Immigrants' dollars helping Mexico thrive

PHOENIX -- Driving through the cobblestone streets of his hometown of San Jose De Mendoza, Mexico, in a shiny new pickup, Alfredo Chalico passes adobe homes being torn down and rebuilt with red bricks.

While burros and goats are still common sights in this farming village in the central state of Guanajuato, so are pickup trucks and color televisions hooked up to new DVD players showing the latest movies.

The growing economic prosperity in this small rancho, or farming village, is the direct result of an infusion of American dollars sent home by hundreds of local residents like Chalico, a Phoenix businessman who left behind poverty to find work in the United States. Community leaders estimate that one-third of the town's 5,000 residents, and 70 percent of its men, live in the United States.

The amount of money Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans send to Mexico this year will easily exceed the record-setting $13.3 billion sent last year, experts say, and is now Mexico's second- highest source of foreign income after oil exports.

Chalico, however, is an extraordinary case, a former undocumented immigrant who gained U.S. citizenship, built a successful tire business and now helps boost his hometown's economy in ways that go far beyond the typical immigrant.

The average immigrant toiling in construction or restaurant jobs manages to send home a few hundred dollars a month. Chalico, who lives two out of three months a year in Phoenix, sometimes sends home as much as $4,000 to his wife, Lorenza, and their two children, Alfred, 4, and Eladio, 19 months. His wife and children moved back to Mexico this year and live in a $200,000 ranch house with a large sloping lawn in an exclusive country-club neighborhood in Irapuato, a city of 350,000 people about 30 miles from Chalico's hometown.

With profits from Llantera del Valle, his $500,000-a-year tire business in Phoenix, Chalico also has been buying property, opening businesses and employing workers in Mexico who otherwise might head to the United States.

He also pools his money with other immigrants from the same hometown to finance bigger projects. For the first time ever, San Jos de Mendoza's health clinic is equipped with an ambulance. The town's crumbling church is undergoing major reconstruction. And when school opened in August, 84 preschool and kindergarten students returned to freshly painted classrooms, upgraded light fixtures and new learning materials paid for with money earned by immigrants working in the United States and matched by the Mexican government.

About 1.5 million people from Guanajuato live in the United States, fourth in total number behind the states of Michoacan, Jalisco and Zacatecas.

Last year, immigrants sent $1.2 billion to relatives in Guanajuato, the third highest amount behind Jalisco, $1.3 billion, and Michoacan, $1.7 billion, according to the Bank of Mexico.

Under a government economic-development program created in 2000, for each dollar contributed by immigrants, the municipality, the state and the federal government each chip in as much as an additional dollar, multiplying each dollar made in the United States by three, and thus the program's name, Tres por Uno, Three for One.

Last year, the government financed 92 projects totaling $3.7 million in 32 towns in Guanajuato, including the church in San Jose de Mendoza. Of that, $1.1 million came from immigrants.

Chalico was 15 when he struck out for the United States nearly 20 years ago. His father, Eladio, 91, owned a small ranch but had a difficult time supporting his 11 children.

Chalico hitched a ride to Irapuato, a large agricultural center, and then hopped a bus to the border. He crossed illegally through the desert near Yuma.

Chalico didn't tell anyone he was going, not even his parents. They remember being worried sick when he didn't return home from school.

"We looked all over for him. I was crying and my husband was real mad," Chalico's 78-year-old mother, Amada, recalled.

At the border Chalico encountered three men from his hometown. They agreed to help him get a job picking cauliflower and watermelons on a farm in Marana on one condition: If Chalico couldn't handle the work he would return to Mexico.

He toiled in the dusty fields as long as 16 hours a day, six days a week.

He worked 10 months on the farm in Marana and another farm in Scottsdale. After that he got a job cleaning stalls on a horse farm in Buckeye, and then fixing flats at Villa Tire, a tire shop in southwest Phoenix.

In 1993, when the owner wanted to retire, Chalico bought the tire business, changed the name to Llantera del Valle and moved the business. He employs six full-time and three part-time workers. The shop sells new and used tires. Every day, Chalico and his employees drive trucks to car dealerships throughout the Phoenix area to collect used tires, which they resell at Llantera del Valle. His mostly Mexican-immigrant customers can't afford new tires. The shop sells about 35,000 used tires a year.

The time Chalico spent as a farm worker made him eligible for legal residency under the 1986 amnesty. In 1987, Chalico got his green card. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1998. He took English classes and earned his high school graduation equivalency diploma.

At first, Chalico sent home about $300 a month. As Chalico's fortunes increased, so did the amount he sent.

For at least 10 years Chalico has been buying farmland in San Jose de Mendoza. He now owns more than 65 acres. In August, he showed off the fields of sorghum and corn.

"I made this property from the U.S.," Chalico boasted as he waded through a field of thigh-high sorghum.

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