also is a legal resident.

Maria feels she has no choice as an undocumented immigrant but to stay on the Fairmont City side of the U.S.-Mexican border. For her children's sake, she won't leave and risk losing the minimum-wage work she gets with the help of a falsified permanent residency card. Even so, the security she clings to here is tenuous, at best.

In mid-April, her supervisor at a local factory gathered the handful of undocumented Mexican workers there on their lunch break - including Maria - and fired them from their $5.50-an-hour jobs. The federal government had officially notified the company of what Maria said her bosses already knew: that the workers' Social Security numbers were fake and didn't match their names. Yet she stays, and takes comfort in the fact that there are no such risks for her U.S.-born son and daughter.

"I know my children won't ever have to fight like I have," Maria says. "They're citizens, whether they like it or not."


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