The Pilgrims of Palomas

The parched high desert of this remote village in the Sierra Madre Oriental
mountains could hardly be more different from the marshy waterfront of
Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Tovar Tovar, 46, has for more than a decade
made an annual journey to make a living picking crabs.

She prefers the desert. But she desperately needs to get back to Maryland
this spring to earn money for the year to come – and probably won’t be allowed
to go.

To enter the United States, she needs a temporary visa from a program known
for its citation in the law, H2B. Tovar Tovar – and hundreds of other Mexicans
who have jobs waiting in Maryland’s seafood industry – can’t get visas this
year because businesses in other parts of the country appear to have used up
the nation’s quota of 66,000 workers.

“My hands are ready to go back to that place, ready for that work,” Tovar
Tovar says.

Usually at this time of year, she and about 80 other women from this town
of 600 would be getting ready to leave their homes and families for the long
trip north.

It is an arduous three- or four-day bus ride: 2,000 miles without a shower
or hotel, sleeping sitting up, stopping only for gasoline and food.

The destination is a Dorchester County crab packing plant. The women,
sometimes working 10-hour shifts, can – in a flash of busy hands and flying
shell – pry out as much as 40 pounds a day of the fluffy white meat, the
Chesapeake Bay’s most prized bounty.

By night they sleep in dormitory-style bunk beds in clapboard houses in
Cambridge and Hooper’s Island, where they may pay $50 a week to share space
with anywhere from a handful to two dozen other workers.

The women have returned year after year for this hard work because they can
earn $8,000 and more – nearly all of the annual income for their families –
during their May-to-October sojourn on the Shore.

The money pays for food in winter months. It paid for the materials for
Tovar Tovar’s house. She would like to earn enough to install a toilet.

But unless Congress approves emergency legislation in the next few weeks to
increase the number of visas allowed, Tovar Tovar and others won’t be making
the trip to Maryland this year.

`A hard-working area’

Situated in a valley that is almost 4,000 feet above sea level, Palomas
sits squarely in the shadow of two unnamed mountains, indistinguishable from
an endless expanse of brittle, rocky terrain.

Hooper’s Island, where Tovar Tovar still hopes to spend another crab
season, is barely more than a low-lying clump of dry land that seems always to
be looking eye-to-eye with the ever-encroaching bay. The Mexican crab pickers
joke that the island’s mosquitoes and humidity are so thick they can blot out
the sun.

The two small towns are bookends. They circumscribe the 2,000-mile pipeline
that links poor Latin American workers such as Tovar Tovar with seafood
processors, landscapers, logging companies and others who say they need cheap
labor, the willing employees who’ll take dirty and difficult jobs that most
Americans won’t.

Jay Newcomb, who runs the A. E. Phillips Seafood plant in Fishing Creek,
Md., says workers from Palomas have a reputation as diligent. He remembers
Tovar Tovar, for instance, even though she switched to a rival processor years
ago.

“That’s a hard-working area that they come from,” Newcomb says. “They have
harvested beans, tobacco, tomatoes – you name it. They’ll do whatever they
have to do just to survive.”

But jobs in their home region are nearly nonexistent today, residents say.
As Mexican agriculture has declined in recent years, the only option for many
families is to take in piecework, cutting and shaping dried corn leaves that
are used to wrap tamales for baking.

Like picking crabs, it is repetitive, tedious work. But a day’s labor nets
as little as 100 pesos, about $9. Experienced crab pickers say they can earn
as much as $80 a day cleaning crab meat.

Palomas, nearly a three-hour drive from the state capital of San Luis
Potosi, is an isolated village where only one main street is paved and the
local priest comes every third Sunday to celebrate Mass.

Few here who have found work through the H2B program since it began in 1990
have heard or understand the details of the current visa issue. One rumor has
it that the processors just don’t want them any more.

They know full well, however, the impact it could have on their families
and their town. And they are worried.

As each day passes, the crab pickers wonder when they will get word about
the jobs they have come to expect.

Some have tried calling their American employers – not an easy task in a
town where the only phones are public and require prepaid plastic cards. Even
if they get through on an international call, seafood processors tell them
their hands are tied unless Congress acts.

“As anyone can see, without jobs in America, we could never have built a
new house,” says Tovar Tovar, who is a widow. “If we get sick, there is no
money for medicine. I worry that my little grandson will get sick. I worry
because the life here is hard.”

With little prompting, she invites guests into the cool of the house her
youngest son finished last year. It matches many modest dwellings in Palomas.

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Doors and windows are left open. Even in mid-February, daytime temperatures
here, just a notch below the Tropic of Cancer, are in the 80s. Nights are
cool, and there will be no moisture until the rainy season in May and June.

The family built the six rooms over three years, using wages Tovar Tovar
earned in Dorchester County. Throughout Palomas there are partially built
houses, constructed piecemeal as families, who can’t get credit, buy materials
a little at a time.

Tovar Tovar’s three sons, 27, 26 and 21, brought in some of the money,
working for a landscaper in Virginia.

Reaping the benefits

By the standards of Palomas, the family lives well. Like many of their
neighbors, they have electricity, television and a stereo – all paid for with
wages earned in the States.

Swept and scrubbed daily, the immaculate house is painted a bright aqua
green inside. Bedrooms are separated by curtains hung in doorways, and
stackable plastic patio chairs are always ready for mealtime or to accommodate
guests.

The kitchen, which includes a built-in, wood-fired oven to cook traditional
corn tortillas, has a propane gas range, a refrigerator, a microwave. Someone
has put “SpongeBob Squarepants” stickers on the white refrigerator door.

Unlike most of their neighbors, the family has an indoor shower, but water
for cooking, doing dishes or washing clothes is dipped by the bucket from a
cistern outside. The family’s burro, which literally pulls its own weight
hauling loads of sticks and corn leaves in a big-wheeled cart, drinks from the
well. There’s a crude outhouse in one corner of the property, behind a stand
of 6-foot cactus plants.

Staples for breakfast, lunch and supper for pretty much everyone are beans,
rice and tortillas. Once a week, Tovar Tovar walks down to the tiny grocery
store on the corner to buy a chicken. It is all the meat they can afford, she
says, especially when much of the money she saved last year has been spent.

If she needs any reminder of how things used to be, she can glance out back
at the 50-year-old hut her elderly in-laws use as a kitchen. Tovar Tovar lived
for many years in the tiny, drafty building – with her six children.

Nearby is another shack where the old people sleep. Both structures are
made entirely of tree limbs, sticks and mud. The family helps out the couple,
74-year-old Aniceto Martinez Tovar and Maria Melquiades Herrera, 82, with food
and money from the work in the United States.

“I have mixed feelings about crabmeat,” Tovar Tovar says. “I had a job and
money, but I had to leave my children. Now, they are grown and I am strong.”

For her neighbor Silvestre Tovar Tovar, who is no relation, an American job
at an Alabama farm offered good pay, but he has been disabled since he fell
off a truck five years ago. The farmer took him to the hospital, Silvestre
says, but never sent the money he promised for continuing medical expenses.

His wife, Ramona, and two of their daughters, 22-year-old Rosa and
19-year-old Enedina, have picked crabs in Fishing Creek. Next year, they hope,
there will also be a job for 17-year-old Marcia.

The workers say they are vulnerable to disreputable job brokers and often
must pay a stiff price to get visas and to have jobs lined up with employers.

In Palomas, overseas jobs usually start with Gloria Solis Vargas. From a
home office in Ciudad del Maiz, a regional commercial center of 20,000 people
about 15 miles from Palomas, Solis places as many as 800 workers from several
Mexican states with a Virginia-based company called Del Al Associates.

Last year, Solis Vargas says, she sent workers to jobs in Alabama,
Virginia, North Carolina and Mississippi, as well as Maryland.

The matriarch of a prominent ranching family, Solis Vargas, 48, moves with
ease among her clients in Palomas. She is greeted warmly, invited into their
homes. Her fee of $35 per H2B placement has not changed in years, workers say,
and her partners at Del Al have held their fee to $81.

Still, all told, each worker must pay about $650 in fees, bus costs and
other expenses to get to jobs in the United States.

“The girls who started in this program didn’t know there was such a place,”
Solis Vargas says. “I’m proud of what our workers have done. But now we don’t
know what will happen. If the visa issue isn’t resolved, it will ruin people,
ruin the economy here.”

`We need to go back’

These days, while waiting to hear about their visas, families all over town
are working on tamale wrappers.

Within a few hours, workers say, their hands and arms begin to burn because
of a chemical applied to the corn leaves to make them supple and easy to fold.

Workers endure painful cuts picking crabs, too – but that job pays much
more. That is why, they say, they are willing to trek to an unfamiliar land,
leaving children, friends and family for six months at a time.

“Here, there was nothing. There is still nothing,” Tovar Tovar says. “We
worked on a farm and picked tomatoes here, but even that job is gone now.”

In her house, tucked under a clear plastic table cloth on a long flat
table, is a U.S. dollar bill.

No, it’s not the first greenback she ever earned, she says. She just keeps
it there as a reminder of what she needs to do.

“We want to work to have money to put a toilet in,” Tovar Tovar says. “My
sons want to build me my own house. … We need to go back and work so we can
do more here.”