- SAN
FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico - Ismael Mena's
three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.
Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard
where, today, their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.
An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse
sits empty; the saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights
weeds.
The 14-acre farm here was Mena's dream.
To keep it alive - traditional lifestyles are dwindling as
Mexico goes modern - Mena had to toil in the United States for
much of his life. Most recently, he worked the night shift for
Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched north Denver neighborhood
where drug deals are done. He fixed wooden pallets. He lifted
hundreds of red plastic crates, each packed with eight 2-liter
plastic bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.
The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven
children on the farm. Two older sons had moved to work in Los
Angeles.
Now Mena's dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant
mistakenly in a botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they
went to the wrong house. Once a policeman in Mexico, Mena had
been sleeping off his night shift.
Five months later, Mena's family is torn. Without him
working, Maria del Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one
mule and the horse. She has moved the children in with her
parents 5 miles closer to the nearby town of San Julian and
the doctor her diabetic son needs.
"We are wondering how we will live," she said.
Today, negotiations for wrongfuldeath compensation begin in
Denver, where Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert
Maes, referred by the Mexican government, square off against
Denver's legal team.
The city's offer - $150,000 - falls short of the $5.5
million Maes seeks for the family. Former federal Judge James
Carrigan is to guide arbitration today.
The only reason Maria didn't sell her husband's land, too,
is that Mena's mother, Don~a Julia, absolutely refuses to
leave it. While water trickled from a tap into buckets, Julia
conjured images of Ismael talking to his cows as he milked
them.
"Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so," she
said, drawing a black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she
left the farm, Don~a Julia said, "everything would be over. It
would all fall down. That's why I don't want to go."
Meantime, Ismael's 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in
charge of the children surviving here on beans and tortillas,
cooked over a wood fire in an adobe house with no bathroom.
Ismael Jr., 17, injects himself each morning with insulin.
Rosalilia's twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena's 1-year-old
grandson, also named after him, whom he never saw.
Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a
small rural school; no secondary school is reachable for
Juanita, 11, Irene, 14, and the others. The younger children
grasped that their father was dead when they saw his body at
the funeral. Now they treasure his clothes.
"We try not to talk about it too much," Rosalilia said.
"Thinking about their father makes them feel very bad."
The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life
is also a dream for thousands of other migrant workers in the
United States. For lack of money as Mexico modernizes, they
travel north, sometimes at great risk, to fill proliferating
U.S. jobs that pay $8 an hour or less. Our humming economy
depends on their labor. U.S. big business is lobbying Congress
to allow more migrant workers, especially those with basic
skills, lest labor shortages force up wages.
Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena
work solely to build up what's theirs back in Mexico, using
their savings to expand rural houses and herds. Here in rugged
6,000-feethigh eastern Jalisco, electricity lines installed
around 1993 and telephones more recently raise the possibility
of comfortable rural living.
For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she
felt Mena had achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were
full. Green maize shoots poked up from the field. Mena strode
proudly from the adobe house to the field.
"I was walking with him. We were walking with all the
children too." She wanted that togetherness every day.
"I'd tell him: "Come back and live with your brother and
sisters and horses,' " Maria del Carmen said. "He'd say he'd
come back when he got some more money."
His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: "Save the
money. Send it to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay
here and not have to leave so much." Mena was born during hard
times. His father moved from the town of San Miguel across
what is called "El Can~on" to a mesa. Drought soon drove the
family away again to the current farm near the stone church
and a dozen or so homes that together are known as San Felipe
Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
They sold a little maize.
Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the
dirt-floor house where he lives nearby. "Charro" horsemen are
local heros to this day.
School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At
18, he left Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a
tractor.
Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer
one day when Maria del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He
remembered her. A few weeks later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa,
he approached. "He said: "I want you to be my girlfriend,' "
Maria del Carmen recalled. "I said: "Yes.' " They married. "He
wanted a family." To that end, Mena moved north again - the
migration that would repeat itself again and again over nearly
three decades. In the United States he worked as a meatpacker,
cook, busboy while she raised their babies. Family photos show
Mena working at one restaurant in California. He wore a clean
white shirt with black bow tie and cap. He tended bar, washed
dishes in the kitchen, wiped tables and, after closing time,
swept the floors.
When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought
them presents: bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a
television. The kids spend hours watching a wide commercial
world from the countryside here.
The children especially remember his way with horses. "He
could make one lie down, and then he'd motion and it would get
up," Rosalilia said.
Ismael Jr. recalled: "He would say "Never hit an animal.
Talk with them, chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.' " He
also worked on roads. Once, his brother Salvador said, he
cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For days he wheezed.
Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as
policeman in the sleepy town of San Diego de Alejandria. A
family photo shows Mena standing with a pistol tucked into the
waist of his trousers. Six months later, he turned in the
pistol and the bullets. "He thought police work might be
dangerous,"
Salvador said. "He wanted to get back to the ranch." Yet to
buy animals, Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled Virgen
de Guadalupe prayer card in his wallet. Mena left last in
August 1997. He worked for a beef company in Idaho, earning
more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records attorney Maes
collected.
Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins
in Fort Lupton, cleaning apartments and landscaping.
He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael
Jr. had collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him
to San Julian. "He was almost in a coma," said Dr. Ismael
Macias, who gave basic treatment and then sent the boy to a
hospital in Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on intravenous
fluid. The final diagnosis is that "his pancreas does not work
at all," Macias said. He needs insulin daily.
Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son
Heriberto described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola
bottling plant.
Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: "It
was difficult for him to sleep at day. But he was happy with
this work," said Heriberto, a restaurant worker in Los
Angeles.
Mena also "asked about the family. He said he was going
back to Mexico this year."
Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive
forklifts.
At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing
and an alley where dealers and junkies would hang out. He'd
climb the 15 stairs in the house at 3738 High St. where he
rented an 8-by-8-foot room. The window looked out on the
Coca-Cola plant and a round brick smokestack in the distance.
And he'd sleep.
Penciled Xs mark still mark the spot where bullets pierced
walls in Mena's room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A
Spanish-speaking little girl from another family now sleeps
there.
Mena was sleeping when police burst in.
They'd been paying an informant who once used drugs to make
undercover purchases in the area. Based on his information,
they secured a no-knock warrant for the two-story house where
Mena lived. The informant apparently got mixed up.
Police said they shouted "Police!" and "Policia!" as they
entered. They pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next
to Mena's.
Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a
gun Mena was carrying illegally. They say he had another one
on Sept. 29th, a Burgo .22 - untraceable so far - and that,
despite their warnings, he fired three shots.
Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena's face,
chest and arms. He died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his
sister Maria de Jesus figured he had the gun "for his
protection" in a dangerous big city.
The shooting was "a violation of basic human rights," Dr.
Macias contends.
"Police shouldn't be able to do things like this," Mena's
brother Salvador said.
"Who fired first?" nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.
Sergio feels the "indignity" acutely. When he was headed to
the United States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus
told him to go with her brother. The men crossed near Tijuana.
Though Mena knew the way well, he hired a "coyote" guide for
$800, Sergio said. "He wanted to be more sure we'd make it
because of me." In tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled,
Mena encouraged him.
"He said: "We're going to go work . . . We'll go and earn a
whole lot.' " Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is
generally threatened. His relatives hanging on here still
contend "nothing's better." At night, cattle low amid nopal
cactuses, dogs howl, and constellations light the sky: Virgen
de San Juan in the north, Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and
the Cruz de Mayo to the south.
But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the
focus of economic action in the region. Small farming in
Mexico "doesn't work economically," said Dr. Macias The land
is too poor and there's not enough water, he said. "It doesn't
pay. Fertilizer costs. Seeds cost." Dr. Macias worries that
Mena's children still are "suffering a lot."
He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San
Julian so her children can salvage some education. Then they
could work in small business.
Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from
Denver, she said, she might afford a house. Living in San
Julian would cost about $1,000 a month, she figured. Rosalilia
says she's interested in designing clothes. She wants to make
up the school she's missed over the last eight years.
"I'd say it would be justice to help my brothers and
sisters with their studies. Because my father can't help us.
We don't have any help." The decision to sell off the animals
was painful, Maria del Carmen said, and if immigration papers
were available she'd consider leaving Mexico altogether and
moving to the United States.
"It's over," she said of the farm. Yet nobody's ready to
really accept that, least of all Don~a Julia. In Mena's empty
stable, she tried to fix his bridles and lassos. She nailed a
stirrup on the wall above a crucifix and broken television.
She envisions everybody back in the house. "Como antes,"
she said. "Like before." Money from Denver might help at least
fix up the farm, "starting with Ismael's room," she suggested.
She envisions white paint on the walls, a tiled floor "not
cement," a new door, with a tractor and little cow outside.
The last time she spoke with Ismael, "he told me, "You
know, I love you too much.' I cried," she said, crying again.
"He told me: "Don't cry. When you think about me, just make
a quick prayer. Nothing more.' "