Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...drives a late-model Nissan Pathfinder. In the front of his vast garden are orchids and lilies he brought from the Hamptons. In the back are groves of guava, orange and avocado. But Coria's pursuit of success has taken a heavy toll. Being just about the only Mexican gardener in the Hamptons when he first arrived meant less competition, but it also made him more homesick. He returned to Tuxpan in the winters, but "every March when I went back to America, there would be two weeks when I just didn't want...
...boys would get no further than their parents had. So just before Julio was about to enter the 10th grade, the decision was made for the boys to go back to Tuxpan with their mother to finish high school there, which would make them eligible to attend a Mexican university. Their father would keep working in New York alone...
Finding their place in Tuxpan has been hard for the brothers. In America they were too Mexican. In Mexico they are too American. Julio, for example, started out wearing the baggy clothes he bought at Banana Republic and the Gap before he left the Hamptons, but he quickly found out that what passes for universal teenage fashion in the U.S. is viewed as the indelible mark of a hoodlum in Tuxpan. Even his friends greet him with "What's up, gringo?" So Julio and Carlos spend a lot of time hanging out with other kids who, like them, are Americans...
...QUICK GLANCE AT THE ECONOMY OF A SMALL Mexican town like Tuxpan makes it clear why undocumented workers continue to head north. Tuxpan's heyday was in the 1950s and '60s, when it gained fame throughout Mexico for its gladiolus. But overproduction slowly poisoned the soil, leaving Tuxpan in a slow decline. In the past decade, flowers have made a comeback, but the salary for working in the greenhouses or out in the field still averages only $10 a day. At the same time, the cost of living is comparatively high in Tuxpan. As in much of small-town Mexico...
Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, says the great irony of Mexican migration is that it often feeds the same problems that sent people north in the first place. "Many towns have lost the best of their labor force. There's money coming in [from the U.S.] but no job creation back home," he says. "It just shows that migration does not solve migration...