Eric Eyre

Oaxacans choose small Baja towns like Camalu, Colonia Vicente Guerrero, and Colonia Lizaro Cardenas over larger cities like Tijuana and Ensenada.

CAMALU, Mexico — Powdery dirt coats this tiny hamlet on the Baja California coast like a blanket of copper-colored snow. The dust pastes the sides of school buses that haul working boys and girls to tomato fields. The dirt conceals the buses’ original owners: the Marin County School District and Lakewood Baptist Church. Dust cakes on abandoned cars and windowsills. It dirties polyester curtains and bathroom sinks. It falls on cornstalks that rise 12 feet into the gritty air.

Walking down a dirt path that meets the only paved passage through town, Pablo Hernandez played the daily dust-dodging game. He judged the wind’s direction, and as an oncoming car approached with dust clouds swirling on both sides, Pablo scurried to the path’s opposite side. The car rattled by, but the wind suddenly shifted, tossing the dust cloud at him. Pablo cursed, turned away, and threw the crook of his elbow over his eyes to block the inevitable eye stinging. The dirt dropped on his neck and slid down his back. It slipped through his lips and teeth, moving to his molars, where it mixed with saliva.

Antonio Hernandez. The heat was suffocating as the Hernandez family rode out of the Tijuana bus station on the final stretch of their journey from Oaxaca to Camalu.

Eric Eyre

Pablo spat out a mud clod. He pinched off one nostril and blew out a smaller dirt glob.

He swore again, tucking the bandana he wore around his neck down the back of his T-shirt. He lowered the bill of his baseball cap to protect his eyes. Next time he would be better prepared.

Pablo turned down a side street. He heard someone call his name.

“Your mother, your father, they are already here,” shouted a cousin, who was shopping in the second-hand market.

“No, they’re coming in three, four more days,” Pablo answered back, the dirt still sticking to the back of his molars like chewing gum.

“They are here now. I saw them a while ago,” said the cousin.

Pedro Hernandez, Camalu strawberry field

Eric Eyre

Had Pablo forgotten the day of his family’s arrival from the Mexican interior? His father would be looking for him. He had given Pablo $300 in San Diego, where they had both lived and worked. Pablo was to bring the money to Camalu, where his family would start a new life. His dad had traveled back to the Oaxaca state in Mexico to fetch the family. Dad was going to be mad.

Pablo panicked. Had there been a change of plans? He ran off to look for his family.

He found them in an unpainted one-room concrete block structure that was rented exit as an apartment. Pablo exchanged hugs and kisses with his mother, while his younger brothers and sisters, six of them, tugged at his pants, shouting, “Pavo, Pavo, Pavo,” or turkey in Spanish. His father was not there. Pablo felt nervous again.

Rodrigo Hernandez

Eric Eyre

Just then, Pablo’s father Guillermo walked in with pork sausage, hot sauce, and a stack of tortillas. He was not angry, instead excited to see his son. The family had arrived earlier than planned. Pablo breathed easier and handed over the money. Guillermo stepped out for a moment.

Someone else had been missing. Pablo looked for his 15-year-old sister.

“She stayed behind,” his mother Yolanda said. “She’s run off with her boyfriend." The boy was 20 years old, and Pablo knew him back home in Tuxtepec, Oaxaca.

“I’ll punch him in the face when I see him,” said Pablo, who was very protective of his sister. “I’ll kill him."

Pablo’s father returned with sodas, bowls, and a gas stove burner. Everybody gulped down the sausage and tortillas, and one by one they fell asleep on wool blankets spread on the concrete floor.

Hand washing

Eric Eyre

That night, they dreamt of the sweltering bus ride to Camalu from Oaxaca, where four days ago they had waved goodbye to Pablo’s grandfather and grandmother in a green pasture under a delicate rain.

A migration within Mexico’s own borders is taking place, and San Diego is playing a part in it.

For the past 20 years, families like Pablo’s have migrated north from poorer Mexican states such as Oaxaca to settle in the Baja peninsula. In recent years, the numbers moving there have soared as more men have obtained legal permission to work in the United States under the federal government’s amnesty program.

The Oaxacan men who work in San Diego’s strawberry and tomato fields return to their hometowns for their families and bring them to Baja for two reasons: so they can live closer and so their wives and children will have work too.

Rodrigo, Aida, Nansi Hernandez

Eric Eyre

They choose small Baja towns like Camalu, Colonia Vicente Guerrero, and Colonia Lizaro Cardenas over larger cities like Tijuana and Ensenada because Oaxacans generally prefer more peaceful living, devoid of crime and pollution, something closer to the ways of home.

Their boys and girls, and often their wives, work seven days a week in tomato fields in small towns south of Ensenada, earning $7 each day. When the boys become men, they join their fathers in North San Diego County’s tomato and cucumber fields.

In Oaxaca, opportunities for work are rare and children are generally prohibited from working in the fields and factories unless they can prove they have attended at least six years of school. In Baja, such restrictions are seldom enforced.

Unlike many Mexicans, the Oaxacan men shy away from bringing their families north to San Diego and Los Angeles. That may come later with greater understanding of the strange neighbor to the north. For now, they follow their friends and relatives to places such as Camalu, where a majority of the residents are Oaxaca natives like themselves.

Gathering what few possessions they have, they get on a bus in hometowns with palm trees and lakes — but few jobs — and carve a new home in the near-desert conditions of Camalu, where work is plentiful.

Pablo opened the family’s photo album brought by his mother from Oaxaca to catch up on what he had missed during the past year while living in San Diego. He showed a friend the pictures. “Look at the dam, it’s so big, no?” said 18-year-old Pablo. “Look at all the water. We’d swim in the streams that fed the lake. We’d hunt crawfish under rocks all day.”

In one picture, Pablo stands on top of the huge dam with his arms folded. Behind him is a huge reservoir fed by the Papaloapan River, also known as the River of Butterflies. Pablo’s village is 15 minutes outside Tuxtepec, a city on the eastern side of the Oaxacan state near Veracruz.

Pablo paged through the photo album. Everything in the pictures was green, from his former home’s thatched roof made from palm fronds to the soccer field behind the house where his sister would ride the family’s chestnut horse. There were photographs of his grandparents and of the many parties where the family celebrated birthdays and weddings.

At peak season in Oaxaca, Pablo worked only three days a week climbing trees to pick bananas. A paper mill and brewery in town had work, but the factories required proof of military service before they would hire you. Pablo had never served in the military.

Pablo’s younger brother Alfredo wanted to work alongside Pablo at the Tuxtepec banana plantation, but those in charge turned him away. They check the younger boys to make sure they have attended school. Alfredo hadn't finished the requisite six years. In Camalu, Alfredo now joins his brother in the tomato field ten hours a day. There, the field bosses don’t ask questions. Alfredo is 12 years old.

Pablo’s 17-year-old cousin Pedro, who had come with the family to Camalu, overheard the conversation about work in Oaxaca. He sat down next to Pablo and looked at the photographs. He bragged that he had worked last year in the Oaxacan banana groves without ever going to school. Once a boy looked older than 16, he explained, the owners no longer required proof of school attendance.

Pedro was asked why he never attended a day of school in his life. He pointed to his head and said, “Not very good.”

Pablo smiled and closed the photo album.

Their backs ached and the heat was suffocating inside the cramped bus as the Hernandez family rode out of the Tijuana bus station on the final stretch of their 1500-mile journey from Oaxaca to Camalu. They took up eight seats. There were Guillermo and Yolanda; brothers Alfredo, Antonio, and Rodrigo; sisters Nansi and Aida; and cousin Pedro. An older brother, Lizaro, waited with Pablo in Camalu.

The bus approached Ensenada, and the children looked out the cracked windows. They pointed at billboards, most in English, advertising motels and tourist bars. Those in Spanish solicited support for Mexico’s ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), during a past election.

After Ensenada, the road narrowed to two lanes. Plumes of smoke rose from mountain passes, where garbage burned and the poor sifted through the swollen mounds. The bus passengers, accustomed to the perpetual stink of burning plastic, left their windows open as the bus snaked through the mountains and swung into the oncoming lane to pass a Pepsi truck stacked with returnable bottles.

Suddenly, an oncoming car rounded the curb ahead and appeared destined to crash head-on into the bus. The drivers of the bus and car stared each other down, playing chicken. The bus driver blasted his horn. At the last moment, the car slowed and the bus moved into its own lane. The car’s driver stuck his arm out the window and lifted his middle finger. Only a few bus passengers up front saw the near miss.

The sun moved behind the mountains and disappeared under the Pacific Ocean. The bus swept by tomato and cornfields, where men stood guard at night, keeping warm by campfire.

The bus crested yet another hill, plunged down onto a dusty plain called Camalu, and stopped to let off eight passengers at a pharmacy that doubles as a bus station. The Hernandez family collected their blankets and clothes and started walking through the brown cloud to find their new home.

If they had arrived 20 years earlier, they would have seen nothing but sand, sagebrush, and some 30 settlers who were turning the hard land into tomato fields. Now, about 2500 people live in Camalu year-round. That number swells on weekends and during the Christmas holidays, when Mexicans who work in Southern California come home.

The town was originally settled by the Garcia and Casteneda families, whose descendants still own virtually all the land in and around Camalu. Each family oversees a packing plant and tomato and strawberry ranches. They have a fleet of tractor-trailers that transport the crops that feed the Baja boom towns of Tijuana and Ensenada.

The two families own the town’s largest homes. The two-story houses with green lawns, patio furniture, and satellite dishes tower over their neighbors’ cardboard and concrete shacks. Poor Mexicans seem to harbor no ill feelings toward the few rich in town.

Pablo, Pedro, and Alfredo work on the ranches north of Camalu owned by the Garcias, who operate a packing plant and field closer to town under the name Rancho Santa Cruz. It was there that the three boys went on a sunny Saturday afternoon in late August to pick up their paychecks.

They arrived at the packing plant on separate yellow school buses, 11 of which eventually filled a dirt parking lot. As the buses pulled into the lot, the workers crowded toward the front and poured out of the bus after it stopped. They ran to get in line to claim their checks.

Pablo and Pedro stood in one line, while Alfredo waited in a shorter line reserved for the youngest field hands. The line pressed and unfolded like an accordion; it seemed at any moment that hundreds of boys might tumble like a row of dominos.

A fight broke out. Two boys, no older than ten, traded blows. Their friends egged them on, wanting a more savage battle. The boys slugged each other in the face as the circle of onlookers surrounding them grew. The circle followed the boys as they moved and wrestled through the packing plant grounds. Finally, the two boys tired. They walked away in different directions. Everybody got back in line.

“Who won? Who won?” one boy wanted to know.

“The fat one" was the general consensus.

On the packing plant’s far side, women and girls with bandanas across their faces waited more peacefully in a separate line. The bandanas keep out dust when the girls are picking tomatoes in the field or walking to or from a giant dirt parking lot where buses wait to haul them to work. They wear as many as five bandanas at a time, peeling them off at night before they bathe.

In still another line, more girls, mostly in their teens or early 20s, waited for paychecks. They were from the Mexican state of Sinaloa and were much taller and lighter-skinned than their Oaxacan counterparts, who have darker skin and Indian blood. The Sinaloan girls work in the packing plants, refusing to dirty and callous their hands in the fields. The Oaxacan women say they prefer field work. The women from different Mexican states seldom talk to each other.

The same is true of men from Oaxaca and Sinaloa. The Oaxacan men generally are short, wear sneakers and baseball caps. The Sinaloans are tall, wear cowboy boots and sombreros. The Oaxacans walk to the store. The Sinaloans drive four-wheel-drive Chevy pickups with bumper stickers that boast: “100 percent Sinaloan.”

Pablo and Pedro reached the front of the line and grabbed their paychecks. Each had earned 156,000 pesos or $52 for seven days of work. Now they were going to see how fast they could spend it. Them are no banks in Camalu. No savings plans. If you have money, you spend it. Then, you do without for the rest of the week until the following Saturday payday.

Pablo and Pedro found Alfredo, and the three jumped on a school bus that brought them hack to town. There, a taco stand, movie theater, and dance hall would be waiting for their hard-earned pesos.

American rap music thundered from inside the concrete Camalu social hall, where every Saturday night a dance with “Much Power" is promised by neon-painted signs posted throughout town. Strobe and colored lights flashed inside. It was 9:30 p.m., and three or four Mexican youths wiggled on the dance floor. Another two or three watched. The real action was outside.

Mexican cops stood beside a paddy wagon, and about 50 young men, mostly from Sinaloa, chatted and listened to music booming from car stereos. Pablo was in the crowd, talking to his older brother Lazaro.

Three American school buses pulled up. They were packed with people. All girls. All 100 percent Sinaloans.

The girls funneled out of the buses onto the dance floor. The boys lined up to buy $5 tickets from the window of a pickup. They hurried in. The gutsy ones walked up to their favorite girl and asked for a dance. The nervous ones walked up to the bar to drink up some Corona courage.

Pablo did neither. He liked to watch. His brother found a buddy with two female friends, and the foursome hit the dance floor. Pablo would have to find a girl on his own.

The boys with beers returned to find a dance partner. The girls were sitting down at tables. The young men waited until they saw a girl alone, then sprang into action, sometimes three boys asking the same girl for a dance at the same time. The smell of perfume and sweat saturated the air.

The dance floor filled quickly, and the music alternated between Mexican and American dance hits until the lights switched on. It was time to pick the most beautiful woman at the dance.

Young women with male escorts paraded around the dance floor. Everyone applauded. The blushing winner of the makeshift beauty contest — nobody seems to know who selected the winner — was chosen, and she made a final pass with a bouquet of flowers.

Next, the girls with birthdays walked the floor, and when they finished, the lights went out and the music roared on, this time more traditional Mexican ranchero and band tunes.

Pablo enjoyed the music and went looking for a dance partner. He found a girl in her early teens sitting alone. He stood back and watched her for a few minutes. She was small and very light-skinned, probably from Sinaloa. Other young men asked the same girl to dance, and Pablo watched her join them on the concrete floor for several songs.

Then, she was alone again. This was Pablo’s chance. He walked over to her, held out his hand and said, “Let’s dance.” She looked up and shook her head no. Pablo walked away.

He didn’t ask another girl to dance the rest of the night. He left the Camalu social hall at midnight without a single dance.

Pedro wasn’t going to risk rejection. He had his hair cut, washed his short, straight locks with Head and Shoulders, put on his best shirt and pants, and walked to the movies. A taped advertisement amplified through two giant loudspeakers outside.

Camalu beckoned people to fork over $1.30 for two films: The Sons of a Criminal and The Troubles of a Mafioso. Pedro had waited all week for the double billing.

He arrived early, paid the admission, and entered the lobby. To his right were bathrooms, which had curtains for doors. To his left was the concession stand, where an old man served warm Cokes and popped corn in an aluminum pan. Pedro bought a Coke and looked for a seat.

The theater was empty, except for two or three other early-arrivals. It was much larger inside than it looked from the outside. The theater held about 500 people or 20 percent of Camalu’s residents. And by the numbers of husbands, wives, babies, boyfriends, and girlfriends streaming toward the theater that night, it looked as if the place would be packed.

Inside, the concrete floor and walls raised suspicions about how the film would sound. Rows of brown-painted wooden benches were stacked front to back. The benches’ high backs made them feel more comfortable than they appeared. The white-painted concrete wall in front served as the film screen.

The theater was half full when the lights went out. The first movie, The Sons of a Criminal, started. Immediately, Pedro reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He struck a match. His area glowed in the darkness. He puffed on the Marlboro, slumped on the bench, and blew the smoke toward the tin ceiling. Those around him did the same. Small light flashes danced around the theater. Even older Oaxacan women, their babies on their laps, joined the light chorus.

Pedro concentrated on the movie, unbothered by the scratches on the film and ranchero music that blared from someone’s car outside the theater.

The movie opened with Mexican bandits on horseback who stopped a woman walking through a cornfield. One bandit slapped the woman across the face, knocking her down. A cohort scooped up the woman and carried her off on his horse.

The bandits later confronted a group of good guys, and a shoot-’em-up ensued. The bad guys won. When someone was shot, he let out a scream, red paint spurted from his chest, and he flopped over on his back. The camera later returned to the dead man to show his shirt now completely soaked in red.

At the conclusion of the shootout, the film’s hero ran out of bullets and dropped down to beg mercy from the bandit who stood over him. The bandit took aim and fired at the man’s knee. For good measure, he pumped a few more rounds into the knee until the lower half of the good guy’s leg dropped off. The camera zoomed on the knee for a blood and bone close-up. The flesh twitched. The camera continued to zoom tighter until it lost focus and faded into another scene, this one 15 years later.

The movie dragged on with more violent acts against women until the inevitable happened: the film broke. The house lights came on. The crowd hissed as though this didn’t happen every weekend, which, of course, it did. Five minutes later, the projector started again, the lights went out, and the bursts of light from match strokes did their jig around the theater.

After the first movie ended with a peg-legged good guy taking revenge on a masked bandit, a seven-minute intermission followed.

The second movie was a comedy thriller about the Mafia. It opened with a drunk Mexican Mafioso and his girlfriend riding a bus through the countryside. A bus attendant stopped to ask him what he wanted to drink. He squeezed her butt, and when she complained, he knocked her over.

After seeing this, the bus driver pulled over and demanded that the Mafioso behave himself. The Mafia macho man answered with a head butt. The bus driver fell down, got up, cleared his head, and wiped off the blood running from his nose and the comers of his mouth. More chuckles came from the crowd, which now filled the theater.

The movie continued with its own standard shoot-’em-ups until the Mafioso surrendered at the end to a beautiful blonde undercover policewoman. For a moment, she considered letting the guy go until other police arrived to haul him off to jail.

The theater lights flipped on, and everyone rushed into the dark streets on their way home. It was 10:15. They had to be at work tomorrow morning at 6:00.

Pedro stopped briefly outside the theater to see what was playing next week. Because Pedro can’t read, a friend read the posters advertising the two upcoming flicks: The Day of the Assassins and The Fastest Dancing Girls in the West.

Pablo met Pedro the following afternoon after work at the park, where they stopped for a snack at a torta stand. The park had no grass, no picnic tables, and no squirrels. A gazebo stood at the center of the dirt patch, where sidewalks crisscrossed from four corners. Men relaxed on concrete benches, while women pushed children on rusted swings. Beside the gazebo, workers were building bathrooms. Rumor had it, however, that local government officials had run out of money to complete the project and had instructed the workers not to put in a septic tank. No one knows for sure what will become of the small building when the workers finish. No one really cares.

Pablo and Pedro sat down at the taco stand and ordered two tortas and two sodas. The woman cook scraped aside the grease on the grill and slapped down two fatty meat pieces.

Her name was Lupita, and she was born in Camalu 18 years ago. That made her one of the old-timers. She had light brown hair and was slightly chunky. She smiled a lot. She looked you straight in the eye when she talked. She alternated work weeks at the taco stand with her younger sister. Lupita’s ambition is to become a secretary, but she realizes few secretarial jobs exist in Camalu.

After serving Pablo and Pedro their tortas, she banged on a “Made in Canada" typewriter, which lacked the necessary “ns” and accent marks of the Spanish language. She scribbled those in by hand.

Lupita had another interest — God. Her family is part of the growing evangelical movement in Mexico. Three times a week, she goes to a metal shed to praise the Lord with 30 fellow worshippers. She invited Pablo and Pedro to join her that night. Pablo decided to go. Pedro went home to sleep.

Lupita’s sisters welcomed Pablo into the church lighted by an overhead bulb dangling from the ceiling. The pastor held a microphone and repeatedly shouted, “Glory to God.” The men and women echoed his scream. People from all parts of Mexico were in attendance. One by one, they jumped from their seats and went to the front of the shed. There, they kneeled and the minister placed his hand on their heads. Some cried. Others spoke in tongues. A woman strummed a guitar. The young children seemed confused by the celebration but nevertheless joined their mothers at the altar where they too could be saved.

An older man urged Pablo to go to the front. Pablo pretended he didn’t hear the man. He stood up but didn’t move forward. He preferred to enjoy the Mexican revival from the back row.

For a moment, a hard life in Camalu had been forgotten.

The family gathered for dinner one night in late August. Almost two months had passed since Pablo’s father Guillermo had brought the family to Camalu from Oaxaca. Guillermo had visited Camalu only once during that time. He worked during the week at a nursery in Escondido. The money he earned there bought a television and two beds for the concrete room in Camalu. He promised that his next big purchase would be a VCR. The room still lacked a stove, and the only bathroom was a plywood outhouse in the back yard.

Pedro, Pablo, and brother Alfredo sat at the room’s only table and three chairs. Pablo’s mother Yolanda served ava, large yellow beans, and tortillas. The boys scooped the beans from their bowls with pieces of tortillas pinched to form spoons. They ate slowly. Pablo’s mother asked how they liked the ava, aware that something was wrong.

They hated it. Yolanda took away their bowls and filled them with pinto beans, which they gulped down.

After the older boys left the table, three more children sat down and ate in their places. Pablo’s mother ate last, then washed the dishes.

She said that in Oaxaca there was always running water from a tap to clean dirty dishes. In Camalu, there hadn’t been running water for a month. A truck brought water once a week to the house, where three plastic barrels were filled outside. Pablo’s mother had to wash dishes in a plastic tub, splashing the dishes with cupfuls of water.

After washing the dinner bowls, Yolanda started sweeping the floor. But as she swept, the air inside the room became thick with dirt and dust. She swished the dust outside, but just as quickly it floated back in.

“Everything was much easier in Oaxaca,” she said, her two-year-old daughter Aida falling asleep in her arms as darkness fell on Camalu.

Minutes later, Aida fell into a deep sleep with her eyes open, rolled toward the back of her head. Yolanda smiled. She remembered that Pablo had slept the same way when he was a child.