A mother uses her time in the U.S. to accumulate remarkable savings.
Valeria’s dreams are simple and universally recognizable. She wants to own a little house, and she wants her son to have a better life. However, for a 22-year-old single mother living in a rural hamlet in Puebla, Mexico these simple dreams were destined to remain just that—dreams. So, she hoped to realize her dreams in the U.S.
With only a high school education and no vocational training, Valeria’s employment opportunities were limited. She could have worked as a farmhand growing bananas, oranges, and coffee, or she could have taken the higher paying, less physically demanding and more stable job of being a cleaner in an office building. However, this “better” job paid just MXN 800 ($50 USD) per week. With these limited earnings Valeria was able to feed and clothe her son, and give her mother a few pesos to pay for some household expenses, but she would never be able to move out of her parents’ house.
She knew that if she went to the U.S. she could make $800 a week (16x her current income). She was sure of this because of her seven siblings, four were already living and working in New York. For her, legal immigration was impossible. There was no way an unskilled Mexican worker could obtain a tourist visa, let alone a work permit. The only way to get to the U.S. was to use a coyote.
The coyote she selected was well known in her community, and he had already successfully helped one of her brothers enter the United States. This coyote was low risk as he was paid after his clients reached the United States. Arrangements were made and Valeria’s brothers wired her the MXN 30,000 ($1,500 USD) she would need to travel to the border. She took a public bus to Acambay, a suburb of Mexico City, with her brother-in-law (her sister Isabella’s husband) who would be making the journey with her. At Acambay, they boarded a bus along with other groups of travelers, each group with its own coyote. Traveling to the border in anything less than a large group was too dangerous, she said. The police and the military demand bribes, and gangs target migrants. The gangs know migrants are carrying large sums of money for expenses in Mexico, and that their families have enough to pay thousands to coyotes, thus they must have thousands to pay in ransom.
The bus was stopped frequently at check points inside Mexico. The coyotes negotiated a fee with the police and military at each stop, and each migrant contributed their pro rata share. It was very businesslike, but everyone knew that in the past migrants that did not pay had been taken off buses and disappeared. Valeria carried MXN 5,000 pesos ($250 USD) to pay for these bribes and a little more money for food.
At the end of the journey the bus pulled off the highway and bounced along a dusty road outside of Piedras Negras. Valeria was told to get off the bus. She ran across a graveyard, and then hid in the shrubs. In a little while her group of ten migrants and their coyote were picked up by a small truck and taken to a ranch close to the border.
The border around Piedras Negras is run by the Coahuilla Cartel. To cross the border, each migrant is required to pay a fee to stay at a safe house near the border. The fee varies, but in Valeria’s case it was MXN 25,000 ($1,250 USD). Like her brother Jose, she received a MXN 5,000 ($250 USD) discount for the bribes that were paid along the way. Valeria waited at the safe house for three days, before her coyote decided that the time was right to make a crossing.
She was driven to the border late in the evening. The coyote sent a scout ahead, who reported back that there were no U.S. Border Patrol Agents in sight. She got out of the truck. She was terrified, but she thought to herself, “I came with a purpose which was to get to New York,” so she plunged into the river and waded across. They walked until early in the morning and then they dispersed and rested. During the day it was too hot to walk, and the migrants were too visible. They waited throughout the day and then began walking at sunset. It was desolate. There were no lights. This was good. Any lights that they saw were from Border Patrol Agents or their vehicles and were easily avoided. Her brother-in-law carried seven liters of water and five liters of electrolyte drinks. Valeria carried two additional liters of water, but by the end of the second night the entire group was out of drinking water. The coyote knew his route well and led them to rainwater that had collected in pools on the rocks. The water was stagnant, but they pushed off the scum and filled their empty bottles. They discover that one member of their group was missing. The coyote searched for a few minutes, but then decided to press ahead without him.
They rested the second day and began walking again at nightfall. Around midnight they crossed a major highway. They were picked up on a service road by a truck that appeared out of the darkness. Valeria was relieved to no longer be in the desert, but apprehensive that the truck would be stopped and searched. She was exhausted and fell asleep and only woke up when the truck arrived at an apartment in Houston. She showered and was fed.
Valeria contacted her brothers, telling them that she was in Houston, and that they needed to wire $5,500 to a specific bank account. She could not leave the apartment until the money arrived. She was the only woman in the group of migrants and there were another five men in the apartment that were associates of the coyote. The coyote and his associates were drinking and using cocaine. The coyote sent her brother-in-law away to get some food at a local market. Valeria was alone, and the coyote and his associates grew aggressive.
The next day the money arrived, and Valeria and her brother-in-law were allowed to leave. A car took them from Houston to Tampa to New York. When they arrived, Valeria’s brothers paid $1,000 for her share of the last leg of her journey. Valeria was safe with her family and now $8,000 in debt.
Finding a job was not a problem. In two weeks, Valeria obtained a false social security number and got a job working at a pet store, taking care of the animals. She works alongside her brother Jose. She currently works from 7 AM to 8 PM—thirteen hours a day. She gets a 45-minute break for lunch and a 20-minute rest break. After taxes she makes around $825 a week. She cashes her check, pays the small fee, and clears a little more than $800 a week, approximately $3,500 a month.
It should be noted that Valeria’s gross check is $975 a week. Social Security, Medicare, federal and state taxes are deducted from her check each week. Since the social security number she uses is either invalid or belongs to someone else, she is paying into a retirement and medical system that will never provide her with benefits and paying taxes that without any opportunity for a refund.
She pays $400 a month to rent a room in her brother’s three-bedroom apartment. She shares the room with another woman. There are five other people in the house. Her brother and his son Juan live in one room and an unrelated couple and their infant live in another room. They share the common areas among them. She is able to save $2,000 a month. When asked how she lives, she says she lives on “what is left over” after her rent and her savings. Her other expenses are limited to food, a cell phone, transportation to work, a few clothes, and necessary personal items.
She is extremely disciplined and participates in a tanda where she is required to contribute $500 a week. Every ten weeks she receives a payout of $5,000, when her number comes up. She has been in the United States for a little less than a year, but in that time she has saved $20,000. She has repaid the interest free loan from her brothers and begun to make payments on a terreno or building lot in her hometown. The building lot cost her MXN 300,000 ($15,000 USD). After she pays off the lot, she will start to build her house. She regularly sends money home to support her son who continues to live with her parents, his grandparents.
Although she is saving quite a bit of money, she is not happy in New York. “Money is not everything,” she says. She misses her son. She speaks to him every day on WhatsApp. She would like to bring her son to the United States to be with her, but the way she crossed she thinks it is too difficult.
She would like to meet someone with papers and marry him, so she could get papers and then bring her son to join her. However, the truth is that she crossed into the United States without a visa, and even if she married someone who was a United States citizen, she would still face a challenging process due to her illegal entry. She hopes for an amnesty. Given all these difficulties she says she will stay only three or four years, and then she will return to Mexico to live in her own house with her son.