Mexico’s Ghost Towns

[Joanne98]

Cerrito del Agua, population 3,000, has no paved roads — either leading to it or within it. No restaurants, no movie theaters, no shopping malls. In fact, the small town located in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas has no middle schools, high schools or colleges; no cell phone service, no hospital. Its surrounding fields are dry and untended. The streets are empty.

The explosion of emigration to the United States over the past 15 years has emptied much of central Mexico, even reaching into southernmost states like Chiapas and Yucatan. But it has simply devastated Zacatecas, a dry, rolling agricultural region located about 400 miles northwest of Mexico City.

A little more than half of Zacatecas’ population — about 1.8 million people — now live in the United States, especially in areas surrounding Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2005, three out of its four municipalities registered a negative population growth. A 2004 state law created two new state legislative posts for migrants living in the United States. In 2006, depopulation cost the state one of its five congressional districts.

“Well, you’ve seen what this place is like,” says Dr. Manuel Valadez Lopez, gesturing out the door of his small private clinic when I ask him how emigration has affected the town. “There has not been even minimal development here. There is not a single yard of pavement. The few people who have sidewalks in front of their houses built them themselves. Most people defecate outdoors.”

Lopez, 40, a native of Cerrito del Agua, is one of the few to leave the town and return. All six of his brothers now live and work in the United States. All four of his sisters married men who left to work in the United States.

In his teens, Lopez himself had moved to Guadalajara (about a five-hour drive southwest of Zacatecas) to attend high school and university, then stayed on to study medicine and receive a specialist’s training in gynecology. He later returned to Cerrito del Agua for a visit and realized “there was so much work to do here that I stayed,” he says.

That was eight years ago.

“The whole culture now is that people grow up and go to the U.S. — their parents, their uncles, their brothers and sisters, everyone goes,” Lopez says. “The kids who are strong and smart, they all go to the U.S. There are no basic services here; the government has not carried out a single project.”

The situation has been so dire, he says, that the staff at the clinic had to install its own sewage system. “There is running water, but it’s not clean,” he continues. “People get all sorts of infections, a typical Third-World situation.”

Worst of all, says Lopez, is that “people who could possibly stay here and do something, they all go.”

The new U.S. colony
A January report by Richard Nadler, president of the conservative Americas Majority Foundation, found that the strongest state economies in the United States are those with high numbers of migrant workers. Nadler writes: “An analysis of data from 50 states and the District of Columbia demonstrates that a high resident population and/or inflow of immigrants is associated with elevated levels and growth in gross state product, personal income, per capita personal income, disposable income, per capita disposable income, median household income and median per capita income.”

Those who are leaving Mexico — those whose land goes unplanted, whose roads remain unpaved — are laboring in the United States, building shopping malls and factories, washing dishes in restaurants and cafés, picking grapes and pulling lettuce.

They are creating within the U.S. economy precisely the goods and services that their hometowns lack. At the same time, their anemic home economies falter on the brink of collapse.

“I think that the U.S.’s plan is to make Mexico into a kind of colony,” says Lopez, with a half smile. “People go to the U.S. to work and earn dollars. They come back to Mexico and spend their dollars on American products. It’s a nice, round business.” He continues: “Everyone here depends on the U.S. If this isn’t a colony, then how do you define colony?”

Condemned to disappear
In the heated debates over U.S. immigration policy, the pressing questions seem to be “How many immigrants should be allowed in, if any?” and “How should they be processed into the system?” But rarely considered is what this massive influx is doing to Mexico.

With nearly half a million Mexicans crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every year...
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3693/mexicos_ghost_towns/

[izquierdista]

1. Spot on!

And until there is some kind of development in rural Mexico, they will continue to come. I've talked with many Mexicans who DON'T want to go to El Norte, but sometimes the economics leave them no choice. I've also know a few who went north many years ago, made some money, and are now in a position to return.

Mexico is a classic case study in how conservative trickle-down economic policy works -- it doesn't. After the rich get done taking their cut, the vast multitude have nothing left and their only opportunity is to leave. The federal government funds some development, but only for rich tourists (Cancun, Cozumel, Cabo, etc.) and service jobs in those industries are too few, and poorly paid. Nothing has changed since the Spanish arrived in the 16th century; the rich hacienda owners keep it in the family and the peasants have to fend for themselves.

[psychmommy]

2. k & r

if i had the cash, i'd be investing in property in mexico. eventually, when we are totally overpopulated i can retire to a lovely ranch in mexico. i saw a story on democracy now ( i think). it showed all of the wives left behind. some were abandoned by their husbands, others were receiving money but barely enough to live on. it is not just mexico that is being effected by immigration-guatemala is also.